Lesson Learned

Time for another brief lesson in communications from ORACLE: The message that worked yesterday might not work today.

Case in point: trying to get my kids to pick up their toys, on the pretense that I might remember the color of the living room carpet if I could see it. (The current color… no one remembers what it looked like originally, unless there is a furniture shuffling going on.) Sometimes they respond to rewards, but when it’s already past bedtime there’s not a lot of wiggle room for bribing them. So we move to delayed/denied privileges.“Pick up those toys, or I’ll throw them away” can be a futile gesture, unless accompanied by the brandishing of a plastic bag. Laura responds to that one fairly well (when she is listening.) The other night, I was more than a little surprised to hear Ryan’s take on this:

“Throw. Them. Away. Then.”

Laura never responded in that manner. And therein lay the problem. Ryan was either calling my bluff, or just didn’t understand what was happening. I opted for the latter. (And was later told by my wife that I was wrong.)

Bill Cosby once said that you are not really a parent until you have two children, because if you have just one then you know who broke the lamp. There was a lot of wisdom in that, but the problem extends further. As much as we’d like to think we learn from the first one, every child is different. And like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, adding an observation changes the observed. What once worked with Laura would not work anymore, because she saw it tested. (I was prepared to throw Ryan’s toys away, but knew it wouldn’t be fair if he didn’t get it. I was hosed.)

Of course, there is a management lesson in this. One of my favorite bosses of all time often fielded questions from students who wanted to get into news management. “What should we study?” they would ask. Garry’s answer was (and remains to this day) “Child Psychology.” I saw similar examples play out -where different personalities rendered previous “sticks and carrots” obsolete, because their values and priorities were aligned differently.

There are some organizations that seem to have a great deal of turnover in the middle management ranks. Sometimes it is blamed on undue pressure, or on a burden of responsibility with no backing authority. Some upper managers see it as a form of managerial Darwinism – keep the small fish hungry and swimming, and they’ll perform to potential. In reality, these approaches can mask a real growth opportunity for a young leader: if you’re never around long enough to try something different, then you’re missing out on an entire dimension of strategic thinking.

In a newsroom environment, this was evident by the producers or assignment editors who in essence played out their bag of tricks. The answer, of course, is not to replace a one-trick pony with a three-trick pony, but instead to bring in a horse that can learn new tricks. Thoroughbreds are measured on a track – but how often in real life do we stay within such a narrow lane?

Give me the horse that can find a new way from A to B when the old way is blocked. (My new route from “A” to “B” has been the threat of deleting Ryan’s favorite shows from the DVR.  What’s yours?)

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, learning, parenting, management, leadership, leadership development[/tags]