CNN Money CEOs and Marriage gave me the idea for this post. They say that Big Bosses are more likely to get divorced because they work too much and are highly stressed.
I have a different opinion, since I am a self professed cynic regarding the character of people who strive to attain upper management levels... I mean I am to the point where I almost cringe whenever an upper Manager starts speaking... :-) I often consider them as more annoying and misleading than Used Car Salesmen and Politicians.
The root cause of my frustration is that I am a big believer of the concept of Servant Leadership. (ie Support in Diagram Below) My goal at home and work is to develop, support, give guidance, etc to people so that they and the organization can be more effective, engaged and happy.
Where as most of the people I know who have pursued "power positions" are somewhat narcissistic, showy, self centered, egotistical, money centered and like to control things. (ie Directive in Diagram Above) Pretty much every characteristic that one does not want in a healthy collaborative nurturing marriage. So I am not surprised at all by a higher number of divorces in that population of people. :-)
Now I usually try to avoid stealing posting Dilbert comics, but this one was in my daily calendar for tomorrow and it was just too perfect to resist.
I have a different opinion, since I am a self professed cynic regarding the character of people who strive to attain upper management levels... I mean I am to the point where I almost cringe whenever an upper Manager starts speaking... :-) I often consider them as more annoying and misleading than Used Car Salesmen and Politicians.
The root cause of my frustration is that I am a big believer of the concept of Servant Leadership. (ie Support in Diagram Below) My goal at home and work is to develop, support, give guidance, etc to people so that they and the organization can be more effective, engaged and happy.
Where as most of the people I know who have pursued "power positions" are somewhat narcissistic, showy, self centered, egotistical, money centered and like to control things. (ie Directive in Diagram Above) Pretty much every characteristic that one does not want in a healthy collaborative nurturing marriage. So I am not surprised at all by a higher number of divorces in that population of people. :-)
Now I usually try to avoid stealing posting Dilbert comics, but this one was in my daily calendar for tomorrow and it was just too perfect to resist.
2 comments:
I sometimes refer to the two styles as "East Coast Management" and "West Coast Management." Actually a combination works best, where the goals and direction come from the top, and then it is accomplished bottom-up. Our company called it "management by objectives."
My previous employer was much larger and had a pretty good system. The corporate office would develop 8 - 10 directional high level objectives for the corporation, Then the business unit management would need to create SMART goals that supported them. And finally the departments would create more SMART goals that could be used by the employees to define their SMART goals. And all this was shared with every employee so we knew how our work fit into the big, intermediate and local picture.
The challenge is that with an organization of 100,000+ employees it still had quite a few self serving power hungry "yes person" managers who were more focused on their next position / paycheck / power than on supporting the folks working in their organization.
One good thing it did have going for it was that most of the upper management had been with the company for decades and they really knew the business and industries they served.
Where as in many companies now days it seems, they change upper management every few years. Which leads to discontinuity, stress and inefficiencies.
And unfortunately those manager types never have to clean up or learn from their bumbling.
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