I’m taking August off and largely disconnecting but I didn’t want to leave you with a yawning gap in your intellectual input, an aimless cognitively-starved wreck wandering around reading crisp packets in a desperate effort to feed the hollowness you feel within. No! I have come to rescue your sanity by blithely recycling some old blog posts and making out I’m doing you a favour. Well, anyway, you might find these amusing or, if not, mercifully short.
They’ll be a couple in each weekly post until September, when what passes for normal service will resume.
Enjoy the summer! (but don’t forget your Pac-A-Mac)
The High Church Of Leadership
Have you been anointed to the High Church of Leadership?
You see, not everyone can be a leader. You must be chosen, selected, groomed for the role.
Your potential must be identified, you must be separated out from the herd and put on the elite track.
You must learn the language and the rituals of leadership. As you progress, you must obtain the symbols. The MBA. The summer school at INSEAD. The executive leadership programme.
You must develop presence and gravitas. You must learn to act like a leader, to speak like a leader, to look like a leader. You must know how to dress, how to walk, how to speak and, most importantly, how to fake empathy.
You have to be schooled in the ways of leadership. Know how to be aware of your place in the hierarchy, who you have power over and who has power over you. Learn the signs about how much you can challenge, how far you can deviate from the status quo. Learn the ninja moves that establish your superiority and hold others in their place.
You must learn the secret signs that leaders identify each other with and the gestures and language that communicate your leadership level. You must learn to spot leaders and separate them from mere followers and technicians.
If you are a diligent student and integrate the lessons into your behaviour, you will embody leadership and progress along the sacred path. Ultimately, you may gain access to the inner sanctum, the board of directors. Once you have attained this hallowed office, you will forever operate on a higher plane and receive rewards commensurate with your elevated status. Your position will be secure, you can only fail upwards from now on.
This is what it means to be a leader, to learn the sacred secrets of leadership and to pass through the rites of progress to achieve nirvana, to reach a state of bliss.
Are you ready to commit yourself to the High Church of Leadership? Are you ready to accept your true calling and ascend to glory?
We can show you the path to achieving the one true Leadership style that will ensure you ascend to Executive Suite and pass through the hallowed portal to the sacred realm of the inner sanctum.
Sign up for our 12 month ‘Executive Leadership Development’ programme, starting now, for the early bird price of £100,000 and a piece of your soul that will be forever ours.
Don’t miss out on this fabulous opportunity to secure your place in C-Suite nirvana. Sign up today!
The Importance Of The Janitor
(it’s not just about clean toilets)
I once cleaned the toilets in a Corned Beef warehouse.
I was holiday cover for the regular guy and it was a bit of a doddle, I was done by lunchtime.
What did the regular janitor do with his time? He chatted to the guys who humped the corned beef around. He was pretty popular, a bit of a character and they liked having a laugh and joke with him.
Today, his job would be contracted out to a cleaning company. They’ll be cheaper and in and out in half the time. No chat, maybe a worse job, but who cares? Apart from the people who work there, who’s community is diminished a little.
We’ve seen the same thing in offices, where communities have been chipped away at bit by bit.
When I started work, the ladies with the tea trolley come around twice a day. But it was deemed inefficient, so the ladies were pensioned off, along with their cheery voices and chit chat that lightened our day.
The security guards were also part of our community, a ready source of jokes, banter and gossip. But who employs their own security these days, when you can slash costs and outsource to a faceless cadre of blokes in G4S uniforms?
And the cleaners, familiar faces replaced by an ever-changing parade of strangers who pass through the office like ghosts.
And so, after decades of this, our workplace community has been pared back to almost nothing. The numbers are at a bare minimum, the energy is minimal, there’s no time to sustain it, let alone build it.
You see, the janitor at the Corned Beef warehouse wasn’t the hardest worker but he was a key part of the community. Everyone knew him, he was a hub for fellow feeling, for belonging, a point of connection.
So too were the tea ladies, the canteen staff, the security guys, the cleaners - and the typists and admin assistants. They were the social lubricant that kept the wheels of the community turning, the glue that held it together but also gave it substance. The little interactions we had with them lifted our mood, made our day a little brighter.
What little community was left after they were all swept aside has now been snuffed out by the pandemic, leaving the workplace barren and devoid of life.
Leaders want to get everyone back into the office but for what? There is little there, just an empty stage for work theatre to be played on, performative busy-ness and a pretence of meaning. They want to restore the culture but it’s not culture that people want.
People want community - and that’s not something that’s held in an office anymore.
They want belonging, connection, meaning. They want to feel part of something bigger, something uniquely and unmistakably human.
Building that will take time and effort. It won’t look like efficiency or productivity - that’s the wheel it got broken on in the first place.
It will look like humanity and if you have it, people will want to be part of it.
Even if it’s just to clean the toilets