trust

What if we simply just don’t know?

Posted on by Blog

Matthew Syed wrote a brilliant comment piece in the Times paper this weekend on the public debate on the performance of the Government on handling the Covid pandemic. You can read the piece here, but in summary (and for those that can’t access it), the premise of the column was that too many opinions were thrown around before there was enough data and fact to actual judge the outcome. And now that there is, there are few people willing to change their opinions or admit they called it wrong. Before I go on, it isn’t a pro or anti Government piece, it is an assessment of how our public debate and assessment of situations is becoming more tribal and less rational by the day.

By coincidence, last week there was also a tweet by the well known business man, Sir Alan Sugar, reacting negatively to the news that PwC was continuing the practice of “summer hours” and relating it to the WFH debate. I don’t know the PwC policy in detail, but this is an approach I’ve worked with in the past. Essentially it is compressed hours during a period of time in the summer that allows people to work their hours across, normally, four and a half days rather than five. You can read that tweet here.

It wasn’t long before Twitter and thereafter Linkedin were alight with various references, emojis and gifs likening him to a dinosaur. Now, to be clear, I wouldn’t have expressed any view in the way that Sir Alan did and I totally understand the concept of “live by the sword, die by the sword”. But the language and tonality of the debate was an example of exactly the point that Syed was making in his article.

Different people, different organisations, will have differing views on how to handle themselves. Whether that is their strategy, their physical location or indeed their working practices. I’m not sure, in my living memory, that I’ve heard one organisation be criticised because of their choice of physical location – although that said, having worked for an organisation that was one of the early adopters of Milton Keynes I’m aware there were a few raised eyebrows.

But the debate about the future of work, and before it the recent debate about Black Lives Matters and #MeToo have become polarised in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy to the development of both positive workplaces and a better society. On one side people are castigated as “lacking trust” or being “dinosaurs”. On the other as being “work shy” or “lazy”. None of which makes any sense or represents the complexity of the challenge we are facing into. I don’t think anyone would say that surgeons aren’t trusted because they aren’t allowed to work from home or that the entrepreneurs that started businesses in their bedrooms were in anyway lazy.

Similar to the pandemic, we are in a moment in time that requires more reflection, better evidence, a diversity of thought and approach. And most of all, it needs us to recognise that we simply don’t know. Only then will find the curiosity to explore and ask the right questions.

I’ll be talking about this and more at the CRF event on The Realities of the New Working Environment this Tuesday. More here.

Trust starts in the words that we use

Posted on by Blog

I think it goes without saying that large parts of society have an issue with trust. Whether it is trust in politicians, trust in the media or trust in business. Institutions that once were seen as being cohesive forces in society are now the perpetrators, if not originators, of societal fragmentation.

At the heart of this mistrust is our inability to speak openly and honestly about subjects that are of mass importance, to be clear about the impact of change, to face into the repercussions of our actions. I wrote a few weeks ago about a session I did a number of years ago where I portrayed a rather bleak future on the back of the introduction of technology and how it fell on deaf ears compared to the sugar coated, unicorn riding, emancipation argument being offered on the other side. I’ll bet my house on which one of us is right.

The point though isn’t the change itself, it is our inability to be honest about the implications. And this is something that we see everyday in organisations, in the same way that the “self employed” delivery driver being measured by the second doesn’t recognise the benefits of technology allowing an executive to answer their emails from the Bahamas, too often we communicate an artificial version of the future that just doesn’t match with the reality that people experience.

Last month, Tesco announced around 4,500 job cuts in order to “serve shoppers better”. That’s right, having fewer employees in stores will be better for shoppers. Well I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of one time I’ve been in any retail outlet and thought, “I wish there were fewer employees here to serve me”. Of course the reality is that Tesco needs to cut overheads in order to compete on price and maintain its dividend and one of the most effective ways of doing that is through staff numbers. So why can’t they say that?

If we are going to try to regain trust in our organisations, in business as a whole, then we need to start by being honest. That means being straight up about the good and the bad, it means being honest when things will have a negative impact, it means facing into the implications of the decisions that we make. It means treating employees (see also voters readers and viewers too) as grown ups who are able to understand when they are being told the truth and when they are being fed an institutional mistruth.

Our corporate norms reject ideas of candour, the call for palatable half truths. Our corporate norms, however, have got us into this situation. Maybe now is the time to reappraise. If we can’t be open and honest, we can never truly build trust.

 

Care just enough

Posted on by Blog

How many times in life have you put off doing something because of the perceived consequences, only to find out when you did take the action, that it wasn’t so bad after all?

It’s a tricky thing about leadership – the multiple demands on emotion and energy that can make sometimes even the most straight forward of decision, feel just a little bit too hard. And as outsiders we look on and think, “that’s obvious, why aren’t they doing something about it?”

This situation is amplified when it involves decisions that materially impact other human beings. Whether it is a promotion, a restructure, a performance issues or a reward challenge. We can look at this situation with our own lens and see our own version of perfect clarity, but we will never see the situation from the leader’s perspective.

As a partner or advisor to that leader, our job is to seek to understand, to help, to support, to maintain forward movement and prevent emotions from getting us stuck or avoiding the challenge. Most people understand on a rationale level the things that need doing and the decisions that need taking, but they get complicated by the feelings, emotions and fears.

As a leader, our job is to care enough, but not too much. We shouldn’t eschew all reference to the personal or the human, we should recognise that part of what allows a leader to truly own that title is their ability to feel. At the same time, we need to recognise when we’re allowing “emotion” (and I use this term in a more scientific, rather than literary sense) to prevent us from acting in line with our beliefs.

Where people are involved, there will always be difficult decisions to be made and there will always be outcomes that are less desirable than others. There simply is no other way, regardless of the rhetoric that is sometimes easy to believe. And leaders and their advisors, being human beings too, will bring their own emotional frameworks, relationships and history to any given situation.

Caring at work is really important. We just shouldn’t let it get in the way.

The last resort

Posted on by Blog

We draw inspiration from some funny places. The moments, the stories, the experiences that sometimes we even struggle to place can form our thinking, our feeling and our doing. As a kid, I had a collection of Aesop’s Fables, I can’t even remember whether they were read to me, or I read them myself. Or perhaps even both. But I remember the stories.

The one that sticks with me most is the story of the North Wind and The Sun. If you’re not familiar with the fables then you can read more about it here. The message being that gentleness or persuasion is more powerful than force or bluster. A lesson that has stuck with me through life and work.

The organizational context within which we co-exist is becoming increasingly complex, with relationships stretching across borders and boundaries. Inter connecting departments, shared purpose with separate ownership, leadership from within not above.  The world of work is increasingly full of ambiguity.

And faced with ambiguity and complexity, the natural instinct is to create order from disorder, certainty in uncertainty and control the uncontrollable. But the rules of the games have changed forever and the traditional methods of management are themselves ineffective, outdated and the refuge of the ineffective and outdated; the last resort of the inept.

In this increasingly complex and inter connecting world those that succeed are the ones that understand that trust beats control, that persuasion beats force, that collaboration beats independence. We create cohesion not by instruction, but by willingly coming together, we create certainty by collectively defining the future, we create success through self-determination and empowerment.

The future of work bears little resemblance to the past, the environment is changing at such a pace and some will adapt, but many won’t. The scared, ill prepared and ineffective will try to hold it back. The wise will listen, understand, talk, create, co-operate and succeed.

When things are bafflingly complex, only through empowering, respecting, trusting and collaborating will we find the way through.

Only by letting go will we hold on.