No to Yes or Yes to No...

The subject may look very strange. Sure it is, as this depicts personalities and the way we approach issues. There are basically two major types of personalities when confronted with issues-those who start from a " No it will not work" and elaborating why it will not work and the other end "Yes it will work". You can say this is the same as optimistic and pessimistic characteristics. But this is a little more than this. Those who start with a No are not necessarily pessimistic and those who say Yes are not necessarily optimistic. You may ask how can that be. The people who say No and argue for status quo are also those who are optimistic/realistic otherwise but think that saying yes will add too much work to them...work avoidance can make them say No. This can be tuned to their past experiences of having said Yes and get assigned with a lot of unrelated work which neither is enjoyable nor is making any sense on hindsight.
Therefore there is a conscious change on the part of the individual who slowly builds a Tortoise like Shell to challenge every change proposal, every new idea as it is not may result in something which is not normally part of the role of the person. Are they people bad..not really. They might have been yesterday's super performers with high energy but the invisible shell they carry makes them behave they actually do. Very soon the Shell kills them as it ensures they are seen as resistant camp leaders (as they still retain leadership qualities to convince No sayers). It is important that the bosses of those Shelled individuals identify this early and give feedback to remove it from their behavior. It is a responsibility of the bosses and not HR to do this.
Coming to Yes sayers..are they genuine optimists. Not really. In a lot of cases they are survivors. They know saying Yes is what Management wants to hear and say Yes but studious ones push the consequences of the yes to someone else. This group is more dangerous than No sayers as they look like fully devoted but are not really. This differentiates them from Optimists who are also doers to ensure success of a decision. These Yes saying Chameleons can be distinguished by characteristics like not owning failures, blaming everyone else, everything outside after a failure and sometimes finger pointing own team members.
It is important to note that some genuine optimists can fail due to lack of experience or circumstances that were not foreseen before. They usually own up failures and try to become better. It is important for leaders not to punish them for their entrepreneurship as risks needs to be taken for better tomorrow but success is not 100%.
Next time if you are in a meeting look out for the Tortoises or Chameleons. Just ensure you are not one of them. Forget the inactive, cat on the walls. As they are there today and will be there tomorrow. Looks to me like a zoo in corporations but that is the way it is.

The dangers of YES MEN!

Career path of leaders always has a phase where there are tough decisions to be made. One of the decision is between Loyalty and Quality. Not very explicit in several cases as a lot of time personal attachment to followers do happen to leaders. Similar attachment happens with co-leaders.
This attachment is very important in a lot of ways as it helps to build trust and communicate consistently across different strata of organization. However a leader does face the dilemma at sometime-to make a decision to axe a loyal follower as his performance is not shaping up to current requirements or he is the bottleneck in change without he realizing it.
There are some people who ask me "This maybe true long time ago when people had their job from college to retirement and loyalty with companies was a valued asset. Today people move across so many jobs within career. So this dilemma does not occur as personal attachment rarely develops. Most of it is professional attachment". For sure this is true. However when a Leader after reaching a particular level starts to move around will also try to take his loyal followers from other companies with him with a promise of better career, taking care etc. This creates more responsibility on the leaders and this is a form of attachment which still thrives.
To be clearer it is not bad to have some people who are adapted to your style and with right competence with you. But the danger is if after a few years they are able to predict you exactly and become YES MEN. When two people think alike then one of them is redundant is an aggressive posture in driving innovation. Thinking alike is just one part of the problem. The bigger problem is when others start to perceive the special treatment to the follower whom they implicitly start to think is the successor...then there is a negative halo effect happens. There are usually three aspects of any job-routine, tactical and strategic. Depending on the quality of YES MEN they completely say (even if they don't complete believe) whatever leader thinks is right in strategic and tactical aspects. In fact they praise his vision more often than others. The smiling face of the leader (as everybody likes praise) encourages them to enforce their own controls in routine/administrative aspects which will make them indispensable. This where the leader usually is blind as he thinks overall alignment has happened and is going the right way. YES MEN are more dangerous when they start using the leaders name more often to show to the organization(some pick up the phones in a meeting and talk to the leader implicitly trying to clarify something but explicitly to send a message of closeness to the middle level managers) that there is some extra powers he has.
The dangers of YES MEN don't become apparent till there are more than 3. But even one thorn when not trimmed can hurt the leader's credibility. It surely helps to have political strength by having YES MEN but if it starts crossing the professional boundary then it is time for action.