It Matters What Your People Think

Every business I have consulted on leadership, teamwork, and performance has had essentially the same malady: management wants employees to be more enthusiastic, hard-working, and cooperative, without understanding what they think.  The content of employees’ minds drives their behaviour, and if it is deceived, distorted, or disengaged, enthusiasm, hard work, and cooperation will remain elusive.

Ironically, the surveillance and data-collection that characterises consumer society seem to have left management more out of touch with what people think than ever.  This is even more curious when one factors in fifty years of dumbing down driven by political correctness, state schooling, and the media, which has produced a shallowness of mind one might expect to be easy to read.

Public opinion is obviously significant in democratic politics, but employee opinion, for the most part, carries little weight in business, because managers are not usually elected.  Yet what people think adds up to the corporate culture, and a dysfunctional culture will inevitably produce dysfunctional performance.  It matters what your people think.

Everyone is a philosopher because everyone thinks about what happens in their lives.  Sadly, not everyone is a competent philosopher.  Thinking our way to valid conclusions requires an ever-expanding general knowledge that enables us to understand the concepts of our experience, provides us with facts about which we make judgments, and encourages us to reason about the causes of the things that happen to us.

So the constant growth of knowledge boosts the quality of one’s thinking.  Yet how many managers can count on their employees to think accurately, creatively, and positively about the business?

Democracy is shaped by what people think, and it hardly needs noting that most democracies today are dysfunctional – consider only the low voter turnout in elections.  The anti-intellectualism promoted by state schooling and the media shows how political and commercial interests manipulate culture to promote their own ends.

For better or worse, people with authority have not only the means but also an obligation to guide the way people think.  And that obligation is to truth; if not, then it can only be to some ideological agenda, which by definition, is a distortion of the truth.

Leaders shape culture, i.e. they shape what people think.  If they do not, then they have ceased to lead, and words like vision, mission, and strategy, become meaningless.  Truth is reality, the way things are.  And knowledge can only be truth; because having knowledge means knowing reality, that which is and that which is not.  If you have information that is not true, you do not have knowledge, only nonsense.

Yet the war against truth has always been around, as is memorably illustrated by Plato’s debates with the Sophists, who in thoroughly modern fashion, were motivated by utility rather than truth.  Plato toiled for fifty years to pin down what made the Sophists so dangerous.  In a final dialogue, he showed how they set out to manufacture a fictitious reality.  This Platonic nightmare has greater relevance today than ever as politicians and managers construct the fictions they hope will extend their power.

Public opinion has been impoverished because people no longer know where to find the truth.  Worse still, most people are not even inclined to look for it, deceived and manipulated as they are into going along with the fictitious reality created by the elites through the corruption of language.

Plato insisted on three principles: first, a meaningful human life requires an understanding of things as they actually are, and living in accordance with that reality; secondly, the potential of a person can only be brought to fruition by access and receptivity to truth, and society can only be sustained by a commitment to truth; and thirdly, the truth lives and grows naturally where there is free and open communication.

Truth is promoted in dialogue because its habitat is language or the word.  Business leaders need to think long and hard about the implications this has in the workplace where disillusionment, demoralization, and disengagement are the reigning realities.

In order to think productively about the contribution required of them, people in any business need to know, at the very least, the following:

• The corporate vision aims at the good of all, including the wider community

• Making the vision happen depends on achieving specified goals along the way

• This requires dedicated teamwork and constantly growing personal excellence

• Personal development demands a balanced lifestyle and healthy relationships

• This requires practical wisdom, courage, self-control, and a sense of justice

• These virtues depend on personal honesty and respect for the dignity of others

• Customer satisfaction is the responsibility of all, demanding personal integrity

• Reading history and classic literature is the best way to improve one’s ability to think

• Wisdom grows from expanding knowledge, experience, and living the virtues.

In my experience, people from most cultures readily embrace these principles and their far-reaching implications.  It is the misleaders and the cynics who hedge and carp and unleash the deluge of Sophist deceit.  Their present ascendency explains the sense of hopelessness so common in the workplace and the polling booth.