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.

Can you hear me?

Do you have a brother or a sister? When you were growing up, did they ever pretend not to hear you? What did you do? If you’re like most other people, your response probably went along these lines. Firstly, you repeated yourself: louder, perhaps with some attention-grabbing techniques like shouting into their ear or poking them. When that didn’t work, you probably appealed to your mum or dad. When that failed to get a response, probably you hit them.

Time after time, I’ve asked groups the same question and time after time, I’ve got the same answer. And the interesting thing is, we follow the same pattern as adults. When we feel ignored, we repeat ourselves, we try to gain attention; if that doesn’t work, we appeal – to managers, to unions, to regulators, to the media – and if that doesn’t work, we’re left with violence. Perhaps not physical violence but some other way of registering our dissatisfaction, like this wonderful news report.

Not being listened to really gets to us, which is why it’s such a surprise to me that managers I speak to say that not listening to the people in their teams is their number one mistake – the one they make the most often.

It’s understandable that it happens. Managers have so much to do, so many different demands on their time, that setting aside some time to just listen to people, to pay attention to them, can feel like a waste. There are so many emails to reply to, so many other things to do, that the temptation is to multi-task, to pretend to listen whilst doing other things. The problem is, we know when someone isn’t really listening. We can tell when they’re just going through the motions and not really paying attention and so, just as we did when we were kids, we repeat ourselves. Which, of course, is an even greater temptation for the manager not to listen – after all, they’ve already heard that, haven’t they?

It may feel like it takes a long time but listening – really listening, not just to what’s being said but also to how it’s being said, and noticing the things that aren’t being said, too – is much quicker in the long run. It can be the key to unlocking all kinds of prizes: to helping people feel engaged and valued at work, to new ideas or proposals, to really understanding people’s talents and skills.

It takes effort and discipline to listen but the reward is worth it. Try it, the next time someone talks to you. Stop what you’re doing and focus on them. Ask yourself how it feels to be them; what is it that they’re trying to tell you? Why are they telling you? What do they look like, what do they sound like? What aren’t they saying? Do you really understand what they’re saying and what it means to them? If not, ask questions until you do.

It doesn’t matter what technique you use – techniques can be studied and mastered easily, with practice. What really matters is your intent: do you really want to listen to them. Do you really believe they have something valid and useful to say? Until you can answer yes to those questions, you’ll keep making that same mistake of not listening and we’ll keep repeating ourselves – or worse!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.