Pushing through the revolving doors of my office building after a long day at work in July, I stepped out into a glorious afternoon. The sun was out, the sky was blue and, best of all, the wind was blowing out of the northwest at 15 to 20 knots. It was going to be a very exciting Wednesday night regatta at a local sailing club, where I had the privilege of crewing on a beautiful racing yacht with 11 other fun-loving, passionate sailors.
The only problem was that my gut was in a knot, not just with nervous anticipation of the competition but with genuine dread for what was likely to happen in the next few hours on the water.
Until the summer when I began sailing competitively, I had been a recreational sailor crewing on friends’ boats, taking my family for outings on the water during vacations and windsurfing. For years I wanted to take my sailing skills to another level by learning to race. But it wasn’t until my family and I moved to Rochester that I had the opportunity to pursue this long-time dream.
After arriving in town, I was fortunate to find an open spot on a large, sophisticated racing yacht. One of the first things I learned was the vast difference between the relaxed, peaceful nature of recreational sailing and the raw intensity and difficulty of the racing game. To be competitive in a yacht race, every crew member must execute his or her assigned tasks competently and with split-second timing. Failure to do so not only causes you to lose ground on the competition but can result in damage to the boat and serious injury to crew members.
Fortunately for me, our captain was one of the most experienced and dedicated sailors on the lake. His sailing prowess was supplemented by his genuine interest in helping his crew hone their sailing skills in weekend training sessions in which he would reach into his own pocket to pay for outside racing experts to coach us. However, our captain’s many positive attributes were more than offset by his rough treatment of the crew during the races.
From the moment the starting gun sounded, our kind, soft-spoken, grandfatherly captain transformed into a brutal taskmaster barking commands and harshly criticizing even the slightest errors. Although his tirades were in response to crew blunders that hurt our performance and his genuine desire to help us become better sailors, the captain’s relentless tongue-lashing often amplified the anxiety on the boat so that our performance suffered and our spirits sagged.
After one of our captain’s more derisive outbursts, I recall one of my crewmates capturing well the negative vibe on the boat when he turned to me and said, “You know, I just don’t want to be here. I love to sail, but this is not fun anymore.”
By constantly indulging his temper and berating his crew, our captain was making a fundamental mistake that is common among business leaders. He was engaging in a brand of destructive leadership that relies on coercive power through the specific use of intimidation tactics and reprimands.
Every day, millions of people around the world who work for such leaders walk into factories and offices with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Their professional lives are often ones of quiet desperation in which they tolerate as best as they can the stress associated with accomplishing their daily tasks under the supervisor’s critical eye. In addition to causing needless suffering, highly critical, “no defects” bosses who rarely take time to thank subordinates for their hard work greatly diminish their team’s effectiveness.
By contrast, leaders who balance the need to hold team members accountable with the equally compelling need to foster an atmosphere of compassion, forgiveness and gratitude will not only greatly reduce worker misery and stress but also outperform their more dictatorial counterparts.
Research done by Cameron, Bright and Casa in 2004 of organizations across 16 different industry groups showed that companies that fostered compassion, forgiveness and gratitude among employees performed significantly better than those that did not. Specifically, this study found that such behavior resulted in higher profitability, productivity, quality, innovation, customer satisfaction and employee retention.
Compassion, forgiveness and gratitude lack the “hardcore” cachet of typical business practices, but these study results should come as no surprise. Business teams are not spreadsheets or machines; they are human institutions comprising a collection of flawed individuals who all learn by making mistakes. Managers who treat colleagues and subordinates as if the contrary is true create toxic work environments in which employees spend as much time trying to stay out of trouble as getting their work done.
By contrast, those who strive to balance holding team members accountable for getting their work done with a healthy dose of humanity create loyal teams of workers who can devote more time and energy to mastering their craft and getting the job done.
So if you’re a manager, take time before your next encounter with your “crew” to ask yourself whether you might increase your “boat speed” by providing constructive criticism, cutting your team a break every once in a while and taking every opportunity to thank them for their hard work and dedication.
Editor’s note: This article was first published in the Rochester Business Journal.
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About the Author
As compliance director at Bausch and Lomb, Jim Nortz has global responsibility for developing, evaluating and supporting the company’s compliance and ethics programs.
Mr. Nortz has a Mechanical Engineering degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a law degree from the Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Nortz can be contacted by email at james.a.nortz@bausch.com, or by phone at 585-338-8156.
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