Sterling Performance

What does it take to be a really bad boss? David Silverman reveals all in “11 Habits of the Worst Boss I Ever Had”, a timeless collection of how to confuse, intimidate and generally exasperate employees. I don’t want to steal his thunder — it’s worth reading for yourself.

But a few jumped out because they perfectly encapsulate the right-meaning, wrong-thinking boss who inhabits a parallel universe to your own.

You know the type: nice enough, but unpredictable and unaware of your skills needs or progression. They’ll remind you to do something you’ve been doing in your sleep for months, yet expect you to handle a problem far beyond your level of expertise.

Silverman nails three particular traits of the well-intentioned boss:

1. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. You don’t have to explain. They just need to make it better. If you give them too much direction, how will they learn?
2. Be careful not to get too wrapped up in your employee’s own goals. If you’re too supportive in helping them develop, they’ll leave you for another job. And that’s not good management.
3. Thank your employees — but only for efforts below their skill level. “Thank you for showing up today.” “Nice handwriting on that expense report.”

Possible remedies:

1. For under-directing, vague bosses, you could try repeating their woolly instructions back: ‘So that’s do more of X, less of Y, all of Z, by close of play today.’ Or email them a summary of Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s Situational Leadership. This essentially advises them on how to adapt their level of support and direction to the individual. It’s not subtle, but it might help.

2. Ask for an evaluation with inbuilt objectives on at least an annual basis. If needs be, create the first list of objectives yourself — if you’re expected to write your own job description, then do just that.

3. Tricky. Any suggestions?

What about you — do you have a boss who means well but gets it wrong? Or are you guilty of a few of Silverman’s management mishaps? How do you handle these situations at work?

Nick and Julia (names changed) were together for seven years. When they first met Nick, who works in IT, was attracted to Julia’s bohemian lifestyle. A struggling jazz singer Julia and her free-spirited friends celebrated their freedom from the rat-race.

Once they’d moved in together, things quickly fell apart. Nick started to feel peeved with paying all the bills and regularly lending Julia her tube fare as she was broke (again). There were constant rows followed by painful long silences and the relationship ended.

So what of Nick? Since parting he hasn’t looked back. In the last 12 months he has been promoted to Head of Infrastructure and now looks after a team of six. Once the red mist had cleared it became obvious that his relationship had been holding him back.

Julia had always made him feel silly for wanting to work hard and achieve career progression. With no-one sneering over his shoulder, he had taken the plunge and asked to be promoted. Losing touch with Julia and her crowd opened up new doors, new people and new opportunities.

This is an example of the how the company we keep in our personal lives can be detrimental to our work lives.

Ok, so no one can make you behave or think in a certain way — the responsibility for  your choices lies with you. But the people we choose to allow into our lives have an impact on our views and perception of the world.

Who we choose to hang out with at work is equally important and can impact our careers and opportunities. Success in your career is influenced by who you know just as much as what you know. Like attracts like. If you are spending time with the ‘moaning and whinging’ crowd, the eternal victims who are always passed over for promotion, guess what? You’ll be next. Don’t assume those whinge sessions go unnoticed.

Take care as you pick as your mates, especially when you first join a company. Try to get to know as many people as possible and spend breaks with different groups. If someone spends the whole lunch hour complaining and full of negativity, give them a wide berth until you have a better idea of the office politics. Under no circumstances join in with the complaining to fit in. As the new person you’ll be under management’s radar.

The negative attitude will rub off on you, too. Before long a destructive work image will catch you off guard and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seek out positive role models in and out of work. Invite them out for lunch or catch up over a coffee. If you aren’t confident and don’t want to be direct, think of a project you are working on and invite them to share their viewpoint.

The more people you meet the luckier you’ll be in your career goals. Before you know it people will start seeking you out for all the right reasons.

Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France in Paris on Sunday. After three weeks and nearly 90 hours of racing he beat second-place Cadel Evans by just under one minute.

Sastre didn’t gain the race-lead in steady increments over the three weeks, nor did he do it as a result of having a better sprint finish or even by making a break on a flat part of the course.

No, Sastre’s victory was grounded in his decisive break along the hardest section of the 3,500km Tour.

The 13km, 1 in 10 climb to the ski resort of L’Alpe d’Huez comes at the end of a 200km stage that includes two further gruelling mountain climbs. As Sastre said about his two-minute victory over the main group of riders, or peloton, “I suffered a lot on the way to the summit …but I had to take the risk of attacking from the beginning of the Alpe d’Huez.”

In the business world we have daily evidence that the economy is taking a downturn. It is the sensible choice to hunker down, cut costs and bide your time in your own particular peloton. Then, as the economy picks up, you will be well placed to attack and grow.

Or there is an alternative strategy. Like Sastre you can pick the hardest part of the course to make your move. As your competitors focus on ‘making it through’ the fallout from the credit crunch, you have the opportunity to drive for longer-term growth and be way ahead of the competition when the economy improves.

In the past week both Amazon and McDonald’s delivered profit results that beat market expectations. My belief is that the management of these two companies, possibly unlike some of their competitors, is now focused on how they can build on their growth momentum and establish an even bigger lead in the market.

At the bottom of L’Alpe d’Huez Sastre climbed out of his saddle, cranked through the gears and rode through the pain to the summit and ultimate victory in Paris.

Where are the challenges in your business that will give you a worthwhile lead?

Photo by Celso Flores CC 2.0

Employers take note: there’s an online forum for employees to rate their company anonymously, whether they work their or not. Personnel Today’s podcast features a story (it’s about half way through, for the impatient among you) about Work Rewired.com, a website that ranks companies according to what employees say about them.

Employees rank companies on issues such as pay, training and career progression, with the RAC and Microsoft scoring well, while Boots languishes in the lower leagues.

Far from seeing it as a negative for businesses, founder Greig Harper believes the site provides HR professionals with a balanced view of the business as seen through its employee’s eyes. It’s also a valuable gauge of how the company’s perceived externally.

But what of the legal implications? As long as it’s true — or the employer cannot prove otherwise - the comments are non-defamatory.

A similarly controversial site targets doctors. Dotcommer and doctor Neil Bacon has launched a site for patients to rate their doctors — to the horror of many in the profession. The traditionally cliquey medical profession is divided as to whether this will knock the God complex out of doctors or unfairly tarnish medics in specialisms where mortality is high.

The threat of an annual MOT for doctors also divided the nation this week — the biggest question being: who will evaluate them? Something tells me a brain drain’s imminent…

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How do you stop a profligate person from over-spending? You could cut their expenses allowance or withdraw signing power. Or you could try something a little more benign — say, drawing a frown on their cheques, perhaps.

I’ve picked a facile example, but this is the idea behind a book creating a big buzz here — ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness’, by University of Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

The basic premise is that nobody likes being ordered around, but people cannot be relied upon to act in their own best interests.

As Richard Reeves, Demos’s director, explains in his review of the book, “homo economicus”, or “Rational Economic Man”, is a myth. We are, instead, “ill-informed weak-willed and lazy”, more likely to go for instant gratification today than ‘jam tomorrow’.

So we need a little nudge in the right direction if we are to, say, put money into pension schemes. We’ll be put off by coercion — hence the idea of drawing smiley faces on a miser’s banknotes to encourage spending, or Schipol Airport’s decision to paint ‘targets’ onto men’s urinals to improve their aim and keep the floors clean.

As we are also heavily influenced by our peers, the trick is to use their behaviour to influence a decision. If you want to encourage people to consume less energy, it’s more effective to compare their use with their neighbours’ than insist they cut back.

Does it apply to business, too? Some corporate practices already have a nudge-like approach. Look at benchmarking — it uses peer performance to influence strategic decisions. Viral marketing and social-networking, too, capitalise on the power of peer persuasion.

Workplace health schemes such as those set up by BT are another source of benign intervention and it’s at policy level that there’s been most interest in Thaler and Sunstein’s theories in the UK.

Whether nudge applies to managers is another matter. Yes, it makes sense to incentivise good performance — but managers have espoused this idea for a while now.

Beyond that, there’s that tricky line between intervention and interferance. In the book, Thaler and Sunstein’s suggestion of a cooling-off period to guard against quickie marriages is overbearing. If you prevent mistake-making in business, you can thwart learning as well as the chances of accidental invention.

Paternalism is not a word well suited to the modern workplace, even in family businesses. There’s a danger of infantilising people — becoming a Mary Poppins manager. What’s more, if Thaler and Sunstein are right, the minute someone feels they are being manipulated or ‘manhandled’ into doing something, they’ll dig their heels in. Then it’ll take more than a nudge to encourage them.

Noting the effectiveness of one-word titles a la ‘Blink’, Reeves comes up with a next-seller of his own: ‘Wink: How Small Signals Transmit Big Messages’.

How about: ‘Leap: the Power of Uninformed Decisions’? or ‘Blip: the Little Mistakes That Spell Big Trouble.’

Any more one-word title suggestions?

Last week I spent a few days in the Swiss Alps. One beautifully sunny and clear afternoon I sat outside a mountain chalet amid the distant sound of cowbells and watched a Red Kite (the bird, that is) soar and circle above some meadows. After five minutes or so it swooped down to catch some prey, before flying off into the trees to eat its lunch.

The critical point for the Red Kite is deciding when to swoop and when to continue soaring. She is constantly looking out for prey and, once she has identified her potential victim, she must calculate her chances of a successful attack. Only then will she act.

This got me thinking about different types of decision-makers. I’ve identified three.

1. The Driver. This leader says “yes” to virtually every new opportunity that comes along. He has boundless energy but can tire out his team and, when the big opportunity finally arrives, the organisation can be too stretched to exploit it.
2. The Analyst. This manager wants absolute certainty before taking action and exasperates his team with the constant need for further information and the development and evaluation of more and more options.
3. The Red Kite. The Red Kite decision-maker understands that nothing is certain in today’s complex world and that she cannot consume precious resources chasing every opportunity.

Equally, she also knows that when there is a big opportunity that her organisation is capable of exploiting she must act. Self-confidence and the honest ability to trust your judgement are the hallmarks of this manager.

Perhaps the quintessential Red Kite leader is Steve Jobs. When he returned to Apple in the late 1990s he closed down several high-profile development projects and stated that his strategy was simply to “wait for the next big thing.”

As he continued to check progress in his own business against emerging developments in adjacent markets, he ultimately identified the potential of iTunes and the iPod. Apple has exploited the momentum gained to drive further developments such as the iPhone, as well as growing its Mac business

“Waiting for the next big thing” is the essence of the Red Kite leader. So is acting decisively once you have identified it. Being a Red Kite requires judgement, confidence in that judgement and a willingness to take prudent risk.

Are you a Red Kite decision-maker?

Photo by Alistair Duncan, CC 2.0 

Let’s start with enterprise. Bad Entrepreneur explains the value of setting goals that are challenging, but reachable.

The advice is sound: focus on a particular earnings figure per week. For BE, It started out of necessity. He set a figure that he needed to get him out of a financial hole, then “ate, slept, breathed and focused on” that figure.

Now’s he’s got a new one to obsess him — it’s higher, but still “seeable”, not a dream number. It’s created a virtuous circle — the more reachable your target, the more likely you’ll achieve it and want to raise the bar a bit.

My question: How scalable is this idea? Could it work for departmental target-setting?

And for (cod) ingenuity, Squander Two presents Britain’s answer to the Apple Mac, the Shrovis-Bishopthorpe Envaliant III. Its sellout feature? “Shrovis-Bishopthorpe lead the pack in considering the internet a nuisance. To this end we have installed a lock, so that the decision to leave the real world behind… is anything but a thoughtless one.”

An in the virtual world, as social networks take off, so do ‘anti-social networking sites’, the most populous of which is Germany’s hatebook.org.

If you’re a little sunnier, the trend also extends to ‘auntie’ sites, too, such as SavvyAuntie — for P.A.N.Ks (professional aunts with no kids — not to be confused with Universal Aunts, who were auntie-style escorts for children travelling alone. Do they still exist?)

Initially targeting US working non-mums, the site offers godmothers and aunts advice and gift ideas, as well as an agony-aunt column. One current question is about how siblings share out their care for an ageing parent — step forward, SavvyChildren.com?

Enterprise is alive and well in London, too. Andrew Charalambous has launched Club4Climate at King’s Cross, London’s Club Surya. Forget the dry flush loos and the solar panels on the roof. This is the genius bit: “…the most impressive jewel in the Surya crown is a dance floor which uses piezo crystal technology to convert the kinetic energy of the dancers’ footsteps into re-useable power for the rest of the club.”

In more traditional enterprise, a bid for growth paid off for the Co-op this week, with the Somerfield purchase dubbed ‘transformational’ for the Co-op brand, according to CEO Peter Marks.

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Marcus Buckingham asks a key question about managing talent: “What would happen if men and women spent more than 75 per cent of each day on the job using their strongest skills and engaged on their favourite tasks, basically doing exactly what they wanted to do?”

They’d produce great results, in all likelihood.

To harness that productivity for the organisation, people should be given jobs that suit both their abilities (current performance) and their capabilities (potential performance). They should also understand the actions and behaviours they need to use to perform the job well.

This is not what normally happens. We often promote people out of a job they are good at — and in a way that makes it clear that cannot say no.

To top it all, they receive no hints about how to approach their new job — what specific actions they need to demonstrate to perform well. You’re just supposed to know.

It’s a common mistake to move your best sales person to sales manager, the best engineer to manager, a strong functional specialist to general management. Not to say that excellent sales people cannot become excellent sales managers. Of course they can. But do they want to?

Some people are at their best right where they are, and moving them or promoting them in order to reward their excellent performance is a formula for failure.

Couldn’t managers ask people what they feel their skills are and what they think they could do to add the most value to the organisation — and then try to give them these jobs?

Is it that we think people are intrinsically lazy and will only want to do as little as possible? Or that there are jobs no-one would ever elect to do? What might seem interminably boring to you may be very interesting to me.

One chief executive I worked with recognised the two-sided nature of talent — ability and capability. He laid out this challenge to his top 300 or so managers around the world: “Rather than have us tell you what and where your job should be, would you please tell us where you think you would add most value to the company. List the three jobs you think you would be best at and we will do our best to put you in one of them.”

It resulted in some dramatic shifts. One senior line manager who had been in charge of a large business unit in Africa elected to move to a public affairs role in Brussels. The net result was that people came close to Buckingham’s 75 per cent goal. Revenue and profitability soared and the company’s value tripled.

Managers need to trust people to choose their role. They also need to understand that not everyone wants a job change or career progression. Where they are is just right.

UK business leaders have their heads in the sand as the economy goes into sharp decline, says the Hay Group’s report, ‘Fight or Flight?’ It exposes what Hay describes as a “startling lack of forward planning” among British businesses.

Just over half of the 120 senior business leaders questioned (40 of whom were in financial services) admit they had the “wrong strategy” for economic slowdown.

Some of it’s down to lack of planning — 18 per cent admit they’ve only just started tackling the downturn — but a large part of the problem’s that UK bosses are playing ostrich.

While 78 per cent recognise the need for action and even admit their current plans may be wrong, 68 per cent have no plans to change direction. Instead, they’ll just downgrade targets to reflect lower sales.

Only a very small minority are planning for the upswing, showing a surprising lack of opportunism.

Some blame short-termism for forcing them to make myopic decisions — which is a bit hand-wringing. But Hay also identifies inexperience as a fundamental issue — these CEOs are part of Brown’s ‘Boom Generation’ and know only stable markets and low inflation.

Nearly half (46 per cent) admit they don’t know how to handle economic turmoil. Worse, 45 per cent believe they lack the vision to steer their companies through the coming difficulties.

So this small band of UK bosses, while demonstrating admirable frankness, is totally bereft of the abilities that surely should’ve got them to the top in the first place — decisiveness, risk analysis, planning, execution. It takes courage to change direction, says Julian Baggini.

Forecasting is hard — some would argue impossible. (Although Warren Buffett’s certainly made a fair fist of it, his hurricane bet notwithstanding.)

But it’s part of the job — it’s risk management at heart. Who hired these people?

Ex-Hewlett Packard boss Carly Fiorina has joined Republican John McCain’s campaign as chief economic adviser and has quickly become a target for Democratic sniping, according to The Sunday Times.

Fiorina, you may remember, was summarily fired from HP when she was felt to have lost her way strategically. Some of her decisions may have been vindicated, but it’s all fuel for the political fire anyway. “With advisers like this, no wonder John McCain doesn’t understand the economy,” said Democratic National Committee communications director Karen Finney. Fiorina, meanwhile, is giving as good as she gets.

Neither side’s behaviour is especially endearing. Even if nastiness is generally expected in politics, it’s tawdry to watch.

For a demonstration of leadership, you’d be better off booking tickets to Flushing Meadow. If you missed the men’s singles final at Wimbledon this year, you missed not only an epic match but an inspiring show of professionalism and humility on both sides.

It is precisely Fiorina’s lack of humility — her hubris — that makes her vulnerable to attacks today, according to Businesspundit’s ‘10 reasons people hate Carly Fiorina’.

The 10 complaints offer a cautionary tale and raise questions for any change leader. If some seem obvious, remember that they felled Fiorina.

1. Can you admit to your shortcomings? Honesty is more effective than defensiveness — M&S’s Sir Stuart Rose has been too prickly under pressure, while Pendragon car dealership won approval for being honest about its uncertain future. “More of the same transparency… would not go amiss,” said Mark Kleinman in The Sunday Telegraph.
2. Are you as good as your word? Good leaders, say Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, practise “tough empathy” — that is, they care genuinely about employees and are realistic with them.
3. Are you delegating fairly or guilty of favouritism? Try to avoid a command-and-control structure that alienates the bulk of your employees. Teamwork flourishes where people feel their contribution matters.
4. Are you focusing on a few key priorities? A scattergun approach to strategy will confuse everyone and dilute the impact of each initiative.
5. What’s great about your company’s culture? New doesn’t always mean better. In dismissing the ‘HP Way’, Fiorina “hobbled employees’ abilities to communicate effectively with managers.”
6. Does your vision translate into action?
7. Where is your innovation coming from? What products or services will give you the edge and who are the people who can bring them to market?
8. Where will sales come from? Have you got a sales pipeline?
9. Do you feel trusted by employees — do you walk the floor or are you too busy promoting yourself?
10. Do you listen to shareholders, employees and the public? What measures have you got in place to allow their voices to be heard?