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Political correctness is killing this country, or so I’ve heard.

What I haven’t heard is a clear, crisp definition of what the phrase political correctness means.

When I first heard it I was pretty clear on the concept: It meant I couldn’t tell Polish or Italian jokes anymore. This was back in high school, where my clarity about the concept came courtesy of a much larger and more muscular Polish acquaintance who made certain I understood his point, reinforced by a seriously cute Italian girl who explained that I’d just reduced my chances of dating her to the sort of number mathematicians use negative exponents to express.

Along with the recognition that racially-and ethnically-oriented jokes were in bad taste came an increasingly widespread recognition that the extensive and colorful variety of racial and ethnic pejoratives that had been in common use, and the various stereotypes that had accompanied them, were no longer to be uttered in polite company either.

As my own heritage has in the past been used as a verb meaning “to negotiate beyond the point of reasonableness” — a stereotype I’ve often wished was more accurate when negotiating compensation and consulting rates, even while finding it offensive when spoken aloud — I long-ago made my peace with political correctness.

My perspective is, I recognize, less than universally shared — a situation I always find puzzling. In this case I’ve often wondered if the main problem is one of pronunciation: It should be spoken as “Polite-ical correctness.”

The problem, friends and acquaintances have explained to me, is that the desire to avoid offending anyone has been taken off a cliff, as in the example of calling people who are particularly short in stature “vertically challenged.”

Which leads in turn to the question, why would you want to call attention to someone’s past-two-standard-deviations stature? If they suffered from some other unusual size characteristic … say, unusually small hands … would you … oh, wait. Never mind. We crossed that boundary a couple of months ago.

None of this would be in bounds for Keep the Joint Running were it not for the nature of the most recent attempts to make political correctness socially incorrect.

Which is that right now, among some members of the political (as opposed to the polite-ical) class, political correctness means being forbidden to attach bigoted and factually incorrect stereotypes to all Muslims of all stripes everywhere in the world.

And, for that matter, to all Sikhs as well, because many of those who complain about political correctness aren’t all that well-informed, not only about Islam but also about what it means to wear a turban.

This is a legitimate KJR topic because, in your role as business or IT leader, you’re likely to hear colleagues emulating their favorite political personage or pundit, expounding loudly, unfavorably and in public about Muslims.

Which, whether they realize it or not, insults the DBA, developer, or sysadmin in the next cubicle. One of those who feels offended might report to you. If so, you have a legal responsibility to make sure they don’t work in a threatening and harassing environment.

Depending on your personal moral code, even without HR’s dictates you might figure you have a responsibility to help out someone who’s on the receiving end of verbal bullying, because being a bystander in a situation like this is the sort of passive behavior that won’t make you proud of yourself when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

More important than this: Why would you want to let some uninformed lout spew garbage that drives good employees to work for a competitor? We’re all in a fight for talent. That being the case, fight to win.

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions we hold back, for no other reason than that we aren’t sure what to say in embarrassing circumstances like these. If that’s what’s troubling you, be troubled no more.

I recommend starting by looking at the offending party with a sour expression and a don’t-look-away gaze that’s just short of a stare. When you’re sure you have their attention, say, “What you’re saying is offensive and uninformed. You’re welcome to your opinion, but you aren’t welcome to share it here. What you’re doing is a firing offense, so we’re both better off if you button it right now. Save it for a bar after you’ve left the office. People in bars expect to hear folks who have had a few too many expressing their ignorance in loud voices.”

Well, okay, maybe that isn’t the best way to handle it.

Tempting though.

Leading isn’t hard the way neurosurgery is hard. It’s hard the way digging a ditch is hard.

Thinking about what I’ve accomplished since I starting publishing KJR and its predecessors, I consider Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World one of my highlights. What follows is my attempt at the Classic Comics version.

Leadership defined:

Peter Drucker and Admiral Grace Hopper suggested, respectively, that, “Leadership is doing the right things. Management is doing them right,” and, “You manage things. You lead people.” I don’t like them because neither is a definition.

And so, mine: “If people are following then you’re leading. Otherwise you aren’t.”

I’d leave it at that except President Eisenhower did me one better, with, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

Maestro!

The Leadership compass

“Leader” isn’t a title. It’s a choice. Which brings up the leadership compass: Every employee is in a position to lead in one or more of four directions. They can lead South, to the people who report to them on the org chart. They can lead North, to those higher up on the org chart, and especially those they report to. They can lead East, to their organizational peers. And they can lead West, to those who make use of the services their organization provides.

As a general rule, some managers excel at leading in the southwesterly direction; the rest are northeasterners. Southwestern leaders are good at getting done what they’re supposed to get done. Northeastern leaders are good at getting ahead in their careers. At, not to put too fine a point on it, brownnosing and schmoozing.

But also on getting the budget and resources their organizations need, from the people who are in a position to provide them.

Leadership Power Rankings

How you lead depends in large part on the level of power you bring to bear on your relationships, and there are five levels. You can (1) control, which is the power a programmer brings to their relationship with the computers they program. You can (2) exert authority – you can tell someone what to do, and hope they do it and do it right. You can (3) persuade – you can modify a colleague’s thought process so they reach the same conclusion you’ve reached. And you can (4) influence, which is like persuasion only less complete: you can modify a colleague’s thought process so it’s closer to your own.

And, least appealing, you can (5) be a victim – you can be powerless, which is the definition of victimhood.

No matter which direction you’re facing you have opportunities to lead, which you can take advantage of so long as you recognize that influencing is a legitimate leadership result.

Which brings us to the world of technique: How effective leaders get others to follow their lead.

The eight tasks of leadership

Effective leaders master eight tasks:

Setting direction: Leaders must be clear about their organization’s mission, vision, and strategy. The mission is the reason the organization exists – what it’s supposed to accomplish. Vision is a clear and precise account of how tomorrow will be different from yesterday. Strategy is how the leader expects to deliver on their organization’s mission and make the vision real.

Delegation: Effective staff get things done. Effective leaders build organizations that get things done for them. The process of getting staff to do the leader’s work and do it well is the essence of leading.

Staffing: To build organizations that get things done, effective leaders must be adept at determining who to recruit, hire, train, and promote so the organization is staffed with people they can delegate to.

Decision-making: Decisions commit or deny staff, time, and money. Everything else is just talking. Decent leaders don’t necessarily make good decisions, but they do take the steps needed so good decisions get made.

Motivating: A point not worth bothering to make is that motivated staff work harder and better than apathetic staff. Leaders motivate by (1) avoiding de-motivating employees; and then (2) energizing them.

Managing team dynamics: Most of the work that gets done gets done by teams – collections of employees who trust each other and who are aligned to a common purpose. The best leaders don’t consider themselves part of the teams they lead, but do take responsibility for creating the conditions that result in trust and alignment.

Instituting culture: Culture is how we do things around here – not on a procedural level, but on an attitudinal one. Employees who share the same unconscious assumptions and thought processes collaborate more effectively than those who don’t.

Communicating: For the most part, the way leaders accomplish the first seven tasks is by communicating – the eighth task. Communicating means they listen, inform, persuade, and facilitate.

There’s a myth that leadership training is pointless, because you can’t teach someone to be a great leader.

It’s a myth because it’s based on a bipolar outcome.

Few who aspire to leadership will become great leaders, no matter how much education they receive on the subject.

But only the most oblivious will improve their skills at the eight tasks and still fail to become a better leader.

As with so many other subjects, when it comes to leadership perfection is the enemy of the good.