Excellence and Fairness - Part 1

Abdul-Jaleel Al-Khalifa, 2007 SPE President • president@spe.org

It is amazing how all people are attracted to excellence and fairness, reflecting a human unity without regard to colour, race, gender, or religion. However, as much as people are united in admiring fairness and excellence, they sometimes differ in understanding their true meaning and application in real life. This can explain why some people live isolated in their thinking and feelings despite today’s fast-growing means of communication. Let’s explore an understanding that I hope can be universal and practical. We will then try to apply this understanding to individuals and corporations in our industry.

Let us start with the idea that excellence and fairness are twins; they rise and shine together. This principle applies to individuals, corporations, and industries. Individuals, aspiring to be excellent, can be a change agent within their corporations and the industry at large.

Background

In my November JPT column, I talked about how healthy organizations enjoy an evolving process of technology innovation, cost management, and high productivity. They engage the workforce and utilize their employees’ full potential. Healthy organizations also exhibit a very high degree of character and competency at both the individual and corporate levels, as demonstrated in Fig. 1. The increasing challenges of higher demand and stretched human resources will drive organizations to do a better job of engaging their workforce. A corporation’s workforce is its foundation for future survival. Industry’s focus on research and technology spending will build on this foundation.

Fig. 1—Healthy organizations exhibit high character and competency of both the individual and the corporation.

Genuine efforts to enhance character and competency must be at both the individual and the corporate level. This month’s column focuses on the individual. Individuals at all levels collectively form the character and competency of the entire corporation. Furthermore, it is essential to plant the seeds and anchor high standards of character and competency at the individual level, where ownership and accountability reside.

Let’s now discuss how SPE can help enhance the individual’s character and competency.

Broaden SPE Focus to Cover People Issues

SPE’s historical focus has been mostly on technical competencies. Very few SPE papers have discussed ethics, values, organizations, and leadership. Only one in 100 Distinguished Lecturers over the past few years spoke about ethics with regard to reserves booking. Engineering curricula are almost void of courses on character, values, and ethics. While industry training offers courses and information like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, in general there is a dire need for an immediate focus on this critical area. This explains why 95% of the respondents in the December 2005 SPE survey of members’ job satisfaction were in favor of a more SPE focus on people issues.

SPE plans to hold a summit for industry leaders in early 2007 to frame a grand strategy for both people and technology. In March, SPE will begin publishing a new quarterly magazine titled Talent & Technology, which will feature articles on career planning and leadership, as well as state-of-the art in various technical fields. The first SPE workshop on human resources was held in Cyprus in August 2006. Future workshops to discuss people issues are being planned in 2007.

Our industry is more familiar with the term excellence rather than character and competency. How does our industry define excellence and does it relate to character and competency?

Excellence is Character and Competency

The human brain tends to simplify complex physical objects into simple one- or two-dimensional images. For example, we visualize the globe using simple two-dimensional maps. The same applies to intellectual concepts. For example, people collapse their impression about others’ character and competency into a one-dimensional scale ranging from extremely poor performance to outstanding. Employees are rated on this excellence scale to decide their monetary rewards, promotions, and job opportunities. So, how does excellence relate to character and competency?

The dictionary defines excellence as superiority, or surpassing others. This implies two risky propositions: that there is an environment of competition rather than collaboration, and that only few people, or possibly only one, can excel in a group. This definition creates a fierce competition ignited by self-interest, and it deprives the majority of people of the chance to satisfy their natural aspiration toward excellence. Therefore, excellence has to have a different definition.

Let’s explore other possible definitions of excellence:

Is excellence being extremely rich (earning a lot of money)? No. One cannot correlate excellence to one’s standard of living or level of earning, as many low- and middle-income people are also excellent. Furthermore, there are many unethical ways to make money.
Is excellence climbing the hierarchy to a very senior position? No. Many people excel not through a managerial ladder but through a technical ladder. Additionally, there have been senior officials whose behaviour did not gain respect of the people.
Is excellence achieving awesome objectives while maintaining the highest ethical standard? Yes. This definition emphasizes the importance of the means as well as the end result. It reflects both character (ethical standard) and competency (achieving results). With this definition, making money demonstrates excellence if ethics are preserved. Similarly, securing higher positions in a corporation demonstrates excellence if fairness has been observed. Pursuing not-for-profit objectives such as disseminating knowledge and performing volunteer work is also excellence. This definition implies that excellence can be nurtured in a collaborative environment where people work together to achieve grand targets rather than compete for limited objectives.

Now that we defined excellence in our industry, let’s see how individuals can achieve excellence in their life.

Reason and Sensations

Psychologists confirm that the most important force behind any human action is the desire to be happy. Internal drivers for human behaviour are our biology and our intellectual reason. Our biology drives for short-term pleasures that draw strongly on sensory components (food, drink, games, etc.) Our intellectual reason drives for long- term aspirations to virtues such as autonomy, richness, excellence, generosity, honesty, peace and charity. Fig. 2 shows the different intensities of short-term pleasures and long-term aspirations.

Fig. 2—Spikes of pleasure driven by sensory interest compared to long-term gratification driven by reasoning.

While our intellectual reason drives for long-term aspirations, sensations drive for quick pleasure. The combination is like a rider and a wild horse. The rider is the reason and the wild horse is the aggressive sensations. The more professional the rider, the easier he can tame the wild horse. Overdoses of sensational pleasure reflect that the horse is taking control, and the rider is in danger. This is catastrophic to long-term aspirations such as excellence. A simple example is a child who must choose between enjoying the fun of playing soccer (horse interest) and studying for exams (rider interest). Happy people are professional riders who entice the horse through controlled pulses of short-term delights while maintaining the focus on long-term objectives. Internal beliefs aim to strike this delicate balance and achieve fairness between reason and sensation. This is sometimes called the spiritual part of the human.

Taming Self-Interest

The most dangerous threat to excellence is self-interest at the expense of others. Indeed, super-elevated self-interest can override common bonding between human beings and can damage such group virtues as generosity and fairness. Self-interest rationalizes a strategy of “the end justifies the means.” It kills fairness and drags excellence into a steep decline. Taming self-interest is critical to achieve fairness between self-interest and social responsibility. Fairness is the magic concept that achieves excellence.

Fairness

Fairness paves the way to excellence, providing equitable opportunities to all and not favouring one over others because of personal feelings and interests. Fairness gives everyone what he or she deserves.

There are many external forces that can support or discourage fairness. These include family, school, society, and policies of company/country, as shown in Fig. 3. Such forces can tame self-interest in favour of reason and social responsibility. Ironically, however, they sometimes tend to boost self-interest and thus encourage bias and greed. Take for example, uncontrolled affiliation to families, friends and groups. It can serve as a mental filter favouring certain groups, thus causing major threats to fairness and excellence.

Fig. 3—Individual character reflects a continuous interplay between internal (physical, intellectual, and spiritual) and external (family, society, schools, and policies) drivers of behaviour.

Individuals socialize and work with superiors, subordinates, peers, family, friends, and so on. Their behaviour is a continuous interplay of their internal (physical, intellectual, and spiritual) and external forces. While behaviours are visible to others, the complex interplay of internal and external components is hidden (see Fig. 4). Therefore, any attempt to change behaviours such as fairness and excellence needs to drill deeper into the hidden components. This explains why character changes cannot be an on/off process. It also explains why posting values on the walls and talking about them is good but not sufficient. Most important is living these values and walking the talk.

Fig. 4—Behaviours are the visible part of a continuous interaction between external and internal forces.

Onward

Excellence is achieving awesome objectives while maintaining the highest ethical standards. Fairness cultivates an environment conducive to excellence. These twin behaviours reflect a constant interaction between the individual‘s internal forces (physical, intellectual, and spiritual) and external stimuli (e.g., family, society, school).

In next month’s column (Excellence and Fairness—Part 2) I will explain how our work environment can nurture fairness and excellence and stimulate full engagement of the workforce.

References

Covey, Stephen R.: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Schuster, London (1992)
Cooper, Robert K.: Get Out of Your Own Way, Crown Business, New York, (2006)
Haidt, Jonathan: The Happiness Hypothesis, Basic Books, New York, (2006)
Gilbert, Daniel: Stumbling on Happiness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, (2006)
Amini, Ibrahim: Self Building, Translated by Hussein Alamdar, Ansariyan Publications, Qum, Iran (1997)