How NOT to be 'Putin'?

BBC headline: Ukraine war: Putin being misled by fearful advisers 

"Interesting! Why were the advisers scared?"

I continued reading.

The advisors were frightened and “afraid to tell him the truth", as they were uncertain how Putin “…is going to react to getting bad news”. As Putin consumed the (mis)information fed by his own subordinates he ended up thoroughly “misled” and “massively misjudged” the war situation. 

Result?

An impending disaster.

As I write this post, experts are labeling the Russia-Ukraine war, spearheaded by Putin, to be “a strategic blunder” which politically isolated Russia and severely damaged Russia and the world - economically.

The Putin incident is a grim reminder of an age-old people-related challenge in any organizations - government or corporate. 

We like to believe a leader should treat her/his followers evenly. It’s a myth. We don’t live in a perfect world and the leader, being a human first, is also not perfect. The leader (consciously or unconsciously) buckets followers into two groups- ingroups and outgroups and DISCRIMINATES between them.

Ingroup members are close to the leader and are more likely to say what the leader wants to hear by enthusiastically nodding and smiling (and internally disagreeing), thus feeding the leader’s ‘confirmation bias’ . The ‘groupthink’ leads to false consensus and ultimately to a fatally flawed decision which is very far from the ‘truth’ - an essential  ingredient for an successful business decision. 

On the other hand, the outgroup members are…you guessed it right - are lonely outliers, worker ants far away from the power center, less valued in the group whose suggestions and inputs are routinely ignored by the boss/manager and the coterie. Interestingly, both groups live under the shadow of a common fear: What will happen if I tell him (or her) an uncomfortable truth? What’s going to be the cost of telling the truth to power?

As groupthink suffocates bottom-up communication, the result  can be fatal. 

In January 1986 the NASA’s space shuttle Challenger exploded within 73 seconds of its launch. All seven crew members died and millions of dollars wasted. Rogers commission, which investigated NASA’s organizational culture and decision making process found the culprit to be  “the dangers of groupthink”. Much before Challenger's  launch, lower-level project engineers identified a serious engineering design flaw, which according to them could be “catastrophic”. Unfortunately, they  chose to sit on this information as “the boss will not like it”. Higher in the pecking order, the NASA top management was (politically) pressured to launch the space shuttle on time and any delay would make the political bosses ``angry”. Ignorance is such  a bliss!

So, what to do when the boss is maha-angry and -annoyed because a gutsy subordinate mentioned the proverbial  'elephant in the room' (i.e. the subordinate has the spine to highlight a problem which others have turned a blind eye to) but the boss refuses to entertain citing "lack of bandwidth to process it now"? 

How the sincere subordinate, with the organization's best interests at heart, deals with the disturbing label of "anti-team" as "only you always complain when others have no problem"?

Sorry, there is NO easy answer. 

My suggestion for the lonely subordinate is don't give up.

May be not today, may be not tomorrow but sooner or later, you will be noticed and appreciated for the value you bring to the organization you work for.  And in future, when you become a boss, make sure to keep at least one 'devil's advocate' in your team and start the meeting with what he/she has to say. 

And when that person talks...you, the boss,  please listen.

Image courtesy: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Flive.staticflickr.com%2F5593%2F29495272034_0e380efc35_b.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fnotionscapital%2F29495272034&tbnid=YvfsiNaiLrp3ZM&vet=12ahUKEwj1m5e07JD4AhVi_TgGHSy0CLsQMygMegUIARCAAQ..i&docid=MBEi4UlYqkvw4M&w=1024&h=613&q=groupthink%20photo&hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwj1m5e07JD4AhVi_TgGHSy0CLsQMygMegUIARCAAQ (under Creative Commons License)