Strategy #29: Be a Dionarap

Dionarap is the word paranoid spelled backwards (don’t try to find this word in the dictionary – I made it up). If you can be a Dionarap, a “backwards paranoid,” it will give you a completely different outlook on the world and on other people. As a Dionarap, you will automatically assume the best of others. You will assume that they like you, that they want to help you, and that they are working hard and doing their best. You will assume that your customers want to buy from you, and thus it will be a lot easier to ask for the sale.

Since you tend to get what you expect out of other people, and out of life, by being a Dionarap you will create positive self-fulfilling prophecies. And one of those self-fulfilling prophecies will be that you will look for, attract, sign-up, and retain the very best people for your organization.

By definition, effective delegation requires that the person doing the delegating have faith in the ability of the person to which the job is being delegated.  For many people, this willingness to replace the need for personal control with faith in someone else does not come easily. Your effectiveness as a leader, though, will be greatly enhanced by the extent to which you are able to set aside your own control needs, and have faith that your people can and will rise to the occasion when given important responsibilities.  In his book Up the Organization, William Townsend said that true delegation means telling someone what needs to be done without telling them how to do it, and then refraining from looking over their shoulder while they do it. You might call that “Management by Dionarap.”

There is an important side benefit to promoting a culture of Dionarap: it will help you bring down the silo walls that now divide your organization.  If everyone had the Dionarap mindset, there would be a lot less finger-pointing and blame-gaming. People would be much more likely to take a walk to another department and deal with a problem rather than make negative assumptions about the people in that other department who the perceive to be the source of the problem. And wouldn’t this be the type of organization the people you want to recruit would be proud to work for?

“When you look at your people, do you see them as the fundamental resources on which your success rests and the primary means of differentiating yourself from the competition? Perhaps even more importantly, would someone observing how your organization manages its people recognize your point of view in what you do as opposed to what you talk about doing?”

Jeffrey Pfeffer: The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First

Next >