Focus on the Positive: A Response to IT Bullies
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Promoting positive practices, not obsessing on bullies, can help transform an IT organization. |
Responding to Getting IT Bullies to Behave, a CIO Insight interview with Robert Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule, Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, Jon McAdams, IT infrastructure coordinator at the software and consulting firm iCohere writes:
"Senior IT staff seeking to contribute to the success of their total enterprise should look beyond legacy and refurbished HR employee management practices. IT groups should consider new ways of transforming their organizations so they can begin building upon their most positive practices rather than continuing the largely ineffective and obsolete approach of focusing only on what's gone wrong, fault finding and name calling (bullies, assholes).
"Those interested in moving forward into a more positive and significant organizational transformation may be interested in the principles and demonstrated successes of Appreciative Inquiry, a portal and framework for implementing positive organizational change, pioneered by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva at the Case Western Reserve School of Management.
"This is not a "feel good" Band Aide; it's been used successfully by the U.S. Navy for a major IT initiative and has had a direct impact on the bottom lines of many corporations. However, it does require rethinking many assumptions about how organizations succeed."
What's your solution? Tell us below.
[Can Bullies Be Tamed? See what other readers have written about IT bullies.]
Comments (1)
Jon McAdams' views regarding Appreciative Inquiry, or more generally, a focus on the positive, is a more powerful--imho--solution that it appears because the individual resources that rise to the (O, so rare) opportunity to work in a supportive environment are most impressive and often very surprising.
Firstly, this balance of "head and heart" releases stored energy in people, locked up in whole lifetimes, it seems, of working under constant threat or intimidation.
Secondly, challenging someone with negative or manipulative tendencies does not work, even in the short term. These guys--respect your enemy--are experts at their craft; they are often brilliant and spending time and energy decoding innuendo and stiffening against intimidation are poignantly futile.
CIOs need to take the lead here. This is a strategy that works best from the top down.
Yours,
mwm
Posted by mwmccune | May 12, 2007 2:26 AM