Chapter 4

Political management skills: acquiring power to make things happen

The ten laws of power: achieving PQ

In the new world of PQ, power does not come just with your title. Even managers with big titles often struggle to gain control. Instead of formal power, you need to build informal power and influence, which goes far beyond your formal title. Look around your own place of work and you will see people who do this well. They do not rely on some mysterious, genetic X-factor to do this. They all follow some simple rules.

These rules are tacit knowledge, not explicit. They are a set of know-how skills rather than know-what skills. These know-how skills become more important the more uncertain, ambiguous and challenging your situation becomes. These know-how skills are automatic reactions for the high PQ manager. They are like default settings in their mindset. Once you understand these automatic responses, you can start to learn them yourself. They can be described as the ten laws of power.

Here they are in summary:

Taking control: the power of ideas

In the old world, power and control came from formal sources of authority. These included:

• Control of budgets. A manager’s empire was defined by the size of their budget. The bigger the budget, the better. This led to highly dysfunctional empire-building that did nothing to control costs and increase efficiency.
• Control of information.
• Control of staff and skills. If you and your team have a unique set of skills on which the firm depends, you have power. Until you are outsourced.
• Control of customers. If cash is king, then your customer is the queen and wields the real power. In professional service firms, power goes to the rainmakers who help customers part with their cash.
• Control of permissions. This is the world of the jobsworth (‘It’s more than my job’s worth to let you do that…’). Petty officials who have little control do not cede it easily: it is their only source of power and purpose.

All of these sources of power still have some relevance today. They are bargaining chips that you can play with. Put simply, if you have no budget, information, staff, skills, customers or permissive authority, you will not have much influence with anyone anywhere.

But these sources of power are not enough: they are simply your entry ticket into the world of influence. If the first challenge is to acquire some of these sources of power, the second and greater challenge is to know how to put them to use.

In the new world of management, just because you have the title and formal authority, it does not mean you are in control. Taking control can be difficult, even for the most senior managers. If you are following an agenda that you inherited with a team and a budget from your predecessor, you are not in control. You are simply administering a legacy. Worse, you will be at the mercy of the competing agendas and priorities of all your peers and colleagues in other departments. So, how do you take control?

Having a very clear, relevant and worthwhile agenda is at the heart of control in a world of ambiguity. Your agenda should be an idea about how your department or unit will be different and better as a result of your leadership. You have to describe a future perfect that your team can work towards and that top management will support. This will help you cut through the day-to-day noise of management and let you focus on what is important, not just on what is urgent.

There is a huge amount of noise for you to deal with. There are daily mini-crises and conflicts. There is an endless stream of reporting and administration. Annual budgets and performance reviews are events to which all managers must apply themselves. But they are simply a means to an end: the objective of management is not to deliver budget papers and performance reviews. Managers have to achieve budgets and performance. This normally means that you have to do something different from what was happening before. Doing the same as before and expecting a better result than before is an exercise in wishful thinking. If all you do is deal with the noise, you will not make a difference.

Sometimes this is called having a vision. This conjures up images of Martin Luther King and ‘I have a dream…’ Most managers with a vision like that should keep it to themselves. In management terms, a vision is no more than a simple story that has three parts:

1. This is where we are going.
2. This is how we are going to get there.
3. This is how you can help.

Some people add an optional fourth statement: This is where we are. This simply helps explain the relevance and importance of where we are going. Dwelling too long on the present and the past is not a good way of driving to the future.

Managing change: people, not projects

The received wisdom is that management is all about change. Perhaps it should be. But most managers most of the time are not keen on change. It represents risk, uncertainty and even more effort than the regular day job. The only people who are addicted to change are management consultants (change means fees and they are not at risk from the consequences of their actions) and CEOs (change tells the board that they are doing something and, since they are in control of the change, they have little to fear from it).

Because change is seen to be central to management, management naturally claims to be implementing change. There are some traditional institutions where they do little more than change the wall calendar once a year, but even they will talk about the ever-increasing pace of change and the challenge it represents. This perception may be wholly false. Perceptions may be imaginary, but the consequences of them are real. If managers feel that they are already changing fast, then any more change will take them well outside their comfort zone. Suddenly, you will hear many clever and rational arguments about why the change is very risky and doomed to cause chaos. Rational arguments are often no more than a plea for help from threatened individuals.

Change is the land of FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Managers do not like to go there.

Change, like people, is not easy to put in neat little boxes. In principle, people should not be put in boxes until they are dead. But behind this messy reality, there are some consistent rules of success and failure. Every film is unique, but most follow familiar themes. The same is true of change: each change is unique and succeeds or fails in its own unique way. But there are common themes behind both the successes and failures. Learning from personal experience is painful. What follows will help you learn from the experience of others.

We will explore the two main aspects of successful change:

• setting up change to succeed
• managing the change process.

Setting up change to succeed

Most change efforts succeed or fail before they even start. As a manager, you have to invest time before you start to set up your team for success. Over the years, there has been one way of predicting which change efforts will succeed or fail. It can be summarised in an equation and here it is in all its spurious mathematical accuracy:

N × V × C ≥ R

where:

N is the need for change
V is the vision of what the change will achieve
C is the capacity to change
R are the risks and costs of change

What the change equation says, in plain English, is that you need a strong perceived need for change, a vision of what you will achieve and you must have the capacity to change. All of that must exceed the risks and costs of your change effort.

Let us explore what each element means in practice, and how you can put it to use.

Managing the change process

The change process is much more than project management, which we will deal with later. Project management is vital as it deals with what has to happen when. Change management is about people and politics. Good change managers and good project managers are often very different species: one is good with people, the other is good with tasks.

First, we will look at the nature of the change process and how you can deal with it, and then we will look at the specific problem of dealing with resistance to change.

The nature of the change journey

Change rarely runs smoothly. It can be a roller coaster. Each person has a different journey through this roller coaster, so you need to help each person individually.

There are some practical ways of helping people through this emotional roller coaster. If they become too stressed, they will become dysfunctional. They need your help to stay productive. The key principles are:

• Incremental commitments. Do not ask people to do too much too soon. Stage their commitments. Start with something easy for them to do. This has two effects:
  1. It builds their confidence as they perceive that they can succeed.
  2. It creates a sense of obligation – having started, they will feel obliged to see the whole effort through.
• Stretch, but do not break people. Change, if it is serious, will take people outside their comfort zones. This can be exciting for them and lead to increased performance, if they are well managed. But if they are stretched too far, they become too stressed. Like a mountaineer getting altitude sickness, they need to go all the way back to their comfort zone to recover. Then the process of staged commitments, increasing commitment and stretch can start slowly again. A common mistake is to keep forcing the pace instead of giving people proper recovery time. Look after the people, and they will look after the tasks. Do not let the tasks defeat the people.
• Focus on the positives. Recognise and reinforce the right behaviours and performance. Find something that each person is doing well, recognise it and build their confidence. Where there are problems, help the team drive to solutions and action as fast as possible. Do not let them dwell on problems and on what they cannot do. Even if there is only a small thing they can do to contribute to a big problem, get them to do it.
• Be firm on goals, flexible on the means. Goal focus is not just about what must be achieved, but why it must be achieved. Achieving the goal will have positive consequences for the organisation and the individual: keep them focused on that prize so they see the value and relevance of what they are doing. But then allow them flexibility over how they get there. Give them a sense of empowerment, control and responsibility.
• Set expectations early. If people expect to go through a valley of death, they do not panic when things get tough. We told one CEO to expect a valley of death experience. For the next two months he was like a child asking, ‘Are we there, yet?’ at each new setback. He steered the organisation calmly through the tough period because he was ready for it.
• Find some early wins. A few symbolic acts will often help convince people that you are serious about this change and that there is real momentum. People will start to climb aboard the bandwagon when they see it is moving.

The different journeys that can be experienced through this roller coaster are illustrated in Figure 4.1 below.

Figure 4.1 Change and the valley of death

Dealing with resistance to change

Most of the principles of managing resistance are covered in more detail in Chapter 3 under Persuading people: how to sell anything and Handling conflict: from FEAR to EAR. If the project has been set up the right way, most of the resistance will have been overcome before the project even starts.

But one danger lurks. Any change attracts resistance. The resistance will be most vocal from people who perceive that they have the most to lose (see Figure 4.2 below). They will make a large amount of noise. Meanwhile, the majority will keep silent. You can see the same effect when the government changes tax and spending priorities. The losers make a huge fuss and the winners keep very quiet.

The trap for the PQ manager is getting bogged down in debate with the minority. The more you listen to those in the minority, the more you legitimise their point of view. In effect, you give them a veto over your programme. At worst they will stop it and at best they will merely delay it, weaken it and cause huge disruption.

Figure 4.2 Shifting the change bell curve

The best way to deal with such obstacles is to navigate around them. Focus your efforts on enthusing the mass of people (and the critical opinion-formers and decision-makers). As they begin to give their tacit support to your efforts, the resistance army will start to feel isolated. As the train leaves the station, they will have a choice: get on the train, stay behind or lie on the tracks in front of the train. No matter what, the train will not stop. In business, the resistance army will break down slowly: some will join you, some will go into hiding and some may seek other opportunities elsewhere.

People and change: through the valley of death

Project managers often like to call themselves change managers, because it sounds much more sophisticated. They are following the same road as personnel (whoops: human capital management, strategic talent management) and sales (whoops again: client relationship officers, key account managers, market executives, development associates).

Behind the harmless semantics, there is some serious confusion. Project management is largely an IQ skill that focuses on building or, sometimes, changing things like IT systems, production lines and major civil engineering works. Typically, it will involve the following sorts of activities:

• drawing up job specifications
• creating risk and issue logs
• sizing the job – people, time, materials, money
• defining the critical path and what tasks need to happen in which order – put the foundations in before building the roof; open the door before trying to walk through it
• measuring and monitoring progress
• creating project plans with all the symbols that show decision points and pathways that most of us struggle to understand.

These are highly valuable disciplines that are essential when managing complex tasks, such as building a nuclear power station.

At the end of a well-managed project, things will have changed. But people will not have changed simply as a result of building a new factory or IT system. To make a project truly succeed, you have to change what people do and how they do things as well. This is the essence of change management as opposed to project management. It returns us to the heart of the role of a manager: making things happen through other people.

Effective change management is about people, not just projects. We will explore five of the most common ways to affect people in the organisation:

• Changing what they do: roles, responsibilities, job descriptions.
• Changing how they do things: skills.
• Changing how they and their tasks are organised: processes and procedures.
• Changing how they are measured, rewarded and recognised: information, measurement, appraisal and incentive systems.
• Changing how people behave: cultural change in its widest sense.

The high IQ skills of project management will not help you when faced with the deep EQ and PQ requirements of change management: changing people. Unlike buildings or IT systems, people have minds of their own with their own hopes and fears. They will argue back, avoid and evade, cause trouble, act emotionally and politically. They will act in their own self-interest, tempered by the interests of the organisation. Change is a messy reality that does not lend itself to being captured on neat little critical path analyses with elegant box and wire diagrams in a piece of project management software.

Changing what people do

Reorganising often is taken to mean structural change: moving the boxes around the organisation chart in the hope that something better will happen as a result. Structural change meets with increasing cynicism from managers who have seen it all before: centralisation to decentralisation and back again, organising around products, customers, functions or markets, according to the fashion du jour.

There are three sides to any reorganisation: IQ, EQ and PQ. The intellectual, rational reason for the reorganisation is the most common and least effective reason for the reorganisation. The benefits of reorganisation come from its emotional and political impact, if this is well handled:

• Rational aspects of reorganising. This is where consultants get very excited and draw up lots of charts, do job-sizing and profiling and create countless job descriptions. Often they create needless complexity and bureaucracy to justify themselves. The real problem with the rational approach to reorganisation is that very often there is no way of knowing, or proving, that one organisation structure is definitively better than another.
• Emotional aspects of reorganising. Reorganising at its most basic level is a call to arms for the organisation. It is a way of saying something like: ‘We have to get closer to the customer, so now we are moving away from a product-focused structure to a customer-focused structure.’ Change the structure and back that up with changes in measures, rewards, processes and procedures, and people will start to believe the story. At an individual level, the reorganisation is a great opportunity to reset the psychological contract with each member of the team. It is a way of saying, ‘Here is a new world, now let’s work out what we both have to do to succeed in that new world.’ (See the boxed example below.)
• Political aspects of reorganising. A very good reason to reorganise is to overthrow the power barons. For example, Martha was appointed to run the European operations of a large systems house. In a highly macho culture, the power barons were determined to keep her at bay. They all had elegant reasons why their part of the organisation was unique and could not help the cost drive. So Martha reorganised the entire team (with one ritual execution of a power baron who was offered an unacceptable job and left). She moved the firm from a geographic focus to an industry focus (financial services, oil and gas, public sector, etc). The rational argument was the need to build greater industry expertise. The real reason was to break the power of the power barons. They found themselves in unfamiliar territory; they could not use their old excuses and they had seen what resistance led to. Martha was now very firmly in control of the macho barons.

Changing how people do things

Raising and changing skills is a constant struggle for managers themselves and for the people they manage.

The manager’s career journey is marked by a complete change in the sorts of skills they need to master. Early in a career, managers need to learn their trade. These craft skills may be accounting, IT, law or marketing. For the most part, people are keen to learn such skills:

• They know they do not yet have mastery of their craft.
• They know that mastery is essential to career progression.
• The knowledge is well documented and can be learned with effort.
• These craft skills become decreasingly important as the manager’s career progresses. Someone who is still cutting code or doing stock checks for the audit is probably not a senior manager.

The skills that become far more important are people skills: getting other people to do things. If you cannot get other people to do things, you are not managing.

Simple observation within your own organisation will show a few managers who can do this very well, and many more who are somewhere between adequate and abysmal.

The toughest challenge is to learn and then upgrade people skills: motivating, influencing, delegating, managing conflict and dealing with different styles. But this is where training fails badly. An extraordinary number of managers find that they are busy arranging yoga lessons for their cat, or whatever their excuse may be, which means that they cannot attend your lovingly crafted people skills workshop. People skills training has precisely the wrong dynamics compared to craft skills training:

• Most managers do not want to admit they have poor people skills: going on a training course is seen as a sign of weakness. And most managers like to think they are good with people.
• Managers do not see the relevance of the workshops to their careers: they will have far more pressing needs to meet some immediate challenges.
• The skills required are not well understood or well documented: we are dealing with tacit knowledge, not explicit knowledge. Into this vacuum step both charlatans and gurus who claim to have found the answer: all their answers contradict each other and it is not clear that their solution fits your problem anyway. They offer one miracle solution for all problems from drooping morale to drooping profits.

Most of us trust experience, not training. That makes sense. We see someone do something well, and we might try to copy it.

This gives managers the clues about how they can enhance the people skills of themselves and their teams. There are three basic mechanisms:

• Coaching. This is covered in more detail in Chapter 3 under Coaching: no more training.
• Peer group learning. Let people learn from each other about what really works (see the boxed example below). The essence of this is to create a structured journey of observation and discovery. Tap into the collective experience of the group and identify what works in practice in the current context. Done well, this is also an opportunity to help people rethink what they do. Learning from peers has credibility and relevance, which few outsiders can match, but it has to be well structured.
• Building hinterland fast. Good managers tend to have hinterland. They have a range of experiences and perspectives to draw on when faced with unfamiliar challenges. This is where outsiders can help – not by offering answers, but by offering alternative perspectives and experiences. No single experience or perspective will work for everyone: the idea is to give enough alternatives to allow people to learn from what they want to. At the risk of shameless self-promotion, my work with indigenous tribes in Papua New Guinea and Mongolia, in the Arctic (the Saami) and with the Tuareg (Mali and Libya) gives managers an insight into ways of surviving environments that are even tougher than most business environments. (See www.ilead.guru)

Changing how people and tasks are organised

Process change is very powerful and very misused. Used well, it helps an organisation improve marketplace performance in terms of quality, cost and customer experience. The essence of process change is to turn the organisation on its side. Most organisations tend to think functionally. This is human nature. We all look at the world from where we stand, be it in customer service, logistics, operations or any of the support functions. This makes it difficult to achieve two things:

• Cost efficiency. You can cut your departmental costs, but many of your costs are driven by the demands of other departments and you cannot see what knock-on effects your cost cuts will have elsewhere. Cost-cutting in the absence of process focus is a crude hacking at costs that results in political turf battles as each department tries to protect its own territory. Recessions lead to cost-hacking. Like a surgeon amputating a leg with gangrene, the patient may survive but will not be fitter as a result.
• Market effectiveness. The traditional functional view of the world encourages each department to see other departments as their customer. The real customer, who buys our services and pays our bills, becomes an invisible and remote being.

Cost inefficiency and market ineffectiveness are not a recipe for success. A good focus on process overturns the functional focus. By looking at a process (new product development, order fulfilment, customer service, trade execution) from end to end, you can see how your departmental actions link with others. You rarely see how your work fits into the whole business (from sheep to shop in the rag trade, or from soup to nuts for gastronomes). Once you can see the big picture, you can improve things by playing a managerial equivalent of a parlour game called ‘Just a Minute’. In this game, you have to speak for a minute without repeating the same word, without hesitating and without deviating. It is fiendishly difficult to do this. The re-engineering equivalent of ‘Just a Minute’ is to redesign a core business process so that it works without:

• hesitation – avoids any delays in the process
• deviation – avoids any unnecessary activities that add no value
• repetition – avoids rework as a result of poor quality.

The result should be a process that achieves success in the corporate challenge of betterfastercheaper.

To succeed, process redesign needs to start with the customer. Start by working out what the customer experience should look like, and work back from there. Do not start with what you already have as it may be broken. Incremental improvement of a broken system simply helps the bad survive longer. Starting with a blank sheet of paper based on customer needs gives you a chance to focus the organisation successfully.

The downsides of process redesign are great. In many cases, re-engineering has become cost-cutting with a smile, where the smile is an optional extra. It has become a dirty word. Mention re-engineering, and people imagine hordes of junior consultants arriving to map your existing processes in great detail and at great expense before firing you.

Delivering successful process redesign is a corporate overhaul that includes rethinking how to serve the customer; redesigning processes; changing the structure, rewards, measure and information systems to support the new redesign; changing skillsets; and changing the way people work. It is ambitious and requires very strong political support. Few managers get to initiate a true, company-wide process redesign. If you hear that such a redesign is going to happen, it normally pays to be on the inside helping the redesign. Being on the outside, your risk of being redesigned out of a job increases dramatically.

The power of process re-engineering was demonstrated by Dell. Michael Dell, as a young graduate, took on the might of IBM, Apple, Toshiba, HP and Compaq in the PC market. He had nothing going for him. Perhaps out of desperation, because he could not afford to have any stock, he decided to sell his computers to order and direct to the public. In one fell swoop he had re-engineered the entire industry as follows:

• Traditional PC process flow: make, then hope to sell.
• Dell PC process flow: sell, then hope to make.

This is re-engineering made simple, beyond the wire diagrams of process re-engineers. The effect of this one change was to:

• eliminate all finished stock
• make growth cash-positive as customers pay you before you pay your suppliers
• eliminate losses from unsold stock, write-downs and fire sales
• eliminate the need for sophisticated sales forecasting tools
• reduce costs by eliminating expensive resellers
• gain very good and fast knowledge about customer and market trends
• beat the competition.

Good re-engineering has two characteristics, which Dell showed:

• It is simple, not complicated.
• It is focused on market pressures, not internal pressures.

Most process redesign fails these two tests.

Changing how people are measured, rewarded and recognised

Two of the oldest adages in management are still two of the truest: ‘You can control only what you measure’ and ‘You get only what you reward’. Core to your task is to measure and reward the right things. Here are some good ways not to do it:

• Measure call centre staff on number of calls handled: customers suffer from poor service as call centre staff rush to get through each call.
• Minimise warranty claims: watch managers erect huge barriers to claims from customers (must pre-register the product after the sale, produce the original till receipt, stamped warranty document and original packaging, pay for the postage to Vladivostok, produce evidence that the fault is not subject to any of the 317 exemption clauses in the warranty document and then have the submission signed and approved by all eight of your great-grandparents).
• Measure bank calling officers on the volume of loans advanced: then discover that lending money is easy, but getting it back is difficult, if you have not paid proper attention to loan quality. This is a basic truth of banking, which earlier versions of this book warned of. It is a basic truth that seems to have eluded many highly paid bankers.
• Measure software writers on KLOCs (thousands of lines of code written): get huge amounts of complicated code, which is hard to change, instead of fewer, more elegant and more robust code. Measure book writers the same way and you would be in trouble.

The only simple answer to the question, ‘How should I measure performance?’ is ‘Measure it well.’ This is as simple as it is unhelpful. Sometimes, questions are more helpful than answers. Here are the key ones for you to ask:

• What is important to the organisation as a whole currently? This creates the context for setting and refocusing rewards and measures in your area. Make sure your goals align with the corporate drive for customer retention, cost reduction, or rapid growth of skills, staff and sales.
• What do I really need to measure? Be careful what you wish for. Remember King Midas in Greek mythology who wished that all he touched would turn to gold. He cursed his wish when he found his food, wine, wife and mistresses turning to gold. In reality, you will need a mixture of financial, market, organisation and development measures (see the boxed example below).
• How will people react? Think through the consequences of human behaviour. People will take the shortest route to your goal, and shortcuts are not always good.
• How will I recognise and reward performance? Human nature is curious here. People tend to spend disproportionate emotional energy on what is visible and discretionary. This means that core salary does not drive performance. But bonuses, prizes, company cars, titles and perks receive huge amounts of attention. These are important because they are visible to colleagues and they feel like something we can control directly.
• What unintended consequences will this goal have? One way to find out is to ask yourself what games you would play if you were set the same goal. Work out what shortcuts, priority changes, pointless cost cuts or data manipulation you could use to hit the goal? Rest assured that all those games will be played by others, if not by you.

Changing how people behave

Cultural revolutions normally fail badly. Think of Mao Tse-tung and 50 million dead. There are good reasons why cultural revolutions fail:

• Culture change is normally an attack on the majority. Culture represents the informal rules of success and survival in your organisation. Attacking the majority is not a good start. Attacking what is perceived to be at least a survivable model of behaviour does not make it any better.
• Culture change is about how people behave. Changing behaviour is an attack on people’s personal behaviour. Personal attacks are not the best way to enthuse people.
• Cultural change programmes often confuse the ends and the means. The purpose of most organisations is not to produce happy employees. Happy and productive employees are a means to achieve some other end for the organisation.
• The process of cultural change is often mismanaged. It may not involve 50 million deaths, but it can involve lots of touchy-feely, introspective and interpersonal events that are highly divisive. Some people love the events and claim their lives have been transformed while other people find they make their skin crawl.

Having trashed most cultural programmes, it is now time to praise them. In context and done well they can be essential. There are many organisations where the culture has become deeply dysfunctional. These are the organisations that turn on its head the old adage that ‘organisations help ordinary people achieve extraordinary things’. There are far too many organisations that help extraordinary people achieve ordinary things.

It is mainly legacy organisations that are at risk of cultural dysfunction. They grow fat and happy. They get caught in old ways.

For a while, this does not matter. They are so strong and dominant in the market that they appear invincible. Then an upstart comes along and changes the rules of the game. The first reaction from the giant is denial. Denial continues until panic or destruction. Panic at least gives a chance of survival.

If you are tempted to start or get involved in a cultural change programme, here are a few guidelines:

• Attack culture crabwise, from the side on. Focus your overt efforts on the business goal, which most people can rally behind. To achieve that goal, you will need to put in place a number of enabling activities, which will include rewards, measures, how we work, skills and more. Behaviours are embedded in this.
• Be relentlessly positive. Celebrate all the right behaviours. If a shop assistant gives a disgruntled shopper a refund, celebrate the assistant’s initiative and customer focus (if that is what you want to achieve). Do not attack everyone else for lack of initiative or customer focus. Slowly, people will get the message about what is valued in the organisation.
• Use cultural change levers. Reward and measurement systems are very powerful at driving behaviour. If the rewards are 100 per cent commission, do not be surprised if you have a high-performing and low-ethics sales force.
• Lead from the front. People will listen politely to speeches about culture, because they have to. Round the coffee machine they will quickly decide whether the speech was rhetoric or reality. To make it real, you have to support your words with decisions, especially tough decisions.

Making things happen: managing projects

Most battles are won and lost before the first shot is fired. The same is true of most business battles. Make sure you are set up for success before you embark on a new challenge. It is far better to spend one month playing hard ball over the set-up of a project than to spend 12 months of misery trying to deliver an outcome that was impossible from the outset. The high PQ manager instinctively will invest very heavily in setting up an agenda for success, whereas the naive manager will accept a challenge out of duty and commitment. A year later, the high PQ manager will be seen to be a success, and the diligent but naive manager will be seen to be a failure.

The simplest way to run a complicated project is, in theory, to hire a great project manager. You can find plenty of people with PRINCE2 qualifications (PRojects IN Controlled Environments, a de facto process-based method for effective project management), who know all about Gantt or PERT charts, risk and issue logs and critical paths. This is good technical knowledge to have at your disposal and should ensure that the most obvious disasters are avoided.

Your first job as manager is not to run the detail of the process. Like change management, your first job is to make sure that your project is set up to succeed. You are likely to succeed if you:

• work on the right problem
• find the right sponsor
• hire the right team
• have the right process.

In other words, the requirements for success are the same for project management as they are for change management. But the challenges of the project management process are different from the challenges of change management. Because they are so important, we will remind ourselves briefly about the need for the right problem, sponsor and team, and then we will focus on the right process for project management.

The art of unreasonable management: ruthlessness

Perhaps, in a perfect world, managers would always be reasonable. We do not live in a perfect world and managers are not always reasonable. The best managers are selectively unreasonable and ruthless. The worst managers are always unreasonable and ruthless. Being ruthless is not the same as being a bully, showing aggression, personalising issues and making life a misery for everyone. There are plenty of people out there who are like that. They are collecting enemies who will be only too pleased to see them fail and to help them fail when the time comes.

If you ask senior leaders if they are ruthless, they will nearly always deny it. They do not like to see themselves that way. But look at how they behave and they are ruthless when they have to be (see the box below). Even if they will not admit to being ruthless, they will admit to having a hard edge. Spot the difference, if you can.

To be effective, you need to know when to be ruthless (and when not), and how to be ruthless.

When to be unreasonable and ruthless

Sun Tzu’s three rules of warfare make a useful reappearance at this stage. Only fight (be unreasonable and ruthless) when there is:

• a prize worth fighting for
• certainty of success
• no other way of winning the prize.

The times it is worth being ruthless are when the stakes are highest, such as:

• budget negotiations
• target setting
• team formation
• assignments and promotions.

To make this simple: if you work on the right assignment with a great team and a good budget to meet sensible targets, you have won 80 per cent of the battle. If you are on the wrong assignment with a lousy team, a thin budget and absurd targets, start looking for another job. There may be other battles you need to fight, but do not waste personal time and equity on fighting skirmishes. Even if you win the skirmish, you will lose a friend, and you could pay for that dearly when the big battles start. If you see a skirmish, make your position clear and then concede, preferably by negotiating for something in return for your concession.

How to be unreasonable and ruthless

Great things are rarely achieved by reasonable people. Look at the heroes of history and you will not find many reasonable people among them: from Charlemagne to Churchill, Genghis Khan to Kennedy, you find events shaped by people who achieved the impossible. The great entrepreneurs from Getty to Gates are not modest people who settled for a reasonable outcome: they played to win and to win big. In your own organisation, you can probably identify people who achieve much. They may well be among the more ruthless and unreasonable managers in the organisation. Meanwhile, many reasonable and decent managers find themselves sidelined.

It is possible to be ruthless without being unpleasant. The key is to understand that you can be unreasonable and ruthless about the outcomes, while still being reasonable about the method of getting there. The following examples are where you need to find your hard edge.

Managing your boss: and difficult people

In the new world of flat organisations, you will have to work with people who have far more power and influence than you do. You have to find a way of influencing them positively.

Perhaps the most important power person for you to manage is your boss. Bosses are problematic. You will never find an instruction manual for your boss, and when things break down it will always be your fault. You have little power over your boss, but your boss has plenty of power over you. In other words, they are the perfect practice ground for developing your influencing skills. If you can influence your boss well, you can influence other powerful people as well.

In this section we will look at how you can:

• manage your boss
• say no to your boss (or any other powerful person)
• manage an unreasonable boss
• deal with unreasonable people
• influence very senior people.

How to say no to your boss

You must be able to say no to your boss if you are to have any control over your own destiny. If you cannot say no, then you are at the mercy of the whims and judgement of your boss. If your boss is benign and also has good judgement, you will find yourself working on the right agenda and the right problem. But saying no is not a risk that always pays off over a long career. It is an art form that has to be learned.

Saying no to your boss is harder than resisting ideas from elsewhere in the organisation. It is harder to ignore your boss than it is to ignore your colleagues. If you are close to your boss, it pays to be direct: say no and explain why, in terms the boss understands so that they realise that it is in their own best interests not to proceed. As you do this, be clear about the risks and consequences of proceeding, but also try to come up with an alternative. It pays to be positive, particularly with a negative message. You need to offer solutions, not just problems.

So you need to deal with the issue, and with the boss. The challenge of this game is to find ways of saying no without actually saying no. Risking alliterative overload, remember the three Ps of saying no: priorities, process and people.

How to manage an unreasonable boss

Ruthless people are not necessarily bad. As we have seen, all leaders need to be ruthless at some point.

It pays to separate out style and substance in a ruthless boss. Normally, you will find this leads to one of two types of ruthlessness: bosses who are ruthless in achieving their personal goals and bosses who are ruthless about achieving the goals of the organisation. Both can be uncomfortable to work with. It pays to know which sort of ruthless person you are working with.

Managing the effectively unreasonable manager

Reasonable managers are often easy to work with. They set reasonable goals and expect you to comply with the process. Provided you do not mess up, you will be fine. Unreasonable bosses have much higher expectations. They will want to achieve more, they will stretch you and the team. But they will be flexible about how you get there: process compliance is not high on their list of priorities and they are more likely to forgive you if you mess up occasionally, provided they believe you are still capable of stretching to top performance.

If you work for such a boss, you need to follow all the standard rules of managing your boss that have already been outlined. In addition, you will need to deliver against a much higher performance bar. This is good news in that it will stretch you, and you will learn and grow. And your boss should, normally, be supportive.

Your challenge is to decide if this is a boss who you can trust when it comes to bonus and promotions. You will have put in extra, discretionary, effort and you will have learned and grown, but will you be rewarded or taken for granted? To help you decide, it pays to watch the feet, not the mouth. Look at the track record of your boss, not at what they say. If your boss has a good track record of supporting team members at crunch time, you can trust what is said. If your boss is more focused on the mission than on the team, take care. You may enjoy learning and being stretched, but your career will not thrive. Keep a look out for another boss who can help you more. How you do this is covered later in this chapter under Managing your career: career is a noun and a verb.

Managing the painfully unreasonable boss

These people are often the power barons where you work. They create their own little fiefdoms. Either you are part of the team, or you are part of the enemy. And, if you are part of the team, you have to be 100 per cent loyal and committed to the power baron.

The simplest way of dealing with such people is to sell your soul to the devil: sign up with the power baron and live life on their own terms. Power barons need loyal retainers and, if you are one of them, you can go far by following the baron. But, if you sign up, you need to judge whether the baron is likely to be successful and trustworthy. If you think that they may not succeed, that they may jump ship, or you do not trust them, then you face some uncomfortable choices.

In the short term, you have to live with the devil. It is no use getting sucked into negative emotions of anger, frustration and depression. Your performance will suffer and your nightmare boss will become even worse. You land up in a vicious circle that ends only with the exit door. Remember, your first goal is to survive.

You can then either outlast the boss, or buy time to make a graceful exit to another boss, department or organisation on terms you dictate. Some simple survival mechanisms for living with such a boss include:

• Loyalty. Disloyalty is the greatest cardinal sin for all managers. It breaks the bond of trust. Loyalty means always backing the boss, even on unpopular decisions. It means no bad-mouthing in private: word will get back to the boss eventually, and then you are finished.
• Flattery. Devils have huge egos that need constant massaging. Convince the devils that you are a loyal follower and want to learn their dark secrets. They may look after you well, until they decide to dump you.
• Do not take it personally. However offensive the devil is personally, do not take it that way. Focus on solutions, actions and the future personally and with the boss. Change the devil’s agenda to a focus on action, solutions and the future by relentless role modelling.
• Sit it out. The corporate carousel moves round fairly fast. Few bosses last more than one or two years. You can learn much from all bosses, even if all the lessons are negative.
• Prepare your escape route. Find other sponsors in the organisation, find other opportunities and go for them at the right time. Explain to your devil boss that you are simply seeking the right personal development opportunities and experience. Pretend you like working for the devil boss, but you simply need new experiences.

How to deal with unreasonable people

Organisations are not always happy families. Even families are not always happy families. You will come across colleagues who think politics is all about back-stabbing, positioning, making other people look bad and ruthlessly promoting themselves at all times. They will deceive happily in order to get their way and, because they deceive often, they become very good at it. They appear to lack any moral compass or conscience. They are sociopaths. Estimates vary, but up to 5 per cent of staff may have some degree of sociopathic leanings. That is a small proportion, but they can have a disproportionate effect on the organisation and on you.

When faced with aggression, it is very easy to respond emotionally. If you do this, you will lose. If you fight aggression with aggression, you are fighting on their terms. They have more experience of fighting that way, and will win. If you flee, you become another of their victims and you lose again. So, you cannot fight and you cannot flee: what can you do?

The first step is to take control of your own reactions. Remember, you always have a choice about how you feel and how you react. If someone is being annoying and offensive, you have every right to feel angry and upset. But there is no law that says you must feel angry and upset: that is a choice you make.

If you focus on their behaviour, it is hard not to react emotionally. Instead, you can choose to focus on the task and the issue. This may well annoy them, because you are not playing their game: they want to distract you away from one issue onto other issues. If you remain positive and professional, this will also annoy them, as that is not the reaction they enjoy. Role model good behaviour and focus on the core issue. This is your territory, the territory of professional management. Stick to this and the sociopath will find life hard.

The different approaches are summarised in the table below. Remember that you have a choice about how you react: choose well.

Choose your approach

How to influence very senior people

When dealing with very senior people, it is easy to get altitude sickness: a shortness of breath, headaches and a general feeling of nausea and disorientation. The consequences can be fatal to your career. These feelings are wholly unnecessary.

• See the world through their eyes. Senior people need you. You have some idea, analysis or plan that might help them. Make sure that your idea is big enough to interest them, or at least it fits with a big agenda that they are chasing. Do your research and get advice beforehand: find out what their agenda is and how you can fit in. If you have a plan for reducing the consumption of paper clips, do not expect to find much excitement for your plan from senior people: they have other things to worry about. It pays to be bold.
• Be positive, even enthusiastic. In some organisations, enthusiasm is regarded as a certifiable psychiatric disorder. But, equally, most organisations and most people have no defence against enthusiasm, which is infectious. If you are enthusiastic about your idea, others will tend to believe your idea must be good. If you are not enthusiastic about your idea, do not expect anyone to be enthusiastic on your behalf. In a world where senior people are used to dealing with problems, it is a breath of fresh air to find an enthusiastic and positive person bringing solutions and ideas. You will be judged as much by how you appear as by what you say, so make appearances count in the way you act as well as the way you dress.
• Act as their partner. If you act like a junior, you will be treated like a junior. All hierarchies are set up as a series of parent–child relationships, which is fine for the people in the parent role. But adults do not like being treated as children, which is one of the reasons so many workplaces are dysfunctional. Act like an adult partner: you have something they need. Even if you are pitching for investment, you still have something they need. You have a great investment and they are fortunate that you are bringing it to them. You are not a supplicant, supplier, junior or child in the relationship: you are their partner, so act that way.
• Master your brief. The more you have mastered your brief, the more confident and relaxed you will be. Mastery is more than mastering all the detail. Mastery means knowing what the senior people really want, what their big picture is and where you fit into it, and what sorts of questions they will ask. They will focus on the big issues, not the detail. If you focus only on the detail, you are likely to be wrong-footed by questions about the big picture.
• Be prepared. You never know when you might bump into a senior person. You can then chat about the weather, if you want. But, if you are prepared, you can engage them in an impromptu, but substantive, discussion about your agenda (see the box below).

Managing your career: career is a noun and a verb

For some people career is a noun: it describes a steady progression from bright-eyed graduate to the point of retiring where a grateful employer gives you a carriage clock for 40 years of loyal service. For others, it is a verb that describes a roller coaster of experience as you move between roles and employers: the highs are high, the lows are low and there is no carriage clock, but there are a lot of memories.

Whether you choose to have a career or to career through life, you still need to manage your journey. Even the best managers can be lousy at managing their own career. They are then frustrated when less accomplished colleagues pass them by on the up escalator to the top. With a little PQ, you can manage your career well. Career management is not a substitute for good performance, but it is a way of ensuring you are recognised for good performance.

The box below summarises how you can manage your career – or how to career – successfully.

This section explores each of these themes in a little more detail.

Find your calling

Management is hard work. Occasionally, it can be exciting, exhilarating and even terrifying. But often it is dull. We can all sustain a high level of effort for a few weeks or even months when there is a real crunch. But a career is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to sustain high levels of effort for decades, not for days. You have to keep on putting in discretionary effort. You can do this only if you enjoy what you do.

The words enjoy and work rarely go together. The whole work–life balance industry is based on the implicit premise that work is not enjoyable and should be reduced. When did you last hear a work–life balance guru advocating more work?

Enjoying work is not like social enjoyment. It is about finding fulfilment and satisfaction in the work itself. An easy test is to see how fast time passes. When you are bored, an hour stretches to eternity. When you are deeply engrossed in something, time flies past. When you lose yourself in your work, you are on the way to finding meaning and satisfaction in what you do. This sense of fulfilment does not have to come from changing the world. Look at craftspeople working: they often concentrate so hard on what they are doing that the outside world disappears for them. Whatever your calling may be, find it.

In working with and interviewing senior leaders, I often hear them complain about how hard they work, the late evenings and the long travel. But it is a façade: it is their way of showing off. Listen harder, and you find they enjoy every minute of their time. Their greatest fear is retirement: that is when they lose meaning and purpose. It is the same with top sports people. They may complain about the long hours and the endless, tedious training. But there is nothing else in the world that they would rather do.

Of course, it takes effort to reach the top and to be your best. You can do these things only if you enjoy them. You excel only at what you enjoy, so find what you enjoy.

Find the right organisation

Just as there is no such thing as the perfect leader, so there is no such thing as the perfect organisation. You always have to make some trade-offs. And, to make things harder, you never really know what you are letting yourself in for until it is too late. Any employer likes to present its best face to the world: you discover reality only when you have joined. The grass always looks greener on the other side of the hill. So, remember that it is greenest where it rains the most. You cannot have it all.

You can tilt the odds in your favour by knowing what to look for:

• Will this firm grow or fail?
• Will I acquire useful skills?
• Will my track record be recognised?
• Is it the right culture for me?

Note that pay is not on the list. If you make a decision about your career based on 10 per cent here or there next year, you are focusing on the wrong issue. If pay counts, take the long-term view and ask: ‘How can I be earning ten times this amount in (say) ten years’ time?’ That gives you a better test of the opportunities that lie ahead and what you will have to do to succeed. If there is no chance of real income progression, then 10 per cent extra today does not help you very much at all.

Find the right role

Clearly, the right role has to be one that you enjoy and that plays to your strengths. But it also needs to be a role that will let you grow your career. This leads you in two opposite directions:

• Go to the heart of power: at head office you have access and visibility with all the power players, but it is hard to stand out. Power attracts talent like honey attracts bees: you will be in the middle of intense competition.
• Go to an outpost of empire: here you have freedom to experiment, grow yourself and create a claim to fame. But, you will be out of the power and communications loops, unless you are careful.

Here is how to manage the trade-offs.

Find the right boss

Most career grief comes from having a bad boss. As a coach, this is where I find many clients struggle: how to deal with a problem boss. It is also true that many people do not leave their employer: they leave their boss. We have already looked at how you can deal with a bad boss. But the best way of dealing with a bad boss is to make sure you have a good boss. Prevention is better than cure.

You can leave choice of your boss to the random walk of the HR and assignment system, which is called hoping to get lucky. But hope is not a method and luck is not a strategy. At minimum, you should weight the dice in your favour.

In practice, everyone knows who the bad bosses are. Their reputation precedes them. And, you probably know a few bosses who you trust and want to work for. So, now you have to make sure you get picked for the right team.

First, make yourself useful to the prospective good boss. Bosses always need a helping hand with a discretionary project, an idea they are chasing, a speech they want to make, or information they are looking for. Put in some discretionary effort. Show interest in what the boss is doing and perhaps ask the boss for some advice. Engage with the boss and role model being a great team member: positive, enthusiastic, with initiative and action focus. They will notice and next time they are looking for a team your name will be on their wish list.

Equally, when the Death Star bosses are looking for victims, copy Harry Potter. Put on the cloak of invisibility. Make sure you are very, very busy and completely indispensable on your existing work. The Death Star boss will pass by and look for easier victims elsewhere.

You cannot always have the boss you want. When you land up with a bad boss, do not panic. Remember that the corporate carousel keeps on turning, and no boss lasts forever. And, you can always learn, even from the bad bosses. Many of the lessons may be about how you do not want to do things yourself. But there is a reason that your boss has become a boss: there will be something that they do that the organisation values. Understand that, and you will have gained one more insight about how you can succeed.

Find the right assignments

If you know the principles for finding the right organisation, role and boss, then you already know the principles for finding the right assignment. These are:

• Be proactive – do not wait to be assigned, but find what you want.
• Find something you may enjoy, with a good boss.
• Play to your strengths, and build new ones.

It is the last principle that is the tricky one. Any employer wants you to do more of what you are good at. I had one team member who did an excellent job at building a business case for an IT investment for a life insurance company. He was brilliant at it, and it led to clients signing up to multi-million investments. So he spent the next three years doing exactly the same thing for different clients. He had a claim to fame, but his career went nowhere because he became boxed into an obscure area of technical expertise. He had happily gone along with this because he was in his comfort zone. He knew he could succeed as everyone liked what he did and he had to take no risks.

You need to play to your strengths and build your claim to fame. But you also need to be building your skills base for the future. Be prepared to stretch yourself and take some risks in doing new things, otherwise you will stagnate. Keep one eye on the present and one on the future when taking on new assignments.

Build your network

Management is becoming twenty-first century slavery, with the twist that we are all volunteering to become slaves. The twentieth-century hype was of a consumer society where we can have anything, any time and any place 24/7. The twenty-first century reality is the 24/7 manager who has to do anything, any time and any place – and lives in working hell. We wear our technology shackles with pride. Managers compete to see whose shackles are the newest and best: tablet, computer, internet service, smartphones and more.

Our ultimate slave drivers are the merciless demands of the market. Our immediate slave drivers are our own bosses. We have a very unequal relationship with them. They matter greatly to us, but we are less important to them. If we leave in a huff, complaining about being treated like a slave, we only help make our boss look good: they will record that we were not up to the job, did not have the drive and were not a real contributor, so they made the tough decision and let us go. They look like heroes, and we have just become zeroes.

We let ourselves become real slaves to our bosses when we become totally dependent on them. If they are benign slave drivers, they will look after us and make sure we get the good jobs (not cleaning out the lavatories), get well rewarded and, maybe, even get promoted. If they are evil slave drivers, our lives will be a misery.

To buy some freedom, we need to find ways of becoming less than 100 per cent dependent on the whims of our boss. We need some allies and a network of support.

Ultimately, your security does not come from your employer but from your employability. Make sure that you are building the right skills and right track record for the future. This is your plan B, if things go wrong with your boss. With the right skills and right track record, you will be in demand from people in your network: at a minimum, they will be ready to recommend you to employers who will want your skills and track record.

Build your skills

At risk of repetition, the skills you need today are not the skills you need tomorrow.

There are two reasons for this.

First, any technical skills you have today are at risk. All skills can become obsolete through changes in technology or in the market. Even if they do not become obsolete, you will find yourself being challenged by younger, hungrier and cheaper talent with the same skillset. Your experience will help for a while, but it becomes ever harder to compete.

Second, the management skills you need to succeed change at each level of the organisation. This is discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

In the short term, life in the comfort zone is low risk. You stick with the skills you know, you play to your strengths and you do well. In the longer term, life in the comfort zone is fatal. You will find yourself in a skills dead end, being outcompeted by cheaper, younger skills or technology. You have to keep pushing yourself, stretching yourself to learn new skills that will help you build a better future.

Build your claim to fame

We all like to think we are exceptional. There are not many people who would admit to being worse than average at driving, loving, intelligence, achievement or work. At work we are surrounded by people of similar ability to ourselves. They think they are better than us, and we think we are better than them. This is logically impossible but emotionally inevitable.

You need something that easily sets you apart from your colleagues. In a crowded market for promotions, you need to be able to differentiate yourself in some way. Here are three basic ways of achieving differentiation and a claim to fame:

• Exceptional achievement. This has to be demonstrably better than your colleagues. In sales and trading, performance is easy to measure. In many other roles, performance is much more ambiguous.
• Starting something. New initiatives are ever present in most organisations. Not all will succeed, but they offer managers the chance to build a distinctive claim to fame, while learning and growing at the same time.
• Changing something. Managers have to change things and, hopefully, improve them. Failure to change things ranks a manager as an administrator or caretaker. It is not enough simply to do the job: you have to show improvement.

Once you have a claim to fame, you need to stake your claim. If you do not, you will find plenty of people who come out of the woodwork to claim their share of the success you have created. There are simple ways of staking your claim to fame:

• Congratulate and thank people for their contribution. People like public recognition, and you are giving it to them. By congratulating them, you are also showing that you were in the lead role.
• Review and discuss the challenges and lessons learned. This requires a level of knowledge about the initiative, which probably only you have. It demonstrates your mastery of the programme.
• Stay in control and build on success. Take the lead in discussing how to take the initiative to the next stage. This will keep people off your bandwagon because it implies that more work is required (which they do not have time for) and it requires deep knowledge of what is happening, which they lack.

Claims to fame also come whenever you work with top executives. Make a good impression and you have a claim to fame, whereas if you make a poor impression you have a claim to infamy. The top executive will judge your track record through the warped lens of their personal experience of you. If you impressed them well, they will interpret your track record favourably. Otherwise, they will regard it suspiciously. This may be unfair, but it is reality. So, you have to make the most of those limited opportunities to meet senior executives. Their limited direct contact with you will influence their thinking more than all the formal HR assessments, which are often exercises in box ticking and propaganda.

Given that moments of truth count, make sure you do the following:

• Over-prepare for presentations to top executives as this is your chance to shine, so shine brightly.
• Act as a role model: be positive, professional and proactive.
• Find opportunities to engage positively with senior executives. These informal opportunities arise all the time – before and after meetings, at conferences, over lunch. Do not hide, shine.

Act the part

All organisations are tribal: they have their rules and etiquette that all members are expected to follow. These rules vary by level and by function: the culture of sales is usually very different from the culture of accounting. And the culture of new managers is different from the culture of the board room. If you want to join the club, you have to show that you know the club rules and will follow them. We can debate whether such tribalism is good or bad, but we still have to deal with it. That means you have to act the part.

Acting the part is both style and substance. Ultimately, you have to work out the rules for yourself. Some places still believe you have to put your liver on the line to succeed, while in others it seems mandatory to wear ripped jeans and t-shirts. The rules are often bizarre, but you ignore them at your peril.

Below are some common rules that will help you act the part in most places and roles.

Control your destiny

The best book you never need to read is called Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Noel Tichy and Stratford Sherman. Once you have read the title, you have read the most important message of the book. The rest is detail.

This is the fundamental truth of career management. We have to take control of our destiny, even if that is hard at times. If your career is going wrong, it is easy to rage against the evils of your boss or against the malign forces of fate. These are troubled waters, which everyone has to navigate at some point. If you want to find out who is responsible for your fate, look in the mirror.

Career may turn out to be a verb or a noun for you: whichever it is, make the most of it.

Playing the game: manage the politics

Organisational politics are seen often as a highly dysfunctional game played by dysfunctional managers. This view is often right. But all organisations have politics. Used well, political skills enable you to make things happen through other people and departments. Politics becomes a way of extending your power and capability. As in Star Wars, politics is a force that has a good side and a dark side.

In this section, we will explore the different sorts of games that managers can play, and show how useful each one is. The emphasis of this book is on playing productive political games. The dark side can indeed be powerful, but it is very dangerous, and often costly to the organisation as a whole. We will look at three major types of political games:

• Win/lose games
• Appearances games
• Performance games.

Achieve and use influence: become the trusted manager

At the heart of PQ is the idea of influence. Influence allows you to extend your power beyond your formal limit of authority. This lets you achieve more by harnessing the power of your colleagues to make things happen.

Influence is not just about what you do. It is also about how you are. The way you behave will help you become more or less influential. Your shorthand guide to influence surrounds you at work: look at who has influence beyond their own area, and see how they act and behave. They are the role models to follow.

Behind the obvious rules of influence lies a deeper rule: the influential manager is a trusted manager. Put it the other way around and it is very hard to become influential if no one trusts you. Without trust, no one will want to work with you, although they may occasionally have to work with you. Trust is the currency of influence: the more trust you acquire, the more influential you can become.

Influence is not about popularity. If you seek popularity, you will find weakness. If you are weak, you make promises, you accept excuses, and you avoid confrontation. In the short term, you may be popular. In the longer term, you become weaker and irrelevant. It is better to be trusted and respected than it is to be popular. It is a lesson politicians around the world struggle with.

The best way to destroy trust is to go around saying, ‘Trust me …’ You cannot claim trust, you have to build trust. Here is a simple way of thinking about how you can build trust, captured in the form of an equation:

where:

t = trust
a = alignment
c = credibility
r = risk

Here is how you can put these terms to use.

Alignment

We trust people who are like ourselves. This is not good news for diversity, but it is human nature. At work, some people will be like you in that they will come from a similar background, share similar tastes, may well be a similar age and same sex and race as you. It is easy to strike up a relationship with such people.

If you find yourself with someone from a completely different background, it is much harder to find any affinity with them. But you can help yourself and them. Take time to listen to them. Let them talk about their favourite subject: themselves. Just the act of listening helps you build a relationship. In a world where everyone is too busy and self-important, it is flattering to have someone listen to what you have to say and to appear interested in your story. Listening also gives you valuable information. It tells you where you may have common interests or experiences. As you discover that you both have more in common than expected, you will start to find some degree of alignment. You have started to build the first building block of trust.

Credibility

Alignment is good, but not enough. When we go out with friends, we will have plenty of alignment in terms of common interests. Whether all your friends would make good colleagues is another matter. We have to know we can rely on them to deliver.

Credibility is about doing as you say. At this point, most people react indignantly and say, ‘Well, of course, I always do what I say: you’re not implying that I don’t keep my word, are you?’ Of course, you will be acutely aware of times when peers have failed to deliver to you. And we are all someone else’s peer. When we fail to deliver, we sometimes do not even realise it.

There are always reasons why we cannot deliver. Maybe we were let down by someone else: parts were not delivered, analysis we required came too late, and the information was incomplete. In our minds, we have not failed to deliver: someone else has failed to deliver and we are the victims of their incompetence. In the mind of the person to whom we did not deliver, we are the incompetent person who failed to deliver. They do not care about our excuses: all they know is that we did not deliver.

And then there is the question of expectations. Some of the most dangerous words in management are: ‘I hope… I will try… I intend… I may… We could… We might…’ In our minds, we have not made any commitment at all, beyond hoping or trying. But, what you say and what is heard are completely different. What is heard is, ‘I will…’ Later, when you say you tried, the other person will think, ‘You failed.’

This means credibility comes in two parts. The first, obvious part is that you have to deliver. Failure to deliver destroys credibility. Credibility is like a vase: once broken it is hard to put back together again. And excuses are as convincing as repairing a Ming vase with sticky tape.

The less obvious part of credibility is about expectations. You have to be ruthlessly clear about setting expectations. This is difficult. It is human nature to want to please. In the moment, you might use the words ‘I hope… I will try…’ If you find these words passing your lips, check yourself and ask why you have any doubt about delivering. Then explain your doubts and conditions very clearly. It is better to have a difficult conversation early, that sets expectations clearly, than it is to find excuses later. That is a far harder conversation to have.

Risk

Trust is not an on/off switch. We have degrees of trust in people. You may trust a stranger in the street to give you directions. You would be unwise to trust a stranger in the street with your life savings. The same applies at work. You have to earn trust step by step. Show that you can deliver on the small things, and slowly you will be trusted to deliver on bigger things.

The alternative way of dealing with risk is to reduce it. If you want to take on a risky project, reduce its perceived risk: break it down into small pieces with clear reviews at each step. You may not be trusted with the entire project, but you will be entrusted with each piece of it.

Your network of trust is a vital asset that makes you an effective manager where you work. You discover just how valuable this asset is when you change employer. Suddenly you find you have no networks, you do not know who to call on to make things happen, you have no track record and you have to start earning trust and respect all over again. It is seriously hard work.

Influence and trust are invisible advantages, which makes them all the more powerful. Your peers will see you are more effective, but will not quite understand why. They are useful PQ tools: build them, use them.