Rules Of Management

RULE 8 - Be ready to prune

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it.”
H. E. Luccock, Christian preacher

OK, so you’ve got your orchestra and you get them to play. You listen. Something wrong somewhere. Yep, that flute player is out of tune, off key and playing from a different hymm sheet. Now you have three choices:

- Put up with it
- Change it
- End it.

Let’s have a little look at these three because, as in all things – from relationships, to life, to work, to being a parent – these three choices are the same every single time.

So, you’re going to put up with it. This makes your entire orchestra sound flat, out of tune and ill-fitted to do its job properly – that of supplying sweet music to the masses. Your listening public (your objective) will not listen and will accuse you, the orchestra leader, of being a nincompoop* - and they would be right.

* They don’t of course use this word, but I’m not allowed to use the word they really would use.

OK, so you’re going to try to change it. Flute player X gets some retraining. They get sent on a remedial flute course – residential of course. They come back with the right hymm sheet but have decided to switch to the bassoon as they were feeling creatively hemmed in by the flute. Problem sorted. Well done for tackling it.

However, what if their report says they are tone deaf and should never have been in the orchestra in the first place and should have taken up a career sounding the fire alarm somewhere? What you can’t do is then embark on another course of action where you give them the triangle to play but the mess that up too and by now the rest of the orchestra has lost confidence in you and is beginning to mutiny.

Time for the third course. You make them redundant. It is swift and kind. They can then go on to become a champion alarm ringer somewhere, somewhere else that is, and your orchestra recognizes you as decisive, knowing what you want, objective (you put the need of the many before the bad playing of one) and utterly in charge. Have an extra brownie point.

Always be ready to prune dead wood, straggly growth, lousy flute players (and any other team players who didn’t cut the mustard).

“their report says they are tone deaf and should never have been in the orchestra in the first place”

posted by Right Ranger @ 5:58 PM