And about good & bad/ right & wrong …
To manage means to act. And I learned, both in life and in many expensive seminars and intense discussions with my mentors:
A good manager should distinguish between good and bad a little more often than other people. And he should make more good decisions than bad ones. If he succeeds, then he has achieved quite a bit and you can respect him very much.
Moreover, I learned that the “attitude of mind” has central meaning for everything you do. Attitude of mind is made up of two words: mind and attitude. If you wish to act with responsibility, you should have the “correct” mind-set. Your attitude can be the backbone you need in order to maintain your mind-set even in what you do.
Well, this is not precisely news. Neither is it news that all decisions, along with the subsequent behaviour, by definition have both a constructive and destructive component. I will not go into details, because everyday-life is full of examples.
Also, it is quite trivial that decisions and behaviour will always have both constructive and destructive elements. If a decision is “right” and an action is “good”, then the constructive element should always be stronger than the destructive one.
The same is true for what you say and what messages you send. Basically, the task of a manager is to communicate. Whatever content a manager communicates will always be partly constructive and partly destructive. Therefore a “correct” or “good” statement will always also – apart from the hopefully strong constructive idea – contain a destructive part. You can – often quite easily – find it by “logical negation”.
Some people, however, – and I am afraid we all have a tendency towards this – like pocketing the constructive message and then they get extremely enthusiastic about the destructive part. In doing so, they deprive the sender of the trust that the constructive part is actually the most important part of his message.
I am not the only person who sometimes comes close to despairing when witnessing this. Here I am, wishing to say something positive. The majority of my audience also understands this. But then some people extract the “negative” element. In the worst case, they will hand it on as some kind of “conspiracy theory”. And if I am out of luck, this theory will be taken up by someone or somewhere and a lot of damage will be done.
Consequently, I believe it is also part of a good enterprise culture to not just point out the constructive part of your actions, but also to see the constructive element in everything you receive and evaluate. Rather than minimizing this element through heightening the destructive parts.
Incidentally, what annoys me most about eloquently presented and well-sounding messages is if they contain ZERO information – that is if, after close analysis, you discover that they contain NOTHING. The senders of ZERO messages make use of the advantage that, if you send no content, naturally you cannot send constructive or destructive elements. In this case, nobody can degrade the message through a heightening of the negative. I would not be surprised to see that such people are actually particularly well-loved and successful.
🙂 This is another place where I will refrain from giving examples for persons whose messages have ZERO content.
RMD
(Translated by EG
P.S.
For all articles of my entrepreneurial diary, click here: Drehscheibe!
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