Member-only story
Think about a situation like this for a second.
Let’s say you get a chance to talk business with a 30-year veteran of some industry. It can be forks, for all I care, or Persian rugs. The industry doesn’t necessarily matter.
What matters is this guy (probably a guy) is getting “disrupted.” There are upstarts who are beating his company on cost, digital, service delivery, customer experience, or something else. The market share is slipping.
Now, if you asked this guy what he needs to do in terms of the teams under him, this is my prediction on what he’d say:
- “Teams? I can’t worry about that. I need to keep a close eye on the financials.”
- “I need people like me in the foxhole; these are challenging times.”
Both of these answers are wrong. Here is why:
- is wrong because any true “leader” needs to focus on people and teams, as that’s where the work is getting done. The financials you breathlessly analyze are the result of actions from those people.
- is so, so, so wrong that I need a few more paragraphs to explain it.
Northwestern research on conformity
A few years ago, Alvaro Sandroni, a professor of managerial…
