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.