Ruckus, Random, Resistance...Killers Of Good Business

We Keep Trying To Do The Things That Do Not Work.

Working with business leaders can be trying.  I have seen many leadership styles.  Some styles have helped the business leader win often.  Some styles have contributed to the slow destruction of the business model.  Some styles of leadership need so much repair that it is amazing the business model still exists.  Let's talk about the styles of leadership that will guarantee fair levels of failure.

Sometimes it is good to describe how to win.  It can be helpful to read about how to do certain things that will help deliver winning results.  On the other hand, sometimes it is best to see the kind of leadership that will slowly destroy a good business model.  Describing how particular leadership styles will negatively effect good business results can be useful.  One time I remember watching the Johnny Carson Show a few years ago and a popular young actor came to the show as a special guest.  Johnny Carson and his sidekick Ed McMahon were describing to the audience how this popular actor had announced his intention to get married.  It became the fodder of attention in the discussion.  During the whole interview Johnny Carson kept giving the young actor a lot of advice on how to help protect a good marriage.  During all of the advice Johnny was offering, Ed McMahon was laughing deeply.  Finally Johnny stopped and turned towards his sidekick Ed and asked him why the advice he was offering was so funny.  Ed kept laughing and told the audience that he found it funny to listen to Johnny's advice since Johnny was on his fifth marriage.  Ed described Johnny's advice much like listening to the captain of the Titanic describing how to ram icebergs with a ship.  Everyone got a good laugh.  After the laughter settled down, Johnny spoke up.  Johnny Carson said he was giving the newlywed some advice on how not to do what Johnny did.  Johnny said it was not so funny to describe how to destroy a good marriage.  He continued to describe how some of the best lessons that he could offer to the actor would be the ones that could help the newly wed avoid the most destruction.

Sometimes describing what actions to avoid can be more effective than describing what techniques will work well.  Business leaders can practice some of the things they have heard will work well while at the same time performing other things that are very destructive.  They may avoid performing those destructive patterns if they learned about how those patterns can destroy their success efforts.  What kinds of management patterns help to produce ways to kill good business models?  What kinds of patterns will usually kill good business success?

If you are the type of leader who has the kind of personality that uses a stick to stir up bee hives, I can assure you that eventually your staff support for performing well will 'creatively' disappear.  The kind of leader who finds a stick and hits every little beehive on the business path is the kind of business leader who performs the ruckus style of management.  There are a lot of business managers who operate their leadership style using the ruckus style of management.  They like to create a ruckus in order to take control of the things they want to lead.  They deliver and manage a divide and conquer set of patterns to control.  The production of the business takes a back seat to the production of the divide and conquer methods instilled into the business operations.  The health of the relationships among the staff and customers becomes strained enough to refuse permission for success to grow.  A business can operate for a very long time in this kind of mode.  It will never become very successful.  It will flop along forever and ever doing well short of what it should be doing.  The ruckus developments of control will dominate the energy that could be applied to growing up big.  The model can never become efficient enough to produce the small 2% of difference that makes or breaks the great ones versus the 'also-rans' of the business race.  The ruckus style steals the energy that is needed to make that 2% edge become a reality.  The 2% winning difference will never show up.  The ruckus style eventually kills the good parts of the business model.

I have met a lot of business owners who practice this style of business leadership.  It saddens me.  Not one of them win big and not one of them can sustain a victory for very long.  However, most of them are still operating their struggling business models.  They get by just enough to play in their business models for another year.  Each time some good finds its way to the model, the ruckus style of leadership destroys the opportunity for success to settle in.  It almost appears as though the business leader kills the opportunity for success on purpose.  The ruckus style of leadership is a very destructive cycle to perform.  Hitting beehives with a stick is not a calm method to use for stirring up success.  It brings all of the bees out and they become very agitated.  Customers tend to flee from that kind of sight.  Remember, customer are very fickle.  Their support is very fleeting.  Customers do not appreciate bee stings.  Hanging out near business models that agitate bee hives looks too risky for them to support.  The ruckus style is a killer of good business.  Do not practice it in the marriage of your business model.  Divorce might not be the result, but a rotten marriage will need to be endured.

Wrong Leadership Styles Need A Rest Once In Awhile.

Random management styles are not random.  They occur routinely.  Some business leaders are terrible planners.  They operate from the style that does most of its work shooting from the hip.  Each day they come to work with a new idea, a new plan or a new method that they want to use to insert into their business model.  They come to work with random ideas, random thoughts and random leadership.  They are leaders that 'pick' their style for the day based upon how they personally feel.  If they feel like they want to instill more security, they request that all of the facility doors remain closed during business operation hours.  They tell an employee or two who are standing nearby about this new rule.  They walk over to close the back door of the operation and describe how they want to see more security.  They fail to notify the other employees in the front of their facility about this change.  As the day wears on, this leader gets upset with the employees in the back of the facility because the rear door remains open.  The random changes have little meaning and are not respected.  The leader turns ugly on the situation and loses the leadership they need to maintain.  The random management style will only guarantee the delivery of some poor performance results.

Two days later, the random business leader goes out the back door of the business facility and forgets to shut the door behind him.  Every employee notices.  The once serious safety rule becomes so random that it quietly disappears off the face of the earth.  It no longer is moved by the leader of random acts.  Random management styles are not random, just destructive and ineffective ways to produce good business success.  I have met a lot of these types of business leaders.  They are great starters of new ideas.  They are also great killers of many business efforts.  They manage a lot of unfinished ideas, systems and errant plans.  They walk the life of their business model like a lost kid playing in the neighborhood park.  They enjoy the swing sets and slides in the park so much that they do not remember when to go home nor where their home is located.  They have learned how to live for the moment instead of plan for the future.  They function randomly.  These are the kinds of leaders that grow up to destroy every opportunity to succeed.  They find how to get lost in the random forest of daily operations.  They take charge by re-directing the work they feel needs to be done at the moment where they stand.  It is a random act.

Random leadership is random success.  Random leadership is one of the killers to good business success.  If you practice random leadership, good luck with trying to win big.  I have not ever seen it happen.  The two do not mix well together in the same bowl.  Random leadership is just another way to waste a lot of valuable energy.  Success does not appear in business models that waste a lot of valuable energy.  Energy waste does not attach itself to high levels of winning success.  In fact, energy waste attaches itself to losing efforts.  Random management styles attract a lot of energy waste.  Guess what happens next?  Tip: The answer is not success.

Random leadership styles are very destructive methods for producing healthy business results.  If you are entrenched with the random habit of leadership style, get some help.  Your habits are quietly killing your business success.  Your marriage to success is quietly failing.  Your random style and your business model may be able to share rooms together for a very long time, but great success will never join the two of you in that room.  The food bill, the room rent and the dirty clothes on the floor will always be there for your random style to manage.  Unfortunately, success will not be part of the duties you manage.  Success will go find some other place to live.

Resistance.  I like this one the best.  Everyone has some level of resistance inside of their management style.  Nobody can escape this one.  I have a lot of it in my own style.  I like this one the best.

Resistance kills business success.  However, we all like it so much that we protect every bit of resistance we can generate.  Resistance is the most prevalent method of business leadership.  We resist good changes, we resist taking risks, we resist good ideas and we resist being told we resist.  We love to resist.  It seems to give us a sense of power.  We like power so much we will make sure we have it even at the risk of killing our business success.  The power we get when we resist in our management style is so attractive that we forget to manage the things that produce great success.  We love what resistance helps us to feel.  The sense of control we get from the resistance we produce gives us such a great feeling that we forget how to win.  Resistance takes over.  We actually feed it willingly.

Some business leaders are so entrenched in the style of resistance that when you offer to them a good idea they kill it before you finish the sentence of description.  They resisted it before you finished describing it.  It is a debilitating process to achieve success.  In fact, it kills good business models.  It lives like a king and demands center stage but destroys the path that could lead to great success.  Most business leaders are afflicted with some level of this ailment.  Some come dressed with a lot of this dirt on their leadership clothing.  They carry too much resistance in their style of management.  They want too much control to permit good ideas to flow about the inside halls of their business model.  The practice of resistance gives them this false sense of control.  The resistance wins again.  It slowly destroys a perfectly good business model.

Resistance.  I like this one the best.  Everyone has some level of resistance inside of their management style.  Nobody can escape this one.  I have a lot of it in my own style.  I like this one the best.

Ruckus, random and resistance techniques can and will destroy your good business efforts to succeed well.  Make sure you protect all of them well.  Keep them alive and well.  That way you can make sure you have something to complain about when your business model struggles to survive...because it will.

Until next time...