Not Making Others Do What You Wouldn’t Do Yourself

Posted on August 21, 2009 by Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D.

Doing unto others…

In the early days of flying, transporting mail by air became a huge business. But it was also dangerous in those flimsy planes that were used after World War I. Of the first forty pilots employed with the U.S. Mail service, thirty-one died carrying the mail. In fact, the life expectancy of a pilot was four years. Finally, in 1922, the pilots worked out a deal with their supervisors. If the supervisor of an air field told a pilot that he had to take off to deliver the mail - even though the pilot thought the weather was too dangerous, the manager had to be willing to sit in the plane’s second seat and fly once around the field. That next year, there were no U.S. Mail pilot fatalities.

** Due to the pressures of the bottom line, sometimes a leader will pressure a subordinate (either overtly or subconsciously) to complete a task that is either unethical, unsafe, or premature.

Paul Carroll & Chunka Mui write, “Humans are hardwired to come up with bad strategies.” When under pressure, making a wise leadership choice can be extremely difficult because of the following natural tendencies in humans:

- Humans tend to focus in on an answer very prematurely, long before they honestly evaluate all the information available.

- People have difficulty remaining objective while they sort through contradictory information.

- People have a strong tendency to conform to the wishes of a group, rather than raise objections that test ideas - especially if there is a strong personality in the senior leadership role.

- People don’t learn as much as they could from mistakes because we typically suffer from overconfidence - and have elaborate defense mechanisms to explain away our failings.