Talking Chemistry E-Book

Christian M. Wegner

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 148

Beschreibung

"Talking Chemistry" is a management book about leadership. It shows why the good chemistry between managers and their employees is a mandatory prerequisite for the success of a company. The book propagates a modern management style which has the employees in its core focus and is aimed at fostering their individual capabilities and talents - to their own benefit and to the benefit of the company. Mutual trust and respect form the foundation of modern leadership. On the basis of concrete business scenarios, the book shows how trust can be built and addresses some bad practices which destroy trust. It explains why many current approaches for building trust (such as team events and workshops) cannot function and suggests that daily business offers enough opportunities in this regard. For example, the yearly recurring planning process opens managers excellent opportunities for building mutual trust with their people and for aligning everybody toward the global business success. In some companies, planning fails in achieving this goal and destroys trust. The book presents a new method for establishing meaningful management profiles which can be of great use for assessing the suitability of candidates for management positions. It further proposes a new method which allows a differentiated evaluation of individual performance and personal motivation. "Talking Chemistry"addresses managers with the aim of stimulating them to continuously reflect about their leadership behavior. It addresses also young people at the starting point of a manager career for encouraging them to opt for a career path flanked by trust and respect. Why is this book especially relevant today? The expected economic transformation resulting from the tremendous technological development and the introduction of new (hybrid) work models is likely to also change the business culture of companies, making more room for value managers with a collaborative, trustful, and empathetic leadership style. Winning the race for the best and most talented people requires a new kind of management in total contrast to conven­tional approaches based on hierarchies, subordination, and authority.

Leseprobe

Contents

Personal Note

Preface

Introduction to the Chapters

The Chemical Factor

The Planning Drama

The Race Boat Analogy

The Death Spiral

The Ego Trap

The Value Chimera

The Motivation Matrix

The Pentagon Profile

The CXO Dilemma

The Family Business

Closing Words

Personal Note

“Every special calling in life, if it is to be followed with success, requires peculiar qualifications of understanding and soul.”

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832

The motivation for writing Talking Chemistry stems from my observation that in today’s world of business, ‘peculiar qualifications of understanding and soul’ do not receive a prominent enough role when people are selected for leadership positions. Therefore, too many managers with little empathy and little talent to motivate people rule organizations, and by not being able to unleash the total potential of their employees, they stand in the way of companies achieving their best possible business performance. It is especially this ‘qualification of soul’ that distinguishes great leaders from the rest.

The special recognition and appreciation for my work which I have received from my superiors, colleagues, and especially from my employees encouraged me to believe that sharing my experiences by writing this book may be a good idea.

Talking Chemistry is based on the experiences I have gathered in dealing with a large number of companies and organizations, including customers, suppliers, partners, and my ‘home’ company, for almost four decades of professional activity. Staying interested in business matters even after retirement allowed me some additional and very interesting insights into other companies. These experiences were also a valuable source of inspiration for writing this book.

I am dedicating this book to my parents. From my mother I inherited the joy of writing. From my father I learned that hard work and perseverance are a good recipe for professional accomplishment. Both passed on to me the values of respect and humbleness.

I would like to extend special recognition to three of my former managers who have influenced my career the most. The one who taught me what management is about and trusted me with my first important management assignment. The one who gave me confidence and supported me during the challenging integration process of an additional large business and finally, the one who accompanied me throughout my last years of active professional engagement before my retirement and who introduced the principle: “The CEO is the first servant of his company.” Looking back, I realize how great their influence was on me as a person as well as on the development of my career. Especially their trust was extremely motivating for me, and therefore the trust between managers and their employees plays a central role in this book.

I would like to convey my sincere gratitude to my former organization, the international service team of Siemens Logistics, which I had the privilege of working with for more than a decade. Our exceptional accomplishments are still reason for joy and pride.

Finally, I would like to also express my genuine gratefulness toward the Siemens AG which gave me the chance to fulfill my career aspirations. It was my professional home for so many years. Being a ‘Siemensianer’ was always very important for me.

Thank you, Gert, Cheryl and Daniel, for your valuable support in linguistic matters.

Christian M. Wegner

May, 2022

Preface

Throughout my professional life, I have been fortunate to meet a number of great people who taught me a lot about business and management. I also had the chance to be a manager myself. After I retired, I took inventory of my career, something I guess most people do, and inevitably pondered over the question "What makes a good manager?"

Many top managers—some of whom have even made the cover of business magazines—left behind an incredible mess after taking over initially prosperous businesses. All of them were accredited with a strong personality, insatiable quest for power, and an exceptional capability for making decisions—as such, all the traditional traits of a good manager. So, what went wrong?

If a strong personality ends in narcissism and stands in the way of accepting and appreciating that others are also capable of achieving great results, if the quest for power distracts from the job at hand, and if exaggerated self-confidence leads to wrong decisions, these capabilities no longer have value. To the contrary, such managers become high business risks. Interestingly enough, today's business world still accepts such people in leading positions and gives them a second (and sometimes even a third) chance.

Well, what makes a good manager?

There are a several good qualities that definitely help, such as talent, integrity, resilience, and diligence. Beyond these, I think that genuine trust and humbleness are the two qualities that really make the difference.

Believing in your own strengths emanates the degree of sovereignty required to make others trust in your leadership. But more importantly, you as a leader, trusting your people unleashes the total creative potential of a team. Many managers do not really trust their people and tend to regard them only as business assets who just need to perform. These managers often believe that without coercion and control, employees would rather go for an easy job inside their comfort zone. Some would, no doubt. But in the absence of trust, good employees will not be able to capitalize on their talents and capabilities and will fail to develop their best possible performance.

Trust is a value that needs to be equally shared between managers and their employees. It takes so much to build and so little to destroy. The initiative for building trust has to come from the manager, and there is no easy way to gain it. Too often, managers surround themselves with people known from previous jobs. This bears the risk of perpetuating old customs, structures, and patterns, thus obstructing fresh ideas and suffocating development. Trust needs to be earned, by the managers as well as by the employees. If trust is granted freely and becomes a habit, it can easily turn into a liability.

Facilitated workshops, experience camps, and team events are not appropriate instruments to establish genuine trust. The assumption that freezing together in a wooden hut on a cold winter night or sharing a couple of maggots for lunch in a forest experience fosters bonding and builds trust is erroneous. In such situations, most people will play the role they are expected to play. They will play this role for just a limited period of time (thinking “It's all over after one or two days anyway”) without undergoing a genuine transformation. Most of the results and findings elaborated during and carefully documented at the end of such events will not sustain in real business life. There is no need to create artificial situations to build trust. Daily business yields enough opportunities for that. Genuine trust can only grow in a bilateral relationship between the manager and his or her employees. This can only be achieved by opening up one’s own personality and by sharing one's expectations, common values, goals, and individual needs. It is a long process requiring a significant amount of effort. Therefore, genuine trust can only be established with just a few people and should especially encompass a manager’s core team. Building a corporate culture based on trust requires flowing this concept from the top level down to the shop floor. Frequent structural changes and reorganizations will strongly impair this process.

Therefore, selecting one's team carefully, trusting good people, praising them, establishing a creative environment for them, and allowing them the opportunity to excel makes a good manager. If granted carefully, trust becomes a tremendous motivator encouraging people to give their very best. Accepting incidental failure is a must and should not affect trust. In a trusted business environment, one's own disappointment in having failed is a far stronger motivator for making it better next time than the fear of consequences.

Humbleness generally has a negative connotation and is often associated with poor or underprivileged people. Some act humble to receive better treatment from their superiors. That is not the kind of humbleness to which I am referring.

Great people are humble even in their greatest moments of success. They are able to recognize and value the contribution of people surrounding them. Reaching the top, they do not celebrate themselves but rather give exposure to their entire team and use their position to foster the success of young people. Humbleness can allow managers to seek advice or input from their team when faced with difficult decisions. It also helps when dealing with one's own mistakes and failures. It makes it easier to eventually accept being wrong and asking for forgiveness.

Careers of great leaders are undoubtedly the result of talent coupled with hard work. On the other hand, talent and hard work do not necessarily lead to great careers. Favorable circumstances, being at the right time in the right place, a good mentor, and simply luck play an important role in most great business stories. Another facet of humbleness is to accept that occasionally one gets lucky.

Trust and humbleness give mangers a human touch, make them genuine, and enable them to become the top ‘servant’ of their business. These are the type of leaders most good people want to follow.

Introduction to the Chapters

The first chapter, The Chemical Factor, introduces the value of trust. During my entire career, I perceived the trust of my managers as the most motivating factor. In the early days of my professional activity, their trust in my subject matter expertise helped me in solving even the most complex technical problems. Later, the trust of my superiors in my ability to manage a business allowed me a high degree of entrepreneurial freedom and the fulfillment of my professional aspirations. Because working in a trusted environment was so important to me, I invested a lot of effort into earning the trust of my managers—something I strongly recommend especially to everyone who is just starting his or her career: Do not be afraid of taking the first step!

The good chemistry between employees and their managers is of utmost importance for the success of a business. For this reason I decided to start my book with this chapter.

Mutual trust does not just happen; it needs to be earned by the managers as well as by their reports. Because building trust requires a lot of effort, people often shy away from making this investment. This is an observation confirmed by many people from various companies, and therefore, I believe that emphasizing the paramount importance of mutual trust between managers and reports has general relevance. This chapter highlights a couple of aspects about how trust can be established and also addresses some bad practices that destroy trust.

The three following chapters, The Planning Drama, The Race Boat Analogy, and The Death Spiral focus on some important business aspects which, if not properly addressed at management level in due time, can lead to a severe business downturn. Many aspects described in these chapters are based on observations and experiences I made assisting a friend in the recovery attempt of a larger company in the installations business for the automotive industry. Being already retired at that time and thus not any longer active part of a particular business allowed me to have an outside point of view less affected by my own emotions and therefore more objective.

The Planning Drama focuses on the business planning process. This is a mission-critical process because it defines the future development of a business. Thus, it can be well expected that all participants in this process look forward to it with excitement and positive expectations. I have not met many persons who share this feeling. To the contrary, most people hate this period in the business cycle of companies. This phenomenon seems to be common for many organizations, and therefore, I decided to address it. Business planning could be a valuable instrument for aligning everybody toward a common business goal and for strengthening the community inside the company. In some companies, business planning fails to achieve this purpose and therefore should be revised.

Apart from describing general deficiencies of the planning process, this chapter also addresses the shattering effects of bad business planning on companies.

The Race Boat Analogy addresses a common problem at many companies resulting from inflated overhead structures. Even though being the most affected by an unhealthy ratio between productive and non-productive personnel, operational people usually do not openly address such organizational deficiencies. Sometimes because they are too absorbed by the challenges of the daily business. However, the reason often is that staff departments have the stronger lobby inside the company, which is exactly the opposite of what it should be. This chapter shows why the thorough assessment of the added value of functional departments is an important aspect of organizational hygiene and an indispensable management task required to maintain the competitiveness of a company.

Unrealistic business planning and the uncontrolled development of administrative costs were the main reasons for the downturn of my friend’s installations company mentioned earlier.

The Death Spiral describes some of the reasons why companies can get caught in a downward swirl potentially ending in a business crash. It addresses some of the possible root causes and analyzes the dynamics of such a potential downturn. Because death spirals, if they occur, usually end in a disaster for all company stakeholders, and especially for their owners and employees, I wrote this chapter with the goal of sensitizing managers to be alert with regard to some aspects that could cause such a situation and of encouraging them to initiate corrective action when it is still time to do so. At the end of the chapter, I am proposing a simple method that can be used by managers to assess the health of their business.

The Ego Trap unmasks managers who put themselves above everything, including the business. In total contrast to such ego-managers, true leaders dedicate all their efforts to serve their company and coach their employees. The rational for this chapter is to unveil the predatory effect of ego-managers on their companies and to encourage organizations to not accept those individuals in leadership positions.

The Value Chimera is a critical debate about the value campaigns of most companies today. By concentrating on a generic level on the company’s responsibility toward everybody and everything, these campaigns do not proclaim genuine core values which employees can use as a guideline for their individual actions. Numerous scandals in almost all economic sectors, like the automotive industry and the banking community, just to mention two, demonstrate that individual actions of employees is not governed by the values proclaimed in those companies’ value campaigns. This chapter shows where many bad business practices start and also gives some hints with regard to what companies can do to improve their business culture.

The Motivation Matrix is a reflection on what motivates people in business. Generally, managers are only interested if their employees are motivated or not. Very few care about where this motivation stems from. Not all kinds of motivation are equally valuable, and sometimes motivation can easily turn into the opposite and endanger the business. Individual job performance should always be considered in the context of individual motivation. In the second part, this chapter introduces a new method for developing a performance–motivation map of a company, which can be very helpful in defining the best personnel strategies.

The Pentagon Profile is an analysis of different manger types by looking at their attitudes in relation to a broader set of aspects. The method described in this chapter helps elaborating comprehensive and meaningful manger profiles, which can be of great use in the selection process of candidates for leadership positions. It was also my intention to provide managers a guide for working on their leadership profile and to give people some orientation with regard to assessing the leadership qualities of their superiors.

The CXO Dilemma focuses on the business relationship between CEOs and CFOs. In my experience, such a relationship is never straight forward and requires a substantial investment from both sides to be successful. Many CEO–CFO partnerships are not really working well and represent a big burden for the company. This chapter addresses a couple of aspects which need to be observed by both protagonists if they want to be successful as a team.

The Family Business describes how company leaders can achieve that all employees perceive their company as their professional home, and as such dedicate all their best efforts to support the company’s goals. The Family Business concept reflects my personal preference for the business setup and culture of a company. Centered around mutual trust and respect, this concept requires a high upfront investment in terms of heart and soul from the side of the managers. For me personally, the image of a manager running his or her business as a ‘family head’ in a way that all employees feel being part of a great family and perceive the company as their professional home is the most appealing, by far. This is the main message I want to convey to my readers, and therefore, I chose this one as the closing chapter of this book.

The Chemical Factor