DAVE SWANN / DSWANN@STARBULLETIN.COM

Don’t be a dumbo

Your management style could be nurturing
creative thinkers or cautious elephants

It seems that when training a young elephant to work, the first thing the trainer does is place a heavy manacle and chain around its leg, and then secures the chain to a stake driven deep into the ground. Moving freely and escape are severely curtailed.

It doesn't take the baby elephant very long to get the message. Its working life becomes more comfortable, less painful, as long as it a) stops wasting energy trying to operate outside its "managerially prescribed," limited range of influence, and b) passively allows its "manager" to make all decisions.

What is even more amazing is that, once these beliefs are internalized, the elephant can be transported to and employed at an entirely new "job site," with only a very thin rope to remind it "who is the boss around here."

The parallel managerial challenges are clear. Let's look at a few.

YOU'VE HIRED a new young employee, a real "go getter" ready to set the world on fire and show everyone what he has learned in his recently completed MBA program.

Having been there yourself, you know the dangers of just letting him run loose. In his youthful inexperience, he can inadvertently end up leaving others feeling "stampeded" and resentful at this "Young Turk" who has all the answers.

You know that what you ought to do is take some real quality time to walk him around, show him the ropes, and be available to answer a ton of questions, to be his hands-on coach.

But because you are up to your eyeballs in your own mountains of work and e-mails, if you're not careful, what can end up happening is one of two things:

>> You may send the person out to the trenches, a 6-inch thick orientation manual in hand, to sink or swim. If so, be prepared to have to deal with the consequences of the normal mistakes he is likely to make. Ask yourself honestly: How do you react to these expected early mistakes? Do you, in effect, "crack a whip?" Do you summarily "yank them back?"

>> You may, to protect the person and yourself, send him out to the trenches on a really tight leash. You start with micro-managing him and warning him to "Go slowly. Be careful. Check with me before you do anything 'significant'." (Whatever that means!)

If you adopt either of these kinds of strategies, the die may be cast. An enormous reservoir of strength and desire to contribute, like a baby elephant, may be being conditioned to "play it safe."

WHILE WE MAY not initially see it, this same dynamic can be set in motion with other newcomers. In this case, instead of a Young Turk," you've hired a seasoned veteran. You know the kind -- someone like one of those "special players" a professional sports team hires late in their career. The missing piece who will get the championship they've been missing. Big signing bonus. No trade clauses in a sweet contract. Decades of deferred compensation.

In the business world, analogous contracts used to bring very senior people to large corporations can take on the qualities of the manacle and chain around the elephant's foot. We know that more than 50 percent of a broad spectrum of America's middle management and general work force is just "hanging around and marking time" until they can retire. One can only wonder how many more senior executives are just marking time. Playing it safe. Staying low on the radar screen until their stock options come to fruition. Indeed, "golden parachutes" can become "golden handcuffs."

It may behoove you to take a good hard look at both your own managerial behavior and some of your organization's personnel policies and procedures and ask yourself: Are we inadvertently training our "most valuable assets" to act like trusted creative thinkers or like elephants?

Rule No. 1 in the wired
world: Know these rules

The world is full of rules. Of course, you have "The Rules," which was full of tips on how a woman was supposed to fool a man into marrying her, or something like that.

Then there were a bunch of books that refuted those rules and instead defined new rules.

Don't worry; this column hasn't turned into a relationship advice piece. Far be it for us to define such rules. Rather, these are based on observations of the wired world. So, although we're very tempted to paraphrase Brad Pitt, here goes ...

1. E-mail is not a guaranteed means of delivery. For important messages, follow up with a phone call to ensure that they got there. Since this call should be a short and sweet "hey, did you get the contract that I just e-mailed you?" it shouldn't cost much -- less than a dollar anywhere in America and less than $5 anywhere else in the world. That would be a good gauge: Is it worth $5 and two minutes to make sure my message got there? If so, pick up the phone.

2. There are certain types of attachments that you need to know how to receive reliably if you want to effectively communicate by e-mail. PDF files are one. This requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free at www.adobe.com. It is not shareware -- Adobe will not guilt-trip you into paying for it. You also need something that will send and receive Microsoft Word and Excel documents. Note that this doesn't mean you need Microsoft Word and Excel, although that would be easiest. Let's face it, as much as everyone likes to bash Microsoft, they own the market when it comes to office productivity applications.

3. If you are capable of setting up your own wireless network at home, you should be capable of turning on encryption. This prevents neighbors and passersby from snooping on your PC or stealing your bandwidth. Most wireless equipment vendors explain this process well in their documentation. We continue to be amazed at the number of unencrypted wireless networks we find.

4. The use of e-mail, fax, and voice mail has affected the rules of time. While the wired world has not changed the laws of physics, it has changed the way we view time. The phrase "Close of Business," often abbreviated as COB, used to imply a specific time, generally 5 p.m. Nowadays, it really means "before the start of the next business day." If you tell me that you will have an answer for me by COB Tuesday, I won't expect it until I show up for work on Wednesday. This gives you up until about 5 a.m. (assuming you're in the same time zone) to deliver what you've promised.

5. Speaking of time zones, anybody you communicate with on a semiregular basis knows the general time difference between Hawaii and wherever they are. In the "old days" which I define as pre-1985, people could get away with "oh, I subtracted when I should have added." But the world is such a small place now, that excuse doesn't fly. Here in Hawaii, for example, we all know that Athens and Baghdad are just about the opposite side of the world from us. When it's getting light here, it's getting dark there -- at least it is on live TV like CNN. (A little off topic, but does anyone else notice that Iraq is shaped a lot like Oahu? Baghdad is Wahiawa, Karbala is Mililani, Basra is Hawaii Kai and Mosul is Haleiwa.) A couple of caveats to this rule: (a) Due to daylight savings time, it's certainly excusable to be off by an hour, and (b) No one is perfect and even the most seasoned travelers (both virtual and in the flesh) make a mistake once in a while. But if someone is doing this to you on a regular basis, it is either intentional, or they are lolo.

6. No matter how good your cell phone quality is, a land line still delivers higher quality. By the way, for you pseudo-techies out there, that's land-with-a-"D" line, not a LAN line, although for you super-techies out there, we must admit, there are certain circumstances where a land line is a LAN line.

7. At some point in time, someone in cyberspace will Google you. That is, they will put your name into Google to find out information about you. Most of the information that can be found about you could have been found before the Internet was "invented," but it's a lot easier to get now. By the way, searching for yourself in Google is known as "ego surfing."

8. Paper is still king, and we're not getting away from it any time soon. People still like to rely on paper for all kinds of things: legal documents, books, receipts. You might be able to convert your own operation to paperless, but the outside world will still give you important information on paper and ask for it on paper as well. Even many seasoned technologists admit it is easier to read paper than your display. Can you imagine reading "The Da Vinci Code" online?

Of course, as times change, so will the rules. But for now, that's the way it is.

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