Monday, August 16, 2010

Middle Way Management and Shared Vision

In my last post, I discussed setting goals in the context of Middle Way Management™. No matter what goals the Middle Way Manager™ is promoting, his/her primary objective is to relieve suffering at all levels of the organization. In this post, I will discuss how vision is a moral imperative of the Middle Way Manager.

A Moral Imperative?  Really?
Morality and ethics are the foundation of Middle Way Management. Several options were available to me when I began creating this approach. Some types of ethics emphasize rules and how those rules act as constraints upon our behaviors. Others emphasize only outcomes. In this way, the end justifies the means while remaining mindful of how one can maximize the good for all parties concerned. This does not mean all parties achieve fair and equitable results, only that the inequities they suffer are minimized. Another approach relies upon personal virtue as the guideline and measure of success. This "virtue ethics" approach, combined with a Buddhist-based ethic, is the one upon which Middle Way Management is based.

All ethical approaches assume the active application of a particular moral sensibility. Morality can be culturally relative, yet we must proceed with caution down such a path. It is certainly acceptable in our Western world to consider certain behaviors universally immoral; robbery, rape, and murder come immediately to mind. In the case of Middle Way Management, compassion tempered by accountability rules the day just as virtue ethics requires us to ask, "What sort of person am I?" whenever we are confronted with a situation requiring a moral decision. Because this approach relies on the personal virtue of the manager, it is important she understand clearly her moral foundation and how it informs her daily management practice.

Vision as Morality
If you have ever worked for a manager who has not supplied the team or organization with a coherent vision, you will understand why vision is so important. For those of you who have not, an example: I once worked for a VP who supplied an overall technical vision for a product set and then sat back content in the knowledge that the entire IT organization would rise to the occasion to fulfill his dream. The only trouble was that he had neither provided information about why the technical solution was the best choice under the circumstances nor had he entertained any input whatsoever from the people who would actually be doing the work. In the end, the organization experienced an annual turnover rate of 40% and he was left mystified as to why such a thing could happen on his watch.

What the VP failed to recognize was the inherent morality in the act of inclusion and in providing an overall business-level vision that speaks to goals, objectives and, heck, the reasons why we would all get up and come to work in the morning. The organization at large produced and maintained testing and assessment data for children. If he had only tied the technical vision into the larger motivational goals that really did bring people to work every morning, he would have had another problem: holding people back so their enthusiasm did not cloud the technical vision! Naturally, this man was not a Middle Way Manager.

As I watched the drama of the sinking ship unfold, it occurred to me that the VP's personal philosophy was not congruent with the organization's nor did it serve his work teams. After all, a true Middle Way Manager serves first. As he continued to task the teams unreasonably while not providing an overarching vision, he was acting in an immoral way because a) he was killing the motivation of the IT organization, resulting in significant individual and organizational suffering and b) he was not fulfilling his role as leader and/or manager by working with his teams to create a shared vision. His paycheck was contingent on the understanding that he would provide sufficient quantities of leadership and management and he was doing neither.  By doing this, he was accepting a (very large) paycheck on fraudulent grounds. Of course, no organizational accountability existed, which speaks to leadership and management at higher levels, but I digress.

Being a Middle Way Manager
As I've stated in previous posts, Middle Way Management is as much a way of being as a way of doing. While I've provided a solid practice methodology, a major part of being a Middle Way Manager is understanding your own morality, including your strengths and weaknesses, and trying hard to practice compassion, empathy, and kindness with a good dose of accountability thrown into the mix. This can take some hard work on your part - not everyone is born a Middle Way Manager (in fact, I would argue that no one really is). But, if you are sincere about changing your viewpoint and work daily to bring your habits and behaviors into alignment with your stated philosophy, you will succeed and you will earn the right to be called a Middle Way Manager!

Go now, and manage with compassion!

Onward! Darin

Copyright © 2009/2010, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.