Nobody does it better

We talked last week about managers who don’t listen to the people in their teams (I do hope you were paying attention) and this week we look at the second of the two biggest mistakes that managers make. It’s almost an offshoot of not listening - micromanaging: telling people how to do things and then hounding them until it’s done.

It’s understandable that a lot of managers make this mistake. I’ve written before about how managers often find themselves in charge of a team not because they are good at managing but because they are good at something else. Someone displays an aptitude in their job, they’re marked out for progression and management, often, is the only way of progressing. So a very good engineer, say, finds herself in charge of a team of engineers because that’s the only way she can climb the corporate ladder.

But good engineers - or anything else - don’t necessarily make good managers and, lacking confidence in their new role, managers often fall back onto what they know. They start telling other people how to do their jobs or criticizing the job team members are doing because it’s not done in the way the manager would have done it.

If you suspect this might be you, relax; it happens a lot. But remember, each time you do it you’re making it harder for your team members to engage with their work and you’re making your - and their - life harder. There’s a difference between advising someone who legitimately wants or needs your help and nitpicking, so the next time you delegate work, focus on the desired result and not the method. Explain what you want, not how you want it done. If there are particular rules that they must follow, if there are particular consequences to the outcome, make sure you explain those too, but keep your focus on the outcome.

You’ll need to trust the people to whom you’re delegating. You have to extend that trust - thoughtfully, sensibly - and it will, in time, be returned. It takes two to delegate work; for that piece of work to be done well, you need the other person to accept it, not just take it on because you tell them to. Telling someone how they’re supposed to do a particular task is the quickest way of stopping people from accepting it and as Stephen Covey says “you cannot hold someone responsible for their results if you supervise their methods.”

That’s it for the inspiredblog for this year - we’re off to find a cosy nook in which to celebrate the festive season with a pile of books and some mulled wine. We’ll be back in 2011 to do it all again - in the meantime, have yourself a merry little Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Are you managing?

Many years ago, I spent about six months or so as a manager. In common with many managers, it wasn’t a role that I had particularly coveted or even particularly wanted but, in order for my career to progress, management was the next step. And, to be honest, management looked pretty easy. I was going to be managing the team of which I was currently a member, so there were no problems there – I knew them and they knew me. I knew the job they did, so I wouldn’t have to learn anything about that. About the only difference I could see was that I’d be earning a bit more money and I’d have a new job title.

Of course, I know now that I was in the learning phase that development experts call “unconscious incompetence” – in other words, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Of course management looked easy – I didn’t know the first thing about it. Sadly, this state of blissful ignorance didn’t last very long and reality hit me like a bucket of cold water. Within the first day, I was brought face to face with a whole bunch of things that I didn’t know about management and I learned very quickly that I had a great deal to learn.

This is the phase that development professionals call “conscious incompetence” and it’s painful. It’s that point in development when you are suddenly confronted with the depths of your own ignorance. You’re suddenly painfully aware of just how much the job involves and how much you have to learn.

For me, that pain lasted for about six months; I tried to learn more about management on-the-job but the company I worked for at the time wasn’t particularly enlightened on the subject and so I was left to fend for myself. I was wholly unprepared and I failed: I was eventually put out of my misery and mercifully removed from the role.

It wasn’t a total failure, however, because it taught me a few lessons that have stayed with me. First and foremost, it taught me that management is actually a lot harder than it looks and people who do it well have a real skill and my undying respect. Secondly, it taught me that there often isn’t a lot of support out there for people who move into the role and that support is the one thing that can make a real difference. If I’d been able to find someone to support me through, to teach me what I needed to know and help me avoid a lot of the mistakes I was making, the transition might have been quicker and easier; it might even have been successful.

Since then, I’ve spoken to a lot of managers about the lessons they’ve learned and the mistakes they make and two consistent themes seem to come out. Consistently, managers berate themselves for not listening and for micro-managing. The odds are, if you’re a manager, you make these mistakes too, so over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at these two common mistakes and suggest some ways in which you could avoid them.

Banking Crisis

If you deposit more money in your bank account than you with draw, your balance will increase. The more your balance increases, the more interest the bank pays you – increasing your balance further – and the kindly your bank looks upon you. Get a big enough balance and other banks may court you for your business. On the other hand, if you withdraw more than you deposit, the balance will decrease. It won’t stop at zero, however: your account will go overdrawn, taking you into the mysterious realm of negative numbers. The more overdrawn you go, the more your bank will charge you – decreasing your balance even further. If you continually go overdrawn, your bank will probably ask you to take your business elsewhere. Decrease your balance to such a level that you cannot possibly pay it back and you’re likely to be declared bankrupt – which makes further banking (and other things) problematic to say the least.

In his book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey talks about the Emotional Bank Account. It’s a metaphor for the state of relationships and works in the same way as a normal bank account except that, instead of money, the balance is the level of trust in the relationship.

Some actions you can take – we’ll call them deposits – will improve the relationship, increasing balance of trust in the emotional bank account you hold with the person concerned. The higher the emotional bank account balance, the better the relationship and the more benefits you with both reap from it. Some actions you can take – withdrawals – will harm the relationship, reducing the level of trust. Keep making withdrawals and your emotional bank account with the person concerned becomes so overdrawn that the relationship breaks down. Do it often enough with enough people and you’ll become bankrupt and, no matter what you do or say, no one trusts you anymore; even things you sincerely intend as deposits will be seen as withdrawals.

I was reminded of this as I read a lot of the coverage about the publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs. I’m not making a political comment but it was interesting to see how, no matter what he said or explanations he tried to give, no matter what deposits he tried to make, they were interpreted as withdrawals by some. Even giving a potential £4m to the British Legion was seen by some as self-serving; they just wouldn’t believe him, no matter what he said.

We all make withdrawals occasionally – it’s just part of being human. An apology is usually all it takes to restore the relationship. But make sure you notice the withdrawals; we may not all run countries, head political parties or start wars but it’s still possible for us to end up bankrupt.

The accidental manager

It’s an old cliché that people join organisations but leave managers and I was reminded of this recently whilst speaking to the manager of a medium sized company. They’d recently done a lot of organisational surveys and the results weren’t good: trust was low, many people were discouraged by the style of leadership and parts of the organisation were very unhappy. It started me thinking about those simple – but often powerful – questions that I like to ask.

Pretty much the first question I ask of any new or aspiring manager is “why do you want to be a manager?” The number of people who struggle with that question might surprise you. Often it’s not something that they’ve ever asked themselves before but it’s a question worth thinking about in some detail, even if you have to mull it over for a couple of weeks before coming up with a reason that you feel comfortable with.

I hear many different answers but they broadly break down into three. Some people become a manager because it’s the natural next-step on their career path; if they want to progress within their organisation, they have to move to a management role. Linked to this, for some, is the fact that – in their organisation – it’s the only way to earn more money. Alternatively, some people have a desire to work with and a love of people; for them, the buzz of working closely with people, being responsible for their performance and their development is what leads them into management.

Or, some people become a manager just because they were promoted into it. They were the most productive/technically skilled/best looking in their team and the powers-that-be decided that being so good at whatever it was they did made them the perfect candidate for management. Within this group is a small subset of people who just find themselves there, without having much planned or thought about it and without really knowing what they’re doing there in the first place.

None of these reasons is necessarily a better or worse reason than the others. Whatever anyone’s reason is, it’s their reason and it’s not for me to tell them it’s the wrong one. Nevertheless, I’d argue that, in order to be a successful manager you’d need to (at least) like working with people and want to do it. Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh on the manager in question but these qualities seemed to be lacking – and it seemed like the organisation knew it.

Coincidence?

A few months ago, I wrote about the spate of suicides that occurred amongst employees of France Telecom. Since 2008, 46 France Telecom employees have committed suicide, following a downsizing programme that resulted in the loss of 20,000 jobs. The situation is complex and investigations – in both Paris and Besançon, in eastern France – are ongoing, so we can't draw any definitive conclusions. However, an apparently similar situation has come to light in Longhua, China, at the Foxconn electronics construction factory. So far, around a dozen workers at the factory – reports vary, making exact numbers difficult to rely on – have killed themselves this year. In response, Foxconn have increased salaries, brought in Buddhist monks and installed 1.5m square meters of safety netting.

Context is everything: the Foxconn factory employs nearly half a million workers and the number of suicides is not – in statistical terms – remarkable; suicides tend to happen in clusters and the average suicide rate in China is around 13 per 100,000 people. It is true that some workers at the plant have blamed a culture of bullying and harassment from managers but others have dismissed that idea. No one knows for sure what is causing the suicides but Foxconn is interesting, not just in the light of the France Telecom case but also because it constructs some of the worlds most in-demand consumer electronics. If you’re reading this on an iPhone or an iPad, the chances are it was built in the Foxconn factory in question.

As yet, there are no answers from either case and we may never know what caused the suicides – each of the 60 people who chose to end their lives may have done so for entirely separate and unconnected reasons. Each one is an individual tragedy and deserves both our sympathy and empathy. But this is the second time, since the beginning of the financial crisis, that two such suicide clusters have come to light within two separate employers. Is the financial crisis, with its attendant increase of pressure on employees, in some way connected to this? As the saying goes, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence…” For Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, three times meant enemy action; we’ll have to watch for a third cluster before we can judge whether there is something here about which we, as a wider society, need to worry.

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.

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.

Consequences

There are times when you want to do what my American chums call “the headslap” and I recently encountered one of those times. I was working with a manager who was having problems with a contractor who was producing poor work, missing deadlines and so on. She told me that, despite talking to the contractor about it, the problems continued and it was causing her a lot of extra work, irritation and inconvenience.

We talked for a while and she told me the only sanction she had was to withhold the contractor’s payment but she didn’t want to do that because (a) she thought it wasn’t very nice and (b) it was a hassle for her to fill in the paperwork. In other words, the situation was causing her some inconvenience but she didn’t want to do anything to correct it because it would cause her some inconvenience. Hence the headslap.

It started me wondering, though: how often do we complain about situations that are, fundamentally, of our own making? I wrote previously about Irene – that situation was as much a creation of the managers who didn’t want to grasp the situation as it was of Irene’s making. I’m not saying that any manager should like or enjoy confrontation but it is a fact that sometimes we have to confront issues that aren’t going well or situations that aren’t working. What I tried to explain to this manager was that confronting the issue wasn’t being “nasty” but was the only way the situation was going to change.

We make decisions in the light of the consequences of those decisions. In this case, for the contractor, until this point there had been no consequences: he could continue to hand shoddy work in late and she would fix it for him. The only price he might have to pay was the occasional meeting where she complained a bit but even that was mild. There was just no incentive for him to change. For Irene, there was no real consequence to taking all that time off – she just got passed on to another manager.

I suspect that, for this manager, it was easier to complain than it was to fix – for her, the consequences of inaction weren’t sufficient motivation to do anything about it. Although I would choose differently, I respect her decision. I’m not advocating the old-fashioned “carrot and stick” approach to motivation or suggesting that the way to get people to do something is to threaten them, but it is vital that people understand the consequences of their current behaviour in order to make a decision to change. That’s not being nasty – it’s just common sense.

A sticky situation

You find me in a grumpy mood this week. I had planned to post a piece on weekly planning but my eye was caught by a joint paper from Toronto and Chicago Universities, reported in the Economist. It seems that researchers at the universities worked with the managers of an electronics factory in China, to explore the ways in which bonus schemes might be made more effective. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that I’ve had a couple of things to say in the past on the way in which managers and leaders attempt to motivate their teams. It’s a particular interest of mine and what I read did nothing to improve my mood on the subject.

You can find the whole of the report from the Economist here but let me quote a couple of lines which, I feel, sum up the tone of the article and – if we assume the Economist to be reporting faithfully – the paper itself: “the fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain... Carrots... may work better if they can somehow be made to look like sticks.”

Let’s ignore the fact that this research paper is, in essence, a bulletin from the school of the bleedin’ obvious. Researchers find that workers are afraid of losing money they’ve been promised; who could have guessed it? Without wishing to be too political, let’s also overlook the fact that this research took place in China – not a haven of best management practice or the freedom of workers to withhold their labour and search for other employment. Instead, think for a moment about what this paper means and what it suggests. Are we honestly saying, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, that it is acceptable working practice to threaten people in order to “motivate” them? At a time when workplace stress is increasing (and, interestingly, Chinese workers are the most stressed of all), do we really want to work in environments where that kind of management practice is even considered, never mind actually practiced?

I believe that, fundamentally, people come to work in order to do a good job. I believe that people will do a better job if they know their work has meaning. I believe that one of the roles of managers/leaders is to create the circumstances within which workers can do a good job and then, essentially, get out of the way. It always depresses me when I find there are still managers who think that threats, fear, bullying and intimidation are effective ways of “motivating” workers: the fact that this academic report adds a spurious veneer of legitimacy to that viewpoint just makes me angry.

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.

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?