The Good, The Bad and The Enlightened

A mixed bag of leaders

How Bizarre

“You’re a bit harsh on CEOs, It’s not all their fault.”

This was said to me in a conversation recently.

“No, it’s not all their fault. But it is, always, their choice,” was my response.

I understand why CEOs do restructuring programmes, dump employees to hit the numbers, pursue destructive mergers, relocate plants and offices to another country. It’s perfectly logical from their perspective. Their tenure is short, they do the things that maximise their pay and/or follow the logic of stock markets.

But they choose to do that. Every time. That’s why they get my criticism, with both barrels. I don’t apologise for that.

So it is rather unusual when I feel moved to praise a CEO. Especially on leading a Fortune 500 company but Enrique Lores, CEO of HP, deserves a pat on the back (although, before I get carried away, he has announced a 10% reduction in their workforce due to falling PC sales, so …)

In this article, Lores starts by saying that the conversation has been about where people work but it should be about the more profound issue of how people’s relationship with work has changed.

To explore this question, HP commissioned the HP Work Relationship Index. What they found out shocked them.

Only 27% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work. Lores recognises that is unsustainable and that companies need to change to redefine that relationship. He suggests three areas of focus.

1. Reject the false choice between Productivity and Happiness.

Sort of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

2. Evolve company cultures.

83% of employees would take pay cut to feel happier at work! As he puts it “It’s critical for companies to foster environments that allow people to excel in their careers while thriving in their lives.”

3. Technology needs an upgrade.

75% of employees say tools and tech are integral to being successful but only 25% say they have these tools today (and this is a tech company - imagine what the situation is elsewhere. Needing an average of 40 log-ons just to do the job is where…)

I praise Enrique Lores for recognising what question needed to be asked and for having the courage to ask it. How many other CEOs are thinking about our changing relationship with work, other than railing against it and trying to drag workers back to their desks? I agree with his conclusions and areas of focus. Some sanity, at last.

However (well, you knew that was coming), I have a couple of comments on them.

I don’t remember ever signing up to trade my happiness for productivity. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in the employment contract, they didn’t mention it in the interview process and I’m certain it wasn’t on the job ad. However, we’ve all been sort of aware that this is the deal that’s been going down these last few decades. It’s the remorseless logic of the extractive capitalist model that has pervaded business. It’s not just a false choice, it’s a malign one.

Yes, company cultures should support thriving in life as well excelling in work. How did we ever get to thinking otherwise? As I’ve written often before, this was how it was in the post-war period, when companies looked after their employees. They did it then because they either felt it was right or they were compelled by governments to do so. Now, it is being driven by enlightened self-interest (although I’d like to see government legislation more on this too).

And, yes, we need better tech that supports the new ways of working and more open and fluid organisational structures. The strains many companies feel at the moment is that they are trying to operate flexibly on old, static infrastructure. It’s like trying to have a motor race on cart tracks. The best organisations that are emerging do so with a world-class technical infrastructure to support them.

Praise for CEOs. Whatever next.

Somethin’ Stupid

Fortunately, there are still plenty of them driving their heads firmly into the sand and trying to drag us back to the last decade. Bizarrely, these include those who were seen as the pioneers, the cool kids of the last decade, the tech companies.

They forged their reputations with a series of breathtaking leaps in imagination that have transformed the way ordinary people live their lives. Apple, Amazon, Zoom - although they also have one other thing in common. They have all issued Return To Office (RTO) mandates recently, insisting employees show up for a minimum of three days and applying sanctions on those who don’t.

The folly of this is highlighted in this article in Entrepreneur by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, which pulls together recent research and interviews to show the link between flexible work policies and innovation. (Dr. Gleb has been called a ‘Hybrid Expert’ by the New York Times and is well worth following).

One point really summarises this

“EY's Technology Pulse Poll recently unearthed a startling insight: a whopping 78% of senior tech leaders assert that remote work positively impacts their ability to innovate.”

I identified greater innovation as a benefit of these new and flexible ways of working a while ago, so it’s not a surprise to me but good to see some evidence all the same. However, it appears to escaped the notice of the “Titans of Tech” who run Apple, Amazon and the rest (not to mention the idiot man-child Elon. Dammit, I mentioned Elon!!!), who are busy actively damaging their company’s futures with their RTO policies.

Innovation is the life-blood of these companies and yet they are a implementing a policy that, at best, reduces the supply and, at worst, cuts it off completely.

Maybe the likes of Apple and Amazon have done all the innovation they are going to do, at least in their current iterations. They will go into a long and slow decline that will end in their acquisition (think Blackberry or Nokia) or a significant reinvention (think IBM, Microsoft). Even if they survive, they will never scale the heights they did before.

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating. Some very big names are going to take a fall because they cling to the past rather than grasp the possibilities before them.

Somewhere Only We Know

Francis Saele is a great source on LinkedIN for articles on Workplace, with a particilar focus on Corporate Real Estate, which is his area of interest. He does a great job summarising them (very handy if they are paywalled), so worth a follow.

As well as pointing to Dr. Gleb’s article, he has been highlighting stories of organisations who are grasping the possibilities. They include the tech companies Atlassian, Nvidia and Dropbox. If you’re looking for the companies that will emerge in the coming decade, they are going to either be in this group of pioneers (I mean the group more broadly, not just the three I’ve mentioned) or they are going to look very similar - digital and remote first organisations with a distributed operating model.

You might wonder why you don’t read more about these companies. Francis explains it like this,

“The elites, the top 10% of the top 1% of wage earners are heavily invested directly or indirectly in office buildings and financial firms including banks. They are simply protecting their investment…

Don't expect to see anything like this message or this article in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times or even Bloomberg. Lots of elites there.”

I think Francis is right and I’d chuck in HBR and its incestuous relationship with Big Consulting, which really doesn’t have much to say in this space because their ‘off the shelf’ solutioneering is irrelevant. Although I’m sure they’ll come up with something to flog to the idiot CEOs to help them drive their businesses into the ground a bit faster.

There are lots of great examples of companies and organisations who are forging their own approach, rejecting the orthodoxy of the past, you just have to look in the right places. They are being curious, experimenting, playing around with the possibilities and creating their own, unique and evolving approaches to work.

There’s a revolution going on under the radar and one day it will overwhelm the status quo, who will say “We never saw that coming’”. Because that’s how change always happens.

Come Away With Me

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop run by the UK arm of the Semco Style Institute and find out more about their methodology to help organisations implement a human-centred workplace.

It has been developed with Ricardo Semler and based on the principles of self-management that he pioneered at his company Semco in the 1980, and wrote about in his book “Maverick”.

Imagine that. Ideas from the 1980s that are still seen as revolutionary and anathema to conventional management doctrine. I wonder why they have not been more widely adopted? (Hint: see previous paragraph).

Semco make a point of their ‘non-dogmatic’ approach. You could almost call it ‘anti-consultancy’. They don’t have a ‘change programme’ for you to roll over your employees, a ‘one-size fits none’ approach that appeals to those who want to get fit without going to the gym. Instead, they offer a framework of five pivotal principles, 15 pillars and 100+ practices to guide you towards a self-managed workplace.

I like frameworks and principles. It’s an approach that treats people like grown-ups and allows them to work in their own way and at their own pace.

I’m not going to castigate people who don’t move lock, stock and barrel to a fully self-managed, autonomous, flexible structure. That’s often not feasible, desirable or sensible. But everyone can try to move forward, can take something like Semco’s list of practices and try some out, run some experiments. Start small, see what works and do more of it. That’s really all I’m asking people to do. That alone will start to Decrapify Work and move towards a better future.

Yet that’s too much for some of the annointed ‘Industry Leaders’ that push for RTO. Once again, the words of General Eric Shinseki come to mind.

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Dog Days Are Over

It was Mental Health Day last Tuesday and, rather on the spur of the moment, I wrote this post about my mental health journey.

It was suggested to me some time ago that I was experiencing workplace PTSD. I was a bit taken aback because I didn’t know there was such a thing and, well, it all sounded a bit overblown, didn’t it?

But in the last couple of weeks I have come to accept the truth of this. I have been in denial and avoidance for a very long time for all sorts of reasons. I was ashamed, I was fearful of the consequences, it didn’t fit my story about who I am. Maybe it was just too big and dramatic for me.

The thing is, I know a lot of people out there have been affected in similar ways. And I know a lot of you are still in denial, or maybe just a half-acceptance that means you don’t take it seriously enough to do what you need to do to heal.

But I also know you want to be happy, you want to lift the weight you feel on your shoulders, to be more of the person you used to be. The only way to that place is to go through your fear and shame. That’s not easy but it is possible.

I’ll be exploring this in more detail in the coming months. If you’d like to talk about this or any related topic, please get in touch. (Email me or book a call)

To use a one-time advertising slogan of my erstwhile employer, “It’s good to talk”.