“It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”
There is a tension in leadership between attending to the person and to the operation of “the machine.” Automation is a system of operating a process by highly automatic means that reduces human intervention to a minimum. Complex systems like healthcare require the efficiency and lack of variation of automation in order to insure the highest predictability and the best outcomes. Unfortunately, the most important cogs in the machine and the most critical consideration in the outcomes of any business are people.
Alterity is a philosophical term that means “otherness” (from the “other of two,” in Latin “alter”). The word implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint on a given subject. Leaders demonstrate alterity when they are willing to look beyond the “machinery” of their organization and consider its individual members with empathy.
People are the least predictable part of the machinery of production and the most variable part of the product. They have bad days, bad weeks, bad moods, bad weekends that spill into bad Mondays and so they hurt, are distracted, are grumpy at the very times when we need them to be focused, selfless, responsive and loyal. Employees want the efficiency of the machine when it comes to the processing of their pay, leave and vacation requests. Customers want service efficiency. But both groups resent being treated like they are cogs in a machine when they are hurting, frustrated, angry and need to be heard.
Every organization has stories of times when the “machine” was unable or unwilling to respond to the personal needs of a member from its rank and file or a customer. This is especially true in healthcare and service industries where internal and external customers expect both the efficiency of automation as well as individualized empathy. The lines can be even more blurred as we allow for the evolution of automatic processes to address individuals: computer generated birthday greetings for customers or staff, “personal” notes of congratulation or condolence signed with auto-pens. Do machine generated, automated well-wishes accomplish the intended personal touch?
People are not inspired by machines. They align to organizations, but they follow inspiring leaders. The art of leadership is to know the importance of listening even when there is nothing we can do. The risks of an “open door policy,” of taking the time to attend and to listen include inefficiency, the perception of favoritism, and the possibility of being taken advantage of. The risks of not listening, of not attending are greater. Organizations change. Change involves the sense of loss not by the machine but by the individuals affected. Leaders must learn to listen to those who believe they are losing.
What do they need from their leaders? The people need to experience practices that acknowledge “otherness.” One simple example: we smile, make eye contact and greet staff members in the hall. The former Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Gordon England, once said that the most important principle of leadership is that no one is more important than anyone else. He knew people’s names. When as a leader I stand next to you in the elevator looking at my Blackberry instead of engaging you in conversation I demonstrate disrespect and have become the machine. When I learn employees’ names and greet customers by name and title I show respect and connect with what matters most to them: their identity. (I am decidedly bad at this. We increased the size of the names on the staff ID badges in part because of my nearsighted forgetfulness.) And if I can remember their favorite ball team and can speak to the team’s most recent performance all the better (!)
This is alterity – the recognition and connection with “other.” Sherry Turkle writing in her 2012 book “Alive Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other” tells of a 17 year old woman who as part of an MIT study spent time with a robotic puppy “AIBO.” Dr. Turkle observed that in the study the mechanical puppy becomes alive to this young woman – as all robots seem to come alive – “not because of its intelligence but because it seems to her to have real emotions.”
The same is true of the machines we lead. An organization is alive and decidedly more likely to be the place customers and employees prefer when it has real emotions, demonstrated in tangible ways by its leaders.
In the end, it’s not just business.
It’s personal.
Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front https://henryv43.wordpress.com/
Henry V 4.3 
Colleagues
Is there anyone who would like to share some of the tangible ways that your organization has addressed the tension between alterity and automation?
/chuckcallahan