Given the choice between looking good or doing good at work choose the latter. Always. Life benefits those who do good far more.
Many organisations are obsessed with appearances. Good news flows up. Bad news is hidden or manipulated. There is so much attention on managing appearances that there is no attention to actually doing the work, let alone doing it well or for the wider benefit.
I came across a wonderful story on Twitter today of a business doing good for its own sake and benefiting the community. Ultimately that flowed back to benefit them in a surprising way.
You can grow your business and grow everyone’s capability at the same time. You will always be part of a wider community. Make contributions to that community and good things flow. https://t.co/rTpcIBPJbo
Again and again in my career I have found that doing good for others and focusing on the long term delivers the better outcomes. Gaining at the expense of others or reality is rarely worthwhile or sustainable. All the short term trade offs and image management costs in long term performance. Images shatter eventually when they have no real foundation.
More than anything it costs in reputation, trust and your own self-esteem. People do repay kindness and good work. People do tell others about it. So many unique opportunities flow from those two things that are inaccessible otherwise. If you want to look yourself in the mirror, leave aside the corporate posturing and focus on doing good work well.
We only get one shot at this. Do your best work for others every chance you get. Leave the spinning and shenanigans to those who want to spend their time that way. The rewards of power or status alone are shallow. These advantages will be also be far too short-lived.
We tend to think we have a choice between love and power. We need more of both.
Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love was a revelation to me when I read it years ago. Kahane highlights that effective social change relies on both power and love. We fall short if we rely only on our idealist tendencies to focus only on love or its many other related manifestations, compassion, empathy, generosity and more. Power is always in the room and must always be engaged, if only to be acknowledged. Importantly, denying our own power weakens advocacy.
We are deeply engrained to see power and love as alternatives. From the fickleness of childhood memory, a parent is either harsh or loving. We fail to appreciate that the harshness might have been out of love, an attempt to protect and preserve. There will always be bad and abusive parents, but the many are those who express their love both in tenderness and in a fierce form of protection.
In a world of digital separation, we need more power AND more love if we are to create the change we desire. We cannot increase autonomy without increasing both support for individuals to grow capability and increasing accountability. Both sides of that support can be scary: acknowledging how much you need to grow to succeed and owning your own power to do so.
The standard metaphors of power all invoke distance and uncaring. We need new models that acknowledge we can exercise our power for the love of others, for their betterment and for their realisation of potential. Power need not be extractive. It can be generative and compassionate. For it to do so will take more power and more love.
Trickle down of power, wealth and prosperity is failing us with greater inequality, greater division and a slide to populist autocracy. Reality is that’s not how power, wealth and equality have ever been created. Each have risen from the bottom up by those who embrace more love of their fellows and more exercise of their personal power. If we follow them, perhaps we have a chance to turn the tide.
As we wrap our working lives around a new more flexible way of work, there’s a simple habit that can make life easier and more productive: Add the Call Details to a Meeting.
Things Change
The meeting may have been arranged to be exclusively face to face, but in a fast paced world things change. Now we have videoconferencing or audioconferencing at a push of a button in solutions like Microsoft Teams why not allow the option to cover surprise eventualities.
Adding the option prevents the need for last minute emails to bring people in who can’t make it. There’s lots of reasons why that might be the case:
People might be running late or from a different location
Someone may need to be at home or otherwise working flexibly (especially with illness rampant post-pandemic)
Another person may need to attend to maximise the value of the meeting
People can be called into the meeting as it progresses where something unexpected arises.
As host, you still control who attends the meeting and should be planning to shape how it runs. You can still be clear who should be in person. However, this simple step should reduce the amount of time spent fumbling around to add people or create a call at the last minute. Your meeting attendees will be grateful and your day will be more productive.
Now that Microsoft Teams and its peers have put calling at our fingertips, we can take advantage of the optionality it offers. Options have value.
We obsess about success. Our work, our lives, our loves and our relationships are woven through with focus on achievement, recognition, status and success. Oddly, few are content with their success. Those with the most are often the most dissatisfied.
Success is rarely a measure of happiness and content. Each new relationship, promotion, business achievement, and award starts a new challenge. Nothing is ended. Nothing is complete. Nobody is content to discover that reaching the next level just means fighting a bigger and badder boss. The worst boss of all is our own feelings that there is more to do and more to be. We can’t live our lives for what we will be in the future. We must live our lives today, here, now.
“A winter world. Ways icy. Most men fall” To speed on ice, pick filthy spots, is all. Follow the dog’s way; praise it, nose alert. Feet that go further faster move in dirt.
A focus on competitive success into the future is also likely to draw us away from what matters most to us. The demands of the marketplace are demands to ‘go further faster move in dirt’. Success demands compromises and tests our priorities, our ethics and our compassion. Too many times in my life, I have had to give up a potential mark of success because I could not live with the taste in my mouth. Success can be cold and metallic, far from Dickinson’s nectar.
The hardest and most important element of a life and a life’s work is to set your own definition of what achievement means and what matters for you. Nobody comes from the perfect place, has the perfect resume, achieves everything they ever want, is loved unreservedly and has untold wealth. External measures of success are for the demanding landscapes of politics and competitive sport.
Much of what we achieve in one life is reversed in the same life by others. Much does not endure beyond our meagre efforts to sustain it. The goal of a fulfilling life is the way, the company in the striving and what we become through that process, not the goals.
Next time it feels like your falling behind, let go of the measure. Ask what matters most to you. Focus your life, your work and your love on that. There lies the best chance to find a success that you can embrace, sustain and carry as yours alone.
I can’t compete: what I’ve done stands toward the back of the courtyard near the church wall,| a few fuzzy words from several years ago. That one of the words has turned a shade of ochre that’s hard to come by—that I’ve been trying to put my hands on for years— purely by chance (plus exposure to a few back-to-back winters) is most discouraging.
Anyone who has worked for a while quickly discovers that jobs can be a hall of mirrors where things are not quite what they seem, where the jobs widely perceived to be great are actually awful, and where the best test may not be your bragging rights.
Any independent consultant can you tell you the true test of a job is what your parents tell their friends about your work. Job status is a currency of success. Not fitting the models of hierarchy and familiar company or industries can be hard for people to grasp. When I was independent, my family would often say I worked at Microsoft because my status as a Microsoft MVP meant I had the swag and that was something people could understand.
We also know that many fancy high status roles are full of disappointed people. The work of being in a high status profession like lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs, and entrepreneurs might be attractive socially but the hours, stresses and family demands offset remuneration for many. The actual work in many of these roles is less rewarding than some expect from outside the industry. The pressure can make careers short.
Differences in corporate culture, business models and other minor changes can mean the same role in a different business is actually a completely different role. So many people jump from a business to a competitor chasing money or a promotion to discover they have landed somewhere completely alien. The two jobs only looked alike.
The one question people often forget to ask in a job interview is ‘what would I actually do?’ We are so keen to appear in control and capable that we sell ourselves against the wrong opportunities. Employers can fool themselves by selling the job and not addressing the real challenges.
In my 30s desperate for a great gig, I agreed to be introduced by a headhunter to a founder of an early internet startup as a CEO candidate. My first warning was that the Internet start-up was in the offices of a building full of listed junior mining companies. The founder was a mining promoter who had bought slices of internet businesses to list as a corporate vehicle. He wanted a CEO for the listing. The job was really well paid except there was only one thing to do raise more money and sustain the share price so the the founder and his mates could sell out at a profit after listing. As he gleefully explained the share price couldn’t fall far enough for them to make a loss as their entry price was below a cent a share. My competence was irrelevant. The CEO was just a fancy expensive element of their profits. Somebody else took that job.
The best way to guide yourself through this hall of mirrors is to found yourself in the real. Let go of the focus on fancy industries, fancy brands and fancy titles. Focus instead on the work and its impact. Focus on the quality of the people you will work with and the quality of their relationships. Focus on what you will learn and the capability you gain to do what comes next.
Don’t treat any job as the last one. Focus always on that job as the next one and see where it takes you.
The unheralded corners of the job market are where you often discover the greatest work, relationships and development. These roles are those that might not appeal to your grandma, but create greatest value for you. Choosing this way is most likely to lead you somewhere you want to go.
Even with labour market shortages and shifting demographics, ageism is still rampant in our workplaces. The cost of ageism is both in the journey and the destination. Why can’t we work to realise everyone’s potential?
An outcome of a photo search for older on a free photo site
Ageism is deeply engrained in our organisational psyche. We obsess over made up generations. We fail to appreciate the ‘war for talent’ is because of an ageing demographic. There’s no 50 over 50. Young guns are prized. Twenty-somethings are venerated as startup CEOs. Development is for younger talent. Transition to retirement programs start as young as 45 when retirement is over 65. As our economies have shifted to services and knowledge we have failed to see the value of experience. We retain mindsets from the days when physical work broke bodies.
The Cost of the Journey
Ageism affects all workers. Everyone ages and the implications are not lost on the young. In my twenties, I observed the hair colour of those leaving the organisation and the thinning ranks of older employees. I decided I needed a second or third occupation for my fifties. I thought my career was over when I hadn’t made general manager young enough. I gave up on a goal to be CEO (even though that proved to be wrong many times over). I ended up freelancing much of my forties after a poorly timed redundancy.
As a manager, I have hired so many talented older workers and discovered the breadth of what they can contribute. I have worked with many to develop new career opportunities and new skills. Despite their success in winning and performing in the role, some have been sceptical that they could keep it. The culture of ageism is so deeply engrained that despite their obvious contributions they expected me to move them on. Unnecessary stress hangs over all work. This stress is greater when combined in intersectionality with other forms of discrimination.
No talented person young or old should live in fear of ageing at work. Nobody should view their financial and emotional security tied to a Logan’s Run process where regardless of your potential your life is over at 45. The cost of this is not just on the older workers. This deprived organisations of workers full of talent and experience, both young and old. Talented people of all ages leave when you don’t respect the older worker.
We know horoscopes are make-believe. Generations are a marketer’s confection. We need to stop believing a birthdate determines potential or performance
Hire talented people. That’s it. That’s the advice that ends this nonsense.
I first came across the idea of an Awkward Squad in Sophie Henaff’s detective novel about a division of French police comprised of other teams’ rejects. The idea has a long lineage in business and the military where putting trouble together is seen as freeing others to perform. More importantly, celebrating and empowering your Awkward Squad can be a powerful step to leverage and integrate difference.
Difference Matters
Our organisations are systems of standardisation, whether we realise it or not. As a consequence, everyday processes and interactions can isolate and alienate those whose inherent approach to work is different. What drives that difference to the standard is incredibly diverse and should be irrelevant. We cannot make people into others. We must work with their strengths and their potential.
The literature that diverse teams and organisations are better performing is clear. Diversity matters, whether it is the power of diversity to better reflect stakeholders, shatter groupthink or bring extraordinary new talents to bear on work. The best performing teams that I have been lucky enough to work with were often viewed by other teams as the Awkward Squad and then showed them how to perform.
Celebrate Awkward
Remember that the designation of difference is not a choice of the individual. Difference is an outcome of systems and cultural norms in the organisation. Those norms and processes drive counterproductive standardisation in the name of efficiency, ease and an unspoken inhumanity. These processes drive out the awkward.
Robots are standardised. Humans are not. The cost of driving out the different falls on everyone’s inability to express their uniqueness.
Often the only way people and organisations begin to appreciate difference is to feel and acknowledge those moment of awkwardness. Many people don’t appreciate that their experiences, perception, thinking or approaches are different until they that feel that discomfort. Many leaders are blithely unaware of the awkwardness they create. If we hide awkward, we lost the learning experience. We hide the ability to leverage difference.
Embrace your Awkward Squad in any way you can. Network people together so that those who think, act and are different can find the likeminded collaborators. Form special project teams to solve the most challenging issues and celebrate the creativity that results. Hunt for talented people being excluded by redundancy and performance management and give them another chance better suited to their talents. Be explicit that Awkward is ok, in fact, valued and great.
Buried in your organisation today is a team of talents that feels they don’t fit. They are planning to leave. That is not their issue. It is yours. They can’t and shouldn’t change who they are. It’s up to you to value their work and create the opportunities they need. Everyone will benefit.
I’ve written before about kintsugi. Humans aren’t perfect. There will be breaks and repairs and workarounds. Making them aesthetically pleasing and convenient is sensible.
However, in organisations, corporate kintsugi becomes its own art form. Processes are broken and we develop elaborate manual interventions. We need to fit agile into the waterfall processes of the organisation and we fall in love with our reporting, stage gates and delivery trains. An MVP was proof of our speed to market, but when we still love the pilot jerry-rigging a decade later we need to move on. Often, the gold lacquer with which we make our repairs is greater than the porcelain. Whole departments and silos exist to beautify the cracks.
Just as relying on resilience isn’t resilient. developing a competitive advantage at corporate kintsugi is undermining your performance. Stop falling in love with the fill-ins at work. Repairs are fine but the thousand little compromises that undermine and reshape the work need to go.
It will be sad to discard the clever little interventions that covered the gaps. You may need to make work less complex and less exciting as your take out these golden bridges.
Better work is the prize. Let the corporate kintsugi and its practitioners go.
It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.
Location was once a certainty. Things were only where they were and nowhere else. The global pandemic has accelerated a digital dislocation of a massive scale. We are yet to adjust.
I imagine in the quiet cottage of his brain the sepia of this desert city, wind, dirt, grit that scuffs your skin. Wish him gentleness in the shade of shadows.
We are dislocated. Our favourite places are closed. Our work patterns are disrupted between home, work and third places. Our travel patterns have become alien. Restaurants, cafes and bars are closed and new businesses have opened in their place. Much of the world comes to us through our screens and our phones. It is all quite strange.
Familiar patterns of location, travel, commuting and entertaining are disrupted. We are dislocated by new digital options. People are losing the niceties of social interaction in a physical space. Rudeness, anger and frustration are the result. Frustration at the physical movement of people shows up in our traffic, our movement and a general sense of impatience with the physical world. Dislocation is not a comfortable place.
Once again instinct has taken him where he’s needed; where the unexpected transforms routine into celebration.
Organisations are pleading for the return of their employees to the office because the social benefits of connection, learning and work are real. Informal interaction doesn’t happen in the zoom call. You can’t belong to a chat.
We are all somewhat dislocated by the disruption to friendships. We need to gather to close these gaps and tell lost tales. All my catch-ups with friends of late must begin with all the stories untold since 2019. We know the public and the shared. The private and the secrets are mysteries and disturb the surface of those public lives. We need places to share secrets. Quiet bars and deep booths work, so too the kitchen, the queue, the cafe and the cool of the porch.
To end this unnerving sense of dislocation we need to fall in love with place and with new places. We need to return to the romance of our being there. Whether work, life, love or simply being, we need to step beyond the screen and be in a place. We need to be there with others. Only then will we be able to ground ourselves again in the tangible venues of our connection to others.
The fall of romance, the hold of the tender new, programs aloft, every nerve to shudder: ghosting monitions of the incomplete. Either will the aching swells, apart from bliss.
‘Off with their heads’ Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com
For almost 100 years, management has been associated with the five basic functions outlined by management theorist Henri Fayol: planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling.
It seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
For over a century, years management theory has asked us to believe our daily diet of six impossible things (Fayol’s five plus measurement). We take these six things to be the art of management so for granted that we rarely stop to consider their role in the design of every action we do at work. Like the characters of a magical realist novel, our management lives have their own unique logic divorced from the exacting demands of reality. We ignore the warning signals of this world because it does not fit with the narrative.
Weary searching a bad cipher For a good that must be meant; Discontent with being weary,— Weary with my discontent.
Fayol’s list and his logic reflects his context. Fayol was documenting management science at its inception in the late 19th century. A contemporary of Frederick Winslow Taylor, both he and Taylor were providing managers with ‘scientific’ tools to bring order to the rapid expansion of industrial capacity and transformation of industry to reflect new tools of communication like the telegraph and later the telephone and transportation, through the railways and the automobile. Fayol and Taylor were describing processes to bring order to chaos in industrial and mining contexts with often unskilled workforces. Often workforces for whom they had little respect.
I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handing pig-iron is so great that the man who is fit to handle pig-iron as his daily work cannot possibly understand the science; the man who is physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron; and this in ability of the man who is fit to do the work to understand the science of doing his work becomes more and more evident as the work becomes more complicated, all the way up the scale. I assert, without the slightest hesitation, that the high-class mechanic has a far smaller chance of ever thoroughly understanding the science of his work than the pig-iron handler has of understanding the science of his work
Frederick Winslow Taylor
It is our loss that we are still applying similar logic as the essence of management a century later in a global economy when the communication technologies are digital networks and real-time global logistics underpin our transportation. The logic of superior control and direction hardly applies at all to the modern networked knowledge economy and particularly the focus on services that now shapes an increasing amount of our economic activity. We cannot begin to assume that somewhere there is smarter management scientist better able to shape the work.
Fayol’s fourteen principles of management, being longer and less memorable, lack the same traction. They include principles of fair remuneration, equity, stability of tenure and initiative for employees. The value of these latter principles have been lost in the relentless focus of management on command and control. The allure of power and its wealth and now global reach means that some of the local community characteristics of early management were lost in the wash. As we now deal with labour shortages and disgruntled workforces it is intriguing to see this community orientation returning to employee engagement.
Fayol’s five functions of management are born of a desire to simplify work down to a convenient and carefully constructed fable. Complex dynamics are lost in simple, predicatable and mechanical myths of performance. As we plan, organise, command, co-ordinate and control, we follow a linear authorial path towards a predetermined outcome with magical regularity. Uncertainty is swept aside by the superior powers and perceptions of the managerial class. Like an all-knowing narrator, the manager sees the sweep of history and can shape the tale to their liking and their entertainment.
I have thrown in measurement because it is rare that a discussion of management does not devolve into the science of measurement and its ability to shape influence on people. Measures poorly constructed and blindly applied have done far more damage to performance than individual worker shortcomings. We are entrapped in the farcical reality of magic realist systems of measurement, prone to illusions and magical manipulation. Most important of all management turns its attention from all that cannot be measured with sufficient certainty, regularity, or confidence.
The linearity of this view of management relieves the complex systems of most modern work from inspection. We can blame our people, our planning or our managers but we do not review the design of the work or its fitness for the challenges faced by the organisation. We can eject people as unfit and ignore their past and future successes as inconvenient to our story. Reality of complicated and complex systems, changing circumstances or the need to respond to forces beyond our control are swept away by a magical narrative of power and expertise.
Loss of Direction
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
So many people are shocked to discover that CEOs, the epitome of power in the exercise of Fayol’s five management functions, often see themselves as powerless. From the pinnacle of their organisations, they see not command and control, but forces working against their direction – markets, stakeholders, competitors, fellow managers and the vagaries of the organisation system that they did not design and often barely perceive.
Exhorting people from the CEOs office to manage better rarely improves performance. There may be the Hawthorne effect of attention or the jolt of a short sharp shock but it will fade. Sustainable changes in performance requires adaptive leadership that will lean into the systemic and cultural change that enables people to do what they think is better, away from the myths and romantic notions of planning.
I escape to the same places and same words. Cold breeze from the sea, the ice-dragon’s licking the back of my neck while the sun glares. The moving van is burning with cool flames.
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Our ‘wildest and most tenacious love’ for the power of management will fade. We need to let go the certainty of linear machine metaphors of performance and in particular those that degrade or demean the contributions of those who do the work. Work cannot be done to or through people, like widgets. Adam Kahane highlighted that we need a balance of love and power in our efforts at complex change and the same logic underpins the work of management in shaping any organisation.
The greatest work is an expression of a unique group of people through their contributions, their interactions, their talents and their intelligence. When we focus on the potential of organisations to help people realise these capabilities and to respond to dynamic and changing environments we begin to create better and more sustainable systems of management beyond the romantic centuries old tales of power. When management is the art of realising the potential of people and an organisation in the reality of the world in which we live then perhaps we can move on to a more amenable and shared feast for breakfast.
And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
