Author: Madhuri

Writer - Children's Fiction & Ghost Writer

Cover-ups breed Incompetence

When you cover-up, you are saying its ok not to give your best.

It percolates down to the bottom member of your team. Deep into your systems and processes. Into your people and their mindsets.

Because when you see a problem, you start keeping it to yourself – and to your organization – hoping to correct it quietly. No open discussion over the root cause issues. No collective intelligence to sort it out.

Firstly, this breeds incompetence, leading you to more – and more – situations where you blunder and perform beneath capacity. It becomes your culture – personal or organizational. Your employees will begin following your example.

Secondly, instead of admitting an error to your customers and facing it openly, you are leaving your downstream people to handle it – the ones least experienced, with the least info at their hand and significantly, the ones for lack of clarity and authority, are likely to be the most inadequate in handling the situation – caught between the customer and the organisation’s directives.

When you speak out it’s a single stance you are taking, and you are taking a stance. All your employees need to do now, is follow your lead.

When you leave it to them, you leave it open to multiple responses. No matter what you direct them to do, they will answer differently, depending on their nature, relation with customer and the situation.

The dualness of response would not just confuse the customer, but put them off too. Plus, it leaves them with a stronger impression of your incompetence.

Thirdly, when you force your employees to take on the tough job of facing the customer while you seat yourself behind, you lose your own employees’ trust. Trouble is, when you cover-up from the outsider, it becomes a habit and you start covering up from the insider too. Your employees sense it. On the one hand, it’s the beginning of distrust. On the other, they begin to look to you to cover up their incompetencies too.

For more on the Cover-up series, search my blog for the key word Cover-ups.

So Why do we Cover-up?

Because we are afraid.

Fear follows close behind our errors and failures – It’s the reason we are scared to come clean.

Fear of –

  • Losing face – That others would think us incompetent or not good enough.
  • Losing friends or customers.
  • Losing our place in people’s good books or in the case of companies, precious market share.

When we fear something, we focus on ourselves and we turn a blind eye to the needs of others. And fear has the unfortunate tendency of increasing our incompetence. It prevents us from achieving what we are capable of. Because we are too busy justifying ourselves rather than looking straight in the mirror and correcting ourselves.

For more on the Cover-up series, search my blog for the key word Cover-ups. Next in the series is about how Cover-ups breed Incompetence.

Cover-ups and Drunks

Cover-up a blunder and you are a lot like the drunk. In the first instance, the drunk will not admit to being drunk – doesn’t matter that it’s visible to the world.

Second, when forced to, the drunk may make a promise to the few who confront him (or her for that matter), but will go back to it, by night or noon ‘cause it was a forced admission.

Third, the drunk who’s been forced to confess will not go to rehab that’s needed to keep him off the drink.

Result? People lose confidence – you’ve taken away their reason to trust you.

Trust comes with openness and transparency. The ability to go back and say, “Look I’ve made a mistake. I’m very sorry. This is what I’ll do to make it easy or safe for you. And this is what I’ll do so that it doesn’t repeat in future.”

That’s 3 Rules of Trust – 3 big, straight-forward promises.

  1. The apology – being open and being contrite
  2. Act fast – to correct the mistake
  3. Act for the future – to prevent the mistake

So when Johnson & Johnson issued Tylenol recall promptly, communicated to all, matched it with action by withdrawing the product from the shelves and didn’t stop there, but introduced tamper resistant packaging that would prevent future, deliberate poisoning, it met the 3 rules of retaining trust in the face of adversity. And over a couple of decades after the incident, they still are remembered and respected for their prompt action.

It isn’t as if there isn’t a blip. But the blip is temporary and people do tend to come back to your fold if you meet the 3 rules. Because, you are making a promise, a commitment to deliver, and a commitment to the other’s safety – and acting on it.

By hiding your mistake, you are telling the person that you are more interested in saving your face and your money at their expense. Not in making life easier for them, nor in saving them.

People do understand your need for caution. But not at their expense.

You don’t get many chances. Sometimes not another. So use what you’ve got. And remember The 3 Rules of Trust.

Follow the blog for more posts in the Cover-up Series.

Veering off the Course

Decisions, sometimes tiny, sometimes large thought out ones, they take you inches off your course day after day until one day you wake up and you wonder where you’re lost, who you are, what you love vs what you must, your values, and if you are a business, where your profits and revenues lie, where your future roadmap’s headed – definitely not where it was meant to. And if there’s a way back.

 

It happens with websites, it happens with product GUIs, it happens with brand extensions and it happens with life.

 

We give away what we love, we give away our low cost structures, our uniqueness and our strengths, and we become lifeless or we stand prematurely old.

 

The change is so vast with neither the beginning nor the end in sight, that to get back to a semblance of where we still want to be takes nothing short of painful, systemic revamp. 

 

It isn’t that you shouldn’t change. Change is a definite part of life.

So is improvisation.

Sometimes they add to a fresh new path – a fresh lease of life, like they do with the ocean currents. The wind, the sun, the continents, island chains, they all conspire to make the moving currents. But it all adds up to life, letting life live, to make earth a hospitable place. But sometimes, they are killing if you are caught in the wrong current at the wrong time.

 

What’s the way in?

Never for a moment lose sight of what you set out to do.

Never lose sight of what you love.

Never lose sight of what gives you a kick.

 

If there’s anything that can hold you to your path, it’s this, bringing you back to it time and again, because now each deviating decision is a conscious decision, marked on a personal road map even if a blurry one, giving you more chances than one. 

 

It’s a little like the smart bombs. Once they lock on to the target, they don’t lose sight. Except in the rare cases where cloud cover or obstacles come in the way.

 

But it isn’t as easy as that.

It still takes a tremendous amount of energy, the ability to withstand uncertainty and of swimming against the tide, there still are hard decisions to take, but then, you will have chances in life – chances to at least have a foot in the loved thing, if not move into it completely – someday.

Every Day of our Lives – We wear our old shoes and set forth to another day

One fine morning if you wake up in the jungle, would you look for your office shoes to go to the non-existent office and the attendant security, looking to sit down at your safe-in-the-hole desk?

An extreme metaphor, but true enough in our lives.

We don’t wake up in the jungle, but we don’t wake up to just another day either. We wake to a different day, a different story, a different project, a different document, a different launch, a different customer.

But most days, we ready ourselves for just another day.

Not a new day, not a new beginning. Just another day.

We carry our old notions, old habits, old learnings – The Old Highways in the Brain – and begin the new day as if it can take us to the next level of experience, exhilaration, growth and yes, income too. But then, we walk where we are – on a treadmill. Going nowhere in our minds, except ratcheting up our heart beats a bit to keep ourselves alive.

Unable to take us out of our own corner.

Unable to place ourselves in new shoes.

Unable to free think our minds.

I truly believe that all of us want to free think. Assuming for the moment that this is true, how do we help ourselves do it? ‘Cause it’s a learning, it’s about finding the door that opens us to the ability to free think. And the door is different for each.

Some I’ve listed, there would be more.

Fear of failure and a related reason – lacking in self-confidence – fear of contending with authority, fear of being laughed at, fear of being called a fool, fear of……… Can we for just a day in our lives set aside the mind numbing fear and let our minds hop, skip and jump?

Pressure that builds up in the confusion of vast amounts of previously unknown information and factors when we set out on a new task – until it all slowly becomes familiar and we just need to hang in there, juggling the balls mentally till they fall into a pattern – till the core, the sticky point reveals itself.

Beginner’s Block – Plenty to do with the reluctance to let go of our safe, known corner and begin anything new.

Arrogance – Every new thing is a place of ignorance to begin with. The inability to shrug off our I-am-Wise badge, go to people and learn from them from scratch and not let this ability diminish with age, time or labels.

Let’s take the first step of recognising our door. The key search can only come after that.