As some of you know I started back to the gym this year after a long absence with some legitimate excuses, I had a hernia that made exercise excruciating and that took a long time to fix while I waited for insurance to kick in and even longer to recover from, and some lame one’s, any other excuse I came up with for the past few years. In order to track progress I keep a calendar up front and center on my computer. It shows how much I weigh everyday and what amount of exercise I have done. I have a few set routines that work on cardio and strength development I picked up from my personal trainer I had in Shanghai and track how much I do each time go . Most importantly the calendar shows that I go. Showing up is really the key here, if I show up the exercise is easy.
So let’s just say the calendar is there de-bunk my own bullshit. I realized today that I hadn’t been to the gym in ten days. I was out of town for a few days, but the doesn’t justify missing ten days strung together. Sooo… either I go today or it adds up to eleven days. The calendar doesn’t lie. It’s incapable of lying it records data, so I will be going to the gym to fix the situation. Forget the excuses and just get the calendar back on track.
The other side to that is to examine my schedule and look where I can find time to squeeze in my gym time when things get busy. At some point I have to make those ten lost days come into focus as a chance to break what ever habits I let get between me and the gym. To me the whole reason of keeping track isn’t about seeing where I am going. I have a scale and a mirror for that. The calendar is for catching my own bs. It is for letting me know when I have used my normally best friend, my “bad-ass rational thinking,” and used it to substitute a reason to move off track. The thing is failing to hit the target or listen to my inner bs doesn’t make me “bad.” It shows me that I have the luxury to miss my target. I know have the luxury to figure out how to get on track. That’s worth celebrating.
Since I write this Blog about doing business in China unsurprisingly I can find a way link my own gym experience back to my work experience. The thing I find here coaching young leaders is that as their companies are find ways to better measure their out put and how they benchmark their KPI it is getting clearer. As a direct result it is getting harder for them to substitute BS and lay blame in other places for missing targets. As companies here learn how to keep it front and center it means that the young managers and leaders here have a tough evolutionary jump to make. At the same time older leaders are failing to make the jump to work in a results driven system.
This leads to a couple of serious issues for leaders both young, let’s say 35 and under, and old, let’s just say the folks managing the younger leaders since many of them are also under 35. Let’s start with the first common problem I see, demanding to just see the results. Strict adherence to results is great if you are landing on the Moon, for example, when you have no error for margin. You also have no way to exceed results either you land on the Moon perfectly or you fail and something goes wrong which can in fact be disastrous.
What happens when you miss the Moon and hit the stars...
One can in most business cases not only both fail to hit your targets but also exceed them. In my gym experience this would equate to going five time a week instead three or four. Yes, you sometimes hit your targets as well. By strictly demanding results you find a few things happen. The first is you make excuses impossible and by keeping metrics up front and center keep the pressure on to perform according to those metrics. In essence there is nothing wrong there since it eliminates passing blame and excuse making both of which are fairly common no matter where you are and create no useful results for anyone. The second is you stop serious recognition of what worked or what turned out to be a lucky break when you hit or exceed your target. Most seriously you turn off the ability to reflect on success or failure and learn from what works and what doesn’t. If your goal is to become results driven this means in the long run your drive to focus on results starts to kill excellence rather than drive it forward because you don’t learn how to replicate success or reduce factors that lead to failure.
On a more serious note I find more and more young leaders and specialists internalizing failed results as a sign that they are failures. From a measurable psychometric point of view we see this in increased emotional volatility, higher stress levels, and lower mental health. In other words when you turn results into a pure metric evaluation you not only turn off learning you injure the psychic fabric of the people you are responsible to develop and lead to greatness. Now that clear metric evaluation is starting to take hold here in China the next big challenge that those of us in the field of people development face is turning how we interpret those results into a meaningful action that both drives business but also keeps the younger and more emotionally vulnerable leaders moving forward rather than breaking down and burning out.
Since we can actually measure the damage done (and positive emotional support as well) to young leaders I suggest we turn this into part of the leadership metrics in China. I also suggest that we actually create dialogue among our people leaders as to what they are doing to damage their successors and high potentials or conversely what they are doing to foster greatness. Keeping this sort of discussion front and center with business results makes for a more empathic and healthier work experience.
The Anthropologist at Work 