Getting Critical

Interesting article in The Straits Times today from a certain Lee Wei Ling, director of the National Neuroscience Institute, who, I'm guessing from a couple of references in the piece, is former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's daughter. By a brilliant process of deduction I suppose this makes her sister to the current Prime Minister. The interest lies in her call for direct, fearless criticism of 'leaders' in organisations by their subordinates, even those right at the bottom of the heap, which might seem unexceptionable stuff if you happen to live in, say, the UK, but is quite striking here. (Actually, this is now the party line in a lot of organisations here, it's just that, in the majority of them, everyone knows that no one really wants it or does it.) She sounds convincingly sincere and I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt that she practises what she preaches.

I can vaguely recall a time that I would feel rattled and put on the back foot by criticism of anything I was sort of in charge of, but even then I was usually interested in why people should be so wrong-headed about the obvious rightness of my every action. Over time the realisation that I, like everyone else, was capable of doufusness on a major scale dawned, bloomed and flowered as a given in terms of my work and became an enormously useful tool for repair. When possible I tried to institutionalise the means by which criticism might be elicited. A neat trick was to devise a questionnaire about the work of a department of which I was in charge with a big, inviting blank page asking those filling it in to say what we were weak in and how far this stemmed from my 'leadership'. I tried to make it sound like I really, really, really needed to know what was going wrong - which was, in fact, the case. To be honest, I'm not sure how far this really worked - it's quite possible that colleagues avoided saying what they really wanted to for fear of hurting my feelings (I'm really quite a tender bloom), or me retaliating to any personal 'slight' (I'm one tough cookie), or out of worry we'd end up having to work a lot harder to put right what was seen as being wrong. But I do think it was rather a good and simple wheeze.

Now all this sounds more than a little self-serving (if not downright saintly) but I'll try and argue it isn't quite as much so as it sounds. The fact is I've never been in charge of anything really big in terms of numbers of people and I consider this an extremely good thing. I'm temperamentally completed unsuited to be anyone's boss as shown by the fact that I detest being such. So my ability to take criticism (if I'm not deceiving myself) is related to the fact that I've never really ever had to face too much in terms of simple weight of numbers. In addition, I've always enjoyed, no, more than that, relished a good argument and find a sort of deep fascination in people disagreeing with me, even when it's pretty annoying. It helps that they're usually wrong.

And that's another step in the process I need to make clear. I don't think I'd ever just accept a criticism at face value, though I hope I'd never forget a criticism even if I assessed it as inappropriate.

In this respect I've learnt a lot about listening to what people say in relation to stuff I've directed for the stage. I like hearing praise, of course, but it's not terribly useful except as a means of confirming one's original hunches about what is likely to work. In contrast, even what might seem to be the most off centre criticisms can be revealing and useful, if not directly for the 'current' work then as a factor to be considered for stuff that lies ahead.

So that's my contribution to all this stuff about leadership - nothing terribly new, just tired agreement with what Ms Lee gets over rather more convincingly. I'm naïve enough to think that there's really not much to it other than some fairly obvious common sense.