Playing With Loaded Guns

By Chuck Violand

October 13, 2010

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You probably heard about the misfortunes and arrest of New York Giant''s tight end and Super Bowl hero Plaxico Burris.

It seems Burris was trying to prevent his illegally-carried gun from slipping out of his pocket when he accidentally shot himself in the leg.

I''m sure Burris is a decent enough guy and the legal troubles in which he finds himself are largely the result of some bad luck and a few poor decisions.

As I followed his story, I saw how business managers also invite disaster by playing with "loaded guns."

Dangerous weapons

Many business owners carry dangerous weapons of a behavioral or decision-making kind.

Just like Burris, in a moment of poor luck or bad-decision making, these can result in self-inflicted injuries.

And, just as shooting ourselves in the leg with a gun would cause us to limp along in pain, some actions we take as executives cause our companies to limp along.

For instance, it''s hard to encourage customer care among employees when we ourselves publically make offhand remarks about customers.

It doesn''t matter whether we''re the head of a two-man operation or a multi-million-dollar organization. We as owners — and by extension our position as senior managers of our companies — dictate that we must hold ourselves to higher standards of behavior than we hold to those we expect to lead.

It''s part of our necessary growth from technical specialists to business executives and leaders.

Marshall Goldsmith, one of my favorite business authors, put it this way: "At the higher levels of organizational life, all the leading players are technically skilled. They''re all smart. They''re all up to date on the technical aspects of their job."

He explained that the higher an executive goes, the greater his or her problems, and consequently the liabilities he or she brings to the company are behavioral.

In other words, it''s no longer about how our people view our ability to clean or dry. It''s about how they perceive the decisions we make, how we treat people and how we behave during and outside working hours.

Plaxico Burris could have very simply eliminated the possibility of shooting himself by not carrying a gun.

In business, too, we can avoid "shooting ourselves" if we swear off dangerous behaviors.

This means thinking through the implications of our comments and actions before we make them. It means recognizing that, due to the positions we hold in our companies, our comments carry more weight than someone else''s might.

A colleague of mine talks about "customer eyeglasses" to describe how we should view our companies from our customers'' points of view. I submit we should also put on our "employee eyeglasses" to get a sense of how our employees view our behavior inside and outside the company.

Our actions serve as a "stamp of approval" and set the tone for the way the other people in our company can act.

We cannot fall into the trap of believing that the lofty positions we hold in our companies exempt us from acting the way we expect the other people in our company to behave.

Rather, our positions dictate that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

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Chuck Violand began his career by founding a carpet cleaning and disaster restoration operation in northeast Ohio in 1977, and in 1989, began consulting full-time. Each June, Violand hosts an Executive Summit to help owners and managers of cleaning and restoration companies learn the executive skills necessary to manage a growing business (Visit www.violand.com for details). Violand can be reached at (330) 966-0700.