MANAGEMENT SPECIAL The Monsters under the Desk
For me, the scariest Halloween stories have always been those with
monsters under the bed: demonic creatures skulking in the innocuous settings of
everyday life. The same is true with corporations. Often the most frightening
threats to success lurk in everyday practices. So when my friend Bruno began to
explain why he had resigned from his executive position at an enterprise
software company by saying, “It seemed like such a minor thing at first,” I
knew that something truly awful was going to follow.
Bruno was one of the company’s sales leaders. He was the “opener,”
the company’s chief evangelist and visionary, gifted at persuading customers to
transform their entire business with a software overhaul. But he rarely got a
chance to personally close the deal.
At some key point in every major pitch, the company parachuted in
another senior sales leader named Cliff. Cliff was the “closer.” He ran the
group that sold much cheaper functional software packages. Inevitably, there
would come a moment when the customer realized that his or her company couldn’t
afford both Bruno’s comprehensive approach and Cliff’s upgrades. Most clients
chose the expedient approach: buying Cliff’s smaller packages and postponing
the purchase of Bruno’s enterprise solution. Not only did this mean a smaller
sale, but it was terrible for the customer’s strategy. Bruno had to grit his
teeth as he watched the companies delay making the changes they needed and lose
ground to their more capable competitors.
Through all of this, Bruno and Cliff were friendly. Until one
night when the two men stopped for a drink after a sale closed. Cliff raised a
glass to Bruno: “I admire the way you set these deals up for us.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bruno.
“Well, by the time you’ve laid out their future,” Cliff said,
“they realize that we really know their business. It makes it easier to sell
them the upgrades.”
Bruno was speechless. Instead of regarding him as a rival with a
contradictory philosophy, Cliff thought Bruno was just part of his team.
Sitting there, Bruno had to stifle a wave of indignation. Because Cliff closed
the deals, he was always credited with higher sales — which meant he was
fast-tracked and would be promoted sooner. What stung the most, Bruno said, was
the realization that everyone else thought he was playing Cliff’s game, and
that he too, then, must have thought that Cliff’s approach was better than his
own.
These monsters under the bed — or desk — are subtler than the ones
in most Halloween fare. They take the form of prevalent but unnoticed and
stubborn ideas that consistently, mindlessly destroy value. It can take real
leadership even to recognize a problematic idea, let alone supplant it.
In Bruno’s case, three such monsters lurked under his desk. First,
there was an idea about reward — that whoever delivers the end result deserves
the lion’s share of credit, no matter how many others laid the groundwork.
Second, an idea about selling for the short term — that you always sell
whatever you can, as soon as you can, because that’s what counts in the
performance data. And third, a deal is a deal — that every deal is considered
on the basis of the revenue it generates, regardless of its impact on the
client or the company.
Deals like these are addictive. As credit accrued to Cliff at
Bruno’s expense, it made it harder to reverse course. Worse still, Bruno’s
instinct that they would lose customers had proved prescient. Some were already
gravitating away from the company; as they adopted cloud computing, it became
easier for them to switch systems and to associate Bruno’s company with all
those costly legacy upgrades.
Stories like this help
explain why leadership remains a compelling topic in management literature. It’s not
because people expect to find answers. Reliable universal answers are rare in
leadership writing.
But we know that, as leaders, we are constantly fighting monsters
under the desk. The entrenched habits that we hate are hard to see as such.
They often seem like the right thing to do, and even as we hate them, we do
them anyway. Who, after all, could argue against selling as much as we can this
month? Or giving credit to the people who close a deal? Or valuing deals
according to their revenues?
That nagging inner feeling that something is wrong, and the
willingness to listen to it, is the first step toward truly strategic
leadership. As Bruno’s story shows, it’s difficult to take that step, even
for the best of us. Sometimes you really don’t think you’ll ever win, because
the monster under the desk is really, as in all horror stories, residing inside
yourself. How do you bring out that story without sounding shrill? How do you
make your colleagues see it in themselves and change their habits?
The answer is simple to say: You learn to name the monsters, and
talk about them, dispassionately and repeatedly. You learn patience and
persistence. And you decide, in the end, how much you care. If you care enough
about the enterprise, you have a huge task ahead of you. That’s the task we
call leadership.
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/The-Monsters-under-the-Desk?gko=fe852&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171031&utm_campaign=resp
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