Dedicated to learning better management techniques, I am an avid reader of everything management related.  My personal favorites are the “21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, by John Maxwell and from “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.  Together I believe those two books will guide people with the aptitude for leadership to excel in management.  

They are an excellent tutorial on management leadership they are also very “politically correct”.  I am not “politically correct” and believe I have found a few pearls of wisdom that the inner leader in all of us might find enlightening. 

• People will do what it is in their nature to do 

This first pearl of wisdom came from my grandfather, who was a farmer in southern Illinois.  My grandfather and I would plow the garden by hand with an old mule named Jack.  Jack would frequently sit down (yes sit down) half way between the barn and the garden.  That mule knew when he was being put to work and wanted nothing to do with it. 

Gramps would try for a few minutes at pulling and cajoling but invariably he would always end up tying a carrot to the end of a stick and lead Jack on.  Jack would follow that carrot anywhere, and it frustrated me (I was 10).  I asked Grandpa why he didn’t get angry and his reply was simple and timeless.  Jack’s nature is to be stubborn, and animals are predictable. 

Over the years I have interpreted this analogy several different ways but when applied through the lens, provided by Jim Collins in“Good to Great”, of getting the right people on the bus and then getting them in the right seats or off the bus all together I finally found a principle that I live by.  People will do what it is in their nature to do.  Human nature is not universal, however with time it IS predictable.  Let me offer an anecdotal case for your consideration.

            Robert was a junior engineer on my staff.  I worked with Robert on his career development plan. We worked to define goals.  He was provided on the job training, training materials and compensation incentives.  Yet after one attempt at professional certification and one failure, he chose not to try again.  He knew his job required this certification. 

The company would cover up to four failed attempts, so he had nothing to lose.  After a year and half, still no attempts and no progress.  I had a decision to make move him to another seat or move him off.  Robert is an outstanding employee but I found out two things about his nature.

First he could not focus on too many things at once and second he hated the thought of failure. Our business was service based and required an individual to work on multiple projects while studying for certifications, so focus was my first issue.  I needed to provide him stability to study and second I needed to provide him with a greater incentive than his fear of failure.  So my goal was to keep him on the bus but to move him to another seat, one that was stable but not comfortable so that he would want to risk failure to achieve his goals to be moved.  He was moved into our logistics department as the engineering liaison.

 A stable position but absolutely no fun for an engineer, this should get him to fight his nature I thought.  I was WRONG. 

No matter how stable it was, or how much time he had to study, his fear of failure kept him in that position from that point forward.  I employed Maxwell’s “Laws of Leadership” and Collin’s theory of finding the right seat on the bus, but in the end I developed my own Principle “People will do what is in their nature to do”, regardless of all the management techniques deployed.