My Sharona!
It should really be ‘Oh, Corona!”, maybe they’ll re-record it …
Yes, I have succumbed to the bloody virus, having escaped it for 2 1/2 years, which is annoying. Seems to be a mild dose, at the moment, mostly a very sore throat. So it’s painful to talk but I can still write! So you’re not getting off this week - and what a week it’s been!
Boris The Spider
It’s been what they like to call a ‘tumultuous’ week in British politics, ending with the not-resigning-yet-resignation speech by our excuse for a Prime Minister. After several days of a ‘will he - won’t he’ plot line that had all the sophistication of a Netflix RomCom, he sort of went.
I’ve written before about the damage that bad behaviour by a leader can do to an organisation. They basically cast a shadow over everyone they work with and who works for them. The cost is huge and can even be fatal to the organisation.
That’s why I say there has to be a ‘No Arseholes’ rule. Such behaviour should be stopped because it’s wrong but it’s also bad for business. Whatever a ‘high performer’ is bringing to the business, if they routinely behave badly then they do far more damage. The more senior they are, the greater the damage.
If you want an example, look no further than PM Johnson. He has tainted everyone who has served under him, he’s tainted his party, he’s dragged the office of PM into disrepute, he’s undermined parliament and the whole system of democracy in our country, he’s trashed the UK’s international reputation. And he’s not done yet, as he ignominiously clings on to office as ‘caretaker’.
I’m glad he’s going but he should never have got the job in the first place. A recruitment mistake, you could say. In his book “Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?”, Tomas Chamurro-Premusic suggests there are three main reasons:
Our inability to distinguish between confidence and competence.
Our love of charismatic individuals
Our inability to resist the allure of narcissistic individuals
With Alexander DePfeffel Johnson, we got a full house, didn’t we?
And it will take decades to repair the damage he has done - if we can.
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
According to Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer, Johnson’s downfall was because he apologised (“Boris Johnson Made a Terrible Mistake: He Apologized”).
Specifically, it was his apology for appointing Chris Pincher as Deputy Chief Whip despite the allegations of sexual assault against him. Apparently, apologising is a sign of weakness, and that caused the two ministers (Javid and Sunak) to resign, which precipitated his downfall.
He claims that this is important lesson “completely consistent with my book and my class.” When pressed on this, Pfeffer offered as proof that one of the two ministers in question had been on his course.
Is it just me, or does this look like someone grabbing a news item and making a tenuous connection to promote their own stuff?
No doubt we will see plenty of posts jumping on the band wagon, or the ’10 leadership lessons from Johnson’s downfall’ variety, but I expected a little better from Pfeffer.
It’s a bit of a stretch to take one incident out of the swirl of chaos surrounding Johnson and say THAT’S the reason Savid and Sunak chose that moment to resign. One might even say naive. Or just wrong.
I’m not even sure it stands up. If Johnson had acted swiftly and issued an early apology, the issue would have disappeared. As is often the case, it is the denial and cover-up that did the damage, not the eventual admission and apology.
It’s a facile and opportunistic reading of the situation, in my view. Oh well, all our heroes turn out to have feet of clay, don’t they?
There is a rather more worrying aspect to this. Pfeffer’s ‘7 rules about power’ are about how to get power in a hierarchical organisation. He claims they offer a clear-eyed view of how things work in real life. If you want to make change, you have to get power, so you have to get real about how to do that. He teaches this stuff to his Stanford students. So it becomes a bit self-perpetuating.
It’s essentially saying “Here’s how you can be a bastard to get into positions of power. Then you can be a good guy”.
If you assume that the majority of organisations are toxic systems that promote and reward psychopathic behaviours, then it’s a pragmatic approach but how easy is it to change once you are in power?
Perhaps he’d be better off teaching them how to change such systems. After all, one of his rules is “Break the rules” 🏴☠️
I’m Coming Up
People are starting to ‘get with the program’, as our American cousins like to say. I’m not one to blow my own trumpet but I blogged that ‘The SHIFT has happened’ over two years ago.
The focus is still mostly on the ‘where’, which is probably because the possible financial impacts of a move away from city centres and office blocks. Lots of vested interests wanting maintain the status quo and lots of investors looking for emerging opportunities, so a lot of chatter.
I’m rather more interested in changes to the how of work. Including the how much.
There are opportunities to transform our ways of working to make work meaningful and enjoyable, as well as integrated with the other aspects of our work. We can be more effective and make work a smaller part of our lives, in terms of the time it takes up (4 day week, anyone?). As we are untethered from offices, we can become untethered from desks and screens, which will be healthier for us.
There’s an assumption that these changes are only available to knowledge workers but I was heartened to see a post today from someone who was an office equipment repairer, a tradesman. He got his jobs sent to him (by pager!) and he planned his own day. If he needed a part, it was shipped to a pick-up point near him. He worked on client sites and never had to go to an office - he was effectively remote.
We can make work better for everyone. It just takes the will and a little imagination.
Cars
There have been a couple of articles this week about why remote working is ‘failing’ as it’s short-comings are becoming apparent.
This seems to me to be a case of category error. They are comparing something that’s been evolving for over a hundred years and become the norm with something that is still emerging and is far from fully formed (they often don’t define what they mean by ‘remote working’ in the articles, so that not really helping their arguments).
It’s silly to make sweeping statements when we are transitioning. It’s like comparing early motor cars with horse-drawn vehicles and concluding the motor car has no future.
Motor cars were noisy, smelly, dangerous, unreliable. Expensive to own and to run. They couldn’t cover all terrain that horses could. You could get water and feed for your horses but where on earth were you going to get petrol for a car?
People in the horse drawn vehicles business would conclude that their business was safe. Indeed, better to invest more money in it than in motor cars.
But each of the problems got solved. Henry Ford solved the cost issue, roads and garages got built, cars became the transport of choice for the masses. The inherent advantages of the motor car came to bear fully on the market and were irresistible.
That’s where we are with ‘remote’ (by which I think they mean working methods that are not office-centric). Work from Home (caused by COVID) has been like the first Model T coming out, now the roads and garages are being built and the ‘remote experience’ will only get better and better, as the motoring experience did.
It’s really just a matter of time.
And these articles are the equivalent of horse-vehicle owners pontificating on early motor cars. Before they went bust
.