The Apple's Antennagate

Everybody should know about the woe around Apple's iPhone 4 antenna. Now that Steve Jobs held a press conference explaining about this, it means that the problem is real and they are taking serious effort to correct it.

There are some things from the conference that interest me. First of all, Jobs said it himself : "Apple isn't perfect". And the next best thing, he indirectly said that iPhone is not perfect just like other smartphones.

It always baffles me that many Apple products users seem to believe that Apple products are flawless, perfect and superior to other products of its peers. And some of them even condescend and look down to other products, even to the extent of treating non-Apple users with disdain. There's even a saying "Apple and non-Apple products".

Putting Apple aside, there's a good lesson we can learn from this case. You see, I've seen many superiors, or hear stories about superiors who see himself as someone who deserves the position. They feel that they are always right, people should look up to him, or worse, he look down to other people, specially to their subordinates. This is also the case in seniority. And being superior or senior, they have the power to behave that way.

These people tend to protect the image, and become perfectionist. They don't allow themselves to make mistakes or look "weak". When they make mistake, they try to look for a scapegoat to blame, or make it so that it's something normal and not a big deal. Oh, BTW, Jobs showed similar signal-drop case on OTHER smartphones and platforms.

Silly, isn't it?

What I'm saying, I remember I posted something similar, higher position does not give us power to do anything freely as we like. Higher position gives us opportunity to do MORE good things and good deeds. When we continuously make condescending remarks to others - or subordinates, or look down to them, people would love to look for our flaws. And when they DO find one tiny flaw on us, they will make it so big, it matters. And we will end up trying our best to look for justifications, which might make us look even sillier.

So, again, we may be a superior, be it a supervisor, manager, president director or anything. Even a teacher or a senior trainer. We may even be a smart guy who deserve our position. But that's not a reason to behave in such a way that we look down to others. Learn to be a good leader, and make your team a good team.

Allegiance

During a Productivity Improvement Project, I asked this question to my trainees of managers : Do you want your people to do their work? As in, doing it properly, according to the system and the rules, following the do’s and avoiding the don’ts? They answered enthusiastically, “YES!” Well, of course we want our people to do their work correctly, mistake-free and flawless. We want professionals who know what they are doing and do it right.

Then, I startled them that if I were them, I DON’T want my people to do their job. Of course, some of them frowned and asked “why?”, to which I responded with a single sentence that made their frown even uglier : “I want my people to WANT to do their work”. Well anyway, it’s a strategy to give an opening for explanation . . . it keeps people focused.

I believe I explained it somewhere in my previous posts, that modern people are smarter and more critical. Instead of fully dependant on their muscles and physical traits, they use their brains and mental powers to improve themselves and make use of them to their benefit in everyday activities. Thus, it’s one of the reasons behind the term “work smart, don’t work hard”.

With all the skills and knowledge, people tend to think “why should I give more? It’s not worth my salary”. Well, this salary thing is so common. The company doesn’t want to pay more, but the employee thinks that his skills and hard work deserve better compensation. But it’s interesting to find that one guy feels comfortable with his salary and willing to give more, while the other guy keeps complaining and demanding more salary, although they are doing a relatively same job. I’ve seen courageous and motivated employee in one company, and depressed, complaining employee in other organization with the same job description.

So what’s wrong?

Later on, I’ll write something more detail about the 8 Effective Leader’s Behaviors, but now all I’m saying is that it’s people we are dealing with here. We don’t just want them to do their work correctly, but we want them to actually own and develop a sense to do their work right. We want them to – say – automatically do things right and flawlessly. Of course, we would want to implement control systems like Pokayoke, ISO, 5S etc. to improve our organization in a more systematic way, but again, it’s all about how eager our people want to make use it in their everyday life. Or, we might want to push them, squeeze them or bully them to use their skills and knowledge to the benefit of the company, but it would only make them robots who will only move on command, they will not start the initiatives to work and improve.

What should we do?

Be a good leader. Yeah, it may sound naive to you, but I’ve seen people willing to die for their manager, and dedicate their lives to serve under their superiors. It’s all about good leadership, maintaining good work environment and open communication. Win-win solution, involvement in problem-solving, mutual respect and two-way communication are a few among others in order to create a good relationship with our employees, which leads to courageous and creative employees who are willing to “die” for us. They are willing to give more to the company, they are willing to dedicate their skills and knowledge to the benefit of the organization. They might not become super employees, but they have enough sense of belonging to improve themselves, helping the organization and the company to improve itself.

So, back to the statement above : I don’t want my people to do their work, but I want my people to WANT to do their work. I want my people to have the will to work correctly, I want my people to follow the rules and implement well-laid system without me being depressed and stressed-out to make them do it, and I want my people to have the initiatives to improve themselves. I want my people to have allegiance to the company.

It is a cheaper way to improve the company. In a good way, that is . . .