When your boss is on a cruise but no return

I walked to a local promontory last weekend, and looked back where I started. The view, of course, is impressive as a panoramic, even.

Then I realized that it was about 4 kilometers from where I started. Some of the things that bothered me when I set off, like trying to make headway in the soft sand, or worrying about getting my sneakers full of water because I was in danger of getting caught between the oncoming tide and the hateful seawall were quite distant events. My overall view did not capture those moments, nor did they evoke the dots in their memory.

My travels have given me a new perspective, but not necessarily a better one. I lost as much as I gained. This is the vision problem. The more you can get at one time, the more details you lose. The further behind you are, the more things lose their color and texture.

Illustration: Dion Jinattributed to him:

My Sunday trip was a story of a trip and a return. I appreciated the different views, but in the end, I came home and reconnected with the granular perspective of my daily life and my immediate community.

For many leaders, their whole tale is a journey to the point of no return. They have an obsession with the “vision” thing. Even worse, they are promoting vision statements that a clique of senior leaders in collaboration with marketing consultants make on their innocent employees. These temptations may seem to take the view from the bump, but they are often meaningless to their employees facing the oncoming tides with nowhere to run.

loading

I once worked with a president who had become so detached from reality and increasingly rude and unreasonable, that the entire company conspired to keep him on the road, traveling incessantly to conferences, and reducing the amount of time he spent in any one office. While this did lead to some immediate termination of his hapless workers, he was so full of “big ideas” and “visions” that it came as a shock when he was finally told the company was losing money on handing over and was weeks away from closing.

Driving is chaotic and tangled. It can rarely be effective or long-lasting if it is performed at a distance, under a table, or in a basement. However, how often do you hear terms such as overseeing, seeing, looking across the horizon, up in a tree, in Wheelhouse, and many other metaphors being applied to and by leaders.

Details matter. Everything from a distance fades to gray, and local features become blurry. The workforce, constituencies, competitors, threats, and opportunities can disappear, and the details are replaced by ideology, bias, and guesswork instead. This may be all that is needed if everything is going well. But when the tide runs out, those on Earth can see the damage left in its wake, and that can become an alarm bell for commanders in the distance.

Source link

Originally published at Melbourne News Vine