There’s a deep love affair in the culture of the United States with simple dichotomies: yes or no; A or B; black or white; right or wrong. It seems as if we only have enough attention span for two choices. Our students prepare to take true / false tests, learning how to force-fit reality into one of two answers. At large cookouts, the frequent choice offered is hamburgers or hot dogs. Our soft drink choices are dominated by Coke or Pepsi, with a handful of other companies struggling to stay in business. In politics, we choose between Republican or Democrat party candidates, while numerous third parties and independent candidates struggle to make it on ballots. The civil rights movement from our too-recent past fought against the inequities that white people inflicted on black people, even though the reality of ethnic and cultural backgrounds have always been far richer and expansive than just two choices.
Frequently, we fall into this same pattern of thought in our professional lives. We assess securities from publicly held companies as “growth stocks” or “value stocks.” Our company strategies shift from plans to “grow the business” over to plans to “trim the fat.” We fulfill a function “inside” with our own people or we “outsource” it to another firm. When we hire, we decide if we’re looking for “experience” or “high energy” from the candidates. Purchasing departments frequently set up rules for evaluating suppliers to ensure that more than two companies are selected, for when the field is limited to two, we tend compare the offerings in a “this or that” mindset, rather than compare each offering against our stated needs.
A good leader is more effective after developing an “allergic reaction” to the word “or.” One of the many reasons this aversion is important is that “or” is focused on comparisons of things “outside,” and can divert attention from the “inside” issues. A car salesman might offer a prospect the choice of the “luxury package” or the “sports package” to get the buyer to overlook whether either package is worth the added costs. In a project schedule, the decision might appear to be to work late or to work on the weekend, but the obscured question might be why extended work hours are needed, and if the delay would be addressed by more hours. Most companies decide that “trimming the fat” means drastically reducing employee education company-wide, embodying a strange logic that says staff either can be trained or can be efficient, but somehow the two are exclusive of each other. The answer that rarely appears is where the “fat” came from that needs to be trimmed.
Part of a leader’s training in resisting “or” should be to first replace it with “and” to see what the result might be. Training might enable immediate benefits in efficiency gains. Combinations of “inside” staff and “outside” specialty firms could provide a stronger solution than one or the other. Maybe the car buyer should resist the choice the luxury and sports packages and select a different vehicle that is both comfortable and responsive.
One of the strongest cases for “and” thinking was documented in a classic management book titled The Managerial Grid by Robert R. Blake and Jane Srygley Mouton, and there are numerous books that have carried this managerial style model forward. One of the fundamental observations of the book is that managers often fall into a trap of focusing on either the work to be done or on the people doing the work, with either preference made at the expense of the other. The activity-focused manager is dismissive of complaints from the staff, who just don’t seem to want to work hard enough. The people-focused manager hopes that treating the staff nicely enough will somehow encourage them to take more initiative for their work. The wise manager recognizes that hard work leading to accomplishments can be intensely gratifying to the staff, and that manager works to focus both on the work to be done and the people to do the work. In doing so, that wise manager finds ways that improving productivity and rewarding staff feed and amplify each other.
Those opportunities aren’t always easy to find, because sometimes work is just “work.” Still, a leader can’t begin to explore what might be if that leader has hidden behind an “or.”