Close, but no cigar

The right ideas but for the wrong reasons

The Chain

What connects justice, care, teams, culture and pirates?

(Apart from Pirates, that is. Read ‘Be More Pirate’ if you don’t get the connection.)

To my surprise, it turns out it’s the two items that caught my eye this week. One is an article on HBR entitled “The Workplace Psychological Contract Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.”, and the other is an episode of Bruce Daisley’s ‘Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat’ podcast, “Great Culture Starts With Teams”.

They are both right, in a way. And they are both a bit wrong too.

I might be guilty of confirmation bias but they both seem to state things that I’ve been saying for some time, things that might loosely be grouped under the heading of ‘Statements of the perfectly bleeding obvious’. (Maybe I should make this a regular feature …?)

So let’s dive in

Where Is The Love?

First, the HBR article “The Workplace Psychological Contract Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.”

(I have a minor quibble about the title, it’s not the psychological contract that’s broken, it’s the social contract. It’s the implied and socially understood contract between employers and the employed. But hey, we’re in the right ball park, so let’s hear them out.)

The authors say that the conflict over Return To Office mandates is simply the flashpoint that has highlighted the ‘growing divergence between employers and employees in their understanding of what’s fair’. This is because employers are establishing formal workplace policies on the basis of the ethics of justice - a one-size-fits-all approach to fairness-, whilst employees are wanting a more flexible, personalised approach based on the ethics of care.

This was already getting my bullshit antennae twitching as it sounds like academic overkill that over-complicates a fairly straightforward matter but I ploughed on.

Basically, organisations apply the same rules to everyone because they see that as fair, but employees see that they each have different circumstances and requirements and want policies to take account of that. The obvious example (which they don’t actually articulate) is that RTO policies are much easier for men without caring responsibilities to comply with than for those with caring responsibilities (disproportionately women), people with disabilities, those with health conditions, those with neurodiversity and basically everyone else.

So how do they change to basing workplace policies on an the ethics of care? They suggest three principles that will ‘create the conditions for care to happen’.

Those are

1. Relational Proximity (Enabling human interaction)

2. Transparent Principles (Trust and autonomy instead of rules and compliance)

3. Attentive adaptability (Managers adapting policies to meet individual needs)

Look, I don’t have a problem with any of these, they are very much part of what I see as a decrapified workplace. But they are not, by themselves, going to make much difference.

They admit as much in the closing segment, and I quote (my emphasis):

‘Creating a culture of care can be challenging for organizations because it’s based in effectiveness, not efficiency. This notion is anathema to most executives and often leads companies to outsource or delegate care work by sending their managers to customized executive retreats, coaching programs, or special curated events. These efforts are usually self-defeating, however—on a day-to-day basis, employees can easily see what the company really cares about.’

They have unwittingly pointed to the flaw in their whole proposition. That is, you can’t create a culture of care if you don’t actually care; and people don’t evaluate that by what you say but by what you do. And what they see is employers don’t give a monkey’s about them, they only care about the numbers.

They conclude with the utterly heroic statement that ‘The ethics of care can bridge this disconnect.’ Man, the word ‘bridge’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Actually, this is magical thinking.

The only way to show your workplace is based on the ethics of care is to show you really do care, every single day in every single action that you take. But it’s too late for many companies because we’ve seen behind the curtain and we know they don’t. We know the system puts profits before people with a consistent ruthlessness and rewards those who do that in the most effective and cold-hearted way. Until companies start to renounce that system (which is late-stage capitalism, based on ethics of greed), they have no chance of restoring the psychological contract, or establishing any other than the basic transaction of effort for money.

The Sweet Escape

And so on to Daisley’s podcast, in which he speaks to the authors of the book “Leading for Wellness”. (That title got the antennae twitching a bit as well).

Essentially, they talk about creating ‘micro-cultures’, where a manager builds a great culture for their team even if the company is not focused on it.

I heartily endorse this, it’s what I did when I was in a bad culture. Indeed, being part of a team with a good culture and strong personal relationships kept me afloat in what were extremely choppy waters. It’s a good thing to do, for the team and the manager. It just seemed obvious to me because I didn’t want to manage my team the way that I was managed and I wanted to work in a good atmosphere, as much as I could influence that.

It’s also a reflection of the reality of how culture works. I've made this point many times before but culture is not really set by those at the top, or through culture change programmes. They can only create the conditions that encourage the behaviours that lead to a good culture (or, equally, a bad one).

Culture is experienced at the team level (the book ‘Nine Lies About Work’ explains this well and backs it up with research). Your impression of the ‘culture’ is formed by the daily interactions you have, which will be mostly within the team that you work. Or, to put it another way, culture is set by team managers. That’s how it actually works.

That’s why you can go to a company with a great reputation for culture and have a terrible experience, because of the team you are in. I experienced the opposite, a great team culture in a pretty toxic organisation.

One of the way they talk about a manager doing this is by bending the rules to help team members. They give the example of a woman who was going on maternity leave for the second time but it was after the company had been acquired and, subsequently, a new policy brought in.

Under the new policy, the extra leave she had used for her first pregnancy was a benefit that had been removed. Not having the extra leave was going to cause a lot of problems for her she may have been forced to leave her job.

The manager looked at the new rules and found he was allowed to give discretionary leave of absence, so he used that to give the women the extra leave she had applied for and would have got as routine under the pre-acquisition policy. As an added bonus (for her), this would be paid leave, not unpaid leave as before. It made her pregnancy much more manageable and meant she could stay in her job. And she was delighted with her manager, who had shown he cared about her.

Funnily enough, there was a very similar story in the HBR paper about a manager at Dell. The strict RTO policy didn’t make any sense for their globally dispersed team, so they created exceptions for those team members who interacted with colleagues in different time zones. The team was observed to be more engaged than their peers.

Once again, they are so close to the truth here but instead they grasp at something adjacent and proclaim that as the truth instead. The truth is rigid edicts from on high are stupid and counter-productive. The solution is to have guiding principles that can be interpreted at the team level to fit the context that team is operating in. That is, give teams and their managers the freedom and autonomy to organise themselves.

What’s more, this is not really exceptional, it’s what middle managers do. They take the nonsense sent down from on high and fudge it so that it’s workable at the level where the work actually gets done - i.e. the team. That’s why ‘delayering’ middle management rarely delivers the promised benefits because without the ‘translation’ middle managers provide, things rapidly deteriorate. The remedy then is to re-populate that middle layer, often with more expensive hires than you had in the first place. God forbid that senior management should change their ways and communicate clearly with those at the workface!

I’m all in favour of team leaders creating a positive culture for their team, it will help develop their leadership abilities, make their day more pleasant and make them feel good about themselves. Obviously, it will benefit their team members and is likely to lead to better team performance. But it’s not a solution to anything, it’s a sticking plaster on a gaping wound.

It can also get positively dangerous. They won’t get recognised and rewarded for it and may well find themselves under attack for their approach (Mark Le Busque did exactly this, got stellar results and was nicknamed ‘Kumbaya Mark’ by colleagues. Eventually his bosses told him “We love your results Mark, but we don’t like the way you get them”. That was when he decided his career there was over - to the benefit of all those who has taught leadership too since.)

Managers should definitely do this. After all, the way to change the world is by changing your world (a Be More Pirate maxim). However, be aware of the limits of your impact and that there could be blowback. It’s a risk but one well worth taking, however. And it’s way better than being an arsehole manager, like many of your peers.

Invisible

“What about the Pirates, Colin?”, I hear you say.

Well, Bruce got very excited about this approach, which he (correctly) identified as being ‘a bit subversive’. Subversion is a very Pirate thing to do.

It’s a survival strategy too. When I found myself in a toxic, command-and-control culture where I seemed to get criticised, demeaned and dismissed by senior management for what I was doing, I just went underground. I built on my existing network and developed relationships with the people I needed to work with. I was able to persuade them to do what I needed on the basis of personal friendship and without going through the formal channels. Later on, we would cover our tracks and make it look like we had followed the process.

It worked really well, I got my projects delivered and launched and kept my sanity. I got a great sense of achievement but almost zero recognition. No bonuses, no promotion, no praise.

It’s a two-edged sword. It’s a way to make things happen, and if you are made that way (as I am), that’s motivating. It makes you feel good, it aligns with your values and helps others. However, it is always a way of working around dysfunction, a way of coping with the system as it is. It doesn’t address the fundamental problems.

Again, I’m all in favour of subversion. It can make change happen within your circle of influence. It can send out ripples that *might* possibly lead to a greater change. But it’s really only a short-term fix. I should more properly call it a tactic, not a strategy. You can’t build a career in CorporateLand by being subversive.

Outside of CorporateLand, though … well, that’s a different story.

And finally…

A new Work Punks podcast has just dropped. This time we wrangle with the thorny issue of meetings and how to stop being dragged into so many of them. It’s 15 minutes of our distilled wisdom, a zingy little shot of advice that will wake you up and make the world look a better place!

Catch the video here (you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel), or download the podcast from your favourite podcast platform - just search for ‘Work Punks’.

I’ve also put out a post on my new substack, “No-one’s Coming To Save You”. It’s my ‘Origin Story’ of getting chewed up and spat out by the corporate grinder. It’s a cautionary tale, in some ways, but also one that you may well recognise from your own life. Have a read and let me know what you think.