A guide on the side?

When I was about fourteen, my school organised a trip to the theatre to see a production of Macbeth. It was, for most of us, our first time in a theatre and we behaved badly – so badly, in fact, that at one point the actors stopped and addressed the audience directly, telling us to be quiet. Until then, my only experience of performance had been on TV or at the cinema and I vividly remember my surprise when the actors stepped out of the play and spoke to us directly - in my experience, actors just didn't (couldn't) do that.

This memory came back to me the other week when I was in the training room with a group. We’d had a good couple of days and I’d really enjoyed my time with them. They were pretty much what, as a trainer, you’d hope of a group – engaged, engaging, funny and prepared to ask questions. The workshop was about leadership and trust and towards the end of the second day they asked a question which, I felt, was fairly typical of a particular attitude towards trust that I thought I’d seen throughout the workshop. It seemed like an appropriate time to step out of the session plan and talk to them about what was happening, using the workshop material as a guide to explore this real-life, real-time experience. The group’s response reminded me of my youthful theatre experience and it started me thinking about the role of the trainer in the workshop.

Trainers tend to go through three stages in their development. They begin as newsreaders – they have a script and they need to stick to it. Eventually, they memorise the script and the trainer enters the next stage – performer. It can be fun to have a group watching you, doing what you ask them to and so the workshop becomes all about the trainer. Many trainers, I’m afraid to say, get stuck in this phase and never move onto the third stage – facilitator, what a colleague of mine calls “a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage”. If they get to this point, the trainer/facilitator can truly work with the material and listen to what the group are saying.

My guess is that the group I was working with mostly had experience of the newsreaders or performers – having a trainer step outside of the material in the way I did gave them an experience similar to my watching the actors step outside of the play. But it also started me thinking, given that trust was the subject matter of the workshop: does the way trainers behave actually get in the way of learning and development and make it harder for groups to trust them? Do trainers make it harder for groups to learn? Was I, in essence, reaping what I had sown previously with that group?

It’s a question I’ll be exploring further next week but, in the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences of trainers – please do add your comments below or drop me a line at the website or on Twitter.

An honest man

This week, a man talked himself out of $1m by owning up to breaking a rule that no one saw him break and which most observers would feel was a rather nonsensical one. In doing so, golfer Brian Davis has become a bit of a hero to me although there is something about this story that troubles me greatly.

In case you missed the story, last weekend Mr Davis made the playoffs of the Verizon Heritage tournament in America. Whilst playing a shot, his club hit a reed. No one saw him doing it and it made no difference to the quality of his shot. It gave him no advantage. Nevertheless, Mr Davis immediately called over a rules official and incurred a two-stroke penalty, losing the playoff and the $1m prize. Speaking about it afterwards, Mr Davis reportedly said, “I could not have lived with myself if I had not called it.”

In his excellent book “The Speed of Trust”, Stephen M R Covey defines trust as the confidence born of the character and competence of a person or organisation. Mr Davis is a great example: the integrity of his character speaks for itself. His decision to draw attention to his mistake was motivated not by the fear of being found out but by his understanding that, even if no one else ever knew what he had done, he would know.

However, as I mentioned that the start of this piece, there is something about this story that bothers me – and that’s the fact that it’s even a story at all because it really shouldn’t be news. It should be what my journalist friends call a “dog bites man” story. A dog biting a man isn’t news because it happens all the time. A “man bites dog” story is news because it’s unusual. The fact that Mr Davis’ honesty was reported so prominently – and not just in the sports headlines – indicates that it doesn’t happen very often. And it should happen often; that kind of behaviour should be the norm, not just in sport but also generally in life.

Amongst the general population, our trust in institutions, in leaders, in management is crumbling. The financial crisis eroded our trust in the competence of banks and bankers; the expenses scandal eroded further our trust in the character of politicians. Often their defence was that even though they might personally have thought it was wrong, the rules allowed it. As we approach the election, I wonder what Mr Davis might think of that excuse.

Manager or Leader? Who cares...

I’ve been doing the rounds of potential clients this week, talking to them about employee engagement and in particular about how engaged employees, who are generally happier and healthier, also tend to be more productive. One of the interesting things to have come from the meetings is how often people shied away from using the word “management”, preferring to talk instead about leadership. It got me thinking: when did management become a dirty word?

It was the late, great Peter Drucker who coined the phrase “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things” – it’s an easy phrase to use and over the years it’s been used to denigrate the work of managers. Management has come to be equated with control, drudgery and the old-fashioned whilst leadership has become equated with vision, direction and the future. Management is dull whilst leadership is sexy.

Over the years, due in part to this pejorative meaning, perfectly good managers have tried to behave in the way they believe leaders behave. They have focussed, with the encouragement of their organisations, on “the vision thing”: on setting direction, laying down targets and key performance indicators and then measuring their teams against their progress towards these targets. Somewhere, over that period, the human side of being a manager has slipped away.

The CIPD say that a manager’s key duty is to “play a pivotal role in terms of implementing and enacting HR policies and practices”. Not once in their factsheet about the duties of a manager does it talk about the need for managers to have good personal relationships with the people in their teams; to like them, to care about them, to get on with them. Nothing about encouraging and fostering good relationships within the team. Nothing, in other words, about all the things that go towards making the workplace more than a place of drudgery.

Leader or manager? It’s irrelevant, a false dichotomy. You can be a manager without being a leader and a leader without being a manager. Rather than worrying about what to call people, let’s focus instead on bringing the human dimension back to the workplace and realise that there’s more to being both a manager or leader than just focussing on the numbers.

If things don't change...

Many years ago, I came across a Tibetan saying: “if you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what it meant but over the years it’s come to be an important saying to me because it has two meanings.

Firstly, it reminds me of that other old saw – if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same. Whatever we’re doing now, we’ll still be doing it in ten years unless something intervenes to change it. Often, we rely on circumstances or external factors to change what we’re doing – we complain about a job that makes us unhappy but don’t take the steps to improve it or leave, preferring instead to hope that something – redundancy, retirement, a lottery win – will intervene to change things.

Of course, more often than not, those things don’t happen and so time drifts by and we find our selves fundamentally living the same life we lived ten years previously. It’s only then we realise that “if things don’t change, they’ll stay the same” isn’t the entire truth: that only holds true if the rest of the world is static, too. It’s more accurate to say that if things don’t change they’ll steadily decline – but that’s quite depressing and doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The second meaning for my Tibetan phrase is the one that really resonates with me. Whatever your life is like in this moment, the chances are that the shape of your life has its roots in your past – often quite some way in your past. We plant seeds every day and they grow slowly – sometimes we do not even know that we are planting them but they bear fruit in our lives nonetheless. We are often too casual about this – not paying attention to the seeds we’re planting, only to have them blossom into a harvest that we really don’t want.

It’s truly the case that we reap what we sow in life. Each day, consciously or unconsciously, we are shaping our future and we must pay attention to the seeds we’re planting. This week, as you go about your life, focus on what you are doing in each moment; for every activity, think carefully about how it will shape your future – because it surely will.

Killing the goose

You've probably heard Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden egg: a poor farmer finds that his goose lays solid gold eggs, producing a new gold egg every day. The farmer becomes very rich but also very greedy and decides that he doesn't want to wait for an egg a day - he wants all of the eggs, right now. So he takes an axe, lops off the goose's head, reaches down its neck to get the eggs and finds... nothing but goose guts! Next day, what does he find next to the goose? Nothing: the farmer has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I've told that story to hundreds of people and we can all chuckle at the farmer's greed and stupidity. When I ask people what they would do if they were the farmer, they say they would take care of it, on the basis that if they take care of it, it will continue to produce the eggs. We can see the stupidity of doing anything else - like, for instance, treating it badly or not feeding it enough. Yet businesses all over the country are in danger of doing just that – they're actively considering trying to kill, or at least injure, the goose that lays their golden eggs. Why is this so?

The primary "goose" for all businesses is its employees. Without employees, businesses cannot produce their golden eggs – their products, their services, their profits. It's easy to forget, when looking at spreadsheet and company accounts, that employees are people. So often, businesses trumpet the line that people are their greatest asset but where, in their accounts, are employees listed? In the liabilities column - assets are things like plant, machinery, buildings. While they say people are their greatest asset, they treat them as a liability, as their biggest cost and costs are there to be cut.

Employees, like the goose in Aesop’s fable, need looking after in order to perform at their best. This includes ongoing investment in them as people, providing them with ongoing training and development, and a sense that the company sees a long-term future with them. When businesses face tough times, such as now, it's only natural that they look for opportunities to reduce their spend and save money in some way. While no one knows when the current credit crunch will end, everyone knows one thing - it will eventually end. The question for businesses is what shape they will be in when it does. Treating your employees as expendable things – opportunities to cut costs, luxuries to have only when you can afford them – won't help them compete in a global market; it won't help them give of their best to your business.

If you treat people as expendable things, they will inevitably withdraw their commitment, passion and enthusiasm. After all – don't you do the same when you're treated like a thing and not like a human being? They might do what you tell them but will they do it well? Will they do just what you tell them and nothing more? Will they effectively retire on the job, each day doing as little as possible just to get through another day? And in order to compete with and beat your competition, don't you need them to be volunteering their best efforts, their commitment, passion and enthusiasm?

There's no doubt that the current economic climate is tough, but ultimately it is a short-term situation. Taking a short-term view in your approach to it might give you short-term benefits but won't pay off longer term. Smart farmers know that starving your goose might save you money in the short term but it won't help you get more golden eggs in the long term.