For those of you who have subscribed to The Czar Report, and who have wondered where the issues have been, the plain truth is I made the mistake of simply taking on too much during the last year and ran out of time. Something needed to fall off the agenda and the Newsletter was the casualty. In addition to all of that, as I shared with you in my weekly newsletters, I have a new book coming out in April. As a result, the writing part of me has been preoccupied with the new book.
I have returned to write this newsletter and renamed it, Insights . My next book, due out on April 6, 2010 is titled Lead with Love , is a logical extension to much of the thinking I have discussed in my previous books and the Czar Report. However, it makes the case even stronger that the role of Love is the 1st Principle in being an effective leader. I am convinced that without this clear commitment it is impossible for anybody to be an effective leader over the long run.
We have just launched a whole new web site that is focused on communicating this core message from the book Lead with Love , and I have started a campaign using Blogs and social media sites that are discussing the upcoming book. You can find those links on the sidebar.
The fact that I am in the TV production business today is completely unrelated, but my wife and I have been movie lovers for decades. We almost always will see movies in the theater, and almost always during the earliest of days after release. One of the 'Oscar nominee movies' of this year is "Up In The Air". This film, starring George Clooney, is doing very well at the box office, as well it should because the acting is superb and the plot is fascinating. The director seems to be making a statement about "being alone" and the fact that even the most ardent "loners" ultimately become convinced that being "together" is better than being "alone". Indeed, I could even stretch my creative side to envision that the character, Ryan Bingham(played by George Clooney), is actually an alter ego of Clooney himself. This character lives on airplanes, disconnected intentionally, and even spends part of his time giving "motivational speeches" where he tells people to disconnect from all the people in their lives and to live life alone. Looking at Clooney's inability to establish any real "relationships", he was probably quite at home with the part (Ouch! Dead on but risky. He might not buy my book after this remark).
All of that said, the major backdrop for this movie is the job that our lead character has. He is a professional "terminator". No he has not come back to terminate the mother of John Connor, the leader of the resistance; but he is a modern-day, "terminator of staff", in the modern world of corporate downsizing. Yes he makes his living acting as a surrogate for management that does not have the "courage" or strength to face those being fired, or as the players refer to the fact that, "their job is no longer there".
Myra got up Monday morning and felt sick. She simply had a terrible headache and her stomach was churning. Although she had a very busy calendar, she just could not seem to get herself together, so she called in sick. Right after she made the call, her headache started to subside, and her stomach seemed to settle down. She spent the rest of the day catching up on jobs around the house, and then went out to do some food shopping. Her strange illness just seemed to get better very quickly, and she was ready to get up this morning and get to work, actually assuming that the day off had given her a chance to get rested.
But the next morning, it started all over, and she had the same headache and the same upset in her stomach. It was very puzzling to her, and she was struck by the fact that she had the same symptoms. She knew that it was impossible for her to miss two days in a row, so she decided to call in and tell her boss that she was going to be about an hour late, hoping that the headache would go away at about the same time it did yesterday.
Well Myra's boss is probably a classic "coward" manager who simply can not face the responsibility of firing an employee. To have made the decision on the person top go, and to then lay off that firing on Myra was pretty weak leadership.
Myra, on the other hand, probably was so stressed by the termination meeting, that her headache and stomach churn were probably the result of that stress. It is also probably true, that Myra probably did not handle the termination very well. A relatively new employee would not normally have such an emotional reaction since they would not have had a great deal of tenure to fall back on. Myra really did not want to fire this employee, and it probably showed. This is a consistent problem for supervisors who actually do not have full leadership control. Obviously her boss made the decision and she was being forced to handle the execution of that decision. Her "buy in" was missing, and her commitment to the correctness of the decision was as well. In short, she was biased about the call, and she probably did not "sell it well."
What NOT TO DO when doing a termination.
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