Addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you. In business, many are used to doing things not realising that they become harmful.
Often, an addiction gets out of control because you need more and more to satisfy a craving and achieve the "high". In company life, you work hard to get recognised and promoted, so you look for the tools and methods that can keep you where you are or help you even climb further in the hierarchy.
While these approaches can be useful to a certain extent and if they are used adequately in line with the situation, if you push them too hard or use them when it makes little or no sense, they can do more of the wrong. Sometimes the negative impact shows up later, so short term gains can overwrite the long term. Especially when you’ll be already gone when that happens.
Here are six topics that cause a lot of headache for many, yet people are used to them and nobody really wants to change them - maybe except for a few idealists.
Simon Sinek explains it the best in his book, The infinite game, that business does not happen between 1st January and 31st December. Yet, companies set yearly targets, however, life (and business) goes beyond a given timeframe.
Managers are so obsessed with the yearly targets that they sometimes set one even when the running project is not there yet to create the starting point. Implementing a satisfaction measurement approach can be fine, but you also have to let it stabilise and gather the first robust results so that you have a stable basis and that you can define your targets. It takes some time, but this time is rarely ensured for the topic as presenting short term results is pushing the management to instant actions.
Managers know the ups and downs of such an initiative and they get used to handling it flexibly. They can modify the target, recalculate the figures or explain the changes later, if necessary. Actually they simply push the right decision later in time while acting as if the original setup was fine. Instead of acknowledging that life does not happen according to the business year.
Due to the culture of fear that you can be scolded or punished for a mistake, employees often act as they are told to. Because the boss said so. When they ask something from another department, they tend to say that the big boss wants it.
Truth is often partially revealed or sometimes even neglected, because not the optimal solution gets realised but to correspond to the higher hierarchy. After a while, people of the operative layer become silent, they do not share their views and a limited number of aspects define how things go. The company starts to lose the strength of various opinions and diversity. Employees do not take responsibility, because it does not make sense, they get nothing in return.
A painful result of this deterioration is the misleading reporting. It happens when you stick to performance indicators that do not really show what is going on or that cover only some parts of the entire story. But since you are used to them and in some cases the bonus of the higher management depends on them, you keep dealing with them instead of managing the real business. You start seeing and getting used to an alternative reality.
At the end, a few managers will specify everything, the others become only executers and they cannot have an impact any more, relationships and the power with them are conserved. Often you see micromanagement.
Here is a short abstraction of the HBR article about the topic.
The command-and-control management style has been on the decline for decades. Research has shown that companies perform better when leaders empower, encourage, and coach employees instead of delivering orders, micromanaging, and meting out discipline. Nonetheless, that style remains prevalent.
At root, the tendency to micromanage stems from a leader’s own anxiety and lack of confidence. To stop overrelying on a command-and-control style, leaders should look inward to understand what causes it. I don’t feel confident believing what I believe, thinking what I think, or doing what I do until you get over here with me, on my side, exactly as I require.
Unless you are talking about patently objective facts (what day of the week it is, what time the meeting is, and so on), there is no room for “being right” in constructive relationships. The tragedy of tugs-of-war is that both sides expend a ton of energy, but nobody goes anywhere. People get frustrated, and over time, the relationship decays. Your role as a leader is to translate your vision into collective momentum—it’s about moving people from where they are to where they have the potential to be. No one will follow you while they’re busy fighting you.
We seek to control only what we do not trust. Do you try to command the sun to rise? No, because you trust it will. More often, the truth is that you don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust that your plans will be successful if people don’t do things exactly your way, so you command through criticism. You don’t trust that you’ve prepared your team sufficiently, so you command through micromanagement. You don’t trust that your explanation was sufficient, so you command through overexplaining.
Your job is not to control other people; it’s to control yourself and trust that others will follow. Your job is not to be inspiring; it’s to be inspired and trust that others will feel inspired too. When you embody the energy you want to see on your team, you become the energetic standard to which other people will calibrate. That’s how emotions in relationships work. Neuroscience shows us that emotional energy is contagious—and you already know this is true.
When you have a clear vision and mission and you know why you are doing what, you still have to adjust your operation to the ever changing circumstances. Therefore how you do your business can change. When you elevate this ‘how’ as your strategic priority, you can lose your focus. The tool becomes your goal.
You can see that technological change quickly becomes the priority of companies. But digitalisation, or more recently artificial intelligence, is not the goal. Yes, you have to adapt your processes, but never lose your focus.
Let’s say that during the industrial revolution you had a sewing factory and the steam machine showed up. Your goal would have been to create fabric or clothes in a more efficient way and not to have as many steam machines as possible.
The management needs to show results in the short term. To avoid risking too high, they tend to choose the certain over the prosperous. The present over the future. The cautious over the high return.
Recurring and steady growth is valued more than winning huge after losing some. Which is absolutely understandable from the investors’ point of view. But at the end, managers will learn that delivering good enough results is good enough, they are not interested in maximising the gain. They get used to budget restrictions and fixed mindset and they will not act as entrepreneurs who seek every growth opportunity. The show must go on.
It is not enough to be good, you also have to show it. And how can you show it easily? By focusing on things that others can understand instantly. On process over content.
Formal aspects are easier to investigate, e.g. which departments have been involved in preparing the decision, or if the customer has been asked about it. Going through the checklist makes the manager seem to be competent and thorough so they do not have to profoundly understand professional details.
Showing some results is more important than achieving a good result. Even stopping a method or a project in the middle of it can be worth it, because demonstrating the effort is already the sign of ownership.
In big organisations, a visible amount of the work is spent on creating presentations about anything so that the decision maker who is far from the topic can get to the same conclusion. Instead of empowerment.
These practices are not by chance. They have been serving well in many cases and they have their roles in the operation. The problem is when we rely on them too heavily, even in cases where they just fill in the time or when they are used as a matter of pure habit.
It is up to us to break the addiction to them. Be conscious when they serve you well.
