How to have a good fight

Conflict in the workplace is natural—even necessary. Colleagues who challenge one another’s thinking tend to consider a richer range of options, which ultimately lead to better business decisions. What surprises me though is how quickly disagreement takes on a personal tone. And I think we need to put a stop to it—whether it involves our colleagues or within our other stakeholder groups. How do we do that? Mitigate interpersonal conflict is the key and you can do this in a number of ways—think about these*:

Have a common Vision

Have a common value system

Use humour

Focus on the facts

Multiply the alternatives

Create common goals

Balance the power structure

Seek consensus with qualification—that means someone has to make a decision at some point. The talking can’t go on forever.

Now go find someone to have a good fight with ……..

Want me to talk about any of these in more detail – let me know.  Hey come to think about it want me to talk about anything else let me know.

(* With thanks to HBR, 1997 and 2001)

What can we learn from the SABC?

We don’t live long enough to make all our own mistakes and that’s why, if you are smart, you learn from others when they get it wrong. And that’s where the SABC has got it so right—this is a case study of note on how not to run a media business. Now to put it all down to poor corporate governance is just too easy. Sure the Board is incompetent and senior executives must be so preoccupied with (political?) survival that it is unlikely they are able to apply their minds in any meaningful way to the issues at hand. The real problem though is the cumulative effect of a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that’s got worse over a period of years. Too harsh? Consider this for a moment: whether it is the Sunday Times, the Weekly Mail & Guardian or Matebello Motloung writing in this week’s Financial Mail (March 13, 2009) the list of infighting, incompetence and the lack of vision is clear for just about anyone to see. Of real interest to me was this statement by Motloung in the FM: ‘Advertising, which accounts for 83% of the SABC’s revenue, is drying up. Of the R783m deficit, R400m was a result of cancelled advertising’. That’s a nonsense if ever I have seen one. SABC revenue is up 9% Y/Y and yet employee costs were up by 38% in the same period. That’s big when you consider 38% was the equivalent of R410m. Add consultancy fees (up 68% more Y/Y) and the total spent on employees and consultancy costs is almost 40% of revenue. That’s up from only 28% of revenue in the previous year. The net effect is the SABC spent R500m more Y/Y on employee and consulting costs when it knew revenue was under pressure. When you look at it like this you know where to start looking for your problem: Management, not the Board. Someone didn’t manage their budget properly. Someone thinks it’s ok to offer salaries at 35% more than the market and doesn’t get the idea it will come back to bite them in the future.  There is more to come ……

Turning up the conversation to 11*

In the old days—that means around 10 years ago—the quality of a hi-fi was largely determined by its size.  The bigger it was the better it was.  I remember getting my Pioneer XF something something 8, bought from the local Hyperama with part time work-money —what a monster. Took up half the lounge and each speaker was almost a meter in height. The guys at school looked at me with a whole new respect and for the first time I knew what it felt like to be the ‘man’ just because I had more debt than anyone else.

Man, this thing had dials and buttons like those on the flight deck of a Boeing 737-800. On the odd occasion I would turn the volume dial up (forget a remote control) to around 6 or 7 just to feel the vibration in my stomach. Crank it up to 8 and the ornaments on the top of each speaker would start to move to the beat and by the time you got to 9 the windows were starting to vibrate.  At a 10 the family budgie couldn’t stay on its perch and the family cat and dog had all but disappeared—along with Granny.  How was I to know that just coz you were deaf didn’t mean you couldn’t feel the beat?  Boy was there trouble when the folks got home.

But what if that 10 could be turned to an 11?  Surely 11 would be better than 10?  That sort of thinking can get you into real trouble … Ever feel in a world as noisy as ours you would like to turn up the conversation to an 11?  Break through all that clutter and make sure your voice is heard above everyone else’s?  The problem is that when you crank it up to 11 everyone else does the same.  But what if it wasn’t just about loudness?  What if loudness was determined by the quality of the sound not the position on the dial?  What if the quality of your conversation was the real reason your volume level was an 11? 

Read a great quote the other day about blogging:  never in the history of humankind has so much been said by so many to so few … thank you for being one of the few…….

(* My thanks to Brian Penrose of the University of the Witwatersrand, Dept. of Philosophy who first introduced me to the idea of having a conversation, turned up to 11.)