Don't Compromise!

One of the clichés of modern life is that we have to be ruthless, hard-bitten and tough to thrive and achieve success. Sorry if it comes as a blow to the solar plexus from a velvet glove, but that may not actually be true. It’s no bad thing to be determined. Or even driven. But building and maintaining relationships are too important to success that we can just treat others as a climbing-frame: manners matter.

Someone once anonymously said: “Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were”, which chimes nicely with Ambrose Pierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary:

Politeness, n.  The most acceptable hypocrisy.

Reading one quote from Evelyn Waugh, it’s tempting to believe that – whatever we might believe about the decline in public and workplace manners – we value them now more than we used to:

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”

- a remark that’s oddly echoed by Indira Gandhi (which we’ve quoted here before):

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”

Over at the popular management and leadership blog Great Leadership, Dan McCarthy asks the question Would Your Peers Vote for You? One piece of research has shown that your peers’ opinions in 360 degree feedback exercises are a better guide to your future promotion prospects than those – despite our tendency to be more concerned about the scores that they give us – of your manager and your reports. In response, Dan offers advice as to how to behave around our peers in a way that’s more likely to curry favour.

To me, much of the column’s advice and observations were – if not actually as soft-hearted and limp as ‘why can’t everyone just be nice’ – essentially making the point that success for individuals depends at least in part on the way they behave towards – and in relation to – those around them.

(It’s a little disappointing that there’s nothing in Dan’s advice that recommends demonstrating the investment you have made in the development of those working for you and the improvement in team and organizational performance that can be measurably demonstrated as a result. But as we’re being nice here, we should point out that his column is focused on improving your own chances of promotion.)

Actually I was even more strongly struck by the language of some of the remarks of the commenters to Dan’s post, who introduce some new definitions of what this is essentially about: two words that leapt out at me were ‘respect’ and ‘sincerity’. Certainly, the former is far harder to earn without the latter than with it, and far easier to lose – usually irretrievably – when an absence of sincerity makes itself plain. One quote expressed this particularly boldly:

In military units with the leaders dead or incapacitated, soldiers of equal rank will naturally form around the one individual the group feels is most capable of leading. There’s good reason for that.”

- although we would not recommend killing or maiming your current manager to test it out, no matter how politely you perform the execution.

But there’s a comment on another blog posting – What you should really learn from Jack Welch at Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog  - that I think makes an even better point:

 So much of organizational success is independent of classic MBA concepts but very dependent upon culture. Too often overlooked. The pursuit of cultural best practices is embedded in the culture of the best companies.”

Cultural best practice is something that can only ultimately be passed on from one person to the next: any organisation’s culture is expressed through the relationships between its people. Without integrity, sincerity and respect, relationships suffer. Where relationships suffer, an organisation’s culture suffers. And where the culture sickens, the organisation may well sicken with it.

So we’ll finish with two firm – but polite – words of advice: be nice.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine