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ManagementSpeak: I make it a point to buffer my employees from the burden of too many meetings outside the department.

Translation: I want to be the only one who gets any exposure.

I’d thank this week’s contributor by name, but she was concerned about the kind of exposure she’d have received.

It’s hard to soar with eagles when you’re being pecked to death by ducks.

Many authors, yours truly included, have penned grand prose describing the challenges of leadership. From reading them you might think business executives have a powerful focus on grand purposes. You might think that’s why they’re where they are, and that you’re where you are because you don’t. And so, filled with grand visions of your own, you open the door to your office, ready to transform your organization, when an employee requests a few minutes of your time, only to ask:

“Why is it that Harry and June are able to take a half hour every day on smoking breaks? It isn’t fair to the rest of us who don’t smoke!”

Poof! There goes your grand vision, vaporized by the exigencies of day-to-day management.

The average manager deals with approximately 137 issues like this in a typical year: Smoking breaks; the employee who spends a half-hour futzing every morning before starting in on actual work; someone who resents being pressured to contribute to the birthday fund.

Issues, that is, that wouldn’t be worth your time, except that if you ignore them they’ll create friction in the workplace. As with friction in physics, they convert directed energy into heat while causing the machinery to grind to a halt.

Make no mistake: You are responsible for handling these distractions because you are responsible for employee motivation and team dynamics. The question is how to do so. There’s no single solution for all of them. There are, however, some basic dos and don’ts:

  • Do acknowledge the issue. You don’t have to agree that it’s important. You don’t have to commit to doing anything about it. You do have to make it clear that you’ve listened and understood. If you don’t, you’ll lose the trust of the employee raising the issue. That will just compound the problem.
  • Do make it clear that “fair” and “equal” aren’t the same. Different employees take on different assignments, have different personal goals and face different challenges. Just because you don’t treat two different employees identically doesn’t mean you’re being unfair to either.
  • Don’t equate irritation and unimportance. If an issue irritates you, that just means you’d rather not have to deal with it, not that you shouldn’t. For example, if you have an employee who routinely arrives ten minutes late, has a half-hour get-ready-to-work routine, and leaves fifteen minutes early and you ignore it, you can be pretty sure that in a year five other employees will follow suit. Why wouldn’t they?
  • Don’t equate irritation and importance, either. Sometimes, the employee whose arrival time is erratic works harder and longer than anyone else. Yes, she sometimes arrives at 9:30 am. When she does, though, she often works until 10 pm.
  • Do discourage backseat driving. An issue being valid doesn’t mean reporting it is valid. Employees who are busy keeping their eyes on when another employee shows up for work aren’t busy doing their own work. Make it clear that paying attention to how well each employee performs is your role (and, if jobs aren’t shift-work, point out the difference between attendance and performance).
  • Don’t try to be King Solomon. Presented with a problem, your instinct is probably to find a solution. That just encourages more of the same. Encourage employees to solve their own problems, and to recognize the difference between real problems and minor irritations.
  • Don’t allow “third-party offense.” If someone helpfully lets you know that while he doesn’t mind what’s going on, it bothers other employees, helpfully let the informer know other employees are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.
  • Foster a culture of adulthood. Many of these issues are variations on a single theme — “It isn’t fair!” That’s the battle cry of a six-year-old. Adults should shrug off the small stuff.
  • Don’t solve problems with policies. Every policy is a self-imposed loss of flexibility. Leave yourself room to maneuver. Policies, by definition, apply to everyone — they enforce equality at the expense of fairness.

And finally –issues like these are warning signs. When employees express jealousy about each other, worry about minor perks and slights, or otherwise spend their time and energy on trivial issues unrelated to Getting the Job Done, you’re hearing symptoms of two linked problems. First, they’re losing the trust in each other they need to function as a team. And second, you need to spend more of your time and energy creating enthusiasm for and ownership of the organization’s mission and goals.

Which is to say, leading.

Decades ago, Banana Republic was a mail order outfitter with a very cool catalog. It had lots of khaki; hats suitable for jungles and deserts; battered leather pouches, web belts and multi-pocketed vests for carrying the bits and pieces of paraphernalia you’d be likely to need when visiting snake or scorpion-infested territory; and the paraphernalia itself.

Somewhere along the way that formula stopped working, and Banana Republic turned itself into Just Another Clothing Store. It’s been successful, so from the perspective of fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, it Did The Right Thing. But from the perspective of What’s The Point? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

There comes a time in the history of most companies when the old model stops working. Too often, the choices seem to be either vanishing from the landscape or, like Banana Republic, becoming a generic, personality-free enterprise.

When personal computers first burst onto the corporate scene, all of the players … and that includes Microsoft, but also Apple, Digital Research, Software Arts, Micro Pro, Novell, and Don Estridge’s PC division at IBM … were, at heart, revolutionaries.

They supported, not corporate America, but subversives inside corporate America — end-user-department innovators who needed to automate workgroup processes, model alternative business scenarios, or to otherwise solve small-scale challenges quickly, without going through the swimming-through-molasses procedures required by the corporation to get IT support.

The result was an outpouring of creativity that dramatically changed how businesses operate. For those readers too young to have lived through the transition, here’s just one of the changes, to serve as a proxy for all the rest: Before the PC, every manager had a personal secretary. Post-PC, many managers wouldn’t even know how to keep a secretary busy.

While Microsoft took a bare-knuckled approach to competitors, it kept sight of who its customer was — the individual corporate cost-center manager and end-user, not IT. That its operating system didn’t lend itself to central control, and its design was indifferent to security was not accidental. Corporate IT cares about control and security. End-users care about getting things done quickly, without bureaucratic overhead.

And then, somewhere along the way, the world changed and corporate IT became the customer. Microsoft adapted and thrived, but in much the way Banana Republic adapted and thrived — by forgetting what it was.

In microcosm: End-users wanted .bat files, interpreted BASIC and a macro “language” that wasn’t much more than a glorified keystroke automator. Corporate IT wanted standardization, restriction of administrative rights, and enough limitations on what end-users could do to assure the security of corporate information assets.

That was the end of .bat files and interpreted BASIC, while macro languages gave way to Visual Basic for Applications — a language learnable only by those who understand the philosophy of designing and coding software objects.

This is what is sad about some forms of success: Whether the subject is the personal computer industry, the Internet, Linux, or the Olympic games, it seems to drain the charm out of just about any business that achieves it.

And, there are times success results in abandoning a small but still-very-real market. The PC is, we’re told so often it has become tiresome, a business computer and not really a “personal” one. Which leaves open the question of who is going to serve the customers who used to look to Microsoft and the other small systems companies.

It won’t be Apple. Apple makes cool technology; not end-user-programmable technology. It probably won’t be the open source movement either. Those adept enough with technology to create open source solutions aren’t, for the most part, interested in creating tools simple and prosaic enough for average end-users.

The best candidate right now is (of course) Google. Its provides applications with novel capabilities, and because it delivers them via the browser, IT will have a hard time keeping them out of the enterprise.

In the meantime, Bill Gates has left the game, to devote his attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation is genuinely admirable, both in its goals and its execution (and has redeemed Mrs. Gates from having been the force behind Microsoft Bob).

Except … is anyone else concerned about what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation might turn into once Mr. and Mrs. Gates are gone? It’s an organization with a budget rivaling that of some governments, with no public governance or oversight.

I’m not entirely sure that in the long run this will prove to be an entirely good idea.