Decrapify Work or Die (Qu’est que c’est?)
Psycho Killer
We know that a disproportionate number of business leaders are psychopaths, as I was reminded by a post from the excellent Stowe Boyd. He cites one study that puts the number at 4% versus 1% in the general population but I recall a study of Fortune 1000 companies that put it nearer 25% (I think). Whatever, there are a lot of the bastards about.
Basically, high psychopathy scores are associated with perceptions of good communication skills, strategic thinking and high creative/innovative ability, all of which mark out the psychopath as having leadership potential. These frequently overshadow their poor scores on management style, being a team player and even current performance! Gotta love their manipulation skills, haven’t you?
In fact, in the presence of charm and charisma, a failure to adhere to the rules can actually impress others. A case study of this effect is currently residing in No.10 Downing Street. (“Are you calling the Prime Minister a psychopath, Colin?” “You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment”)
What is more concerning to me is that today’s organisational structures and cultures actually promote psychopathic behaviours. As well as valuing charisma, communication and persuasiveness (playing to the psychopath’s A game), they also venerate things like ‘making tough calls’ (not showing empathy) and coolness under pressure (not displaying or recognising emotions in unpleasant circumstances), making the psychopath’s most unpleasant traits work in their favour.
That these behaviours are not only normalised but held to be positive attributes leads to good people doing bad things. If you want to succeed, you have to behave like a psychopath and that has a corrosive effect on you and your soul.
Like many people I have met, I had a psychopath boss who damaged my career and my life. However, many of his behaviours were quite commonplace in the toxic environment I was in, so I didn’t realise how extreme he was. He blended in. It was the hour he spent gloating and explaining to me exactly how he had trashed my career that gave him away.
He got promoted, of course.
Stuck in the middle with you
Talking of psychopaths, Dominic Cummings has been giving his account of his time in the heart of government during the onset and early stages of the pandemic. A man of boundless ego and self-regard and an almost pathological inability to see fault in himself, he is a renowned liar and rewriter of history. However, on this occasion he seemed to have told the truth (albeit with significant and self-serving omissions) because it lines up with what we already knew from other sources.
What he describes is utter chaos and incompetence, cock-up rather than conspiracy. I find this enormously upsetting and dispiriting, even though it confirms what I feared was happening at the time.
You see, I really wanted there to be a conspiracy. I really wanted to find some evil masterplan driving the government’s response because then, at least, I would know someone was trying to exert some control. An evil genius is still a genius. Better that than a bunch of duffers running the show.
I think this reflects how many people feel in large organisations (I certainly experienced this). You want to think ‘them upstairs’ know what they are doing, that they have a modicum of competence and some sort of plan. Because the alternative is to acknowledge that no-one is in charge, that the chaos is inevitable and everything you do is utterly pointless. And that way lies despair.
And so we tell ourselves stories about what’s happening and convince ourselves the madness is illusory and ignore the evidence before our eyes. Until one day we can ignore it no longer and we have to acknowledge that the lunatics are running the asylum.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right …
9 to 5
A friend recently shared a BBC article about the 4-day week, an idea that is gaining attention of governments as a way of improving well-being and reducing carbon emissions by cutting commuting.
To some extent, some of the justifications have been undercut by the pandemic and the move to hybrid working that seems to be taking hold. Commuting is likely to be cut to 2 or 3 days for many, and it’s possible that a lot of business travel will replaced by virtual meetings, so the reduction of the country’s carbon footprint could happen anyway.
There’s also a question as to whether a mandated reduction like this is the right approach, or whether giving people the autonomy and flexibility to fit their working hours into their life as they see fit isn’t a better approach. I know of one company that abandoned the former in favour of the latter, after they had asked their people what they wanted (which they could have done in the first place, of course…)
Reducing hours is something we should be working towards. Keynes predicted that we’d all be working 15 hours a week by now, whereas what we we have seen over the past decade is a steady increase in working hours and flatlining productivity. I wonder if they could by any chance be related?
We all know that organisations’ main growth product has been bureaucracy and that lots of people have meaningless bullshit jobs that add no value. David Graeber reckoned that about 50% of all jobs are ‘predominantly bullshit’, whilst Gary Hamel says that cutting 50% of the bureaucracy in organisations is easily achievable. We should have no problem finding a day a week in that lot.
Work should enable us to grow and develop as human beings and to play our role in society fully. As my brother used to say, we should “work to live, not live for work”.
So I reckon about half our time working should be plenty. And that’s totally do-able.
Take me to the river
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy - and would make this missive extremely tedious (or even more tedious, you may think!). So I am taking a week off to go to our place on the Norfolk Broads, to mess about in boats, go for walks to the pub and generally rest and recharge. It used to be a time to unplug but mobile coverage has improved over the years, so I’ll still be popping online to keep the firehose under control. But I won’t be posting or writing not-newsletters, so I’ll be back in a fortnight.
I really enjoy writing these and I’ve had some lovely feedback from some of you. They are a bit longer than I originally envisioned so I appreciate the time you take to read them. This is the fifteenth, so I think we both deserve a break!