Sounds like a load of rubbish
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 6, 2010
James Adonis exposes the mindlessness behind the worst management cliches. Spend an hour in a corporate environment and you'll no doubt be encouraged by someone to "take it offline". Spend a week in that office and you'll eventually be confronted with the world's most overused prefix, "moving forward". By the time you've spent a month in this environment, you would have been bashed by "at the end of the day" so frequently you'll actually wish it was the end of the day. The end of all days.And so it is with management cliches. Those just mentioned are merely annoying. They're small pieces of literary garbage on an otherwise gorgeous English landscape. The most intrusive and dangerous are the cliches that are blatantly incorrect - apt decades ago but not any more.Take "there's no 'I' in team", for example. Anyone who's ever worked on a team will recall there is most definitely an "I" in "team" because the effort and contribution of each team member is never equal. Some people will pull their weight while others will wait to be pulled. Some people will take the initiative while others will initiate the taking.Then we have the widely accepted acronym for TEAM, which is "together everyone achieves more", even though researchers have proven that the productivity of individuals within a team decreases as the group gets bigger. This cliche is ultimately responsible for what is the biggest waste of space known to humankind: the committee, which tends to attract people who need to be committed - not to a task but to an asylum."Employees are our greatest asset" can only ever be uttered by managers without staff. An asset is something you own. You don't own employees. At a time of their choosing, they can resign and go to a new employer. Other genuine assets, such as your computer, building and car, cannot do so. And many employees aren't assets; they're liabilities.Anyone who owns a small business would have been lectured at some stage by an adviser to "work on the business, not in the business". It's due to this cliche we have so many technically competent entrepreneurs becoming leaders when the last thing they should be doing is having any contact with people. They should be holding a paintbrush, not a performance appraisal. They should be grooming a dog, not a successor.The most heartless management cliche would have to be "it's nothing personal, just business". If what you're doing affects the wellbeing of others, then business is personal. If your actions and words make people feel worried or harried, glad or bad, bored or deplored, then you cannot avoid the obvious fact that business is very personal, no matter how many pieces of awful news you deliver with this cliche as the disclaimer.Millions of people working in offices wouldn't know hard work if it hit them over the head with a hole-puncher and yet "work smarter, not harder" has permeated the corporate world. Look at any successful person on the planet and you'll see not just smarts but a lot of hard work. Alas, people continue to be driven by Edgar Bergen's famous quote: "Hard work never killed anybody but why take a chance?""Let's give it 110 per cent" is a favourite among managers who resort to this idiot idiom when they're unable to come up with more imaginative phraseology to push their troops into action. The trouble is that it's a mathematical impossibility. Even the best performers rarely exceed the 80 per cent effort level. And if you tried to run a motor at 110 per cent, there's only one thing that would happen: it would burn out.The irony with the "think outside the box" cliche is that it's declared so many times by wannabe-inspirers that the phrase itself has become inside-the-box thinking. When managers try to motivate their staff to think creatively by saying something as uncreative as "think outside the box", they're demonstrating their own inability to do so themselves.Blame is focused on the chief executive when people say "a fish rots from the head down". Fish pathologists at the University of Prince Edward Island have conducted countless fish autopsies to discover it's the organs in the gut that go first. Similarly, the source of the rot in an organisation doesn't always stem from management. So long as the leaders stop it from recurring, they're doing their job.Whether you're a perpetrator or a casualty of cringeworthy corporate cliches (or both), it's time to halt the spread of lazy vocabulary and outdated wisdom; to find some "middle ground" on this stuff. You know, a "win-win solution".Corporate Punishment: Smashing the management cliches for leaders in a new world by James Adonis is out now. See managementcliches.com.Do you hate management cliches? Tell us at mycareer.com.au/vote.
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This