Many years ago my father went on a management course and he told me about the 3 sentences all managers need to learn to say:
"You did a great job there."
"I'm sorry, I made a mistake."
"What do you think?"
What strikes me now about these sentences is that they are double-edged. On the one hand, they're intended to liberate the employee; on the other, they're intended to create humility in the manager.
The first seems the easiest and maybe the least interesting. Praise can be either genuine and deserved, or it can be fake and a way of asserting one's authority: I am the person who pats you on the head. Maybe it would be better to enthuse.
The second is crucial. Earlier this year the leader of the School took this step for the first time. We used to say, "being a tutor is never having to say you're sorry" (that's the kind of group we are, I'm afraid!) ... but it seems that the School can now learn to say that sentence.
It prepares the way for the third sentence, which is the most important of all. It's easy to express appreciation and retain one's power; it's even possible to apologise, and still avoid real humility. But to ask people their opinion - really ask them, as in wanting to hear what they think and being prepared for their answer to make a difference - is surrender. It is the spiritual question.
Many years ago, the Economics faculty was deader than Henry George's dog. Occasionally there seemed to be a twitch of activity, but it might only have been a trick of the light. Hard to be sure. Then one day they did something extraordinary. A survey was sent round to every young member of the School, asking what our economic concerns were. I completed it as best I could, and at the bottom of the form remarked, "This is the first time in all my years in the School that I have been asked a non-rhetorical question."
Since then the Economics faculty has staged a revival: it started to study economists other than the Blessed Henry ... made connections with other organizations ... begun to address the needs of the world in which we actually live. All of this has nothing to do, of course, with what I wrote on that form, or in all likelihood with what anyone else wrote. It was a change of heart. For some reason the faculty had stopped thinking it had the answers already, and asked a question to which it did not know the answer.
It's probably fair to say that the School as a whole is now at the point that Economics was a decade ago. Every week brings news of the departure of a philosopher, and the deaths of two more. Soon there will not be enough students left to complete the daily rearrangement of deckchairs on the HMS Titanic. The organization as presently configured doesn't know what to do next.
How bad do things have to get before we ask the question?
So, what do you think?
Thursday, October 12, 2006
The Three Questions
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5 comments:
I've just been listening to Radio 4 with Melvyn Bragg quizzing a group of theologians about Martin Luther.
As you know, in the early 16th century a monk, Luther, spoke up against the power of the Church, its levies of land, tax and indulgences, and its requirement of obedience to God's representative on earth - the Pope.
In brief, Luther's belief was that only God can save and we are alone in front of our Maker.
Leaving aside the theology for a moment, we can make use of our knowledge of the Reformation for a re- formation of our own.
All organisations eventually run down. It's no criticism of them, it's just the way it is. Sooner or later they become tired, corrupt or greedy, or simply out of touch. Out of touch with their supporters, out of touch with the society which sustains them, or out of touch with the primary reason why they came into being in the first place. Understand that - and you understand much.
I stress - there's no criticism in this. What I do query is any self-negating belief that it's somebody else's fault. It ain't. And it can be fixed. But it does require the active participation of every member of the School.
Why do people leave the School? Is it because they no longer feel they have a place there? Lost contact with the teaching? Stuck in the doldrums?
We can't do much about deaths - tempus fugit - but we can address the rest. The leaders do need to ask the questions for which they may well not know the answers.
It shouldn't be left solely to those gingering up on this blog.
I wonder, after reading Kevin's and Laura comments, whether the School hasn't experienced, and isn't experiencing, a sort of crash course similar to the history of Vedic and subsequent development.
To get the School off the ground in the first place needed 24-hour devotion, total obedience and strong discipline and instruction -- a bit like the detailed rules in the Veda, to be followed by the Upanishads pointing out that it's Brahman inside the individual too..
Over the past few years, that early sense of 'tell me what to do,
I don't want to think for myself...' has been changing; but lingers.
Tell me if I'm wrong; but that brilliant remark which you quoted from Mr Jaiswal, about every student having responsibility to envisage what the School should be/really is (which I hadn't heard before), seems to sum up much of what we talk about here ?
Indeed it does! But why 'tell me if I'm wrong'? Do you not know that this is the case? I think you do.
It's astonishing the energy that can be released if people feel it really matters.
It's rather like that news report of disabled patients in hospital, aware of themselves primarily as receivers of care, who suddenly have to move because of a fire in the hospital.
Do they move? Quick sharpish? And receive a salutary shock? Not so much to the body but to a perception of themselves as a patient? OK, I'm inventing the last bit, but it accords with the rest.
Vamana,
I agree with your view of this. Mr Jaiswal's comment says it all. Traditionalists view change with suspicion, because it seems to be a denial of the past. But taking the longer view, the work of the past has created a unique foundation. The question is now what we build upon the foundation.
The next step is of course a step up. Just as the Vedic priests were the guardians of a religion that aimed at results, and the Upanishads offered a finer alternative, so we have to purify the past by selecting from it what is most valuable and rejecting what is less so. The Buddha threw the whole lot out, but the Upanishads were a refinement. He offered a new religion in exchange for an old religion; but the Upanishads offer philosophy.
All of this has only recently become clear.
Laura,
The fire in the hospital scenario could work, but on the whole it would be better if we could manage to wake up to our real capacity without it.
It might be worth saying that, in my view at least, I'm not necessarily looking for an easier way.
There's considerable value, in the earlier stages of School, in providing the kind of rigorous, cleansing discipline that we all 'enjoyed' and which helped clear the ground for work. In one comment Kevin spoke of 'lapping it up', and I know what is meant here when set in the context of increased understanding of oneself, opening up of vistas, and greater freedom. In other words, the larger picture is worth a good deal of personal discomfort.
It's what happens after that, that I'm concerned about. As see the extract (below)from a friend's email yesterday:
'I read the blogspot but do not feel any inclination to join in. SES seems to be not going anywhere fast to me. But good on all those optimists who feel they can see it twitching as it were. I really hope they're right.'
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