You can only learn that which you already know

John McKnight uses this story to illustrate the idea that wisdom is found within a community. I didn't have a written copy of the story so did a search on Internet. This is copied from an interesting sermon given by a Dr. Philip Amerson: http://home.bluemarble.net/~fumcb/sermons/000806.htm

I would like to begin today with a story that is one of my favorites. It is a favorite precisely because it is so rich with meaning. The texture of possible meanings is deep and broad. You can choose to hear the story in new ways each time you hear it. It is a story that comes from the Sufi Muslim tradition. It is a story that informs me over and over again. I haven't told it too many times so I don't know that most of you have heard it.

The story is told of a Sufi Muslim village that was faced with an important decision. The village council met and decided they would send for a wise person who lived miles away across the mountain. Perhaps this great sage could help the people solve their problem.

You need to know that in this Sufi culture, there is an understanding about the world. It is a motto and a way of seeing the world that goes like this: "You only learn what you already know." And so the wise man came and stood in front of the village. He looked at the villagers who were gathered there and he said, "How many of you know what I am going to tell you?" None of them raised their hands, and so the wise man said, "In our culture, you can only learn what you already know so there is no point in my being here" and he left and went back across the mountain.

The council thought about it and said, "What can this mean?" They decided how they would handle it. They invited the man to come back. It took several days to get the message to him and then several days for him to return, but the villagers were ready for him this time. He stood before them and said, "How many of you know what I am going to tell you?" Everyone raised their hands," and the wise man said, "That's wonderful! I don't need to say anything," and he left and went back across the mountain.

The villagers held council again trying to decide what they should do. They met together and had a plan. They sent for the wise man one more time. He came across the mountain and stood in front of them and as always before he said, "How many of you know what I am going to tell you?" Everyone on this side of the town square raised their hands and everyone on the other side did not. The wise man said, "That is wonderful! I want all of you to tell all of them what I am going to say."

Don't Empower Your Staff Liberate Them!

Oren Harari is a writer, a business consultant formerly with the Tom Peters Group, and a professor of business at the University of San Francisco. He recently spoke with us on a subject about which he has some strong opinions: empowerment.

Empowerment is a buzzword that's been floating around management circles for several years, but you've criticized it frequently. What's wrong with empowerment?

There's a couple of problems with empowerment. The most obvious one is, people just don't do it. They talk a lot about it. They talk about giving other folks a teeny-weeny little bit more power--a little bit more discretionary decision-making authority, a teeny-weeny-weeny little bit more budget control, a tiny raising of the bar on performance expectations. It's really something that does not have much real impact.

What other problems do you have with empowerment?

Empowerment assumes that people are passive and weak, and it is the job of a manager to somehow inject them with this magic potion called power. Then their eyes will pop open, they'll spring up, they'll whistle while they work, and all good things will occur. I think there's a fundamental flaw in that.

What's the flaw?

People are incredibly powerful to begin with. They have computers, they contribute to community activities, they run budgets for their home, they raise their kids, they're often involved in entrepreneurial startups on the side, and somehow they do all that without a supervisor. Yet, when they come to work, they're immediately put into little boxes called job descriptions, with highly restrictive policies and procedures. Then some yo-yo says he's going to empower them. Empowerment assumes that the all-seeing, all-knowing boss is going to do something to employees that will somehow make them powerful. That's a con.

So what are managers supposed to do?

The issue is not to empower people; the issue is to liberate them. You should assume that people are strong and ask yourself, as a manager: What do I need to do? Do I need to break down barriers to information? Do I need to provide them with better technology? Do I need to give them better training and development? Do I need to eliminate certain levels of hierarchy that do nothing except delay and distort information? It may very well be that the best thing I can do is GET OUT OF THE WAY.

But don't many managers resist giving up their power?

Much of it has to do with managers feeling that they can't let go. They're thinking, "Wait a minute, my job as a manager means I've got to control people." The irony is that by doing all this you gain more power. If you've got more powerful people working for you, doing exceptional things and taking responsibility, guess what? You're more powerful. You're still the leader, but a different kind of one. Your leadership is not based on barking orders--it's based on your ability to mold a team.

Doesn't this new freedom also frighten some employees?

People very often are distrustful of management's motives. You may get a reaction like, "Wait a minute, this isn't what work is. Work is you telling me what to do and me doing it." Managers can't automatically expect that employees will do cartwheels with joy for this. On the other hand, if management does approach it sincerely, there will be a tremendous amount of receptivity; there are very few people now who say, "All I want to do is meaningless, highly constrained work to get a paycheck."

Can you share some examples of unsuccessful empowerment and successful liberation?

In one company I studied, management had made their numbers look good by downsizing, but they didn't get rid of the inefficient and unnecessary work. Management said, "You're empowered." But what they did was dump the inefficient work on top of the shell-shocked survivors, who now had to do double and triple duty. Another time, though, I visited a manager at a different company and noticed that her clerical assistants were calling up customers to ask how they liked the company's product. When I congratulated her on delegating that task to her staff, it turned out she had no idea they were doing it. She had discussed their common purpose and what they wanted to achieve, and she said, "I leave it to them to figure out how to best get from here to there." And then she said something that I recommend every manager paste on his or her bathroom mirror and repeat three times before going to work each day: "I know that whatever it is they're doing is exactly what I'd want them to be doing if I knew what they were doing." How's that for a statement of trust?

Mr. Harari is coauthor of Jumping the Curve: Innovation and Strategic Choice in an Age of Transition (Jossey-Bass, 1994).

When Choosing Our Thoughts We Choose Our Future

by Jim Clemmer http://www.clemmer.net/excerpts/when_choosing.shtml

... A wise old sage hosted a dinner. Toward the end of the meal, everyone was given fortune cookies and told that they're holding their future in their hands. The guests eagerly opened them to read the words of wisdom they contained. The paper slips inside each cookie were blank.

"Is this a joke?" they asked. "Is our fortune so bleak or so full of emptiness?" "That's up to each of you. The choice is yours." the sage replied. "Many people are eager to have soothsayers predict their future. Fewer are willing to take responsibility for writing their own fortune. Your future is a blank sheet of paper waiting for you to create what is to come." ...

Why Motivation Is Free

by R. Gately, PE, MBA
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/gately/pp09ybuy.htm

Managers are seldom equipped psychologically to talk to their people on a personal basis. One reason is that many people are managers because of their technical ability not because of their people skills.

We should reward our technical experts with higher salaries but not with promotions into management. We would be far better off if we promote to management the people who have good managerial and people skills and poor technical skills -- which will solve two problems:

1 - Improve the technical aspect of the team
2 - Improve the managerial performance as well.

As long as the top executives do not know how to select future effective managers, management will be stuck with the Peter Principle. When managers are asked to list the ten top motivators for their employees the list looks something like this:

Managers Perceived top ten motivators for their employees.

Money Items

1 - Salary
2 - Bonuses
3 - Vacation
4 - Retirement
5 - Other Benefits & Perks

Communication Items

6 - Interesting work
7 - Involved in decisions
8 - Feedback
9 - Training
10 - Respect

Note that the managers rank items that are equivalent to "money" as the top five motivators. However, when employees are asked to rank their top ten motivators the list is:

Employee Motivators as reported by Employees

Communication Items

1 - Interesting work
2 - Involved in decisions
3 - Feedback
4 - Training
5 - Respect

Money Items

6 - Salary
7 - Bonuses
8 - Vacation
9 - Retirement
10 - Other Benefits & Perks

Note that the employees rank items that are equivalent to "money" as their "bottom five motivators".

The managers' top five motivators are the employees' bottom five motivators. The managers' top five motivators are more related to the need of the managers to avoid personal contact with employees than the needs or desires of the employees.

Managers pick the top five motivators because these are the things that managers can "give" their employees without ever having to ask what the employees want or need,i.e., no involvement on a personal level is needed and all decisions can be made behind closed doors--while avoiding personal contact even to the detriment of the organization.

By the way, managers give the same sequence as their employees when asked to rank their own motivators.

Robert F. Gately, PE, MBA
GATELY CONSULTING

Multiverse Theory

"One of the most astonishing of recent trends in science is that many top physicists and cosmologists now defend the wild notion that not only are universes as common as blackberries, but even more common. Indeed, there may be an infinity of them!"

Interesting and very deep idea.

The article is at: http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-09/fringe-watcher.html

Linking Healthy Communities / Healthy Youth and Rural Economic Development

I've discovered a very interesting connection being made to Healthy Communities / Healthy Youth activities and Economic Development - especially in rural communities.

Three examples you can read about at http://www.search-institute.org/assetmag/autumn01/:

Mason City:

"like many other small towns in America’s heartland, Mason City, is shrinking. And the first to take off are youth: about half leave Mason City, demographers report.

“Here’s our reality,” says Lori Henry, a city council member in this town of 29,040. “We have an aging population. WE NEED TO ATTRACT AND RETAIN OUR YOUNG PEOPLE TO KEEP OUR BASE. So we need to get our young people to connect to the community, to get them to return here and raise their families here.”"

Union County Iowa:

"“There’s nothing more important for a community long term than developing young people,” Karl Knock (Banker)says. “If you grow up and leave your hometown and it was terrible, if it ground you down and bored you, you’ll never come back. BUT IF THE TOWN NURTURED YOU, YOU MIGHT JUST COME BACK."

To help foster such a nurturing environment, the bank recognizes and uses its position as the first contact many groups in a rural community make when attempting to establish a new venture. So when an arts project, a Habitat for Humanity home, and a school-based weather station approached the bank, the Knocks made sure to hook the projects up with Youth Plus as well."

Hampton, VA:

"Want a glimpse of state-of-the-art youth involvement? Then visit the port city of Hampton, Va., where more than 600 young people a year are involved in leadership, policy, and decision making. Now known across the country for its dynamic youth-adult partnerships, HAMPTON HAD AN ECONOMIC MOTIVATION TO REMAKE ITSELF INTO AN ASSET-BUILDING COMMUNITY.

Back in 1990, the town was sinking economically. To fight back, the community rallied around a carefully wrought strategic plan, resulting in today’s diversified economy, low unemployment, and emphasis on youth and family."

The page I have linked to also has this great example of community assets approach:

Fast-Food Restaurant Serves Up More Than French Fries in Hartford, Kentucky:

The Hartford McDonald’s serves as something of a community center: the Bookmobile visits the parking lot, high school students read to preschoolers in the Play Place area, and, on Valentine’s Day, dimmed lights and candles offer teens a low-cost alternative to more expensive restaurants.

Technorati Tag hchy

The Q12 Index

From http://www.managementmag.com/

In the best-selling change management book First, Break All the Rules (Simon & Shuster, May 1999), based on that research, Gallup found that business units whose employees scored in the top quarter percentile on their Q12 index showed a 50% higher productivity rate, reported 13% lower turnover, 44% higher profit, and 50% higher levels of customer service over businesses in the lower quartile. The Q12 index is based on worker response to the following 12 questions:

1. Do you know what is expected of you at work?


2. Do you have the materials and equipment needed to do your work right?


3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?


4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing
   good work?


5. Does your supervisor or someone at work seem to care about you as a person?


6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development?


7. At work, do your opinions seem to count?


8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?


9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?


10. Do you have a best friend at work?


11. In the last six months, has someone talked to you about your progress as
    an employee?


12. In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?