Sustainable Results

SUSTAINABLE RESULTS

The business world’s current obsession with ethical breakdowns arising from untempered personal ambition misses a more important point: how personal ambition can compromise results achieved whether or not there is outright management malfeasance. I think it is no coincidence that leaders like Stocking and Cox have been able to achieve significant long-term results. It starts with focus. When positional authority leads managers to invest energy in protecting or expanding turf, it comes at the expense of focusing on, as Stocking said, “the thing itself,” the actual results people are trying to achieve. But there is another matter of time horizon. If managers focus only on short-term results, they are often justified in continuing to intervene to sustain results. Whether this is done consciously or inadvertently, it creates a shifting the burden dynamic and a self-reinforcing dependency on management intervention. In this way, focusing on short-term results becomes a strategy for further concentrating power.

“I reflected a lot on this when I worked with the National Health Service,” Stocking says.[12] “I would watch managers fix immediate problems, like ‘waiting list targets,’ by not attending to anything else. But if you’ve done nothing to fundamentally change how the whole system is working, once you take your eye off it, the problems come right back. If you take the time to figure out with people how you can get a system that is going to continue to deliver better results, it takes a lot longer but when you’ve got it, it doesn’t walk away from you. I would say, ‘It may take me a bit longer to get there, but when I get there I know what I’ve got is more sustainable.’ Eventually, we developed a principle to guide us. When we have to go in and intervene, say, in a hospital, then we should do it in a way that enables the people there to know better how to help themselves in the future. The whole point is to try to improve so we don’t have to intervene again.

“Now, in Oxfam, we have a similar challenge. In humanitarian work there is enormous psychological reward, kudos and personal satisfaction, in stepping into a humanitarian crisis and doing it well. You know, ‘the white men in shorts flying in and delivering.’ Now we’re trying to reach the point where we never have to go into a country and deliver humanitarian relief. If we’ve done our work well, we’ve helped local people develop to the point where they are able to help themselves. In the world of aid, I would say the motivation is not personal power in the sense of control, but a subtler sense of power that comes from feeling needed. Regardless, the dynamics are the same, a reinforcing need for the person in power.