The Chelsea football manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari, has been sacked by his club, even though his team was currently fourth in the league and was in the last 16 in the Champion’s League and the FA Cup. Most managers would give their proverbial ‘eye teeth’ to be where his club was in all of these competitions.
What’s more, Scolari is one of the world’s most respected managers: he coached the Portuguese and Brazilian national teams and earned many accolades and championships over the years. He was only in his job for seven months before he was summarily dismissed, let go as if his club were in the relegation zone.
Is this a way to treat a world-class manager, or, indeed, any manager? Loyalty is now almost non-existent — it’s worst in sport (particularly international football), but becoming bad in business. Unless you deliver day in and day out you are relegated to the human dustbin.
In business, the expectations are for immediate returns, instant success. We no longer seem to have the patience in the developed world, to play the long game, to build businesses and market share over the medium term.
This puts in jeopardy our understanding of the importance of investing in people to deliver in the medium to long term. We can take fewer calculated risks and rarely tolerate the occasional failures that must inevitably occur.
Henry Ford once wrote: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently” — if ever there eas a message for the year, this is it. If managers and business leaders cannot take occasional risks in highly competitive markets, we will get nowhere. As Sir James Goldsmith noted, “the ultimate risk is not taking risks”.
We constantly hear from our HR directors and CEOs that the most valuable resource is our human resource. But increasingly, our behaviour demonstrates the opposite. More often than not, senior executives have unrealistic expectations of their staff, treating them as disposable assets if they don’t meet these unachievable targets and objectives. This is not valuing our human resource, but demeaning it.
It’s the law of diminishing returns — the less time and space we give managers and employees to develop the less they deliver. It’s a truism whatever the economic situation and business. Even at Chelsea, where Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich can throw money at top talent, the board may struggle to find a talented and willing manager for the “Dirty Harry sacking club”.
Cary L. Cooper CBE is Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School.
