Spring Fever

The weath­er here is (final­ly) good enough for a touch of Spring Fever, and so I am remind­ed of child­hood. My old­er broth­er and I grew up on twelve acres of land, half forest­ed, half in fields and orchard. At this time of the year he and I would spend much of our time in the for­est, which was wak­ing up with all sorts of green-gold leaves and pun­gent smells of the earth. We would dart off into the woods at a momen­t’s notice to build a new trail, camp or treehouse. 

What I rec­ol­lect­ed this morn­ing was the ener­gy we used to do all that work. “Why did we want to build a tree­house?” I asked myself, and could only respond, “for the fun of it, and because we could.”

Con­trast that to so much that hap­pens in our orga­ni­za­tions today — where the “fun of it” often hard­ly mat­ters or does not mat­ter at all. 

The dif­fer­ence is in the eval­u­a­tion and demand­ing mea­sure­ment of things, per­haps; the con­stant need to per­form, to show, to prove — or be labelled, cas­ti­gat­ed, threat­ened in sub­tle ways with dis­ap­proval and sanc­tion­ing. Yet I doubt my broth­er and I ever per­formed bet­ter than when at play we fig­ured out what to do about the sud­den urge to put planks in trees. “You go back to the house and get some boards, a ham­mer and nails. I think there’s some boards behind the garage. I’m going to go over to the neigh­bors and see if there is any­body who wants to help and who has some rope to pull the boards up.” Is it any won­der that mod­ern man­age­ment often fails? Trans­lat­ing to such a project would look like, “Okay, let’s first write down your account­abil­i­ties and dead­lines. It’ll be up to you to go find the wood, so don’t screw that up. Your depart­men­t’s ham­mer can’t be trust­ed and you cer­tain­ly can’t bor­row mine, but let’s col­lab­o­rate and be a real team any­way. Let’s inno­vate! Oh, and I’m not pay­ing for any of the nails, either. BTW, there will be a behind-the-scenes review of your per­for­mance at the end of this that will go back to your boss…”

You get the idea. And yet I think orga­ni­za­tions kind of want it both ways these days: a high­ly engaged, pas­sion­ate, excit­ed work­force, plus high lev­els of mea­sure­ment and eval­u­a­tion. Can both exist together? 

This cuts to the quick when we get to the real­ly squishy stuff, like per­for­mance as a leader, exec­u­tive or man­ag­er. There the process of self-eval­u­a­tion has already become deeply ingrained in a fear­ful, depres­sive, defen­sive way. I won’t say “nat­u­ral­ly” defen­sive, because in truth if build­ing our­selves were like build­ing a tree­house that defen­sive­ness might “nat­u­ral­ly” go away. 

This is just a play­ful thought, of course, but per­haps one with a point. Can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly we be real­ly open and yet still be sub­ject to crit­i­cal voic­es about our per­for­mance? Can I receive feed­back from you about ways I might improve as a leader and yet think of it as help­ing me with the next great way to cre­ate myself, my life, and my accomplishments? 

Would­n’t that be amaz­ing — to some­how total­ly drop the fear sur­round­ing eval­u­a­tion of all kinds; some­how get the infor­ma­tion and the learn­ing, the enrich­ment and growth with­out all that anx­i­ety — for the fun of it, and because we can? We would pull the planks up by rope with our friends, help­ing each oth­er, and at the end of the day say to our­selves, admir­ing the view from up there, “Isn’t this cool?”

Per­haps Spring Fever has some busi­ness val­ue after all. 

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