When I was writing my new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, I happened to mention the Roman Catholic Church in a positive sense of an organization that had been successful for a long time with relatively flat management structure. I got a torrent of heatedly negative comments: how could I possibly cite such an organization as a positive example, given what’s happened! Some of the comments seemed to reflect deeply felt personal wounds.
More recently, when I referred in Twitter to the Roman Catholic Church in somewhat less positive terms, I was told that I was being rude and that I should go and re-read the Bible before I dared to say anything negative about the head of a religion.
How can we look at such an organization in a clear-eyed objective fashion?
The reality is that if you want a good example of traditional management on display, one need go no further than the Church’s dealing with the pedophile scandal. The Pope may not be a CEO, but he's certainly acting like a traditional manager. The Pope’s inability to say anything long, adequate, sincere and the role he played is simply typical CEO traditional management! “Why are people criticizing us? The devil is making them do it!”
Seriously.
Maureen Dowd suggests they need sexorcism, rather than exorcism: http://nyti.ms/aH3rvW
Sadly, the Pope and his entourage are doing what traditional management has always done in a crisis: circle the wagons, say black is white, and if anything is wrong, it's someone else's fault!
In 1837, Hans Christian Andersen
advanced our understanding of the phenomenon with his tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. The tale has
a familiar part and an unfamiliar part.
The familiar part is that the emperor
of a prosperous city is swindled into buying an imaginary suit of clothes. The
cloth, he is told by a pair of scoundrels, is invisible to anyone who was
either stupid or unfit for his position. The emperor cannot see the
non-existent cloth, but says that he can for fear of appearing stupid; his
ministers do the same. When the scoundrels report that the suit is finished,
they pretend to put on the suit of clothes. The emperor then goes on a
procession through the capital showing off his new "clothes". During
the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "But he has nothing
on!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. That is the
familiar part of the story.
The unfamiliar part of the tale is that
the truth that the child has inadvertently blurted out makes no difference.
Neither the emperor nor the attendant nobles pay any attention to it. The
emperor holds his head high and continues the procession, as do the other
courtiers. The charade continues.
Thus Hans Christian Andersen put his
finger on a key feature of all hierarchies: the mere exposure of falsehood
doesn’t put an end to it or change behavior. False statements that support the power
structure of a hierarchy have precedence over true statements that put the
power structure in question. Everybody in the power structure tends to go on
acting as though right is wrong and black is white: that’s because their own
role in the power structure depends on defending it.
Radical management is about doing the opposite: when something goes wrong, admit responsibility. Get to the root cause. Fix it before damage gets worse—much, much worse.
If you would like to learn more about radical management and the new workplace, you might like to consider registering now for the Smithsonian symposium, April 16, 2010 in Washington DC: http://bit.ly/5SMWMN
I've read the story so many times, and never thought of it that way. That's a really good point.
Personally, I think the church is a great example of a long-lasting organization because it has had it's failures and kept together.
Posted by: davidburkus | April 05, 2010 at 08:50 AM
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Posted by: Health News | March 16, 2011 at 03:02 AM