EQ is not about being nice for the sake of being nice. Organisations are not created to deliver niceness. Organisations are created to deliver results, which in the case of private-sector companies normally come in the form of profits. EQ is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end.
EQ is about knowing how to get other people to do things. This places it at the heart of management. EQ is not the same as command and control. It is about being able to use influence to get other people to do things willingly, regardless of whether or not you have formal control over them. To make things happen in most flat, matrix organisations it is not possible to tell people to do things as you have no control over them. You have to find ways of working with them that gain their active support and commitment. If you can do this, you will wield power and have effectiveness, which goes far beyond your official job title.
EQ is not an innate characteristic that either you have or do not have. There are many managers who think they are very good with people. They may even be right. But being liked is not the same thing as being respected and valued in a business context. Effective managers need to be respected and trusted: they do not need to be liked. This is not a new insight. Machiavelli (1469–1527) advises his Prince that ‘it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both’. He then recommends a few exemplary executions to maintain order. While such drastic action is not always necessary, the fate of many likeable people is salutary: you often find them languishing in organisational backwaters where their ineffectiveness does not matter.
Learning EQ starts with a Copernican revolution. Copernicus discovered that Planet Earth is not the centre of the universe. EQ starts with the discovery that we are not at the centre of the universe. Effective EQ requires that we can see the world through the eyes of other people. We do not have to like what we see or agree with it. But we must understand the perspectives of other people. Only when we understand their view of the world can we hope to change it.
EQ is best learned as a series of discrete skills that have immediate relevance to essential management tasks. The skills-based approach to EQ is simple and practical. The following sections will focus on ten EQ-based skills that are at the heart of management.
The alert reader may wonder if persuading and motivating people are different: they are. Persuading people often is an event. It is about gaining other people’s support for an idea or course of action. It is, effectively, a transaction between two people where you persuade someone to agree to an idea. Motivating people is not about a single transaction: it is about creating a longer-term relationship with the result that they will do what you want without being constantly managed, measured and monitored. Well motivated, they will go above and beyond expectations and do more than is strictly necessary.
The truly critical reader will have noticed the omission of topics such as change management and political awareness. These are covered in detail under PQ, which focuses on how the manager and the organisation interact, whereas EQ focuses more on how the manager and other individuals interact.
Without further ado, let us look at each of these EQ-heavy skills.
After a few hundred thousand years of human existence, we may finally be working out what motivates people. To find the answer, we will look first at two theories that continue to dominate management thinking. Then we will look at how you can use the ideas in practice.
For the first theory, imagine any work group that you particularly dislike inside or beyond your organisation. Then imagine a group that you particularly enjoy working with. Which of the following two descriptions best fits each group you have chosen?
They are, essentially, lazy and work-shy. They work mainly for the money, which they will maximise. They will minimise the amount of effort, doing only what is consistent with avoiding disciplinary action or loss of earnings. They dislike risk, ambiguity and responsibility. They like leaving all the tough decisions to other people: then they get to complain about the stupid decisions that have been made on their behalf. The best way to control these people is through close monitoring, clear rewards and sanctions, and unambiguous direction.
With proper management, these people can be committed: they will work hard and use some degree of creativity to overcome problems without seeking direction. They will seek responsibility rather than avoid it and clearly get more out of work than just a monthly salary. These people can be trusted with delegated tasks, do not need close supervision and will learn and grow in their jobs.
The chances are that you can identify people who belong to both groups. Each group needs to be managed in a different way. In theory, Type X individuals characterise the nineteenth-century sweatshop full of unskilled labour, and Type Y individuals characterise the twenty-first century highly skilled and highly motivated workforce in advanced economies. In practice, both sorts can be found in all kinds of environments. There is also a large element of self-fulfilment here. If you treat people as if they cannot be trusted and need to be controlled, they will start responding to Type X management with Type X behaviour – they will do the minimum to comply with you, but they will demonstrate little commitment. Equally, start managing in Type Y style, and people are likely to respond positively.
These two types of individual were described by McGregor in The Human Side of Enterprise in 1960. Nearly 60 years later, the idea of Type X managers (close control, tough managers) and Type Y managers (delegating, trusting types) still exists. The big insights from Type X and Type Y have the virtue of simplicity:
You either need to find the right context where your style works, or you have to adapt your style to different situations. Think of most managers you have worked with: very few are able to switch between Type X and Type Y. Style conflicts are at the heart of most dysfunctional team management problems.
If you want to be sophisticated, you need something a bit more fancy than a straight choice between two alternatives, which is as simple as tossing a coin and calling ‘X’ or ‘Y’. So move aside McGregor and make way for Maslow. Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs in a series of articles and books from 1943 (A Theory of Human Motivation) to 1997 (Motivation and Personality). It pays to know about Maslow because his name and his thinking pervade much management thought. His thinking is genuinely useful.
Maslow’s fundamental insight is that we are all needs junkies. There is always something more that we want. Once we have satisfied one level of need, we find there is something more that we want. As children, we want a pushbike, then we want a motorbike, then a car. Then to keep up with colleagues, we graduate to a sports car, then a private jet to keep up with other CEOs and, finally, we need our own personal jumbo jet. We laugh at anyone left on their pushbike. Maslow came at this from a psychological background. Economists notice the same effect and call it hedonic adaptation: we adjust up to a higher standard of living more easily than we adjust down. If you were happy 20 years ago, think if you would still be happy without your iPad, smartphone, computer, internet connection and cheap flights. Quite how anyone survived 20 years ago is a mystery.
At the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid (see Figure 3.1 below) are deficiency needs: if we do not have food, water and air (physiological needs), we are likely to be unhappy. Safety is also a deficit need: we are unhappy without shelter and protection. At the top of the pyramid we have growth needs. We want to find meaning and leave a legacy. Much of this echoes the work of other psychologists, and is not greatly controversial. Having said that, Maslow’s categories are dangerously close to psychobabble and are largely useless in a management context. Asking the CEO if he is at the love stage is open to misinterpretation. Knowing what stage people are at and knowing what to do about it are not obvious.
Managers need something easier and more practical. So here (in Figure 3.2) is a revisionist, unauthorised alternative to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: the management hierarchy of needs.
Figure 3.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Figure 3.2 The management hierarchy of needs
This starts to be easier to work with. In boom times, staff may be lobbying for greater recognition and reward. They may have lofty thoughts of the legacy they will deliver. In recession, people become very interested in job security and will even sacrifice some pay and conditions just to survive. Maslow makes sense over the business cycle. In normal times, pay and conditions are unlikely to make people happy, but getting them wrong can make people unhappy.
Working with an investment bank at bonus time was a revelation. One senior trader was given a $300,000 bonus, which would be enough for most people. He quickly resigned in disgust (pausing only to deposit the cheque into his account). A close colleague had received $500,000. The problem was that the money was recognising him as less valuable than his colleague. For an executive who was clearly at the recognition and reward stage of his career, this was a terrible blow to his fragile, supersized ego.
At a basic level, you can use this framework to see if the basic conditions are in place for having a motivated team:
If you can answer these questions positively, you have gone a long way to creating the conditions for a motivated team. But you have not gone all the way: motivation is not about systems on bits of paper. Motivation is an engagement sport: you have to deal with people, not paper, to motivate humans. There will be some managers who turn this hierarchy on its head and rule by fear and constant threats. People may have to work for such bosses to pay the mortgage. Few people choose to work with such bosses.
Maslow helps us understand only how to create the pre-conditions for a motivated team. He does not tell us how to deal with people on a day-to-day and minute-to-minute basis.
In practice, motivation is happening positively or negatively all the time. Small actions and a few words can raise or lower the motivation thermostat for each individual fast. This means you have to react quickly and well to constantly changing situations: humans are not as predictable as computers.
To find out what made a good manager, we assessed all the managers in our organisation and then asked their teams to assess the managers as well. There was a mountain of data that was largely indigestible and very confusing. But the more we looked, the more we found that there was one question that accurately predicted how well each manager would be rated by their team for intelligence, decision-making ability, charisma, organisational skills, team leadership and all the other qualities we looked for. The question was: ‘My boss cares about me and my career’ (agree/disagree).
This was so simple and so obvious. People want to be cared for, valued and respected as individuals. Do this, and they will repay your efforts many times over. So, the emerging golden rule for motivation is:
Show you care about the future of each individual on your team.
Caring is not about being sugar-sweet nice all the time and one-minute managing people with empty compliments. It takes commitment and hard work on both sides. It involves the following qualities, which will be covered in more detail in later sections:
If this sounds like hard work, it is. But it is hard work with a purpose: to encourage each team member to contribute to the greatest of his or her ability. And if it all sounds a little complicated, it can be made simple. Even trying to show you care has an immediate impact.
You cannot tell everyone what to do, so you have to persuade them to do things. If you manage, you sell. You sell ideas, priorities, changes and solutions to colleagues, even if you never sell products and services to customers.
Fear, greed, idleness and risk may not be the most uplifting guides to human behaviour but, in management terms, they work with unerring accuracy. These are the four dimensions you need to use to influence someone (see Figure 3.3 below). People want to escape fear, strive for something (greed and hope), but face the two barriers of risk and idleness. A good influencer knows how to play on all four of these dimensions.
Greed corresponds to Maslow’s growth needs: everyone wants something and, when they get it, they want something more. To start with, they may want money. But greed is not just about money. People want other things. People like to be recognised. It may be something as simple as praise in public for a job well done. Or it can be the ambitious business person seeking political recognition and public honour through good works and political donations. Persuasion does not start with what you want: it starts by finding out what the other person wants.
In daily management practice, greed can be translated into the everyday hopes of colleagues. They have goals and deadlines to meet. They want to look good and to succeed. It does not matter how brilliant your idea may be – if it does not help your colleagues with their agendas you can expect a lukewarm response. Your idea may look great to you, but it could look like more work for them.
Fear is the other side of the coin to greed. It can be a very compelling way of gaining compliance with your idea. In many cases, the proposal is simple: ‘If you do not do this the consequences will be…’ At the first mention of regulatory, legal, health and safety concerns, many managers give up. It is not worth taking the risk of letting these things go wrong, even if the risk is very small, but the cost is very large. Playing to fear is also used by IT consultants: if you do not implement our very expensive project, then all your mission-critical programmes are at risk. Many senior executives lack the technical expertise or will to argue against such fear-based selling.
Fear is also relative. Cost-cutting programmes normally increase fear, not reduce it. That is one reason why they are resisted overtly or covertly. To build support for cost-cutting programmes, senior executives play up the even greater fear of what happens if we do not cut costs now: ‘If we do not cut costs now, we might all lose our jobs as the company goes bankrupt: better to lose a few people now than to lose everyone later.’
There are many things we would like to do. But life is busy. We might want to learn Spanish, get fit, become a painter and get involved in the community. But these things take effort and, in the meantime, we have the bills to pay, the dog to feed and the car has broken down again. At work, you have your great idea. But everyone else has other problems to attend to: budgets, meetings, deadlines and crises. Your idea is one more item on an already overcrowded list. Colleagues may like your idea, but not enough to stop working on their priorities to help you achieve yours.
You have to make it easy for people to accept your idea. Show how your idea will make it easier for them to achieve their goals by showing the opposite scenario: opposing your idea will take up huge amounts of their time and will result in lost opportunities. Make it difficult for them to say no.
Risk is the iceberg that sinks many ideas. It is often unseen and unspoken. Most people are naturally risk-averse. Any new idea inevitably carries all sorts of risks with it: it may not work, it may divert resources from other things, it may have unintended consequences, or it may lead to a change in the power structure. At any meeting, listen to what happens when any new idea is raised (unless the idea comes from the boss). Immediately, people will start asking helpful questions along the lines of ‘Have you thought of this or that…?’ These helpful ideas have the effect of:
This is an unproductive outcome that could be avoided if people focused on the benefits and opportunities of an idea, before focusing on all the risks and problems, unhelpfully disguised as asking helpful questions.
Risk comes in three main flavours:
It pays to know what sort of risk you are dealing with. Many arguments become increasingly bitter over apparently logical issues. When this happens, both sides start digging ever deeper holes, using logic to defend political and emotional positions. The best solution is to stop digging. Stop the discussion and find some time in private when the real issues can be raised and dealt with.
As with idleness, it pays to reverse the risk equation. Like fear, risk is relative. Show, if possible, that the risks of doing nothing significantly outweigh the risks of doing what you propose. Risk avoidance is a powerful way of gaining compliance. Insurance is sold entirely on the idea of risk avoidance. Government cannot persuade us to pay taxes or wear seat belts, but it makes the risks of not doing so high enough so that most people comply.
This is a process that I have used to sell nappies in Birmingham, to sell the idea of starting a new bank, and to get countless recommendations accepted in different organisations and countries. The process combines a logical and emotional flow designed to make it easy for the other person to agree, and difficult for them to disagree. The flow is not original: it is based on the sales disciplines that Procter & Gamble instils in its sales force.
The process has an acronym: PASSION, which stands for:
Preparation
Alignment
Situation
Size the prize
Idea
Overcome objections
Next steps
Think of the PASSION principle as a series of traffic lights. Do not proceed to the next part of the conversation until the lights have turned green at each step, otherwise you are likely to crash. It is a simple framework that allows you to work in the style you like: it is not a script you have to follow like a call centre operator.
Preparation is about asking some basic questions:
These are very obvious questions. They are very rarely asked, and you can look surprisingly smart by asking them when a team member comes and seeks your advice on how to plan an influencing meeting. Although the questions may be obvious, the answers often are not. Many of them are about understanding the other person’s hopes, fears, needs and wishes. If you do not understand this, you do not understand what you are selling.
A truism among sales people is that you have to sell yourself before you can sell your idea. We buy only from people we trust. You also need to make sure that the other person is in the right frame of mind to listen: if they are frantically trying to put out fires in their area, they may not want to listen to your great idea.
The process of alignment can take a few seconds if you already know each other well. In this case, alignment is complete when you know the following:
This social start needs only a few questions and statements, such as:
If you are meeting someone for the first time, alignment will take longer. You will need to build some rapport and trust. You can do this by finding a common interest, common acquaintances or common professional background. The purpose of such social chat is to build a basic level of trust by finding common experiences, values and outlooks.
This is where most persuading goes wrong or right. You cannot get to the right solution if you do not know what the question is.
As with exams, it pays to know what the right question is. The classic mistake is to think that your problem or opportunity is the problem or opportunity that the other person wants to deal with. In reality, they have many other things to worry about. Buying the dog food may be more important to them than dealing with your issue.
Good influencing does not start with your idea. It starts with what the other person wants. You can preach as much as you want about your brilliant and urgent idea, but you may as well preach to the wall if you do not understand where the other person is coming from. So, if you want to influence well, start by listening and not by preaching.
History is littered with brilliant ideas that failed. Clive Sinclair, a British boffin, developed a vehicle called the C5. It was all-electric and would revolutionise urban transport. It might have done, if anyone had been able to stop laughing at the bug-like vehicle that was so low to the ground that it needed a flag at its rear end to alert other road users to its presence. And it could carry only one person, and it was open to the elements, and it had a limited range. It was technically brilliant but completely failed to solve a customer need. It disappeared faster than the funding of its backers into a black hole.
The purpose of agreeing the problem is to force attention and gain legitimacy for the issue. These can be:
To make the problem compelling, you have to show that it is important, urgent and that the other person has a role to play in sorting it out.
Do not even start to suggest a solution until there is hard agreement about the nature of the challenge. Invite them to talk about it: hear and understand their perspective. As you listen, you can work out how to pitch your idea so that it hits all the right buttons and avoids the red flags, which might stop the idea from their perspective.
You need to identify not just the problem, but who owns the problem. If you are helping the other person with one of their challenges, you are more likely to find an open door and an available diary than if you are solving your own problem.
In business, the most compelling business case is financial. It is very hard to argue against a credible and compelling business case: £1,000 invested now will save £2,000 tomorrow. The critical issue is whether anyone believes your claim. Your claim must be credible. This can be achieved through a combination of rigorous analysis and, more importantly, validation by trusted third parties: finance validates the financial numbers, marketing validates the customer and market assumptions, and operations and IT validate their parts of the equation. Line up the technical experts in support of your claim: use their credibility to support your case.
Not all benefits are financial. Non-financial business cases can be both quantifiable (‘we will recruit more top graduates next year’) and qualitative (‘this is important for morale’).
At this point, there still should be no mention of your idea or solution. Once the other person has agreed to both the problem and the benefits of solving the solution, then the only discussion is ‘How do we best get there?’ Then they are ready to hear your idea. Even if they do not like it, they are now in a position where they are not just trying to evaluate your idea, but they are helping you find a path from the problem to the solution.
Provide a simple explanation of your idea. Keep it short. Show that you do not need them to do everything: you need a limited amount of support in one critical area to progress. Then quickly move on to the next stage.
If you have listened well in the first four steps, you will be able to frame your idea in the language of the other person, and you will be able to show how it helps them. Suggest your idea only when you are confident that you understand the other person and that they are ready to agree with you.
If you have done your preparation well, and you listened to them when you were discussing the original problem, this should be easy: you should know exactly what their concerns are. Do not hide from these objections: use them as a chance to shine. If you now say: ‘I think there are three real concerns with this approach…’ and these concerns reflect the major concerns of the other person, suddenly you will have them on your side. They are no longer going to have to challenge you with their objections. You are inviting them to work with you on solving the concerns. The nature of the discussion has changed completely. You have changed your role from being a pesky sales person to being an impartial and trusted partner.
If the objections start to flow at this point, do not engage in fighting each objection in an ever bloodier version of corporate trench warfare. Go back to step three: check that you both agree on the problem, then agree on the benefits of solving the problem. You need to create a problem-solving atmosphere, not a problem-generating atmosphere.
Most people are not psychic: they will not know exactly what you want. You have to ask them for it. They expect you to ask: otherwise it will have been a pretty pointless meeting. But this is where many executives fail. They are too self-effacing to ask for the next steps. There are four simple ways of asking for the next steps that make it quite difficult for the other person to refuse:
The weakest close is the direct one, because you invite people to say ‘no’. The sneakiest, and often most effective, is the alternative close. You are not giving them the option of saying no to the widget order, but are inviting them to choose only how they should be ordered. The assumed close is a power close because it takes quite a strong person to speak up, especially in a public meeting, and disagree.
At this stage, your preparation is often vital. Over the course of your meeting, you may discover that your plan A is not viable. If you have prepared properly, you will have a plan B and plan C, which will allow you to find a way forward rather than finding a dead end.
Preparation: understand what you want and what motivates the other person.
Alignment: build trust and rapport and make sure the other person is ready to talk.
Situation: make sure you both agree the problem, opportunity or exam question.
Size the prize: jointly agree the benefits of solving the problem you have agreed.
Idea: suggest your idea in the language of the other person.
Overcome objections: do not fight them, agree with them and work jointly to solve them.
Next steps: be clear about what happens next, be ready with your plan B.
All great persuaders and sales people share a common characteristic: they have two ears and one mouth. If you have this, then you are halfway to becoming very good at persuasion. Good influencers and leaders not only have two ears and one mouth, they also use them in that proportion. Persuasion is not about selling and telling. It is about listening well. If you listen twice as much as you talk, you are well on the way to success.
Bosses and clients are used to acting as judges: they judge all the ideas coming before them. This is not a constructive relationship. Typically, it involves the plaintiff pitching his case with a stack of PowerPoint slides and memos to impress the judge. The judge then picks a few holes in the presentation to show she is smart and decides for or against the plaintiff.
A much better way is to turn the boss or client into a partner and a coach. Show that you are there to help with their problem or opportunity, not just to advance your own agenda. Throw away the PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides are the badge of shame that junior staff and sales people have to wear. Colleagues do not talk to each other over a stack of slides: they talk to each other over a cup of coffee. By throwing away the slides you:
Do not worry about the data. Have a few killer facts in your mind. Then you can offer to send across the detail later.
If you listen really well, you can convince the other person that the big idea was theirs all along. You reinforce the useful things they say and ignore the unhelpful things. Do not argue if it is not necessary. Build agreement where possible. When you have enough agreement, summarise what they were saying and thank them for their insight. Your idea is now theirs and you have succeeded: no one argues against their own idea.
In most sports there are players and there are coaches. Players play and coaches coach, but rarely do coaches play or players coach. There is a huge divide between the two. The best players rarely make the best coaches. The best coaches were often journeymen players.
In management, things are not quite so clear-cut, with unfortunate consequences. The good player (IT specialist, sales person or trader) gets promoted and their natural instinct is to go on playing. Playing is what got them promoted and there seems little point in changing a winning formula. But formulas win only if conditions remain the same. Promotion changes everything, as we will discover in more detail in Chapter 5.
The newly promoted player naturally wants to take on all the most challenging tasks. This is precisely the wrong approach. The role of the coach is not to make all the tackles and score all the goals for the team. The role of the coach is to help the team achieve all these things, to bring out the best in each individual and to organise members effectively. The more the coach tries to be the best player, the more the team learns dependency. They rely on the coach to do everything. The coach thinks this shows the team is weak, so redoubles already Herculean efforts to make up for the team’s weaknesses. The coach is playing ever harder to achieve ever worse results with a team that becomes ever more dependent. Eventually, there is an explosion and the coach is fired or gives up in total exhaustion.
The hardest lesson to learn for the newly promoted manager is to move from playing to coaching. Coaching is important for the following reasons:
Coaching, like persuasion, is about listening and asking smart questions. This is easier to say than to do. When a team member comes to you looking for advice, the overwhelming instinct is to give them the answer. As soon as you do that, you have become a player again and the team member has learned nothing except to depend on you even more. Giving the answer may be quick in the short term, but creates a dependent team long term that will suck out all your time and energy. If you help members discover the answer for themselves, you may also find that they have a better answer than the one you first thought of. At a minimum, they will feel more commitment to a solution they have created than the one you have imposed on them.
There are many coaching models available. In essence, they all boil down to roughly the same five-step process. For alliterative purposes, we will arrange them into the five Os:
At each stage, it is more important to know the right questions than to have the right answers. As a coach you bring a different perspective, not a nicely wrapped solution. You do not tell someone what to do. You help them discover what works for them. Bosses tell, coaches ask. Most managers default to the safety of training: ‘Do it my way.’ This is safe in the short term, but it fails to help each team member achieve their full potential.
Step one is to understand the problem we are solving. This is the same logic as the persuasion model outlined above:
What is it that you want to focus on, achieve, review today?
The next step is to gather all the facts before forming a view or making a judgement. This takes some gentle probing, in which you encourage discussion of different perspectives. Do not get locked into the world view of the person being coached: you have to help them see a broader perspective.
What are the potential consequences, good or bad, of this?
This is where you get them to take responsibility and control. By this stage, you may think you know the answer. Stop yourself. They will value a solution they discover more than a solution which you impose. That means they are more likely to act on it with conviction.
Push them to think of more than one option. In very difficult situations, there may not be much they can control: urge them to find something they can control. The more people feel a sense of control over their destiny, the less anxious they will feel. Then get them to evaluate the options they have generated:
As they evaluate each option, they will gravitate naturally towards one solution. If in doubt, back their solution not yours. You want them to be committed. They will be committed to making their idea work. If you impose your solution, they will be committed to showing it does not work.
This is your reality check. Ask simple questions:
If you fail to ask these questions, you run the risk that they will give up when things start to get tough. But, if you have both predicted the challenges, you will be better prepared for them and you will be able to keep going.
Finally, check for understanding. The big risk here is that you both feel happy and confident, but have different understandings about what happens next. Do not ask if they understand: a mumbled ‘yes’ often means ‘not really’. The best way to check for agreement is to ask them what they think happens next. They should say what you expect: if they say something different, you will have averted disaster by catching the misunderstanding early.
By now, you will have noticed some familiar themes running through both persuasion and coaching:
These may seem very obvious lessons. The reason for spelling them out is that very few managers consistently follow these principles. By following them, you will start to stand out from the crowd.
Many managers find it difficult to delegate. Common excuses include:
All these excuses come down to lack of trust in the team and an inflated sense of the manager’s unique skill. And they all condemn the manager to becoming overworked and the team to becoming over-dependent on the manager. Your team will grow only if you can delegate and trust it.
Delegating and coaching go hand in hand. They both ensure that managers achieve the core task of management: getting other people to do things. The process of delegation is simple.
Don’t ask ‘What can I delegate?’ because that will result in a very short list. Ask ‘What can I not delegate?’ In practice, there is very little you cannot delegate: evaluations, promotions, disciplinary procedures, resource allocation and team formation are all your responsibility. Everything else you can delegate. That creates a much longer list of items you can delegate, and it will include not only fairly routine administrative and maintenance activities, but also a few more stretching and engaging initiatives.
Think carefully about who is best for which tasks. Balance their current capabilities versus their ability to learn and grow by doing the task. If a person is 60 per cent ready, then trust them. This can be nerve-racking, as you see them struggle with stuff that would be easy for you. But that is the best way they will learn. Once they have learned, they become more productive and valuable members of your team. Balance out the workload across the team. Given the ambiguous nature of managerial work, it is very difficult to estimate workloads in advance. In practice, you know which team members are shirkers and which are heroes who never complain about workloads.
When briefing a team member, you need to give clarity and certainty to four things:
Explaining why the goal matters gives vital context and meaning. ‘Why’ may be obvious to you, but not to your team. If your team understands why you are making a request, they will be in a much better position to respond to questions and challenges as they arise, instead of having to refer back to you. Investing time now will save much more time later by avoiding misunderstandings and re-work.
You can be clear about the goals, but you need to be flexible over the means.
This becomes a negotiation around several key topics:
This may be more than one conversation. The objective of this step is partly to set your team up for success. Equally, discussion gives your team a sense of ownership over the process. It might even come up with a really smart way of tackling the task that you had not thought about before.
A huge trap here is vagueness. If a team member says ‘I hope to… I will try… I will look into it…’, they are making vague promises that mean nothing. Misunderstanding inevitably follows. Be very clear about who does what by when. Do not ask your team if they understand because they will say ‘yes’, even if they do not understand. Ask them to summarise who will do what when. This quickly reveals any misunderstandings, before it is too late.
Managers delegate, never abdicate, responsibility. You are still responsible for the final outcome. Three key elements of the follow-up are:
Some managers try to steal the limelight at the end of a successful effort by their team. This demoralises the team and does not help the manager. You look much better to your bosses if you can show that you can build and manage a great team, than if you pretend to do all the hard work as a one-man band.
David was a manager from hell. He genuinely believed he was good at delegating because he delegated a lot. What this meant, in practice, was that he delegated all the rubbish. This would be a toxic mix of the routine stuff that anyone could do, plus a few projects that were known as hospital passes: they were so late or so badly messed up that the person receiving the project was more or less certain to land up in career hospital. The manager was, effectively, delegating all the blame. He was very good at this.
To really mess his team up, he would give vague instructions about what he wanted and then shout at people when they failed to read his mind properly and provide exactly what he wanted. His vagueness also allowed him to change his mind frequently, which led to endless late nights and frustration as the team reworked projects for him.
Because he never really trusted his teams, he would ask for constant updates. More time was spent updating him than doing the work. The lack of trust was corrosive of team spirit and used up all the team’s time.
If, by some chance, a good result emerged from this method, David was very keen to make sure that everyone knew he was responsible for the outcomes. Setbacks were, invariably, the fault of his inadequate team. Eventually, this became a self-fulfilling statement. Anyone who was any good found another boss, another department or another company to work for. He was left with the weakest players, which reinforced his belief that he could trust no one with delegated work. The misery cycle was complete, and was broken only when David finally left the company.
Conflict is the natural state for most organisations. The most intense conflict is not against rival organisations. Conflicts are largely invisible on a day-to-day basis for most managers: HR, IT and operations staff are too focused on dealing with their immediate functional challenges to worry about marketplace competition. The real competition is not external: it is internal. The biggest threat to most managers is not a rival organisation: it is a rival manager who may be sitting at a desk near them.
In a well-run organisation, this conflict is healthy. Conflict is the way that the battle for resources and priorities in the organisation is decided. There is a limited pool of management time, money, resources and skills. There is a limited pot of potential promotions, bonuses and pay rises. Every department, function and business unit will have a different perspective on how that limited pot should be divided up. The inevitable consequence is rivalry and conflict between managers within an organisation.
This conflict can be productive. It forces managers to show that they have the best way of using the limited resources of the organisation. Occasionally, this competitive conflict becomes dysfunctional. Dysfunctional conflict comes in two flavours: cold wars and hot wars.
Cold wars are basically political and are an essential reality of management. Hot wars tend to be emotional, flaring up in an instant. Neither side is likely to come out looking good. But there is a question of survival: handle it badly and you can become damaged goods in the organisation.
We were standing in the school corridor, surrounded by well-behaved children. It was a school in a tough area, achieving great results. My colleague dismissed it as old-fashioned. This was, perhaps, not the ideal moment to inform him that he was being arrogant and narrow-minded.
The reaction was spectacular. His eyes bulged. His face went crimson and the veins on his neck popped out. Spittle spewed from his mouth, as he shouted, ‘I have never been so insulted in all my life.’ He quickly got a good audience for his performance.
At this stage, I wanted to reply, ‘In that case, no one has been trying.’ It would have been fun to watch his reaction, and I really did not care what he thought any more. He was now in full raging and ranting mode. I needed to decide fast what to do next…
Sun Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, wrote The Art of War about 2,350 years ago. Perhaps his most useful insight was in knowing when to fight. He gave three rules for fighting:
All three of these conditions need to be in place to make it worth fighting. But, when you do fight, fight hard. Remember the words of Colonel Tim Collins to his troops as he sent them into war during the second Iraq conflict: ‘If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory.’ You will need to win the peace as well as the war.
Human instinct trumps human reason, especially at moments of stress and conflict. The natural reaction to danger is the flight or fight reaction, spurred on by a good deal of fear. In the context of your organisation, these are deeply unhelpful instincts. Running away or fighting the CEO at the first hint of a challenge could become a career limiting move. We have to find a way of managing our feelings.
As my colleague’s arms and arguments got carried away, I had a chance to think through the rules of war:
Fighting looked pointless. The only question was: what to do next? I was feeling offended by his insults to me. I did not want to argue back. I wanted to hit him. He was still ranting. I had a moment or two to gather myself…
The FEAR instinct can be summarised as:
Fight furiously
Engage enemy emotionally
Argue against all-comers
Retaliate, refute reason
Like flight and fight, the FEAR reaction is not helpful. It is, however, a potentially memorable way to spend your last day with an employer. The first step in overcoming the FEAR reaction is to recognise it. Once you recognise it, you can start to control it. In training sessions, we ask managers how they deal with the FEAR reaction. Some of the more original ways of managing personal stress include:
All these tricks help achieve the essential first three goals:
It is extraordinarily difficult to sustain anger for more than two minutes, although those two minutes can feel like an eternity. The only way to sustain the anger is to give it some more fuel. Give the angry person no fuel, and they will run out of steam fast. Fuel comes in several forms, including:
There was nothing worth fighting for. The best thing to do was to get the frothing, foaming fury to calm down. So, I threw away the last of my pride and dignity and did the hardest thing of all: I apologised.
He then threw the apology back in my face. I was insulted. Perhaps I should have hit him after all. But I stayed in control and apologised again. He threw the apology back in my face again. He could not hear reason. He was so self-consumed in his anger he could not see beyond the red mist. I had to stay patient and ignore the invitations to justify myself and provoke more warfare. I was finding it very hard to stay restrained. After five attempts, he finally calmed down.
Now to win the peace…
It is better to win a friend than win an argument. Winning a friend is the best way to win the argument. A friend is more likely to listen to reason and compromise than an enemy. A simple way of doing this is to remove the F from FEAR. What remains is EAR, which is what you should be using. Listening is a far better way of gaining agreement than talking and persuading. EAR stands for:
Empathise
Agree the problem
Resolve the way forward
Some people appear naturally empathetic. The rest of us have to learn the skill. Fortunately, it is quite easy. You do not have to become a fully qualified shrink, a neuro-linguistic programming expert or an agony aunt to become empathetic. Here are three simple ways in which you can become more empathetic in your dealings with colleagues:
Many conflicts are about different agendas and priorities. Finance is focused on cost control, and marketing is focused on revenue generation. The result can be a dialogue of the deaf about decreasing costs versus raising revenues, there is no rational discussion to be had. So the two sides need to agree a common way of looking at the challenge. In reality, both marketing and finance should want to increase the profitability of the organisation. Once both sides agree a common challenge, they can agree a common way forward: marketing investment needs to show an adequate return to shareholders. There is still plenty of discussion and debate, but at least both sides are now working towards the same goal and share the same language.
This is a stunningly obvious point, which is why it is normally missed. There is a real art form in changing the nature of the conflict from a win/lose to a win/win. Costs versus revenues is a win/lose argument. Increasing profitability can become a win/win for both sides.
This rational discussion can happen only when both sides have got past the emotional problems of the hot war and when they have agreed the common problem. In practice, this is often the easiest part of the discussion. If you are jointly trying to find a way through, you are likely to succeed. If you are trying to fight your way past each other in opposite directions, you will find it difficult to make progress.
This is, hopefully, a rational discussion based on emotionally and politically stable foundations. Because it is a rational discussion, it is covered in detail in Chapter 2: Solving problems: prisons and frameworks – and tools.
By now you may have noticed that IQ, EQ and PQ have reared their ugly heads again. The EAR process of resolving a hot conflict pulls together the three core management skills:
Importantly, deploy EQ, PQ and IQ in that order: EQ first and IQ last. Many managers start with IQ and land up having endless logical arguments that go round in circles. Deal with the person first and the problem will melt away.
After we had both calmed down, we realised we had both acted unwisely. Shame-faced, we made peace. As we did so, we realised quickly that we both shared the same ambition of helping achieve greatness in the most challenging urban schools. We realised we both saw many of the same opportunities and we disagreed only on detail. We could now make progress and win together: he is the best of allies anyone could ask for in such a tough task.
Of course, the real lesson has nothing to do with dealing with conflict. The real lesson is that it is much smarter to avoid creating the conflict in the first place. The art of giving feedback constructively is dealt with in the next section. Giving the wrong person the wrong feedback at the wrong time and in the wrong place was not smart.
Managing would be much easier if it did not involve people. At the heart of management is the idea of making things happen through other people. We need to get the best out of our team and our colleagues. This requires a fine balance of providing support and encouragement (positive feedback) and improving performance (constructive feedback). If that is the theory, the reality for many team members and managers is a combination of no feedback (instead of positive feedback) and negative feedback (instead of constructive feedback).
If nothing else, it is worth keeping in mind the perceived reality and the ideal to which you can aspire:
Perceived reality | Ideal |
No feedback | Positive feedback |
Negative feedback | Constructive feedback |
Positive feedback is not simply about being nice to people. Positive feedback helps because it:
There are good and bad ways of giving even positive feedback. Essentially, the principles are the same as when giving effective constructive feedback, outlined next.
Constructive feedback is the art of changing perspectives and behaviours. There are some tried and tested ways of doing this well and poorly. The four basic steps of giving constructive feedback are:
Constructive feedback requires a change in perspective or behaviour: that implies criticism of current behaviour. People do not like criticism, especially in public.
Give the feedback in private, not in public. Do not force someone to defend themselves in public or shame them in public: it will get a negative reaction.
John Timpson owns a chain of shoe repair shops that bear his name. He set himself the goal of giving ten pieces of positive feedback for each piece of negative feedback. This has a powerful effect. It highlights and reinforces the sort of behaviour and values he wants to encourage. Praise sets the norm and quietly discourages inappropriate behaviour. By praising a shop worker who returns some money a customer has lost, he sets the standard: staff know that this is a company that encourages honesty and fair dealing. It is a more powerful way of communicating the message than putting in rule books, procedures and sanctions designed to punish the wrong sorts of behaviour. Praise builds a culture of commitment: rules build a culture of compliance.
Give the feedback near enough to the actual event for it to be fresh in the memory, but not if the person is still upset or angry about what has just happened. Let them calm down first: reassure them that you are not going to bite their head off. Then they may start to transition from an emotional state to a more rational state.
The clear difference with positive feedback is that often it is best given in public. People like public recognition, and it sends a signal to the rest of the team about the sorts of behaviours that you believe are important to the success of the team.
Telling someone that they are unprofessional is, in itself, unprofessional. It is very general and it is an attack on the person. It invites a fight rather than a change in behaviour. Take the concern and ask yourself why you made that judgement. Then focus on the specific behaviours that led to that comment. For instance, ‘I noticed you have turned up late to work four days in a row’ is a factual description of behaviour. If they agree with this, you may be ready for the next step.
The same principle applies with positive feedback. Saying, ‘I think you are a wonderful person’ is unhelpful: it is not actionable and probably sounds insincere. Saying, ‘That solution you came up with on customer service was very creative, and it has worked’ is specific.
Choice of language is important here. Generalisations such as never, always and everyone are unlikely to be accurate and will inflame things.
Give the other person a chance to react. There are several ways of doing this:
At this point, you may find they have a domestic crisis, or they have been working exceedingly late, or there may be some other reason that you can work on together. You are inviting the other person to become a partner in solving a joint problem, rather than being a boss that is going to scold a team member like a parent scolding a child. You are trying to construct an adult-to-adult conversation, not a parent-to-child script.
Do not move to the next stage unless you can:
If you do not have these agreements in place, you may find the discussion going round in circles, from symptoms to causes to facts to solutions and who is to blame.
In this pause, let the other person reflect on why things are happening the way they are. Simply saying ‘I never expect to see you late again’ is unhelpful. You may be addressing the symptom of a problem (lateness) not its cause (domestic crises, late-night working and disenchantment with work). Trying to remove the spots from a child’s face with spot remover is not going to work if the child has measles: to cure the symptoms you have to cure the cause of the problem.
The trick here is to make it their solution: you want them to feel a sense of commitment to an idea that they own. If you have done the groundwork properly, you will now be able to go into coaching mode, rather than feedback mode. Follow the principles outlined earlier in this chapter under Coaching: no more training.
Questions, not answers, lie at the heart of good coaching. Let the other person discover the answer for themselves. If they discover the answer they will be more committed to their answer than an answer you impose on them. There is a risk that their answer may be better than the one you originally had in mind. It is a risk worth taking.
I was ready for an ear bashing from the partner. I had not really delivered on a project. I knew and he knew, even if the client did not really know it. I went to his office and closed the door with my heart in my boots. It felt like going to see the headteacher on a detention. I was not looking forward to the interview.
He then surprised me when he said, ‘You are definitely one of our high-potential associates. Maybe one of the best.’ He went on to describe the specific events that led him to that conclusion. Then, with just a hint of a wry smile, he asked, ‘How did you feel about the last project?’
With very little coaxing I spilled the beans on how bad it was and why it was so bad. So he asked me how I would handle things in future. I knew what I wanted to do. We discussed various ideas and agreed a plan. He asked if I needed any help and we agreed to meet again in a couple of weeks to see how things were going.
I had gone into the room feeling bad, but I left feeling good. I knew what I had to do. I had a supportive boss.
After I left, I realised that he had never made any criticism and never offered any solution. He had just asked a few questions. I had done all the work for him. As a result, I owned the problem and the solution. I left the room committed to action, rather than feeling resentful about a ticking-off.
Time is our most valuable resource. We have a limited amount of time that ultimately runs out. We all have a use-by date in our careers and lives. There are only three ways in which we can make the most of this limited resource:
Delegation has already been covered in earlier in this chapter under Delegating: doing better by doing less. If you cannot delegate well, then you will rapidly run out of time and you will fail the most basic test of management: you will be unable to make things happen through other people. After delegating what you can, you are left with efficiency and effectiveness.
Much of the modern world is obsessed with time efficiency: to do everything faster and to multi-task at the same time. We are desperately trying to squeeze a quart of activity into a pint pot of time. But there is a paradox here. The more we use the time- and labour-saving devices, the more stressed and time-starved we become. Technology does not free us: it enslaves us.
There is a simple resolution of the time paradox. Time- and labour-saving devices never save time: they raise expectations.
Technology may save time, but for whom? It is always the employer, not the employee, who has to reap the benefits of increased productivity to stay competitive. Technology puts employees on a treadmill where we have to run faster and faster just to stay still. The faster we run, the faster our competitors run. We are running flat out, but we are standing still compared to our competitors. Standards rise, and employees pay the price.
Technology does not save time: it eats time by raising expectations.
Presentations
Old world: presentations were a slow and expensive nightmare, involving art departments and graphics people to prepare slides. As a result, each presentation tended to be short and concise.
New world: PowerPoint enables executives to prepare 200-page documents with lots of snazzy back-up slides without the time and expense of art and graphics departments.
Result: executives waste time on PowerPoint, preparing presentations that are far too long. PowerPoint has raised expectations and no executive dares to be left behind. Labour has not been saved: standards have gone up.
Transport
Old world: the boat from England to Empire, or from Rome to Judea, took weeks and was very expensive. So, when people travelled, they made sure they got a serious result. And they also had to delegate. There was no time to ask for directions from Rome or London on how to handle a local riot. People on the ground had to be trained and trusted to make big decisions by themselves instead of setting up a global conference call to cover their backs in case it all went wrong.
New world: the one-day transatlantic visit is a badge of corporate honour to show how busy the executive is. It is also a sign that the local people are not seen to be able to do things by themselves.
Result: because we can travel more, we do travel more. More stress, more jet lag and more air miles.
Communication
Old world: letters written by hand or typed (with plenty of correction fluid) meant that there were few letters written, but each one was important and commanded attention. Replies were slow but equally important and carefully thought through.
New world: email and smartphones mean that we are meant to be in touch 24/7, even on holiday, with rapid responses to a deluge of trivial messages that are sent out on a just-in-case basis.
Result: email and smartphones increase the working week and stress. Information hyperinflation has made each message potentially worthless.
If technology will not save our time, we need to find some more old-fashioned ways of maximising personal efficiency.
Rework is a time killer. It can more than double the time taken for a task. Rework means more than doing the work again. Unpicking work can be very time-consuming. It means trying to find out where things went wrong in the first place, renegotiating with people who were involved in the early work and trying to re-establish personal credibility and authority. To do it right first time means slowing down in order to speed up.
Slowing down is about planning work carefully at the start, negotiating and checking expectations with key stakeholders before starting and then checking progress at regular intervals to avoid misunderstandings later. Like the slow tortoise that moves purposefully forwards, you can beat the hare that runs in circles.
Half-doing a job is as bad as doing it wrong: both result in un-necessary rework. In the case of communications, unanswered phone calls and emails simply add to the mental logjam of stuff that clutters things up. It is an unwanted distraction. There are four ways of dealing with most communications: do it, delegate it, defer it or ditch it. In order of priority, they are:
Some non-actionable items may contain useful information. Note it, file it and move on.
Classic symptoms of procrastination are displacement activities. Instead of doing the job, people do something else like surfing the web, having a coffee, gossiping or doing a minor task. The causes of procrastination will be some combination of the following:
Time-efficient managers can be spotted everywhere. They are at the airport, talking on their phone while writing emails on their laptops. They can be spotted bumping into people on the street as they play with their highly addictive smartphones. Whether they are achieving anything is another matter. Many executives make the fundamental mistake of confusing activity with achievement. At year-end, however, it is achievement and not activity that counts for bonus and promotion.
Time efficiency is about doing things the right way. Time effectiveness is about doing the right things. Being 100 per cent perfect at doing the wrong thing is still a 100 per cent waste of time. The real management challenge is to do the right things. Doing the right thing is a mixture of three elements:
In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy would allow rich or well-connected civilians to travel on their ships. One leisured gentleman wangled his way on to a round the world trip with the Navy. The trip took three years, and most of the time was spent on land visiting friends of friends, hunting, dining and doing some fashionably amateur scientific observations. He was, by modern standards, wasting his time completely.
Things did not get much better when he returned to the United Kingdom. He did not very much at all, beyond pottering around with his studies. Twenty years later, his friends persuaded him to publish the results of his trip and his studies.
The result was the Origin of Species, which heralded a revolution in scientific thinking and in the way humans saw themselves.
Charles Darwin had not been completely idle. Famously, he collected and studied different varieties of finches in the Galapagos and was baffled by their slightly different beaks. He continued to think about this after his return to England. He was a geologist by training and thought only as a geologist can think: in the millions of years that enable the sea bed to rise into mountains. With that sort of time he could imagine how animals could adapt and change dramatically. Geology is the origin of Origin of Species
Darwin may have been idle by modern standards, but he was also focused. Being focused, he achieved far more than all the stressed-out, multi-tasking 24/7 executives who are busy being important. Activity and achievement are very different concepts.
Not all of us will have the chance to transform one of the sciences. But, if we want to be effective with our time, we should think carefully about what we want to achieve. There are no simple answers, but there are some simple questions.
These are deeply irritating questions to be asked when the flak is flying. They are questions to think about at quiet moments away from the pressures of work.
Here are some things you will not remember in 20 years’ time:
These, however, are exactly the sorts of things that consume most management time and attention on a daily and annual basis. The point about them is that they are not ends in themselves: they are means to an end. Emails, meetings and phone calls are all essential activities, but they are relevant only if they help you achieve something meaningful – both professionally and personally. Even beating this year’s sales target is not an end in itself: it is a means to some other professional or personal goal. Personally, it pays the bills and may help you fund some long-held desire. Professionally, beating sales targets is perhaps just a stepping stone to getting that job or starting that organisation that you have always wanted.
Knowing what you want to do sounds obvious, but it is not. In George Orwell’s words: ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’ Many executives fail to see what is in front of their noses. Immediate challenges blind them to other opportunities. Occasionally, a sideways move to build experience, skills and networks offers a better way of achieving long-term goals than mindless focus on goals mandated from above. The courage to move sideways comes only from knowing what you are looking for.
The typical management day is crammed with urgent items. The daily flood of emails and phone calls threatens to drown us if we do not deal with them. But the risk is that urgent matters crowd out important matters. The noise of activity can drown the signal of achievement. The short term always takes priority over the long term. The problem with this approach is that, at some point, the long term becomes short term and what could have been handled easily suddenly becomes a crisis.
There are three simplistic solutions to this, which in some circumstances can work:
The problem with many important agenda items is that they are also the most complicated, most time-consuming and longest lead-time items. Often, it is not possible to deal with them by locking the door and shutting out urgent matters for an hour or two. The more practical answer is to break down the big task into smaller bite-sized tasks, as outlined above.
Even if you cannot find two hours in the day to deal with important matters, you can find a few minutes in which to have a critical conversation with someone, to check a few facts or to ask for some advice. With important and difficult matters, thinking ahead pays big dividends. Work back from the desired end result and identify the critical path for getting there. This allows you to start things early and avoid time-consuming crises later. Start the analysis early; find out early what the approval mechanisms are; get advice, direction and support early; do some early tests. All of these things help shape and focus later work, which will save time. It also means that when, inevitably, there is a setback it does not automatically become a crisis around deadlines. You have spare time and do not need to get stressed out.
Try this experiment. Take a large cookie jar. Put some big stones in it until there is no more space.
No more space? Put in some small pebbles until there is no more space between the stones.
No more space? Try pouring in some sand around the pebbles, so that there really is no more space.
No more space? Pour in some water, until it is at the top of the cookie jar. Now it really is full.
Now think of your day. The large stones are the really important things you must achieve. Put them into your day first and work on them. In the spaces between your important stones, you can fit in a few things you really want to do (the pebbles). In between all the pebbles are the sand and the water: these are the small but irritating things you have to do anyway, like answering emails, which can be fitted into any small spare slots in the day.
Queues and delays were invented specially for dealing with emails and phone calls, which otherwise would get in the way of dealing with the important stones in your day. The cookie jar test is a simple way of making sure you deal with the important stuff, not just the urgent and routine stuff. You can as easily fill a jar with sand and water as you can fill your day with urgent and routine stuff: do not let it take over and prevent you dealing with the important stuff.
Time management comes down to observing a few simple, practical, obvious and even boring disciplines:
Create your personal list of long-term (five-year-plus) goals. Three goals at most: one goal is better. Then look long and hard at how you will get there and how well your current situation meets your needs. To avoid death by list mania, these are goals that often are best kept in your head. Create your list of goals for this year. A good list will have the following characteristics:
Create your list of goals for this month and this week. The weekly goals list is a quick exercise for a Sunday evening. The weekly list will:
Create your to-do list for tomorrow. Do your best to schedule the day into three major chunks:
There is one more tip for time management: once you have made all your lists, act on them.
Urgent stuff may be unimportant and irritating. No one needs that request from a senior manager for an urgent reworking of a standard report into some custom analysis that is nearly impossible to perform. But management reality is that if you do not deal with urgent stuff, it rapidly becomes a crisis. Dealing with urgent stuff has already been dealt with, in effect, in the section on time efficiency. The key principles are:
Personal EQ is not just about what you do: it is about how you are. EQ is not about following a script. Nor can you achieve EQ by checking off lots of boxes on a checklist. You have to move beyond aping the symptoms of EQ and discover the causes of EQ.
How you act is defined by how you think. If you really want to change how you behave, then you have to change how you think. At first, this sounds slightly intimidating. It sounds like you are committing to years of therapy with a highly paid shrink. You can do this if you want, but it is not necessary. You do not have to change who you are, you simply have to become the best of who you are. That is a more enticing prospect: build on your strengths, and let any (very minor) weaknesses fade away.
Over the last six years, I have led original research which shows that the best managers share the same mindset. The results were consistent across industries and geographies. Here are the seven mindsets of management:
When you look at that list, you will, reasonably, assume that you have all those mindsets. On a good day, we can all be like that. The difference is that the best managers are always like that, and they take each mindset to an extreme.
There is plenty of good news about these findings:
This section will look briefly at what each mindset means, and how you can build your version of it.
As a good manager you will be practical and focused. You will:
There is nothing wrong with that. But the very best managers and leaders think differently. The table below shows the difference:
Good manager mindset | Best leader mindset |
Improve performance | Seek to change, dare to be different |
Deal with the here and now: start from the beginning | Focus on building a future perfect: start at the end |
Focus on what you can do | Focus on what must be done to achieve the mission |
The critical difference is where the best leaders start. They do not do the obvious and practical thing, which is to start from today. To think and act like the best, start with a vision of your future perfect, which you want to build, and then work back from there. Do not be constrained by where you start, focus instead on where you want to go. Then find ways to make it happen. There is an old story of a traveller in Ireland who asks for directions to Dublin and is told: ‘If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here.’ Do not get trapped in your current position.
It is not enough to dream the dream. You have to dare to act as well, otherwise your future perfect is just a pipe dream. Obviously, you do not need the physical courage of the kings of old who led their troops into battle. You need a different sort of courage. When leaders talk about courage, this is what they mean:
The easy route is the path of least resistance but, if you take the easy path, you will never climb the mountain. You will meander in the foothills of management. Acquiring courage does not require taking insane risks. It is about slowly building up your risk tolerance and risk awareness by regularly pushing yourself slightly outside your comfort zone. As your comfort zone grows, you slowly take on more risk. Eventually, you will be doing things that look very courageous to other people, but that will be second nature to you.
Courage is about taking risks. Not every risk can work out. By definition, some risks must go sour on you. If you have never failed, you have never taken enough risk. Learning to deal with setbacks is essential to your success: the difference between failure and success in the long term is as simple as not giving up.
You need to build two sorts of resilience: short-term and long-term.
Short-term resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks. The best leaders seem not to understand the word failure. They may talk about the occasional setback, which simply means that they have not succeeded… yet. Keep in mind the mantra, ‘I have not succeeded… yet’. That will drive you to the right short-term responses to setbacks:
Long-term resilience is about sustaining your energy and passion for a 40- or 50-year career. Fundamentally, that requires two things:
Taking responsibility is a self-evident mindset. But the way the best leaders take responsibility is different from how most managers think about responsibility. You can see the responsibility difference in three areas: successes, failures and feelings.
Being positive does not come from training sessions where you learn to say, ‘Have a nice day.’ Being positive comes from the heart. Research from the positive psychology movement shows that people with a positive outlook live longer and better, by a large margin.
It also shows that positive sales people outperform the rest by nearly double. For a manager, being positive is about some simple routines:
As a simple but dangerous exercise, recall every setback you have had today, from missed traffic lights to annoying emails. You may quickly feel quite gloomy about your day. Now recall every good thing that has happened, from waking up in a warm bed with access to clean hot and cold water. You should feel better. We can choose how we want to see the world, and how we see it affects how we feel. Your choice.
You can train yourself to think positively. One particularly positive and enthusiastic manager had an odd habit: she wore a rubber band where others might wear a bracelet. She always wore her rubber band. When challenged on this habit, she explained: ‘Every time I have a negative thought, am about to criticise, be negative or say things cannot be done, I just snap the rubber band against my wrist. It reminds me that I can think differently. I can be positive. When I first wore the rubber band, I had a very sore wrist within an hour. Now I realise that being negative and cynical is just a waste of time. I do things differently now, and people treat me better as a result.’
The headteacher reflected on what had happened in her first year in charge. On arrival, she found that the students spoke 68 different mother tongues. Many were first-generation immigrants, with all the attendant problems of poverty, integration and lack of employment.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that is wonderful news. There is so much buzz and excitement from having such a diverse student population.
‘And first-generation immigrants show real commitment to wanting to learn and make their mark in their new community. They are a joy to teach.
‘We had a challenge when one wing of the school was burned down by an arsonist. But that was a blessing in disguise. It released insurance money for redevelopment: that wing was getting old anyway.’
Most people would run away from such a challenging school. Where others saw problems, she saw only opportunities. Her confidence transmitted itself to staff and pupils and was reflected in both performance and appearance. She was so positive about the school wing being burned down I began to wonder who the arsonist had really been.
To be a manager is to make the vital transition from how to who. A team member, when faced with a task, has to ask: ‘How do I do this?’ As a manager, you have to make things happen through other people so, instead of asking ‘how?’, you have to ask, ‘Who can do this?’
The importance of collaboration is growing as fast as the world of command and control is withering. Collaboration is not about telling people what to do: it is about using influence to persuade people who you do not control to work with you and help you. The art of influence and persuasion has been covered fully earlier in this chapter under Persuading people: how to sell anything.
The main features of the collaborative mindset are:
The collaborative mindset is hard. We all have our own window on reality: this tells us what is important for us and what we must do. The collaborative mindset recognises that there are many different windows on reality, and none is perfect. You have to understand and respect other people’s reality. Only when you understand can you influence, persuade and change their minds. Understanding is not about agreeing with others: it is about laying the groundwork for effective influence and collaboration.
A career is a marathon, not a sprint.
The work you do and the skills you need will change fundamentally over the course of a 45-year career. Looking back to a golden past may be fine when it comes to your taste in music or films, but is a disaster in terms of skills. Your job security does not come from your employer: in a world of technology change, globalisation and competition, loyalty between employer and employee is a one-way street. You are expected to be 100 per cent loyal until you are no longer needed. Your job security comes from your skills, track record and a strong network, which can guide you to your next opportunity.
You have to keep your skills up to date. The skills you need change at each level of the organisation, as will be outlined in Chapter 5. Using the same skills in a different context does not work: you have to learn and grow.
Skills mastery is not just about training. Most training delivers ‘know-what’ skills, which are useful but they are a commodity. Accounting, law and IT are good skills, but there are plenty of people in other countries who will deliver the same skills at a much lower cost. The skills that set the best managers apart from the rest are ‘know-how’ skills. These are tacit skills about how you deal with people, how you make things happen, how you manage your boss and how much risk you take. There is no manual for this: you have to discover the rules of survival and success for yourself. Those rules change, depending on where you work. For instance, government and investment banking have very different risk appetites, working hours and styles: what works in one place will not work in another.
Your ability to learn and grow is vital to your long-term survival and success. How you can manage your personal learning journey is covered in Chapter 5.
Think for a moment about which sort of conditions bring out the best in you:
The work-out environment will bring out the best in most people. Most people will be stretched, without being broken. This is the ideal performance zone. The problem with stress is, when you go into overload, you will break down (illustrated in Figure 3.4 below). At this stage, the remedy is not to go back to the performance zone: you need to rebuild confidence in the comfort zone again before starting to stretch. It pays to recognise this and act accordingly, both with yourself and with your team.
At first, it seems odd that people put themselves into positions where they are going to be outside their comfort zones and put themselves under pressure. A cursory glance at the top graduate employers in most countries shows that the most popular employers are also the ones that generate the greatest amount of pressure: banks and consulting firms lead the way. Far from avoiding pressure, top graduates actively seek out high-pressure environments. After interviewing several hundred graduates for an hour each, some patterns become clear in this behaviour. Graduates seek the high-pressure employers for the following reasons:
Figure 3.4 The zone diagram
You do not have to be an adrenalin junkie to want to work in a high-performing organisation with high-performing peers. Pressure is simply a by-product of such a desire. Highly demanding jobs are not the preserve only of banks and consulting firms. Teaching in challenging inner-city schools (Teach First and Teach for America), becoming a junior hospital doctor or signing up for the armed forces all provide highly demanding environments that are very attractive to top graduates. Top managers do not avoid pressure or seek to minimise it: they actively seek out demanding situations that are personally rewarding.
Ultimately, people go into demanding situations because they enjoy them. This is smart thinking. You excel only at what you enjoy. No leading sportsman dislikes his sport, even though he suffers setbacks and losses. Equally, no successful manager dislikes her business, even though she too suffers setbacks and losses. The right amount of pressure helps people reach out of their comfort zone to improve their performance. Pressure, in the right amount, should be embraced, not avoided.
Sarah had been poached from a rival electronics retailer. She would be a good source of competitive intelligence, so I decided to debrief her on her experiences.
Jo: ‘What is the biggest difference between this organisation and your last one?’
Sarah: ‘People walk here.’
Jo: ‘???’
Sarah: ‘At my last place, no one walked. We never had time. We ran to meetings. If we heard the phone ring, we ran to pick it up within three rings. It was a constant rush. Very demanding, but with a real buzz.’
Jo: ‘And here?’
Sarah: ‘We walk. People let the phone ring unanswered. It does not bother them. There is plenty of time for everything. I have moved from a running organisation to a walking organisation. It is much easier here.’
Within three years, the walking organisation was out of business: outrun and overtaken by the running organisation. My next assignment was neither a running nor a walking organisation: it was a sleeping organisation. Being part of government, it is still in business.
We will look briefly at the nature of each zone: what it looks like and how you can use it to help you.
Being told you are in your comfort zone usually is an insult, not a compliment. But your comfort zone has its uses, and there are times when you should operate in your comfort zone.
You know you are in your comfort zone when you find it easy to perform all your duties. You feel little pressure or stress, and you discover that work–life balance means you can have a life outside work. The good news is that, probably, you will perform well when inside your performance zone. You will be playing to your existing strengths.
Life in the comfort zone is important after experiencing a period of stress. You need time to recover, rebuild your confidence and recharge your batteries.
In the short term, life in the comfort zone is attractive, easy and productive: you will be seen to perform well. This is why the comfort zone is so dangerous: it is easy to be seduced into living there all the time. In the long term, this has serious consequences.
If you are in your comfort zone, you are not stretching yourself. You are not learning new skills that can help you in your next job.
You are quietly side-lining yourself. If you have an area of deep expertise, such as in law or accounting, this may let you sustain your career. But it will be a career limited to being a technical expert, not being a manager or leader. I hear many experts who eventually get very frustrated with their increasingly narrow expertise. One marketing manager, who was an expert in on-pack promotions, eventually gave up: he could not face doing yet another on-pack promotion for yet another brand after 25 years of doing variations on the same theme. Boredom with routine had taken all the interest out of his job. He became a psychotherapist instead.
If you are becoming slightly bored with your routine, your career is not moving forwards and you are being marginalised, then you have probably spent too long in your comfort zone.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the comfort zone is the stress zone. The checklist below shows the main symptoms of life in the stress zone.
The major symptoms of excessive stress include:
Be careful when you look at the list: it is like reading a medical dictionary and discovering that you have the symptoms of every single disease known to man. Hypochondria and paranoia quickly follow. Most managers will experience most of these symptoms at some stage: that is normal. When these symptoms persist or become acute, a death spiral starts: increased stress leads to worse performance, which leads to more stress, which leads to even worse performance.
Given that stress will happen for some periods in your career, it pays to know how to handle it.
The starting point is to recognise that the critical difference between pressure and stress is control.
If you are under pressure, you may work hard but you are also likely to thrive. Now apply the same amount of pressure and remove some of your control: your deadline is moved; you depend on critical inputs from others who may or may not deliver and you do not control; requirements and expectations keep on changing; different powerful people start demanding different things and you cannot reconcile competing and contradictory demands. Suddenly, the pressure turns to stress: the stakes are high and you have to deliver, but it is not clear what you must deliver, when or if you can deliver.
The solution is to regain control of the situation and of yourself.
Step one is to review your situation. Clarify expectations about what is needed by whom and when. This may lead to some difficult conversations with bosses about what is, and is not, feasible. You do not want to be seen to be giving up on tasks. Instead, use these conversations to gain clarity around three things:
Many people feel uncomfortable having these difficult conversations, which they see as a sign of weakness. Do not personalise the issue that way. The issue is not about you – it is about the nature of the work you face. Treat it as a business discussion about business issues and priorities. Have these discussions as early as possible: the earlier you have the discussion, the more actionable they become. If you leave it until the last moment, then there is little anyone can do to help you. Better to have a difficult discussion early than to make excuses later.
Step two is to review what you can do in the situation. Review the current challenges and assign them an ABC ranking:
A Important items that you can do something about. You may not be able to address the entire item, but there are a few things you can start to make progress on. Finding the early wins, building a little momentum, can quickly restore confidence both personally and with your colleagues. Focus on the few things you can do, not on the many things you cannot do.
B Items that are important and where you need help. The help may be in clearing a political logjam, clarifying goals and reordering priorities. Do not let the confusion and anxiety build up. Be proactive and seek a resolution. This is part of your conversation with your boss.
C Items that are less important that I can ditch, delay or delegate. Be ruthless in eliminating as much noise and junk from your to-do list. You will probably need to focus all your energies on the A-list items.
The ABC approach is about gaining control, moving to action and rebuilding confidence. It requires focus on the things you can do (even if there are not many of them) and getting help on items where you do not have control.
You have two surprising, pleasant and effective ways in which you can regain control of yourself: rest and relax.
Rest is tough in the heat of battle. But that is when you need a clear head. If you pull an all-night working session, you may think you are a hero, while if you pull an all-night drinking session, you may expect to get fired. But research shows that the effects of too much alcohol and too little sleep are exactly the same in terms of impaired cognition.
Thursday was D Day: we had to pitch a big new idea to the board. At 8 pm, the presentation looked good, so I went to the hotel and slept. The team was really dedicated: team members stayed up until 2 am working and reworking the presentation. At 6.30 am they were back in the war room again.
At 7.30 am I rolled up. I nearly felt guilty that the team members had decided to stay up, even though I had encouraged them to get a good night’s sleep. Their faces were white with exhaustion. I felt pretty good. They asked if they could now produce the presentation that they had revised overnight. I looked at it. It had gone backwards steadily from 8 pm the previous evening. The fine-tuning added lots of clever detail, but destroyed the logic flow and simplicity of the original. I let them produce the presentation: the 8 pm version. They were devastated.
At 10 am, we presented. The pitch was simple, and it was familiar. The client loved it and we landed up working there for another 18 months. Doing less (well) is better than doing more (poorly).
The more fundamental approach to rest is to take time off work: have a real holiday where you dare to remove the shackles of email and smartphone. Even on holiday, it is easy to spot the hyped-up manager who is still in command, control and compete mode. Symptoms of the unrelaxed manager on holiday include:
The world will not collapse if you are not holding it up for two weeks. If time off is as scarce as hen’s teeth, then find a way of adjusting your assignments so you can revert to your comfort zone. If you stress out for too long, you will burn out and give up.
When the tension rises, our bodies change. Try this exercise: be angry while smiling and sitting back in your chair. It is more or less impossible. You can use this to your advantage. Your mood is affected strongly by your body. If you are tensed up, with clenched fists, sweaty palms and bulging veins in your neck, then you are only a hair trigger away from a conflict.
Control your body and you control your mood. So, when the heat starts to rise, take action. There are many ways of learning to relax your body. Buddhist monks use meditation and breathing exercises. But you probably do not want to adopt the lotus position in the board room. Instead, you can at least learn to breathe in and out deeply a few times: let the fresh air come in and then you can breathe out all your tension. All it takes is a few breaths to make a difference.
You can also learn discrete airline-style exercises: from wiggling your toes, stretching your calves, unclenching your fist through to relaxing your shoulders. By the time you have relaxed your body, you will have relaxed your mind and you will be able to think more clearly and perform much better.
Sports people often talk about being in the zone. Suddenly, everything goes right. For baseball sluggers and cricket batsmen, the ball suddenly looks like a slow-moving melon wanting to be hit, not a vicious speeding curving ball of menace. When they hit the zone, everything looks easy, even though it is based on years of painful practice. It is hard to stay in the zone for long: form comes and goes.
In business, we all have moments like that, and they are equally temporary. In business, we need to find ways of sustaining the performance zone for decades, not days. You will know you are in the performance zone when the following happens:
This is the sweet spot between relaxing in your comfort zone and breaking down in the stress zone. In practice, you have to push yourself into this zone. Most HR systems will inadvertently push you back into your comfort zone: assignments tend to go to people who already have the relevant expertise. That means you learn nothing. The reality of work pressures means that many times you will be required to leap straight from your comfort zone to the stress zone without stopping to say hello to the performance zone.
Instead, you have to manage your career. If you are in the comfort zone, start volunteering discretionary effort for things that you know will push you and seek out assignments that you know will stretch you. Do not wait until you are 100 per cent ready to take on a big new role, because no one is ever 100 per cent ready for a big new role. Go for it early, and be prepared to learn fast on the job. Have confidence and belief in your ability to learn and grow.
If you are in the stress zone, have the difficult conversations early to reset expectations and to get the help you need.
Inevitably, you will swing between zones over the course of a year, let alone a career. That is fine. Do not expect to be in the performance zone the whole time. Manage yourself so that you achieve a balance between the three zones. That way, you can learn, grow and perform without getting sidelined in the comfort zone or burned out in the stress zone.
Read the literature carefully and you will discover that the ideal manager has the following characteristics and behaviours:
Some managers feel they already have all these qualities and many more besides. They are arrogant enough not to feel the need to read this or any other book that might make them more effective. The rest of us feel small when measured against such demanding and contradictory criteria.
At this point, it makes sense to ask what managers expect of their peers, bosses and team members. This is what I have done with thousands of managers. The results are remarkably consistent across industries and countries. The table below shows the results, with the criteria ranked by order of importance. The figures in parentheses are the percentage of managers who are satisfied with the performance of their peers against the chosen criteria.
Top leaders | Leaders in the middle | Recent graduates/ emerging leaders |
Vision (61%) | Ability to motivate others (43%) | Hard work (64%) |
Ability to motivate others (37%) | Decisiveness (54%) | Proactivity (57%) |
Decisiveness (47%) | Industry experience (70%) | Intelligence (63%) |
Ability to handle crises (56%) | Networking ability (57%) | Reliability (61%) |
Honesty and integrity (48%) | Delegation (43%) | Ambition (64%) |
Take a moment to review the list. Four key themes emerged from the survey:
Your team will expect you to deliver on the expectations of a top leader, whatever your current level may be. As far as your team is concerned, you are the top leader. You need to act that way. Given that, it is worth briefly recapping what you need to do to become the leader your team wants to follow.
You need a simple idea of how the future will look different and better. This is more than just setting a stretching target. Show how the team will work differently: quality, customer focus, professionalism, zero defects, as the case may be. Then construct your story in three parts:
This story is vital to you. It gives purpose and direction to your team. Make the story personal to each team member: show how they can make a difference and how they can benefit from your future perfect world. The more relevant it is to each team member, the more committed they will be.
When team members say they want a leader who can motivate others, what they really mean is they want a leader who can motivate them. And teams tend to be unimpressed with the efforts of their boss to motivate them: only 37 per cent of team members think their boss does well at motivation. You will be the last person to hear that truth from your team.
A whole industry devotes itself to understanding and promoting motivation, which goes all the way from abseiling awaydays to neuroscience. For our purposes, there is just one thing you can do to help. In our research we found that one question consistently predicted whether a boss would be rated well, not just on motivation, but also on most other dimensions as well. Here it is:
My boss cares about me and my career (agree/disagree).
If you pass this test, it is likely you are seen as good on motivation, decisiveness, vision, teamwork and all the other metrics. If you struggle on this metric, you will also struggle on the others.
Like all good insights, it is obvious when it is pointed out. If you have a boss who clearly does not care about you at all, it is very dispiriting. But a boss who seems to care makes all the difference.
Caring does not mean being nice and seeking popularity. Caring means that you should know what each team member wants and needs, you can give them the right roles, you support them and, where necessary, you have difficult but constructive conversations about performance with them. Care is about building trust, not popularity.
Decisiveness has been covered before under IQ. For a team, decisiveness is about clarity. As a manager, you are a peddler of hope, clarity and certainty. The last thing your team wants is uncertainty and changes of direction, which lead to rework, lost time and missed deadlines. Often, any decision is better than no decision: you create a sense of direction and purpose and remove doubt and ambiguity. If you have doubts, be wary of sharing them with your team as you will look weak and uncertain. Your little doubts can grow into a major crisis of confidence within your team. Instead of expressing doubt, you can involve your team in a structured and focused problem-solving session. This is inclusive, action-focused and will lead to the decision and clarity that your team craves.
Crises are your opportunity to shine. Managing is easy when things are going well. The test of a manager does not come in easy street, but when things go wrong. Do not avoid crises: embrace them as an opportunity.
Deal with any crisis in two ways. First, be decisive. Do not go into denial: deal with the problem fast and early. Unlike wine, crises rarely improve with age. They tend to get worse, especially when the politics of the blame game start up. Step up, while your peers step back. Quietly, everyone will be relieved that someone has the courage to take responsibility. To start with, any decision can be better than no decision. Curiously, the worse things are, the clearer things become. In the worst crises, there may be only one way out or one thing you can do. So do it. What matters is that you drive to action, create momentum, build hope and give a sense of clarity and purpose. Even if you then have to alter course, at least you have built momentum and you are going forwards.
The second part of dealing with the crisis is about how you are. Long after everyone has forgotten the details of who did what, they will remember how you behaved. This is where you have a choice. Some people will become invisible and will stay out of the fray. Others will go into Machiavelli mode: they will do plenty of so-called helpful analysis, which happens to pin the blame on others, looks backwards and achieves nothing. Others may panic. A few will remain calm, positive, supportive and action-focused. If you look calm and in control, your team will have confidence in you. If you start an inquest into what went wrong, you will create the ideal breeding ground for in-fighting and politics.
How you behave is as important as what you do. Decide how you want to be seen, and then behave accordingly.
Honesty and integrity have nothing to do with ethics. They are much more important than that: they are about survival and success. Without honesty and integrity, there can be no trust and no teamwork. This sort of honesty is not a politician’s honesty, which seems to mean: ‘I am honest until I am found guilty of lying in a court of law.’ Management honesty is much stronger: it means total discretion and having the strength to deal with uncomfortable situations early. If a team member is underperforming, it is dishonest and is a breach of trust not to deal with it until assessment time, when it becomes a surprise. Team members need to know where they stand, especially when they are in the wrong place.
Ultimately, honesty is about trust. No one wants to work with a boss they do not trust.
Investment banking is widely regarded as a shark pool. The leaders of investment banks should, therefore, be the biggest and meanest sharks in the pool. To discover whether this was true, I decided to interview some sharks.
Chris talked about the chairman of the investment bank: ‘His defining characteristic is honesty. He never has a bad word to say about anyone. If you have a private conversation with him, you know it will stay private. He will not bad-mouth anyone behind their backs. If you waste his time or you are an idiot, the only negative consequence is that you will not get another meeting with him.
‘Because of his honesty, everyone trusts him. Staff trust him. Clients trust him. This makes him very powerful in the market. Clients need people they can trust on very sensitive matters. Within the bank, he has virtually no enemies. His position is unassailable.’
Honesty is divisive. Leaders who rate poorly on honesty tend to rate poorly on everything else. Teams will not rate someone highly if they do not trust them. Leaders who are rated well on trust are not guaranteed good ratings elsewhere, but at least they get a chance to be rated fairly.
Being honest requires courage to have difficult conversations and make difficult decisions. In the short term, these may be awkward. In the long term, they are vital to acquiring the currency of leadership: trust and respect.
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