Too many years ago to confess, my high-school English teacher thought I had a few things to learn about respect. I still remember her dismay when I submitted an assignment one afternoon. Instead of gently handing an essay to her, I dropped it on her desk. That was bad enough, but she thought I had thrown it at her.
In retrospect, perhaps I didn’t quite drop it. Perhaps I tossed it. Perhaps I even tossed it with a dramatic, self-important flourish. All right, perhaps I did throw it—but to her, not at her. After all, these things are a matter of perspective.
Some weeks later, in a simple act of leadership for which I never properly expressed my appreciation, she made sure I didn’t carry this adolescent arrogance off to college. Days before graduation, she presented me with a wry verse by the Eighteenth Century Scottish poet Robert Burns, and she asked me to think about it:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An foolish notion:
What airs in dress an gait wad lea’es us,
An ev’n devotion!
Originally written in Scot two hundred years ago, the verse requires translation today. It laments the fact that you can never presume to know how others view you. You cannot objectively size up yourself, for your character cannot stand before a mirror that doesn’t lie. The measure that other people take of you is theirs alone to determine. Often, it is theirs alone to know.
The bard of Scotland is musing: Oh, for the power of God to see ourselves as other people see us! It would save us from so many blunders, in the way we appear and the way we behave!
We Are the Persons We Are Perceived to Be
His lesson is ever truer amid the superficiality and spin of the early Twenty-first Century. You can try to polish your image—your personal brand, as the new vernacular has it—but ultimately you cannot control it. It is always for others to judge, often by caprice, and always by criteria of their choosing.
Whatever excuses or reasons that you use to justify your behavior and decisions—however altruistic you regard yourself, however honorable, however noble—others are entirely free to discount. They can look at you and easily substitute a low common denominator of self-interest. They can assume that, from the first moment to the last and every moment between, you are looking out only for yourself.
From there, it is a small step to the next question: whether, and to what extent, they perceive your self-interest to be compatible with their own self-interest. If they determine it is not, then the possibility of a leadership connection is slim. You can talk yourself hoarse, but they will not be receptive to your message. As leaders, you are most unlikely to reach them. Moreover, their cynicism can spread like cancer. It can threaten your leadership of others. Change can become impossible.
Conversely, if they find some common ground with you, then the possibility of leadership remains real. You can march forward together. But the common ground is essential.
Recognizing this, a wise leader goes out of his way to accommodate the concerns of all stakeholders. In business, that requires looking beyond the single-minded goal of creating wealth for investors. It requires showing real, not merely rhetorical, appreciation and respect for the importance of the work that every person does and could do, anywhere in the organization, and for the needs and interests of all customers, for the growth and well-being of employees and their families (and of vendors and their families), and for the long-term viability of the organization itself.
Pay Yourself a Dividend
Together, this balance beam of concerns is a continuing reflection of the integrity—the wholeness, the oneness—of the enterprise itself. It is inclusive. It appreciates and embraces everyone’s vital interests. Companies that lose sight of this balance have usually paid a costly price—up to and including market erosion, bargaining representation, technology decline, and tarnished brands.
Tilt this way, and investors are happy over the short term, but quality erodes, employees disengage, and customers wander. Tilt that way, and employees grow complacent while investors revolt and customers defect. Tilt yet another way, and process dominates, but you can miss the jump on an opportunity, a new market or a new technology. Balance is critical but precarious.
It is here, at this intersection of perspectives and interests, where we find a leader’s informal voice: explicit and implicit communication between leaders and followers that shapes their essential relationship, if they are to have one. It is both verbal and non-verbal. Some of it is deliberate and calculated. Much of it, alas, is inadvertent and even careless. Almost all of it is subject to interpretation and perception, which depends as much on what people already believe as on what they actually see and hear.
Its impact can be completely at odds with its intent. It is fraught with peril. At first, it will seem difficult to manage. But it carries enormous potential for leadership. In any case, while it can be neglected, it cannot be silenced. It will speak. It will be heard. So it is important that you manage the informal voice. Otherwise, it will manage you.
Look Back Over Your Relationships
To appreciate its importance, think over the relationships you have had with a boss. Go back over all the jobs you have had. Begin with the part-time jobs you had as a teenager: taking orders and giving change at a local McDonald’s. Continue on to your present position: giving orders and taking charge as a manager. Single out the best relationships with a boss you ever had, and single out the worst. Think about the ones between.
Quickly you will recognize that every relationship with a boss fell somewhere on a continuum of mutual respect, mutual dignity, mutual trust, mutual dependence, and mutual concern—each a part of the chemistry, a part of the fabric, of relationships.
The best relationships were endowed with high levels of respect, dignity, trust, dependence, and concern by both of you. You hated to see these relationships come to an end. The worst were just the opposite: low levels of respect, dignity, trust, dependence, and concern for each other. You probably couldn’t wait to move on. Furthermore, in the hardship of those difficult relationships, you and your boss probably went to some lengths to conceal your real thoughts. Unless and until you talk it through, as the Scotsman so poetically bemoaned, you can never know exactly how another person truly views you and your relationship. Oh, wad some Power.
Now take this analysis one more step. Ask yourself what determines someone’s perception of relational vigor, especially across the boss’s desk. What do we hear and see and feel that tells us whether a relationship is good or bad, warm or cold, cooperative or competitive, improving or deteriorating?
Chances are your list will come pretty close to ours. On the basis of numerous focus group and discussions in workshops at large corporations, we have identified many such determinants. Each consists of something that managers either say or do, either proactively or reactively. It is often a pattern that reveals deep-seated preferences and priorities.
Together, these are the components of what we term the informal voice. All these determinants offer particular opportunity for nurturing the relationship and therefore leadership. But they need to be managed. To be managed, they must first be seen, acknowledged, and appreciated. Unless and until you see them, you cannot manage them.
Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.
