Substituting Fixes for Leadership

by Ed Morler, M.B.A., Ph.D.
(excerpted from the Leadership Integrity Challenge)

When integrity and real leadership with their inherent emotional maturity are lacking, needed change does not occur. Instead, a culture of resistance and rationalization develops.

Tremendous amounts of time and energy are spent on posturing, looking busy, protecting turf, and covering one’s back. Personal values are compromised. Problems are magnified. Some form of crisis is inevitable and will not be resolved by tweaking the system and returning to what is familiar and comfortable.

Improvement is an important aspect of being efficient, effective, and appropriate. Improvement makes a good thing work better. Fixes add improvements to what is already irrelevant. Fixing is a way to resist and therefore avoid dealing with the difficult issues of real change.
If you modify or fix what is no longer relevant and expect it to work under the new conditions, you may as well try to protect the country by painting World War II fighter planes; giving them new engines, wheels, and controls; training pilots to fly them; and expecting them to survive dogfights with modern jet fighters. It is not only fuzzy thinking, but costly; deadly for the pilots, and a sure strategy for defeat.

Fixes are neither efficient nor effective. They squander time, money, material, and most of all, human capital. They are wasteful and potentially fatal, especially during times of rapid change. Fixes deflect focus away from what is actually needed. The fix may buy some time and thereby appease some political constituency, but it never lasts. If real change is needed, fixes only exacerbate the problem.

Fixes frustrate competent personnel and stifle innovation and creativity. They build up expectations that do not materialize, which in turn dashes hopes, creating even greater frustrations and eventually apathy. This makes it even more difficult for the next person in charge to gain support for needed changes when the crisis eventually looms even larger. Implementing fixes is one of the surest ways to create mediocrity. If continued, fixes ensure the departure of the best and brightest.
Sometimes the existing paradigm needs reinforcement or development. Sometimes it needs breaking and replacing. The latter is the most difficult and is usually resisted. Regardless, it takes wise leadership to know what to do and when and how to do it. It takes the perspective and discernment of emotional maturity to distinguish among (1) fixing, (2) appropriate improvement, and (3) the need for transformational change. To create transformational change, to stand tall and do what’s right, takes guts.

Your behavior is actually creating structures
that future humanity will inhabit.
Therefore, choose your acts very, very well.

—Ken Wilber