ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY

An organization without a hierarchy cannot function efficiently. An organization with an inviolable hierarchy cannot function ethically. Communication across all levels must be open to catch and address ethical lapses.

Managers must rely on what they are told by their subordinates. This need is formalized in the law as an exception to the “hearsay rule.” Normally, a witness cannot testify to what he has heard from another person. This is considered inadmissible hearsay testimony. An executive of a company, however, is permitted, under some circumstances, to testify about information that was reported to him in the normal course of business specifically because the law recognizes that executives must rely on secondhand information to run their businesses.

Managers who limit their communication to their immediate subordinates, however, do not really know what is going on in their organization. When all communication is filtered through the minds and mouths of others, a lot of essential information is lost. Managers must rely on second-hand information much of the time. This is not an excuse to rely on secondhand information exclusively.

A manager must walk around the various work sites that constitute his organization for a variety of reasons. One very important reason is to gather firsthand information about what is happening. Direct observation of the environment is important to accomplish this goal. Talking to people who are many levels down within the organizational hierarchy is even more important.

Talking to lower-level subordinates during these tours should not be confused with real communication, however, especially if accompanied by a manager whose position in the organizational hierarchy is between the executive’s position and the lower subordinates’ positions. If a middle manager is present during the walk-around, staff will feel inhibited to communicate openly, especially if they have been told in advance to “leave the talking to me” by their superior, a very common directive.

Even when he walks around solo, lower-level staff generally will not communicate openly with a top executive. Staff members frequently feel intimidated by top executives. They also may be afraid of reprisals from middle managers if they state what is really on their minds. While a particular staff member may state his mind despite his fears, what he says may not represent what others want to communicate. I never ignore these statements, but I always seek additional information to confirm, supplement, or contradict what I have heard.

One of the most important concepts that I communicate when I walk around is my “open telephone” policy. This is an extension of my “open door” policy that is applicable to staff members regardless of where they work. Normally, these staff members cannot walk into my office because they do not work anywhere near my office. But they can call me on the telephone. I make sure my toll-free telephone number and direct extension are widely available. Surprisingly, I am not inundated with calls. But, the calls I do receive (or the messages that are left for me after normal business hours) are almost always very important.

Whenever I mention my open telephone policy, I make a point of mentioning the importance of trying to resolve issues and problems in a variety of ways. Some of these ways are spelled out in our written procedure for dealing with “Situations that are less than Excellent.” I always conclude that if unable to address issues and problems satisfactorily following the progressive procedures in the policy, staff members should feel free to contact me, especially if the problem involves a possible ethical lapse by a superior within the organizational hierarchy.

I do not delude myself that staff members’ fears of “going above their superior’s head” are alleviated when I communicate my openness. I have no doubt that staff members who have had limited direct contact with me do not always believe that I will work very hard to ensure that there will not be any reprisals for going to the top. Enough lower-level staff members have contacted me directly with very important issues to assure me that this open telephone policy is working, at least in part. I have no doubt that the “grapevine” within our organization communicates widely and efficiently the outcomes that can be achieved by contacting “the boss” directly.

TEAMWORK

The best team may or may not have the best individual players. The best team almost always has the best team players. Two people can lift more than double the weight that one person can lift. A genius may be able to compose a great symphony, but only an orchestra can bring it to life.

One of the less well-known characters in the Star Trek television series was “SevenOfNine.” This character was a human being who was captured by aliens and forced to meld together with eight other individuals of varying species into an indivisible team of nine. The melding process was so complete that she lost her identity as an individual. Her personal identity became completely subservient to the team identity. The advantage of this form of teamwork was that individual team members ceased to be individuals and worked seamlessly together as one indivisible team.

SevenOfNine was an exaggeration of a problem that many people have with teams and teamwork. Many people see functioning within a team as dehumanizing. Humanity, at least as conceptualized in Western thought, stresses individual choice, individual accomplishments, and individual worth. Subordinating oneself to a team seems to be incompatible with human individuality to many people. When taken to an extreme, teamwork can reduce individual identity in favor of group identity.

As an entrepreneur with a “lone wolf” personality, I have always had difficulty giving up my personal identity in favor of the group’s identity. As I have matured, this problem has been reduced. I have come to appreciate that we can accomplish more as a team than we can accomplish as individuals. I have also come to accept that everyone’s individual identity is composed of many factors including the role that she plays in all the groups that she participates in. When my team accomplishes, I accomplish. This is not a negation of my individuality. It is an enhancement of my individuality. I am an individual who is part of many groups. My individuality and my group memberships do not need to be in conflict.

THE GREATEST GIFT

The greatest gift I can give to someone else is to accept his support. If I give support but do not accept support, my gift implies superiority. If I give and accept support, the supports are reciprocal and imply equality. This is true even when the magnitude of the supports is not equal.

Dom and I are about the same age. He grew up in South Philadelphia and lived a typical South Philly life until he reached 11th grade when his occasional use of marijuana grew into heavy abuse of drugs and alcohol. He did not yet understand it, but Dom had become a heavy substance abuser in an attempt to counter and control his severe depression. Over the next two and one-half decades, he drifted through life cycling between periods of highs and lows as he moved from psychiatric hospital to detox to jail and back to the community. By the time Dom sought services from my company, he had seen and done it all and he was ready for a change.

Dom’s progress came at great personal expense. He had to give up his old friends and stay away from his old stomping grounds to avoid temptation and backsliding. Over a period of several years, he moved from a highly structured group home with minimal independence and responsibility to assisted living and finally to his own apartment. As his need for intensive therapy and supervision decreased, he got a part-time job and then a full-time job. While Dom still benefits from regular contact with his case manager, he has been a model of independence and success for others for several years.

I really got to know Dom when we were asked to make a joint presentation at a local conference on the meaning of recovery. I was asked to speak about the issue from the perspective of an administrator while Dom was asked to speak about recovery from his personal perspective. As we prepared for our joint presentation, I told Dom about my own struggle with severe depression and I mentioned that I was going to share publicly my personal story of recovery for the first time at the conference.

The experience of sharing our personal stories at the conference seemed to create a special bond between us. While I tried to relate to people supported by my company in a friendly way, I always felt that they related to me, at least partially, as an almost mythical father figure. After our joint presentation, Dom seemed to relate to me in a different way. He seemed concerned about me as a human being and always asked me in a meaningful way how I was doing with my depression. In a very special way, I stopped being “the big guy” to Dom. Instead, I was an equal, not because he brought me down to his level, but because the issue of level no longer existed. I no longer was a support for Dom. We were supports for each other.

I found my changed relationship with Dom very supportive, and I realized that it actually was more supportive for Dom than our past relationship had been. He validated me with his concern. Of equal importance, he validated himself by providing me with supports. I believe that Dom has given me a great gift by treating me as a person who benefits from supports. I also believe that the greatest gift I gave to Dom involved validating his humanity by accepting the supports he offered.

GOALS

Entrepreneurs, like sluggers, strike out much more often than they hit homeruns. In life, like in baseball, most people make it home one base at a time.

I started my professional career as a behavior-shaping consultant working in group homes for adults who had a primary diagnosis of severe or profound mental retardation. Most of the residents of these homes also engaged in very challenging behaviors.

The first concept I explained to staff in these homes was the need to set realistic goals. The first procedure that I explained was how to break goals into small steps. People with severe mental retardation learn very slowly. Setting unrealistic goals for them was a formula for failure. I wanted to succeed.

Once the staff mastered this goal setting and achieving approach, we regularly saw significant progress. To the untrained eye, an adult learning to pull his pants up as part of a toilet-training goal may not seem like much. For the residents of the homes and the staff, achieving steps toward goals of this magnitude had an enormous impact on their quality of life and was cause for real celebration.

Since my consulting days, I have learned that this concept and procedure, setting realistic goals and breaking them down into small steps, has nearly universal application. Of course, the absolute size of the steps to achieve any specific goal will vary from goal to goal and from person to person. The relative smallness of each step to the total goal, however, remains a constant.

There may be exceptional people who hit homeruns on a regular basis. If they exist, they must be very rare because I know many successful people and none of them fits that description. The most successful people I know are very intelligent and very talented. They set very high goals because very high goals are within the realm of the realistic given who and where they are. Occasionally, one of these very successful people takes a giant leap and achieves a figurative homerun. Most of the time, they move methodically and progressively toward their goals. That is a fancy way of saying that they achieve their goals following a step-by-step process like all other mortals.

Homeruns are very exhilarating. In real life, great accomplishments and the exhilaration they engender are much more likely to be the product of slow steady progress than a giant leap forward.

NEED TO LEARN

The older I get, the more I know that I do not know, the more I know that I need to learn, and the more I know that what I need to learn cannot be found in books. The more I learn what I need to learn, the more I know that what I learn is much less important than what I become.

When I was 18, I knew that I knew everything I needed to know. Of course, I knew that I did not know everything. I believed, however, that my superior logic could compensate for any deficiency in knowledge that I might have.

As I grew older, I realized that logic is not as powerful as most people think and that a high I.Q. is more an indication of superior ability to play certain types of mind games rather than the ability to solve real-life problems.

Solving real-life problems is facilitated by real-life experiences. Effective real-life problem solving can neither be deduced from logic nor found in books nor acquired by consulting experts.

There is no substitute for real-life experiences because real-life experiences do more than change what I know. They change who I am.

A great decision-maker makes decisions that are functions of who he is, not merely what he knows.

True, I need to learn more. Of greater importance, I need to become more.

POLITE EVIL

Polite behavior without humanity is less than worthless. A polite Nazi is just another Nazi.

Anyone who knows me at all, knows that I cannot tolerate hypocrisy. One hypocritical situation that I have the most difficulty dealing with is polite evil. Invariably, I become rude when in the presence of polite evil. I have been told many times, and I concede, that responding rudely is not an effective way to counter polite evil. I do not care, and I doubt that my future responses to polite evil will be any different.

I first noticed polite evil while reading books about the discriminatory treatment of Jews and other minorities throughout history. The connection between the evil of discrimination and what polite society calls “gentility” jumped off the page. Whether reading about Nazis or southern “gentlemen,” it became clear to me that discrimination was more than tolerated by the classes that advocated strongest for the polite conduct of behavior. It was codified into the definition of politeness. As a teenager, I remember seeing a person smile at an African American server, refer to her as “ma’am,” ask her politely for service, and then refer to her using the “N” word as she turned away to comply even though she was close enough to hear him! When I pointed out the hypocrisy of his behavior, he looked at me with a baffled and annoyed expression. He did not even know that he was being hypocritical!

I also remember reading about what was commonly referred to as “the gentlemen’s agreement” which determined which class, race, religion, etc. was permitted to patronize elite establishments. I can understand (not condone) discriminatory behavior in the sense that some people must find keeping others in their “proper place" a satisfying way to counter their personal sense of insecurity. I can certainly understand (again not condone) the financial advantage that discrimination confers on the discriminating classes. But I am totally baffled regarding how people can find this behavior specifically an activity for a “gentleman.”

As a professional, I have been regularly confronted with the polite evil of discrimination in housing toward people with serious and complex behavioral health problems. Invariably, residents who do not want people with mental retardation or mental illness living in their neighborhoods explain that they are not against people with disabilities. No, the problem is that their neighborhood is not suitable for people with disabilities and their opposition really is out of their sincere concern for these unfortunate people. I would actually find the creativity of their exclusionary reasoning interesting if the inherent hypocrisy of their behavior was not so repugnant.

I find the hypocrisy of local politicians the most abhorrent. Since the Federal Fair Housing Law was amended in the 1990s to protect the housing rights of people with disabilities, case law has piled up that decisively supports the right of group homes for people with disabilities to exist on an equal basis with all other forms of single-family uses. Most local politicians are aware of this case law and no longer put up much resistance when we open a new home in their districts. Unfortunately, there are still enough unscrupulous local politicians and immoral attorneys willing to represent them to create drawn-out battles at times even when there cannot be any reasonable disagreement about what the law requires. Most recently, my organization purchased a 20-acre plot of land with a very large home on it to be used as a group home for 16 people with serious and persistent mental illness. When we researched the zoning ordinance prior to purchasing the property, we found a well-written, crystal-clear ordinance that defined a group home for people with disabilities as a single-family residence like any other single-family residence. There was no doubt that our intended use was permitted under the ordinance, nor could any reasonable reading of the ordinance construe otherwise. Despite this, township officials delayed our use for almost two years through extraordinary means. The attorney for the township made the most unsavory, outlandish, and totally baseless accusations against our organization, drew out a zoning hearing so that it lasted for more than 10 hours over the course of five months, failed to live up to agreements that both parties had accepted and read into the official hearing record, etc. Of course, every statement out of his mouth was full of self-righteousness and indignation regarding our evil ways.

The proverbial “last straw” was the township attorney presenting the township manager to testify to a total lie even though the township attorney had written a letter to my attorney prior to the testimony that clearly and undeniably contradicted the township manager’s testimony. When my attorney produced the letter from the township’s attorney, the zoning board called for a recess to review the letter. I was totally disgusted with the township at this point. As I got up from the table, I impatiently pushed a chair out of my way so that I could leave the room as quickly as possible to get some fresh air. Unfortunately, the metal chair clanged loudly as it banged against another metal chair.

One of the residents of the township started to scream at me for damaging the township’s property and for being so rude. (Of course, there was no damage to any property.) As I walked away, several other residents yelled at me and threatened to do to me what I had had the audacity to do to their property. When I asked why they were so upset with my alleged “rude” behavior when they seemed to be perfectly calm about their township manager committing perjury under oath, the only response I got (surprise!) was further verbal abuse and threats of bodily harm.

Apparently, in that township, it is perfectly acceptable for a gentleman to commit perjury under oath. But gentlemen are obligated to respond to rudeness by threatening bodily harm to their adversary.

FAILURE

When an experienced person fails to perform as expected, it is rarely due to lack of knowledge about what is expected.

The most common management response to a subordinate’s failure to perform as expected is to explain how to “do it right.” This may be effective with a subordinate who is new to his or her position. It is rarely successful with an experienced staff member.

Failure to perform as expected by an experienced staff member may be due to lack of motivation, problems outside of work, anger at management, and many other factors that are, at most, tangentially related to the knowledge and skills of the staff member. Explaining the expected performance standards may have a short-term effect if the staff member thinks that further failure to perform as expected will lead to disciplinary action and possible termination of employment. It rarely leads to a long-term change in the staff member’s performance since it does not address the underlying problem.

If the underlying problem is a lack of motivation, including the staff in formal or informal motivation-enhancing activities may be effective. The key is to reawaken the staff member’s enthusiasm for work. Unless the staff member’s motivation increases, long-term improvement is unlikely.

If the underlying problem is a situation outside of work that is distracting the staff member and consuming too much of his or her emotional energy, providing support to the staff member while the outside problem is being resolved may bridge the gap in performance. A short-term decrease in performance must be acceptable for this approach to be viable. Alternatively, suggesting that the staff member take a leave of absence may be appropriate.

If the underlying problem is anger at management, the risk to the organization is greatest. Anger at management is contagious. If it cannot be reduced and eventually eliminated, it will almost certainly grow. In this situation, the problem may be poor policies and procedures that need to be changed, unfair or discriminatory implementation of policies and procedures, a problematic manager, etc. When one or more of these factors underlay the staff member’s failure to perform as expected, management must address the underlying management problem. Of at least equal importance, management must clearly and effectively communicate to all staff members the steps it is taking to improve management’s performance. Nothing reassures staff members more than hearing management acknowledge problems, delineating the steps that will be taken to reduce and eliminate these problems, and then implementing these changes. Failure to act on announced improvements is the single most likely way to increase anger at management.

FOOTBALL

Consistently making first downs may not be as spectacular as completing a long pass, but it wins more games.

Like most teenagers, I admired and was jealous of my peers who were spectacular athletes. While I knew that I could never be a spectacular athlete, I hoped as I got older that I might be a spectacular clinician. When I gave up clinical work in favor of being an entrepreneur, I hoped that I might be a spectacular entrepreneur.

I was not a spectacular clinician, and I am not a spectacular entrepreneur. Nor do I care.

Being spectacular is not what it is purported to be, at least not for us ordinary mortals. Spectacular athletes may get a disproportionate share of glory, but glory, too, is not what it is purported to be.

The biggest problem with glory is that it is almost always fleeting. Yesterday’s superstar may be today’s used car salesman. There is nothing wrong with being a(n honest) used car salesman, but it is a real comedown from being a superstar.

What is true in sports is also true about other endeavors. Spectacular accomplishments in any arena are almost always transitory.

Sustained success always requires sustained effort. During the years of sustained effort, successes pile up. None of these successes may be spectacular, but the collection of successes can be very impressive.

MENTAL ILLNESS

Many people believe that extreme anti-social behavior is a sign of mental illness. In a small number of cases, this is correct. In most cases, extreme anti-social behavior is a sign of evil. Evil people are not mentally ill. Mentally ill people are not evil.
The probability of a child or teenager being injured seriously by a mentally ill person is lower than the probability that a close family member, friend or neighbor, teacher or religious leader will seriously injure him or her.
Hitler was not mentally ill. He was evil.

I have opened many community-based group homes for people with mental illness, and I have spoken in front of many community groups who opposed these homes. Invariably, the issue of “dangerousness” is the hottest topic. Ill-informed community members “know” that their wives and children will be attacked and molested if “those people” are allowed into the community.

In the 27 years that my company has operated community-based group homes, no member of the community has been injured by a resident of one of our group homes. Can I guarantee that this will remain true forever? Of course, I cannot. Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that residents of group homes for people with serious mental illness are not dangerous to community members.

I know that in the past 26 years at least several members of the communities in which our group homes are located have been injured by other community residents who are not mentally ill. Similarly, I know that additional residents will be injured in the coming years. Informing community members of these facts seems to have no impact on their vehement opposition to group homes.

It is interesting to note that two to three years after we open a group home in a community, the opposition almost always fades to nothing regardless of what we say or do. It is clear to me that the best way to combat opposition to group homes for people with mental illness is to open group homes for people with mental illness.

Equating the most serious mental illness with the most serious violence is not only factually wrong, it is dangerous. Our society has codified laws that protect mentally ill people from prosecution and conviction for violent crimes. This is not because of the high frequency of violent crime among people with serious mental illness. It is because our society recognizes two important issues: First, people with the most serious mental illnesses are not always responsible for their actions. Second, they may have limited capacities to defend themselves in criminal proceedings. When community members confuse mental illness with evil, they may actually increase the probability that an evil person will get away with a crime by claiming that he is mentally ill.

Because our society has legally separated religion from government, it has become unfashionable to talk about evil. Evil does not exist because of religion. It exists despite religion. While I strongly support separation of church and state, I firmly believe that evil needs to be identified and punished. Differentiating evil from serious mental illness is an important part of accomplishing that goal.