Should auld acquaintances be forgot?

Many years ago, I worked at the same company as a woman called Irene; we started at the company on the same day and we kept in touch over the ten years that we both worked in the firm. Over that period, I watched as her career took an interesting turn and, by the end of the ten years, she was taking, on average, around about 80 to 100 days a year off sick.

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with Irene – she didn’t break her leg or anything; that 80 to 100 days each year was made up of the odd day or two here and there. Coughs, colds, sprains, migraines – there were always reasons for each absence and, over the months and years, they added up.

During her time at the company, Irene had a number of different managers, each of whom went through the same process. Initially, they would be crestfallen to find that Irene had been assigned to their team; then they would decide to resolve the problem and tackle it head-on; this would inevitably meet with failure and so they would give up, finally working to transfer her on to yet another unfortunate manager. Irene was not an easy woman to talk to – she was forthright, opinionated and generally older than the people managing her, so she found it easy to intimidate them. Some, less confident, managers would move from the first to the last step, skipping the middle stages entirely.

Eventually, Irene was given redundancy and received a cash payment, together with one month’s salary for every year she’d worked there. Everyone around her breathed a sigh of relief and made a little note to themselves that the consequence of continued poor behaviour is a large cash payout.

She never worked a full year over that ten-year period. Interestingly, though, Irene also participated in a local light operatic society: to the best of my knowledge, she never missed a rehearsal or a performance and I was reminded of Irene when I read this article. In particular, I was struck by the quote from Professor Cary Cooper: “if employers entrust their workers with flexible working, stress-related illness and sickness absence is lower and performance and productivity increases.”

What he’s talking about is an effort on behalf of employers to demonstrate the same flexibility and commitment they demand of their employees. While BA and its employees fight each other in the courts, politicians vilify bank employees and the country wonders whether it will still have a job in twelve months, perhaps Professor Cooper’s words point to a better way of working in the New Year. Perhaps one day, people like Irene – disengaged, unhappy, and reacting to being treated like a problem to be passed from pillar to post – will be treated differently. Perhaps an enlightened manager will one day tap the level of engagement she showed to her operatic society.

As the snow floats down outside and we prepare for the Christmas festivities that seems like a hopeful place to end 2009. We’re taking a break next week so we’ll see you again on New Year’s Day. If I could have one wish granted by Santa, it would be that, if you’ve enjoyed anything you’ve read this year on the blog, you to pass it on to just one other person who might like it.

In the meantime, have a very Merry Christmas.

Spinning plates

I just wanted to draw your attention to this excellent article concerning "information overload", a subject close to my heart in my studies on time/personal management. Having spent a day very recently with a group who complained they never got time to get their work done, while checking their BlackBerrys, iPhones and various other devices constantly throughout the day, it echoes my own thoughts on the subject perfectly!

Cause for hope

There are lots of drawbacks to the job I do – the endless travel and all the associated problems; long days and lonely nights in hotels, away from home; dealing with delegates who feel resentful or angry and seem to have forgotten their manners. As we reach the end of a difficult year, it’s easy for the negative things to stick in the mind, so it was good to be reminded of the upside of the job this week, which found me working with a bunch of graduate trainees from a large organisation on a corporate social responsibility workshop.

The idea was to give the graduates a project to do on day one of the workshop, have them carry out the project on day two and then review it on day three. It’s the third time I’ve run this workshop and previous projects have involved decorating community centres or building things. This time the task was even more daunting: the graduates had to go into a school and engage a group of 40 students (14 to 16 years old) on the issues surrounding electricity generation and supply and to conduct a debate about the “green” credentials of the electric car.

I’ve worked with graduates on development programmes before and, I must confess, my view of them is sometimes jaded. From some individuals on some programmes I’ve seen a sense of arrogance and entitlement that I find difficult. Not this time, though. What I encountered was a group of early twenty-somethings who were polite, engaging, thoughtful and fiercely intelligent. They worked together to achieve the project with a dedication, resilience and humour that I found quite inspiring. Not only that, the students they taught were polite, thoroughly engaged and grateful for all the work that had been put into the day. They were fascinated by the science they were being taught and had a surprisingly comprehensive grip of the issues surrounding electric cars.

I’m conscious that last paragraph contains a great many adjectives but I make no apology for trying to convey how impressive both groups were – if you believe everything you see in the media, it’s tempting to believe that the “youth of today” are nothing but feral, hoody-wearing hooligans. It was fascinating to watch the next two generations engaging with each other and discussing the future of the planet they’re inheriting and exploring practical ways in which to clean up the mess that previous generations have made. The whole workshop made me feel guilty and old but, above all, very optimistic about the future.

Christmas bonus

What are we to make of the furore surrounding the bankers’ bonus saga? Bankers have had a bad time of it recently – mostly at the hands of politicians (who are, no doubt, very glad to have something to detract from their own expenses scandal) and at the hands of the media, who are only too happy to find someone to blame for the economic mess in which we find ourselves. RBS have found themselves particularly in the firing line. There was the fuss about Fred Goodwin and Harriet Harman’s ridiculous comment about his pension failing in "the court of public opinion" and now they wish to pay bonuses totalling £1.5bn, which has sparked rumours of government action in this week’s pre-budget statement.

The ever informative and reliable Robert Peston is forecasting a super-tax on bankers’ bonuses, which is an interesting development. If it does happen – and we’ll find out in a few days – it may well be a sign that the court of public opinion has indeed handed in a verdict. A super-tax will not clear the country’s debt; even at rates of 80% to 90%, the total raised will only be a couple of hundred million pounds – no small amount, clearly, but insignificant compared to the overall debt. The tax will purely be a punitive measure and possibly, if we’re to be cynical, a grab for popularity.

Let me be clear: some of you reading this may well be bankers and I make no comment on whether you deserve a bonus. I’m not even going to comment on whether bonuses are an effective way of motivating individuals. What I find fascinating is that we’re seeing played out, on a grand scale, the principle of reciprocity. There is a perception, rightly or wrongly, that “bankers” have brought about the current economic crises: people have lost their jobs, businesses have closed down. There is a further perception that, having been “bailed out” by the public, bankers are now taking advantage and being unfairly rewarded for what they’ve done.

The key word there is “unfairly” – reciprocity demands that any exchange be perceived as fair by both parties. If it isn’t, then the party on the losing end will take action – even at their own expense – to punish the party seen to be winning. The City of London, despite recent events, has been a source of income for this country for hundreds of years. In the coming weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how far society is prepared to go to punish this income generator in the search for reciprocity.

Do you have the time?

What is time? If you’re struggling to answer that question, you’re not alone. It’s something that we think about all the time but it’s almost impossible to describe what time is. This isn’t a new struggle – in the fifth century, St Augustine wrote, “what then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Often, about the only thing we do know about time is that we don’t have enough of it.

It’s a faulty paradigm, of course: we treat time as if it was a commodity, which it clearly isn’t. If we don’t have enough of something that we want, we’ll generally go and get some more but you can’t do that with time. It’s not possible to pop down to Tesco and pick up an extra half an hour. So we often look for time management systems to provide that “extra” time – some new process, some new diary, some clever system to give us the time we need. But what do we find? All time management advice is fundamentally the same, regardless of how it’s dressed up, and I’d be willing to bet that you already know most of it.

Time management is a myth; there’s nothing we can do to time to give ourselves a 61-minute hour or a 25-hour day. It’s not time we should be managing: it’s ourselves. I was working with a group recently, talking about time, and one of the delegates was in training for an Ironman triathlon competition. He estimated that he spent about 24 hours a week in training and one of the other delegates barked with laughter and derision at this, boldly claiming that, as a working mother of two children, she couldn’t possibly do something like that because she didn’t have enough time. Of course, what we discovered after a little questioning, was that she spent around 30 hours a week watching television.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the time to train for a triathlon – it just wasn’t as important to her as watching TV. Time management, at its heart, is self-management: it’s about the choices we make on how to spend our time and every choice we make has consequences. Recent studies have shown that the average Facebook user spends about 70 hours on the site per year – three whole days. The biggest users spend a full week. Users of social networking sites estimate that they spend around 40 minutes a week, at work, on the sites – at a cost to the economy of about £1.4bn a year. Most eBay bids and sales are made during the hours of 9am to 5pm. I guarantee that most of these people “don’t have enough time”, either.

I’m not criticising television or Facebook or Twitter or any other website – I watch TV and use social networking sites like most other people. But the fact is, we have all the time we’re ever going to get: we’re never going to get any more. We have the same 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year as Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama or any other significant achiever you could mention. What it comes down to, at heart, is the choices we make on how to spend that time. Choose wisely.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

What is it that makes a barrel? Is it the wood, the staves? The metal hoops? The shape? Of course, all of those things are vital but they are not what make a barrel. Interestingly, when you stop to think about it, the thing that actually makes a barrel is the thing that isn’t there – the void inside it. If the barrel wasn’t shaped to contain a void it would be useless; it wouldn’t be a barrel. Likewise, an empty barrel serves no purpose – it is just wood containing a space until you fill that space with something. Then it becomes useful and serves its purpose. The barrel itself, if it is constructed correctly and doesn’t leak, then becomes of secondary importance – what matters is what it contains.

What does all this have to do with training? Well, training is the equivalent of the wood and metal in the barrel; fitted together correctly they contain a void. In the same way that the usefulness of barrel is the void it contains, the usefulness of training and development are the void that they contain – the practical application of what delegates learn back at the workplace. Without that practical application, training workshops or programmes are like empty barrels – pretty to look at, perhaps, but serving no useful purpose and just taking up space.

So what makes training useful is the application. This is an interesting way of looking at the issue and should, perhaps, make those who commission training think more about the application of what delegates learn. However, if this is also the mindset of the development consultant, then it will drive a new set of behaviours.

Just as barrels have evolved into more elaborate and efficient packaging solutions, so too must training evolve. When development consultants are constructing their barrel, they should be thinking very carefully about the space they are seeking to contain and how best to surround that space to the greatest effect. In effect, thinking first about the application of the learning before constructing the workshop to teach that learning. Different shapes require different packages; different applications will require different methods. This focus on application should keep both consultant and commissioner focused on the real purpose of training – to use what you have learned. Sadly, too many training companies are fashioning beautiful and elaborate barrels which remain empty and, therefore, useless.

Learning to Lead

If you’ve ever spent time in a training room, you’ll have heard a trainer use the phrase “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.” I know it’s supposed to be supportive and encouraging but now and again I like to take it as a challenge and see if I can’t find some really stupid questions to ask. You know the sort – the kind of questions that five year olds ask and which parents find so difficult to answer: things like “why is the sky blue?” or “where does the sun go at night” or “is it actually possible to teach someone to be a leader?”

Many years ago, people who thought about this type of thing believed that leaders were born, not made. Leadership was a quality you were born with and the idea was known as the “great man” theory. The difficulty with this theory (leaving aside the obvious sexism) is that, followed to its natural conclusion, if you were born with this leadership quality you’d be a leader even if you never got out of bed. That led to a second series of ideas (known as behavioural theories) that involved what leaders actually did. Of course, anyone who’s been a leader knows that what you do usually depends on the circumstances, which led to a whole new set of ideas, known as contingency (or, “it depends”) theories.

Since the 1990s, leadership theory has fractured into a host of different schools: exchange and path led; charismatic and visionary; transformational; post-transformational, distributed and on and on. However, after people moved away from the “great man” theories, the idea that leadership could actually be taught was never much questioned: leadership was reduced to a series of tasks or activities, leading to the belief that leadership itself could be taught. But what if it can’t?

This is obviously a question that people in my position don’t really like to ask very often – after all, pretty much everything we do is predicated on the belief that it can. But I suspect that there is actually very little – including leadership – that can be taught. Instead, these things have to be learned.

That’s not just semantics. All learning involves change and psychologists say that in order to change, we need three things:

• understanding (knowing and appreciating the need to change);
• motivation (the desire to change);
• resources (the tools or environment to help them change).

As a trainer, I can only provide some of the resources and perhaps help with some of the understanding. The rest has to come from the individual. I was struck by this as I read a very interesting essay on leadership by Elena Antonacopoulou and Regina Bento; their assertion is that the most important thing leaders can learn is not how to create a vision, or to communicate or how to build trust. Instead, the best thing that leaders can learn to do is learn. I think they’re onto something.

Working to live - part three

I ended last week’s blog by suggesting that Frederick Taylor was a fraud. Rather than rehash here all the reasons why that may be true, I’ll refer you instead to an excellent article that Matthew Stewart wrote for the Atlantic Magazine and recommend you read that. What I’d like to concentrate on here are some of the consequences of Taylorism.

Regardless of Taylor’s methods, there is nothing inherently wrong with a drive for efficiency. Everything we do, both inside and outside work, takes a certain amount of time. The principle underlying Taylorism is not necessarily fraudulent - business must involve, to an extent, the search for the shortest time period within which the widget can be made, how quickly the client can be served and so on. My concern is not with that but with the other question that no one seems to be asking: what is the consequence of this efficiency?

The superficial response is that greater efficiency results in faster throughput and therefore greater output and productivity; it may also result in reduced costs and greater profit. So far, so good. This is a logical argument when we’re talking about machinery and possibly even production lines. It even has merit when talking about the everyday processes that employees use in order to get their jobs done: the fewer steps in the process, the faster they are able to get their work done.

But what about the other consequences of greater efficiency? If you’re wondering what they are, ask yourself this question: whenever new processes are introduced at work and time is saved, what does your employer ask you to do with the saved time? Do they allow you to go home early? Have longer lunch-breaks? Or do they, as I suspect, expect you to do more work in that saved time?

What kind of incentive is this? Who in their right mind (aside, of course, from Frederick Winslow Taylor and his deluded devotees) thinks this will encourage people to work harder? Efficiency works well with machines but we are not machines. A drive for ever greater efficiency is damaging the lives of a great many employees in fundamental ways, leading to less job satisfaction, greater stress and, as I wrote last week, increased suicide.

Over the coming weeks, I want to look at and, perhaps, challenge two sacred cows – that setting targets and managing to them is a good thing and that management/leadership can be taught. These two beliefs have been at the base of a system that has resulted in people killing themselves because of their work – what if both of those ideas are wrong? Perhaps it’s time to examine them a little more closely.

Remembering

On Remembrance Sunday, we take a little time to remember the people who have sacrificed their lives in conflicts around the world. There are many people who have had a significant impact on our lives and yet about whom we know very little and I was reminded of this recently whilst posting a link to this blog. Before the website allowed me to post the link, it brought up a box containing some words written in very wobbly and indistinct text and asked me to type in what the words were. You’ve probably come across the same thing any number of times on your travels around the internet.

This is known as a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a quick and easy way of ensuring that the person about to post the link or comment on the blog is a real person and not a computer, which may be trying to spam the site.

The Turing Test was first posited by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist during the 1950s. Turing is one of the fathers of the machine you’re using right now and foresaw a time when computers would be able to think for themselves. The Turing Test was to establish whether a human being would be able to tell whether he or she was conversing with another human being or with a soulless computer.

Turing was a brilliant man and contributed significantly to the British war effort through his work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park; having mastered mathematics, cryptanalysis and logic, Turing successfully turned his hand to chemistry towards the end of his life. But the end of his life came too soon and he died at the age of 41, apparently of suicide. It is believed that Turing first laced with cyanide, and then ate, an apple – urban myth holds that this is where Apple computers got their logo, although the company denies this.

Turing, you see, was gay and British society at that time was bigoted and intolerant: he was convicted of “gross indecency” and forced to take female hormones to chemically castrate him – as a result, he grew breasts. Recently, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised to Turing, praising his contribution to the war effort and stating “on behalf of the British Government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

The Turing Test is a test of humanity. When it came to Turing himself, society failed that test 50 years ago. With this apology, I’d like to believe we’ve finally passed it but there is still bigotry and intolerance in workplaces and society in general: remember that each time you take the Turing Test.

Working to live - part two

I wrote a few weeks ago about the problems faced by France Telecom and the increase in the suicide rate amongst its workers (you can find the entry here). I can’t claim any credit (much as I’d like to) but the Schumpeter column in The Economist picked up on this story recently and added some worrying statistics to the mix.

America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics has calculated that work related suicides increased by 28% between 2007 and 2008. Think about that for a moment: the number of people who were so unhappy with their work that the only way out was for them to kill themselves increased by more than a quarter in the space of one year – and, in the words of the article, “suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness.”

The Centre for Work-Life Policy has found that between June 2007 and December 2008, the number of people who said they were loyal to their employers dropped from 95% to 39%. The number of people who said they trusted their employers fell from 79% to 22%. In other words, if the statistics are to be believed, 75% of people don’t trust their employers and 60% are disloyal or, at best, neutral. It seems that, increasingly, employees are finding themselves trapped in jobs they dislike for employers they distrust.

Unusually for The Economist, the article is deafening in its silence on what should be done about this. Telling managers to think more carefully about what they say or advising workers that longer term demographic trends mean they’ll have the upper hand eventually is, frankly, fatuous. Something has to change and it has to change now.

Much of this unhappiness comes from the drive for efficiency, which I’ve labelled previously as the drive to achieve more with less. This in itself stems from the work of Frederick Taylor, who believed that work could be studied scientifically in order to find the most efficient way of working. In his words, “through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation... faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”

There are two things that I’d like to point out: firstly, Taylor uses the word enforce (or variations of it), five times in two sentences. I don’t think that enforcement is a helpful or effective way of gaining co-operation. Secondly, Taylor – one of the first if not the first management consultant, the father of scientific management and the man whose theories permeate almost every part of business today – was a bit of a fraud.

I’ll be developing these ideas further over the coming weeks in a series of articles that challenge some of the sacred cows of business and I’d love to know your opinion; please do sign up, post comments and get involved in the debate.

It's not a bad plan...

I was working with a group recently and I asked why it is that some work or task starts as not being urgent but eventually becomes urgent because it’s left; the answer they gave me, as groups often do, is that bad planning caused it. Now, bad planning can be the cause of many problems in business – and in life generally – but planning is not the panacea it is often thought to be. There is much more to achieving a goal than just having a plan.

Think of a city, separated from lush farmland by a deep chasm. The inhabitants of the city gaze across the chasm and begin to ask themselves what it would be like to be able to use that farmland – to grow more food, perhaps different food. They get excited about the prospect of being able to expand out, even beyond the farmland and so they commission the city’s architect to design a bridge and when the design is complete they task the city’s builder with constructing it. Soon, the bridge is finished and the inhabitants of the city are crossing back and forth, happily using the produce of the new farmland to enhance their lives.

In a nutshell, this story describes the four stages of goal achievement – and the broader process of project management. After all, what is a goal if not a mini project?

Initiate

The first phase is to have the vision of what you want to achieve – in this case, spanning the chasm and using the farmland that’s currently just out of reach. In projects, this is where you get very clear about your end result, about what your stakeholders and key stakeholders want, about your criteria for success.

Plan

Having decided where you want to go, you have to work out how to get there – the architect’s blueprint for the bridge. In projects, this is where you set out clearly and logically how you will get from where you are now to the vision outlined in the Initiate phase. The plan can be for a beautiful and ornate bridge or a strict, utilitarian bridge – whatever your key stakeholders define for you as part of their vision.

Act

However, having a vision and a plan are vital but insufficient. You can have a great plan but it will be worthless if you don’t do anything with it. This stage is where we take action. We execute the plan – either building the bridge or working through our project plan, responding to events, reviewing our progress, adjusting where necessary, sticking with it

Complete

The hallmark of a project is that it must finish; goals are there to be achieved – at some point, you complete the bridge, you reach the end of the plan, the other side of the chasm. Here is where we learn the lessons from our project and assess the benefits of having completed it – did achieving the vision bring us all we hoped it would, what’s our vision for the future, how do we apply the lessons to our next project?

All four parts are essential to make up the project or the goal – failing to carry out any one of them will dramatically lessen your chances of success, now and in the future. Planning is important but it’s not enough: without a vision, a plan is vague and unfocussed; without action, a plan is just a useless piece of paper; without completion, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our previous plans.

Blackberry Grumble

I recently bought a new Blackberry and I love it; I love being able to send and receive emails wherever I am. In fact, I’m in the odd position of wishing I received more emails, so I could use my Blackberry more. Before this starts turning into an advert for Blackberry, I have noticed an interesting side-effect of constantly being in touch. That little device, so shiny and glossy, with its flashing green light (oh, the thrill when it turns red because then I have a message) is a constant reminder that there are other things going on in the world – there is an “out there”, where things are happening and where people may, even now, be preparing to get in touch with me. As much as I love it, this Morrisian device – both beautiful and useful – is, I’ve begun to notice, something of a distraction.

Around forty years ago, researchers first discovered something they called “microexpressions” – tiny, mostly involuntary, and extremely quick expressions, often lasting for as little as one quarter of a second. These microexpressions were difficult to fake and gave real insight into whether the subject was telling the truth. It is possible that these microexpressions combine with the well documented phenomenon of perception without awareness to give us that “sixth sense” feeling we get sometimes, when we suspect that someone isn’t being totally honest or that something isn’t quite right.

Of course, in order to register the fact that something isn’t right, you have to be paying attention – to yourself and how you’re feeling, if nothing else. However, increasingly we seem to be paying less and less attention to what we’re actually doing. I’ve talked about this previously, when I mentioned the perils of multi-tasking and it strikes me that the more connected we are, the harder it is to be fully present in whatever it is we’re doing at any given moment because of that ever present distraction. And the less present we are, the more likely we are to miss things.

If you’re worried that this might be happening to you, try this experiment next time you have a day off. The night before, go round your house and cover up all the clocks. Turn off the computer, turn off the mobile and have a day without any screens or contact with the outside world – no TV, no radio, no internet. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired. Really be present in whatever activity you’re doing and pay attention both to the task and to how you feel. You might be surprised by what you notice and please do let me know how you get on. In the meantime, I need to go – I’ve just noticed that the little red light is flashing...

Man's Search For Lego

One of the joys of being a parent is that you get to re-live your childhood and, in particular, play with a lot of toys. My favourite toy when I was a child – and, fortunately, my son’s favourite toy now – is Lego and I can happily spend hours building the most complex models, scrabbling around on my hands and knees, looking for the one tiny brick which I’ve misplaced and which completes the whole kit.

I was reminded of this when I came across an interesting research paper called “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case for Legos”. The researchers conducted an experiment where they asked two groups of people to build Lego models. For one group, the completed models were placed on display while for the other group the models were disassembled in front of them and the pieces returned so they could build further models. What they found will probably surprise no one: the latter of those two groups built about 30% fewer models than the former. They felt the work was pointless and, regardless of what they were paid to do it, they didn’t match productivity of the first group, who thought there was some meaning in what they did.

It’s hardly a new finding: the title of the article itself is a play on Victor Frankl’s brilliant autobiography, “Man’s Search For Meaning” in which he outlined his finding that a key driver for mankind is the search for meaning in our lives. You’ve probably heard the old cliché about two builders: they’re both asked what they’re doing and one replies that he’s digging a ditch whilst the other says he’s building a beautiful cathedral. It’s a story echoed by the apocryphal story of Nixon’s visit to NASA, where he is supposed to have encountered a cleaner who described his job as “helping to put a man on the moon.”

A model I use to help managers understand how to work with their teams is one called the 4Cs – Context, Contribution, Coaching and Completion: Context and Completion are concerned with providing some form of meaning and sense of progress in the work that people do. Without this, paraphrasing a quote in the wonderful “Leadership Challenge” by Kouzes and Posner, life becomes “an endless series of Wednesdays”. Work is reduced to the Sisyphean task of endlessly rolling a boulder up a hill but never quite tipping it over the top.

As you go about your business this week, ask yourself what progress you’ve made; if you have made progress, is it progress towards a goal that matters to you? If you’re a manager, have you helped your team feel they’ve made progress towards achieving something important? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you might want to think about the implications for the quality of your/their work and, more importantly, the quality of your/their life.

Employee Engagement

For those of you who have been asking, details of the forthcoming Employee Engagement workshops are now "officially" on the web here. I'm very excited about this project and looking forward to getting them up and running. It's a key value for me to improve the way in which companies work with their employees and this is a big step in the right direction. Please feel free to forward the link on to every employer you know!

Mehrabian Madness and the Lazy Trainer

If I showed you a pie chart with three slices, labelled 55%, 38% and 7%, the chances are you’d tell me it had something to do with communication. If I pushed you a little bit harder, you might (as a group did recently) tell me it means that when we communicate, 55% of our message is transmitted by the way we look, 38% by the way we sound and 7% by the words we use. You may be nodding as you read this, congratulating yourself on knowing that little statistic.

But think about it for a moment: if that was actually true, what would be the point of subtitles in foreign films? You’d be able to get 93% of the movie just by looking and listening. And why would you bother learning another language? You’d be able to get the vast majority of your message across just by looking and sounding right. This interpretation is such staggering nonsense that I’m constantly amazed that intelligent people are prepared to believe it. Not that I blame them, you understand: I blame the lazy trainer that told them in the first place.

The statistic comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian. He found that when talking about attitudes and feelings, the speaker’s body language tended to count for more than the words used when there was incongruence between them (ie, the words said one thing but the body language said something else). The application of the findings to other areas of communication is, to say the least, disputed and even Mehrabian himself doubts that they’re valid when the topic under discussion is anything other than the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

So why is it that groups are still given a misleading (or, let’s be honest, a downright wrong) interpretation of the research? I’m afraid to say it’s because some trainers just don’t think about what they’re teaching groups and, for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I love my job and I take it seriously; without wanting to be precious about it, it’s a privilege to help people and make a difference in some small way. It frustrates me that some trainers seem to take their job so lightly as to repeat, parrot-fashion, such palpable rubbish – it’s their obligation to ensure that what they teach is correct. It’s vital that trainers engage with the material they teach and think deeply about it, at least as much as the delegates do, if not more. Anything less than that and they shouldn’t be doing the job.

Learning is a process

Clients often ask me about arranging a training event. It’s nice to be asked but I’m always slightly nervous; the language gives me a hint of potential problems later down the line because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of learning. An event, by definition, is a one-off, something different or out of the ordinary. Seminars, meetings, presentations are all events – discrete occurrences, usually used to communicate some kind of information; they stand alone, in isolation. Learning is different.

Learning – and, more importantly, the application of that learning – takes place as part of a process and it’s a respect for that process which is often lacking. The process begins with the delegate and their manager having an open and honest conversation about the need for learning. The delegate must be aware of why they’re attending the workshop and how it will help them to do their job better. This also requires that the manager consider carefully how the application of learning is intended to impact upon business results; if it does, measures should be put in place to record the return on investment of the training. If it doesn’t, the manager should think very carefully about the need for training. After the workshop, the manager must pay attention to the delegate’s attempts to apply their learning and support and encourage them as they do so.

In short, managers must be an integral part of the process of learning and organisations, if they truly want the people they train to apply what they’ve learned, must support this process. All of these aspects of the process must in place to give maximum support to the delegates in their learning and application. In the business environment, learning cannot afford to be an event – it has to be deeply embedded within the workplace and directly linked to the objectives of the individual, team and business. Seeing training or learning as an event is to isolate it – essentially, it is to tell the delegates that what they are learning is separate to what they do as part of their day job. And as soon as you give people that impression, you’re asking them to prioritise between what they learn on this event and what they do for a living. It’s no surprise, therefore, that training events tend not to produce any great or lasting change in behaviour. Consequently, nor is it any great surprise that when budgets tighten, the first things to get cut are budgets for training events.

Do bad times produce bad leaders...?

The Mahabharata contains a wonderful story of a wise man counselling a king, who asks, “Whether it is the king that makes the age or it is the age that makes the king”. The thinking behind the question is whether bad times produce bad leaders or bad leaders produce bad times. It’s a question I’ve often had cause to ponder as I talk to people about teambuilding. Often, leaders will ask me to do something with their teams to generate more honesty or openness, to address underlying issues within the team or just to make the team feel a little better. Whenever I’m asked to do this, there’s always a sneaking suspicion in my mind that the problems I’m being asked to resolve are actually problems caused by the leader themselves – as the Russians say, the fish rots from the head.

We all, eventually, become reflections of our leaders. Consciously or subconsciously, we model ourselves and our behaviours on theirs, for very simple reasons – they have the power to further our career and make our working lives happy or limit our career and make our working lives miserable. Most people, quite sensibly, will tend to tailor their behaviour in order to maximise the probability that the leader will do the former of those options, rather than the latter.

Consequently, most behaviour that you see in teams is largely a result of the behaviour of the leader. Notice I say “most” and “largely”: people have free will and their behaviour is sometimes influenced by things other than the behaviour of their manager but if you see problems in a team, look first at what the leader is doing. It’s a shame that often leaders don’t realise this and overlook their own behaviours in the search for what is “wrong” with their team.

This is hardly cutting edge thinking – after all, the Mahabharata is thought to be around 3,000 years old. But as I’ve written before in a previous blog, we often complicate things that are actually very simple and this is, after all, “a question about which thou shouldst not entertain any doubt: the truth is that the king makes the age”. It doesn’t just apply to formal leaders, or “kings”, either. Most of us are leaders of one sort or another – whether it’s within our families, within our peers or some other group and every day we each have the opportunity, even in some small part, to make the age. As you go about your business this week, what kind of age are you making?

What a load of...

This week, climate change protesters dumped manure on TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson’s doorstep in protest at his comments denying global warming. Ordinarily, this would not provide inspiration for a blog, but I had time on my hands during a journey and I started thinking about the role I had before I was a training consultant: for six years, I dealt with complaints.

Complaint handling, for those who’ve never tried it, is the second best job in the world – after training, of course. It’s a tremendous opportunity to understand people and one of the first lessons you learn when you deal with complaints is that you’d better listen to what people say or you’re going find yourself in a lot of unnecessary trouble.

If you have a brother or a sister, at some point in your childhood you will have pretended not to hear them: what happened next will have fallen into a predictable pattern. Having realised that they’re being ignored, they shouted louder – on the assumption that you really did have something wrong with your hearing and if they could just hit the right volume, all would be well. When this failed to work, as it inevitably did, they moved to stage two and went running off to complain to mum or dad. Of course, their response was invariably to tell your brother or sister to sort it out themselves and so they moved to stage three: they hit you – which usually brought about a completely new set of problems!

So what does all this have to do with Clarkson, manure and complaints? Well, I realised when I dealt with complaints that we never grow out of that pattern of complaining. If someone complained and I rejected it, they’d repeat themselves, only louder – the letter would be longer, more strident; maybe there’d be phone calls. If that didn’t work, they’d complain to a higher authority – the MD of the company, the regulator or the media. If they still didn’t think they’d been heard, they’d move to the equivalent of violence: parading up and down outside the office with a sandwich board or dumping manure on the doorstep.

Why does this happen? Quite simply because if people ignore us, they’re not just ignoring our words, they’re denying our very existence. It really upsets us, so we fall into the same old pattern we’ve used since childhood. If you keep having the same conversation with someone, if they keep repeating the same thing over and over again, it’s because they don’t think you’ve heard them yet. Better start listening – and showing them that you’re listening – before you wake up and smell something other than the coffee…

Working to live?

I have been feeling a little uneasy recently. One of the things that I’ve tried to do in my work is to help people become both more effective and more efficient. There have been two reasons for this: firstly, I believe that doing so, people’s lives will become easier and I see that as a good thing. Secondly, the more effective and efficient people are, the better their companies will be, providing continued employment, better goods and services and so on. Recent events in France caused me to question this whole philosophy.

Since the beginning of 2008, 23 employees of France Telecom, the country’s main telecommunications company, have killed themselves. According to the French unions involved, the suicides have been caused by a tougher management style implemented after the company’s privatisation in 1998 and that a “never-ending drive for efficiency is causing emotional havoc in the workforce.” The average suicide rate in the general population of France is 35 per 100,000 and France Telecom argues that the suicide rate amongst its workforce of 100,000 is not, therefore, statistically unusual. However, the situation has gotten so bad that the French Labour Minister is meeting with the CEO of France Telecom to discuss the situation. The company seems to accept that it has some part to play in the suicides, because it has hired more counselling staff, is now talking with the unions about the situation and has suspended a series of internal job transfers.

I’ve written before that a job is not a hostage situation – we always have choices and that while we may need a job we don’t necessarily need the job we have right now; all that is still true. But what if your options are severely limited, perhaps due to your skill set, your personal circumstances or the general economic climate? We’ve all had experience of jobs that have felt like they are grinding us down, even though our friends may tell us “it’s only a job.” Could the working environment within an organisation get so bad as to drive its employees to suicide? Does the greater drive for efficiency and effectiveness just increase the pressure on employees? If we show people how to “get more done with less” (a popular phrase in my industry), are we inadvertently making their lives harder rather than easier?

Recent studies by the Aspen Institute found that when students enter business schools, they believe the purpose of an organisation is to develop goods and services for the benefit of society. When they leave, these future top-business leaders believe the purpose of an organisation is solely to “provide shareholder value”. In France, it looks very much like people are dying in this drive for shareholder value: managers and leaders everywhere – and those who train and develop them – must wake up to the consequences and implications of their actions and acknowledge that organisations are far more than "shareholder value" machines.

Going for a walk...?

This week, along with some other local business owners, I had lunch with David Cameron, the leader of the UK’s main opposition party. I’ll make no comment about his politics as this isn’t the place for that debate but I was struck by how clearly he saw the job to be done by this country’s leader, whoever that may turn out to be. It got me thinking about a quote I read from Albert Eistein: “any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

There are hundreds and hundreds of books out there on the subject of leadership. They come at the subject from a variety of ideas and in a variety of different ways. They use different ideas or gimmicks or metaphors to deconstruct and explain the process of leadership, they will pick a variety of historical or sporting figures as models and ideals. Often the ideas and metaphors used are incredibly complex, thereby reflecting – or so the authors hope – the complexity of leadership and thereby justifying the size of the book they’ve written. (By coincidence, Lucy Kellaway of the FT has posted a very entertaining blog on this subject, here.)

I have a lot of those books in my library – I’ve even read some of them! But the more I work with leaders, at a variety of different levels in a variety of different organisations – the more I wonder whether all these books are heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps we’ve been making leadership too complicated; perhaps it’s actually really simple.

When I ask groups what it is that makes a leader, they come up with a wealth of answers, ranging from charisma, to authority, to… well, pretty much anything you care to mention, really. But the one fundamental thing that makes a leader, the one thing that all leaders have in common, is that they all have followers. Someone one described it to me like this: “a leader without followers is just a bloke out for a walk”.

For people to follow you, you have to be going somewhere they want to go. Let’s think about that sentence for a moment. Firstly, it means you have to be going somewhere. How many “leaders” do you come across, every day, who don’t really seem to be going anywhere except, perhaps, round in ever-decreasing circles? Leaders need a direction, some sense that tomorrow will be better than today, that the grass actually will be greener on the other side.

Secondly, wherever they’re going, it has to be attractive and leaders have to be able to communicate that attraction. You can tell people where you want to go, you can show them how you’re going to get there but if people don’t want to go they won’t follow you. Leaders have to be able to sell the idea of where they’re going and why people should follow them.

Of course, we can dress those two things up with fancy words and techniques, we could add in lots of examples but leadership, fundamentally, comes down to those two things. If you’re a leader and you don’t have them… well, you’re just out for a walk, aren’t you?

The ribbon is fraying...

There was a fascinating report on the BBC website yesterday about India’s second biggest airline, Jet Airlines. As a result of hundreds of pilots calling in “sick” at the same time, the airline had to cancel 120 flights, stranding thousands of customers. The “sickness” continued for a second straight day yesterday (9th September) with the number of flights cancelled increased to over 200. As I’ve been working on the employee engagement workshop I've mentioned previously, it came as a timely reminder of what can happen when employees disengage.

This dispute arose after the sacking of two pilots for (it is alleged) their participation in setting up a new pilots’ union but Jet has a history of, shall we say, fractious employee relations having sacked 1900 staff last year, only to call them back to work 48 hours later after a change of heart. Relations between the two sides currently seem somewhat acrimonious, with the chairman of the airline describing the pilots as behaving like “terrorists” and holding out the prospect of closing the airline down entirely.

When I talked about this previously, I described engagement as a continuum and it seems to me that, as employees disengage from their employer they begin to engage with something else. In the case of the Indian airline pilots, they seem to have engaged with a sense of their own solidarity and self-worth, with representatives of the pilots claiming that they “want their voice back in the company”.

The thing that people want most is to be listened to and understood; if we feel ignored, we tend to take whatever action we can to ensure that someone pays attention to us. On the face of it, the Jet Airlines dispute stems from the pilots not feeling a part of the company and being denied any other way of expressing their views. In the current economic climate, this dispute is the last thing the airline needs but it goes to show that employees who disengage from their employer can, potentially, bring a large company to its knees.

A colleague once described organisations to me as “a bunch of volunteers held together with a ribbon” – it's a beautiful image and I’ve never forgotten it. It perfectly describes the fact that no force keeps those volunteers together and at any point they can scatter into as many directions as there are people.

(By the way, for those of you who’ve asked, the first of the employee engagement workshops (“Engaging for Success – enhancing performance through employee engagement”) will be on 20th October in Bristol, with subsequent sessions on 29th October in London and 25 November in Manchester. I’ll post more details – venues and so forth – as soon as I have confirmation.)

Efficiency

The idea of efficiency has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been doing some diagnostic work with a local authority in Scotland and their biggest challenge is the dramatic reduction in their budgets for next year. Their focus is on finding “efficiency savings” – continuing to provide the same (or better) services with less money and fewer resources. As I was writing this article, McKinsey suggested that the NHS should lose 130,000 jobs to save money while the government has responded that the necessary savings can be made through greater efficiency. It got me thinking: what is this thing we call efficiency?

Efficiency is, essentially, the ratio of output to input. It’s based on the idea that it is possible to reduce input whilst increasing output: in a business context, this usually means increasing outputs such as benefit and profits whilst reducing inputs such as effort and expenditure. Efficiency begins with having a very clear and sharp focus on what outputs are expected of you and gearing all of your activities towards that output. The less clear the expected or desired output, the less efficient the system is likely to be. Everyone in the system – and this is especially important in a complex system like an organisation – has to be aware of the desired outputs and then needs to have the autonomy to gear their efforts towards that output.

As organisations face increasing limitations on their resources (the forced reduction of their inputs) whilst stakeholders demand greater profits or provision of services (the forced increase of their outputs) they are driven to strive for greater efficiencies. While it may be a straightforward thing to set clear, unambiguous output targets for an organisation (or a division or team or individual) it’s vital to remember the system that has to produce those outputs is not a machine. It’s a collection of people and people are, largely, inefficient.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense but it’s a fact that we’re not geared to doing things in the most efficient way, all the time. We have our own quirks and foibles, our own ways of doing things, we have preferences, we do things through habit, and use our emotions and feelings to make decisions, rather than proceeding in a logical, rational, efficient manner. All of these things must have a knock-on impact on the quest for efficiency in business.

There’s conflict here as business seeks ever-greater efficiency from a system that, fundamentally, cannot deliver it. The trick, it seems to me, is to reach a balance between the efficiency needs of the organisation and the human needs of the people who populate the organisation. Great organisations will find that balance and thrive but there will also come a point where further efficiency savings are no longer possible because of the human needs and limitations of the people. What then?

You can't always get what you want

After my last post, an astute reader kindly pointed out that it required assertiveness in order to work on one thing at a time. That got me thinking about what assertiveness is and how you do it.

There are degrees of assertiveness beginning, obviously, with a basic assertion of what you want:

I need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

This feels a little bald, so we can be a little more empathic:

I understand that you’re really busy and would like my help but I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Sometimes, we need to be assertive because people try to break previous agreements; if that’s the case, you can point this out:

You said that if I finished the Johnson report by lunchtime, I could leave early. Now you’re saying that you need me to work late. I’d like to stick with our original agreement as I do need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

Alternatively, you can try to provoke some empathy from the person you’re speaking to, by describing the negative feelings that you will feel if they continue:

When you change your mind after we’ve agreed something, I feel upset and angry. I’d like us to stick with our earlier agreement as I need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Finally, you can include the consequences of the other person continuing to behave the way they are:

If you insist on making me work past 5:30 this evening, I’ll be so angry it’s unlikely that I’ll get any work done and it’ll harm the good working relationship that we normally have. I’d like us to keep to our earlier agreement as I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Notice that the central assertion of your needs – in this case “I need to leave by 5:30 this evening” – remains unchanged and is repeated each time; this is known as the “broken record” technique.

You can practice these different types of statement until you’re comfortable with the words but when it comes to assertiveness, what comes out of your mouth is less important than what goes on in your head. The American Declaration of Independence declares that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right” and the language is very significant here. The Declaration doesn’t say that anyone has the right to happiness – just the right to pursue it and it’s the same with assertiveness.

As hard as it is to accept sometimes, no-one has the right to get whatever they want – but we do all have the right to ask for whatever we want. Truly believing this is the first step to being assertive.

One thing at a time

When I’m talking to delegates about time management, we inevitably come to the subject of multitasking. Once we’ve got past the jokes about men not being able to multitask and women being excellent at it we start to talk seriously about whether it’s either possible or even helpful.

Very often, delegates will boast of their ability to do two, three or more things at once – increasingly, they say they must multitask in order to stand any chance of doing all the things they need to do. Bear in mind that these are the same delegates who complain that they’re too busy and feel under stress, don’t have time to plan and so on. When I gently challenge them on their ability to multitask effectively, given the brain’s ability to focus on just one thing at a time, they’re adamant: they multitask and they’re good at it – it’s what keeps them afloat in the sea of work in which they’re nearly drowning.

It’s not just people with time management issues that do this. BIGresearch claims that 70% of media users consume more than one medium at a time: of those who are listening to the radio, 54% are also online, 47% are also reading a newspaper and 18% are also watching TV. The chances are you’re doing it now – scanning this article whilst listening to music, eating a sandwich, checking your emails and hiding from the boss!

There’s clearly a lot of it about but does multitasking actually help? Research released this week from Stanford University in the US would indicate that it doesn’t and there’s an interesting reason why. It would seem that the people who multitask the most are actually the people who are least able to multitask effectively. Not only do high multitaskers do poorly at multitasking, the more they do it the worse they get! Of course, this has a knock on effect on the quality of their work and the time it takes them to do it – probably prompting an even greater desire or perceived need to multitask.

It’s unclear whether poor multitaskers are more inclined to multitask or whether you get worse at multitasking the more you do it. Either way, I’m starting to build up my library of evidence supporting my theory that concentrating on one thing at a time is the quickest and most effective way to regain control of your time.

Employee Engagement

This week, I’ve been working at home, writing a workshop on employee engagement based around the recently released MacLeod report. As I’ve been researching the topic – and there’s a lot of information out there about it – two things have struck me.

Firstly, to create an environment within which employees can feel engaged is not that difficult. If you give people meaningful work to do, reward them fairly and genuinely care about their wellbeing as they do that work, most people will engage with their job. Of course, many employers don’t provide meaningful work – or even meaning for their employees’ work; they have small budgets and try to skimp on salaries in order to maximise profits; many see their employees as human “resources” rather than human beings. Under those circumstances, getting your employees engaged is going to be tricky, no matter how many great workshops you attend.

The second thing that struck me was that engagement isn’t a binary thing. It’s not that I’m either engaged or else I’m disengaged; I might be highly engaged on some days in some activities but less engaged in other activities on other days. My level of engagement on a day-to-day basis may depend on my mood, on what’s happening outside of work or a hundred other things.

You can imagine it as a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who are highly engaged with their work – creative, excited to come to work, more than happy to volunteer their best efforts to their tasks, to make suggestions, improvements and so on. These are the people you really want to keep and to keep engaged. At the other end are the people who, essentially, do the opposite – they hate their work, do anything to get out of it, maybe even deliberately sabotage what they’re doing in order to “get back” at their employer for some reason. With these people, you’re lucky if they leave – the danger is that if they’re allowed to continue behaving the way they do, they might continue to stay. Either way, attitude is contagious and both groups will proselytise and try to recruit for their cause.

Of course, these are extremes and most of us, as I mentioned before, will move about on the continuum from day to day or activity to activity but will generally have a “baseline” level of engagement from which we don’t stray too much. What’s interesting is that research indicates that most employees’ “baseline” tends towards the latter of these two examples.

What to do about it? Well, as I said, I’m writing a workshop for employers, so we could sit and wait for our employer to do something about it, to create a better atmosphere to engage us. Maybe some employers will, when they recognise that they need the goodwill of their employees and that it can’t be bought but must be earned. Alternatively, we can consciously try to move our “baseline” up the scale for ourselves – either by engaging more with the work we do or finding other work which engages us more. As someone once said, “ask not what your employer can do for you…” Something like that, anyway.

Beginning is easy...

There's a Japanese proverb that says "beginning is easy; continuing is hard" and I was thinking about this proverb when I was planning this blog. I tortured myself with a whole series of questions - would I be able to keep going, did I have enough to say (those who know me will chuckle at that), would I be able to maintain the discipline and update it regularly? And if I did, would anyone be reading anyway, was there any point to doing it, would it all just be a lot of effort for, essentially, nothing?

The more I thought about it, the more I began to realise that while there’s a lot of truth in this proverb, I don’t think it’s quite right. I agree with the sentiment that continuing is harder than beginning but I really don’t think, for some people at least and I count myself one of them, that beginning is all that easy.

Generally, there are only a few reasons to do something; usually they boil down to either it being something you want to do or it being the right thing to do. On the other hand, there are millions of reasons not to do something – you’re too busy, there are other priorities, there are reasons why it (probably) won’t work, you’re not fully prepared, it’s not quite perfect, the timing isn’t quite right. The reasons are endless.

Some of these reasons (or fears or concerns) may have a grain of truth in them but you’ll never know until you actually begin and, when you stop to think about it, are they legitimate reasons not to even try? Some people wait until everything is perfectly set and perfectly thought out before beginning – consequently, they never actually start. Isn’t it better instead, to just start and then fix it as you go along, if needs be? Beginning, as the Latin poet Ausonius wrote, is half the work.

So if there’s something you’ve been thinking of beginning but have been putting it off, make today the day you begin - tomorrow can be the day you start to fix it, if necessary. As Ghandi said: "If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” Who knows, you may even find that continuing, for you, is easier than beginning.

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