What Keeps Leaders up at Night

What Keeps Leaders Up At Night, Recognizing and Resolving Your Most Troubling Management Issues, by Nicole Lipkin, Amacom 2013

What does neuroscience have to do with the hard financials that winners and achievers produce?  Can a great manager win without a soft side?  Seems to me iconic leaders like Jack Welch and Nancy Pelosi are a mixed bag, so let’s see what Dr. Lipkin can add to the discussion.

There’s a lot of negative buzz going around now about the destructive power of Management by Objectives, and leadership that focuses only on the metrics, and I am wondering if the difference between winning and whining – really, only two letters – is somehow connected with generational change, or neuroscience, or the economy, or all of the above. 

When managers lose sleep over troublesome employee issues, they prolong the pain, or, as Lipkin told a group of women auto dealers at their conference, “When people suck, we just kind of suck back!”  It’s a harsh assessment of what happens when managers get stuck and everyone else follows their lead – the air turns toxic and your feel just seem to sink deeper into a bad gravitational pull.  But as Lipkin tells the story, if she had heeded her own advice and followed her own coaching prescription, she would have recognized her problem – a bad office manager – made a decision to fix it, and sooner rather than later fired the problem and hired the solution.  But it took too long and caused lots of troubles before she did.

So let’s backtrack to cover the key indicators and the signs that should not be ignored, niggling feelings telling us that something is wrong – are you losing people, losing sleep, losing your health.  Do you get monster headaches as your car approaches the parking lot?  Is it hard to disconnect and do you feel the job sitting heavily on your chest when the alarm goes off?  Avoidance, procrastination, kill the messenger and other attack modes won’t solve your problem.  Instead, the author recommends:

          The Formula:

·         Admit the problem

·        Recognize that my thoughts and actions contributed to the problem

·        Identify the causes of those thoughts and actions

·        Detect the cognitive biases involved

·        Think up new ways to manage the causes and biases

·        Adjust my leadership approach accordingly

·        Make amends with the people I hurt

·        Expect to make more mistakes but strive to deal with them differently.

A good departure from the Management by Objectives approach to leadership.