Category: Leadership

Anna Farmery has posted the second (and last) part of our conversation at her blog.

In the second part we talk mostly about how you can create a happy business. Give it a listen and tell Anna what you think of it!

David Maister asks a great question: How did you lose your business innocence?

I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them).

An example: “the firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That’s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.???

So here’s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing – the world forgot to “beat out of me” my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people.

I’m really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run (stories please?)

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I have yet another question for ya: What three tips would you give your boss? What would you like him or her to do, stop doing, change, say, not say?

Write a comment, I’d really like to know!

Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten had an article last week about career surfers. In it they describe how employees today often decline job offers or promotions that a company offers them.

Professor Henrik Holt Larsen of the Copenhagen Business School says:

It’s harder than ever for businesses to attract and retain employees who not only possess the required skills but who can also be emotionally bound to the company. People tend to focus more on their own desires and needs and therefore to surf between multiple career paths.

We don’t know enough yet about this narcissistic personality.

You know, Henrik, you say that like it’s a bad thing :o)

I have two comments on this. First, I find it incredible that someone would cast this tendency for people to choose career paths for themselves in a bad light. This is not narcissistic, it’s common sense. I choose my career path based on what’s good for me, not on what’s good for the company.

Secondly, if companies want to “bind their employees to them emotionally”, as Larsen puts it, this bond needs to go both ways. In short, the company must be prepared to offer it’s employees more than just a paycheck. If a company wants it’s employees to feel something about the company, the company must be prepared to feel back. To value it’s employees as people, not just as resources.

And this means yout won’t fire people, just to get a 5% increase in stock price. This means that you won’t carelessley reassign people to a department they don’t want to work for. This means leaders will do everything in their power to make their people happy at work.

The equation is simple:

Want your employees to care about the company?

Start by having the company care about them. Not as employees but as human beings.

Vetle from Norway sent me a link to an article about how bad management is making norwegian employees unhappy at work and costing business tons of money.

From the article:

22% of employees surveyed consider their immediate manager so weak, that maybe that person shouldn’t be a manager at all.
…
There is a clear connection between good managers, satisfied employees and profits. Happy employees create happy customers – and better results for the business. According to our research, happy employees mean a 40% increase in profits.

Also one in three rate their manager as technically competent but a bad leader.

The question is: Is this a norwegian phenomonon or is this true in your country too? What do you think?

One large company finds that many of their top performers are absconding:

It’s like clockwork. Every year a portion of our top talent decides it’s time to move on. Once those bonus or holiday checks are cashed, the flood gates open and the resignation letters start flowing in.

They’ve done an exit survey among the top performing employees leaving the company:

Of the 178 files, 83 people listed money as a reason for leaving. 62 listed it as the only reason.

Their conclusion: They must adjust salaries and compensation. My conclusion: They’re wrong. Here’s why.
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Here’s a scary tale from the real world:

When I was just starting out as a legal secretary, I worked for two lawyers who I referred to as Good Boss and Evil Boss.

Evil boss would never look for a file – he would yell for me to immediately find a particular FILE – which would be on his desk where he kept all of his working files.

In addition he would go through my in-box after I had left the office and rearrange the stack, move his work up and add new post-it notes with different deadline dates.

Three drafts to any document was the absolute minimum, and he often wanted to see the previous drafts for him to check my work. Consequently, my wastepaper basket was very organized.

Source

The old leadership style of “I’m the boss, you must do whatever I say” is being challenged by a different style which is more about supporting people to let them create results.

While the old leadership style reminds me mostly of a prison warden, exercising absolute power over his wards, the new leadership role is completely different. It’s about making people like their jobs. It’s about realizing that people are in fact free to leave at any time.

In short, the new leadership style reminds me much more of the host of a party. Here’s how the two roles compare:
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