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Musing on knowledge workers, leaders and managers
I was reading a blog post the other day where someone was trotting out the differences between a manager and a leader and expounding the theory that managers are no longer needed in business as the knowledge workers require leadership not management.
OK, I understand the argument and, to some degree, am happy to support it. For a start I’ve been doing it for more years than I can remember so why would I think otherwise?
My issue with this kind of evangelical stuff is that too often those who are picking up on the message are not getting the full picture, won’t really understand what they need to do about it and it will end up, for them and those that they inflict it on, as another failed initiative; just one more management fad.
Let me be blunt here: Every business needs to have someone in a management role. Sure, it is going to involve a lot of boring stuff; admin type things that the swashbuckling leader, swinging from the chandelier with a knife gripped between their teeth would look on with scorn, but if you don’t have some form of management, then that leader will soon end up as one famous leader did, caught by a river, surrounded by the opposition and getting massacred.
Sir Richard Branson is often held up as a leadership role model, and quite rightly. His group of companies has grown in my lifetime and I have watched with admiration some of the audacious deals that they have pulled off as the man at the top has kept popping up in the headlines in a series of adventures. Not all of the latter have come off of course, but he has entered our hearts as an example of that swashbuckling leadership style I refer to above.
How has he built such a successful brand? It isn’t just about leadership; it’s about being able to blend that entrepreneurial spirit and the visionary leadership with management skills that can sort out the detail of the deals. The devil is in the detail is a very true saying and you need some completer finishers on the team to nail all of that stuff down. Read Sir Richard’s books or any of those written about him, and you’ll see that he works with the right people on all of these deals, buying in expertise when and where he needs it to augment his own people.
If we are talking in hierarchical terms then I would rather see a good leader at the head of a company than a good manager. I think that a good leader will take an organisation to where it needs to go, seeing the opportunities, setting the agenda and the direction and inspiring their people to sign up to the dream. But it will be the managers who ensure that all of the things that need to happen do happen, when and where they need to.
If you follow these thoughts on a regular basis you will be aware that I am passionate about developing leadership. I firmly believe that business leaders will be the ones to take us out of recession, not the politicians. The latter can only recycle money; business can create wealth.
I am even more passionate about people. It is people that make organisations work, and the organisations that treat their people fairly will prevail over those that don’t. Yes, let’s develop the knowledge worker concept, but in doing so let us also recognise that amongst those knowledge workers are the managers. Lose sight of that and you will lose.
It’s 2062. Or is it?
For the third and final part of our holiday humour trilogy we move from the past to the future. Content after his New Year dinner and with a couple of glasses of claret on board, ThatConsultantBloke (TCB) is half asleep on the sofa doing his emails when he inadvertently clicks on a link and his video messaging software kicks into life. A silhouetted figure appears on his VDU;
TCB: Er, hello?
Other Person (OP) You are through to the Global Institute of Business Infrastructure Management, how may we help?
TCB: I’m not sure. I clicked on a link in my email about speaking at your conference.
OP: Yes, I see now. You were very active in the old Facilities Management arena and we were looking for someone to give our members some idea of just how much progress we have made, but also to see if there were lessons that we could learn from history.
TCB: I’m not sure I follow you. I am still very active in FM.
OP: Perhaps you are, but you are in 2012 and we are in 2062. That is why you may have problems seeing me as you will be on an old version of Windows.
TCB: So you are 50 years ahead! My goodness! So how do you guys work with the likes of BIFM and IFMA?
OP: These were absorbed long since and the GIBIM was formed from them.
TCB: So you don’t call what we do FM any more then?
OP: No. No-one really understood what FM was about and, in any case, Facilities was not a good expression. Did you not have a saying “Can I use your Facilities” as a euphemism for the toilet? What credibility could we expect naming a profession after a lavatory?
TCB: (laughing) Well, the architects always used to say “Here come the janitors” whenever we arrived at a meeting!
OP: Architects! They have learned their place in the scheme of things now. They do what they are told and we have few problems with them these days.
TCB: So how do things work in FM, sorry, BIM now?
OP: It was recognised that managing the business infrastructure, or what you called Facilities, was crucial to business success and that business in general was not competent to be in control of the infrastructure; that was a job for the professionals. Standards were therefore agreed that would be enforced and business could use. GIBIM are responsible for providing those standards worldwide.
TCB: So how does that work with the clients then? How do they choose the supplier?
OP: They don’t. They are allowed to use what they qualify for according to their business and their meeting the relevant KPIs. Let me explain: If you are starting a new business you produce your business plan and apply locally to have the plan approved. If your business plan meets the standards then you will be allowed to start up when suitable premises are available. If you succeed and maintain a profitable business and meet all of your BIM KPIs then you can continue indefinitely, but you must keep above the relegation zone. If you fall into that area then you will lose your place to a new business. On the other hand, if your business is very successful and you want to grow, then you compete for promotion to larger or better premises from a business in a higher division that has performed poorly and has been relegated.
TCB: So business is only allowed to run as long as they meet these KPIs?
OP: That’s right. It came out of what you will know as HSE. The idea of a Competent Person threw into light the fact that few business people were competent to be responsible for what you called Facilities, especially in terms of environmental concerns. The logical step was to reverse the relationship and have competent people running the business infrastructure along lines that were efficient and contributed positively to the environment and then to allow business to use that infrastructure, but only if their performance was good enough. It was probably the only good thing that came out of the nonsense that you call HSE.
TCB: But HSE isn’t a nonsense! Well, some of it is a bit over the top, but it’s important stuff.
OP: Some of the basic principles are correct, but the culture of litigation that it allowed was ridiculous. People have to take responsibility for their own actions. In our world, if you have an accident at work where you are to blame you take the consequences.
TCB: So what are these KPIs?
OP: Some are related to general business performance in the relevant field; they have to make profit for example, but in relation to us they have to behave as a responsible client.
TCB: What does that mean?
OP: Well for a start they treat the premises and the BIM people that operate them with respect. They will be scored down on issues like damaging the building in any way, abusing BIM employees, failing to observe BIM rules on use of the building and so on.
TCB: (sounding puzzled) So BIM rules would be things like access control and meeting rooms?
OP: Exactly! Failure to display your building pass would be a contravention, as would failure to turn up when you have a meeting room or desk booked. And environmental non compliances carry heavy penalty scores; using the wrong recycling box, not turning a device off and so on. Safety failures also are heavily penalised; say you hurt your back lifting something. You will have been given lifting and handling training as a matter of course, so if you do it wrong and hurt yourself, your salary will be docked by the cost of replacing you. Your employer will fail their KPIs as well.
TCB: Isn’t that unfair under your rules to penalise the employer for the employee’s error?
OP: I see what you mean, but they have to be penalised for employing an idiot. It teaches them to be more careful about who they take on.
TCB: So if the clients can’t choose their suppliers, how does the supply side work now?
OP: The supply side is still competitive in that the people who work in it compete for the jobs. There is a pool of suppliers who provide the services in each country. They take a fixed fee per square metre for supplying and running the services, but they run as not for profit concerns as a public service. There are only the required number of jobs to provide the services though, and competition to win them is strong as they are well paid and much sought after. BIM is a well respected profession these days.
TCB: And this is global now?
OP: Well not quite. The EU started it and the Americans and Japan fell in step because they had to. Pretty much all of the old Commonwealth came on board with the UK and then others get drawn in because it’s where the world trades now; if you’re out you’re out, and that means that no people or goods can move from or to the Alliance countries from outside the Alliance.
TCB: So what about some of the countries that were causing environmental concerns?
OP: Well there were some issues about fencing them off, but then sport entered the picture and exclusion was easy.
TCB: Sport?
OP: Oh yes. The major soccer playing EU nations realised that excluding Brazil from the Alliance meant that they would not be able to play in the World Cup, and once that happened then the athletics people realised that they could have some of the serial Olympic winners banned and that was that. There was even a move to have the Yanks chucked back out at one time, but that was never going to happen.
TCB: So what about the Euro Zone crisis?
OP: Well that was easily solved. We just looked back to the colonial model and when a country got bailed out it was basically bought, so Germany and the UK pretty much own most of the EU between them now. The pound and the mark have parity and all of the EU uses one or the other.
TCB: You mentioned architects?
OP: Yes, well the old days of building monstrosities that took months to turn into workable buildings have long gone. Now we have standards for buildings in each usage type and only a certain number of each are built in different sizes in each area so that there is none of the old nonsense of oversupply; we just have what we need. Building stock is changed as and when necessary, but new build has to be to the standard. The only variation is in the external cladding, and here some flexibility is allowed, but only within limits; King Charles saw to that by Royal Decree in the UK and other countries followed suit.
TCB: King Charles? You mean…
OP: Yes, he’s still with us. Just. Now about your fee for speaking at our conference: For a half hour slot we would be happy to offer you…
Mrs TCB looks down at the slumbering figure and gently lifts the laptop off him. “I do wish he wouldn’t snore so loudly” she complains to the watching cat….
It’s about 1150BC, and an FM in darkest Wessex has just taken a call
It’s about 1150BC, and an FM in darkest Wessex has just taken a call from an Egyptian pal he met at the recent FM conference. In the best traditions of the wonderful Bob Newhart, we can only hear one end of the conversation:
Hey Jabari, when did you get back?
Four months? Took me nearly that. Too bad the Romans haven’t started their road building programme yet eh? So how’s that pyramid project going?
Just started. So how big is this thing?
Wow! That’s going to take a lot of labour.
OK, so you can get plenty of people in from overseas? You must have a great benefits, healthcare and welfare package down there to bring them in, right?
Slaves! Can you do that?
You do it all the time? OK, so if that’s how it is. I guess you don’t have a socialist government then? Say, Jabari, how do you do with accidents working with stone?
About 10% of the workforce? How many of those are serious?
That’s just the fatalities! Ouch! Good job liability lawyers haven’t been thought of yet. So, tell me, how do you get involved as an FM while the place is being built?
Trying to head off hand over problems? Yes, we get them too, and FMs do spend a lot of time trying to make new buildings work. Who’s your architect on this one?
No, I wouldn’t know him. How many of these jobs has he done?
This is his first! Why not go for someone with experience?
You kill them at the end of the job? I know I’ve felt like murdering one or two myself, but you must have been pretty dissatisfied right?
Client policy, eh? Rather you than me. I wouldn’t want to be failing my KPIs down your way!
Right. So how long are you going to be using this building when they hand it over?
All eternity? Goodness! Now I’m into future proofing, but this is in a different league. Sooner or later someone will invent stuff we can’t even imagine, so you might want leave some sort of access, and maybe carve some instructions into the stone to say what you’ve done?
OK, well, look: this pyramid shape, it’s not great in terms of user friendliness you know? Over here we’re still strong on the roundhouse for now, but what you need are vertical walls, right? But stick with the pointy roof on top; believe me you do not want to go with a flat roof. So your square shape with walls would give you a great useable space.
Yes, we’re still on open plan, but we have this great new concept; you have interior walls to break up that space, and then you can separate the masters from the animals and the workers.
You already do that? How does that work for you?
OK, so you call them chambers. So how are your occupancy numbers on these pyramids with chambers?
That’s terrible! With that floor plan, even as a pyramid, you need to be getting a lot more people in than that. I know! This some sort of scam to keep the rates down right?
Oh! It’s a tomb for the king! Yes, I get it, so you’re thinking security. We just pile tons on earth on ours so no one can dig through fast enough to not get spotted, but if you’re all sand down there I see why you need so much stone.
Talking about stone buildings, I told you we’re trying to build some over here? Well, I managed to get a couple of big piles of decent stones assembled down in Wessex ready for when we get some demand. Funny thing though, you remember that craze for crop circles we talked about at conference?
That’s right. Well, some crazies got into our storage yards and spread all the stones out into circles and patterns!
No, I’m not joking. They even hoisted some of the damn things up and stood them on top of each other. Goodness knows how, but those Celts are strong lads, especially when they’ve been on the mead.
No, it’ll cost a fortune to tidy it all up again, so I’m going to leave them as they are and just take the odd stone when I need it. Mind you, there’s some religious group want to rent one of the sites for a festival.
Good point! I’ll put a clause in about no sacrifices. They make such a bloody mess.
Your money’s running out? OK Jabari. Good talking to you. Maybe see you again next conference.
thursday news from monday musings
A rare mid-week post, but I have a couple of pieces of news to broadcast.
First off I had some kind feedback on last year’s Christmas Story and so I am working on a couple of humorous posts again for the next two, maybe three, Monday Musing columns and the first of these is already scheduled ready to run.
The other piece of news is that, having become aware that I need to prune the archives here to maintain space I have put together a collection of the older posts that seem to generate repeat traffic and added a lot of new and original material to be published as an e-book. The completed volume is with Amazon at the moment and will be exclusively available via Kindle to begin with. If you don’t own a Kindle, then Kindle for PC can be downloaded from the Amazon site at no cost. Click here to buy the book from Amazon.
As 2011 runs out I’d like to thank all those who have followed my blog(s) and supported my efforts over the year. Seasonal greeting to all and best wishes for a good 2012.
Standards, Good Practice or Guidelines – why and when do we need them?
I’m writing this with facilities management in mind, but it is applicable to business, society et al. It’s on my mind because of something lurking round the corner that I have been involved in commenting on and thinking about the specific has got me thinking about the general point of why we have such things as standards, rules and the like. What is the point?
If one were to live entirely in a vacuum you could do without standards of any sort, but once there are two or more people you start to need to define things; boundaries for example and ways that you will behave towards each other. So in life and business we have a range of things that are set out; money and measurements need some definition so that we can trade, and other standards come along such as the notorious EU efforts to define the sausage, along with more sensible things like regional wine & cheese definitions.
All of these are good because they allow us to function in our lives. Then we have laws, many of which are stupid (because they are unenforceable), but society has to have some foundation. Some laws help, others hinder, but we rub along.
Experience is a big part of life in all its forms. The wilderness can still be a dangerous place as witnessed by the Eton school party last week, and we learn that there are dangers in pushing the boundaries (one of the things about elf & safety for me is that it could be a danger in the long term if we remove all risks and cease to learn; if we remove all risk of falling over, will we forget that it hurts?). As we have evolved we have learned all sorts of things that we can pass on, and these become as Good Practice.
In business we do a lot to encourage good practice; benchmarking and peer groups, professional bodies, continuous professional development and so on, and these are often taken a step further by trade bodies that have codes of practice for their industry. All of this is good because it takes us forward and gives our customers and markets confidence.
And then there are the standards. Imagine what life would be like if we didn’t have an electrical wiring standard; visual signage standards are another good example of a beneficial standard that we work with on a daily basis. We don’t even perceive some of the standards that rule our lives like those that allow us to use our various mobile devices, but they are there and we all benefit from them in life and work.
But then there are another range of standards, and these are closer related to the Euro sausage that we might think. To some degree they are good things. ISO, BS and CE assure us that something has been made to a standard that we can rely on; that we can plug something in and not put ourselves or our families at risk of electrocution, say, is a good thing and one I will defend.
However, I think that there are dangers in taking good practice and turning it into a standard without good reason to do so. Often good practice should be adopted just because it is good, not by enforcing it. Leaders drive good practice forwards; complying with a common standard can stifle that, and also competition and that is bad.
So let’s keep standards for where we need them and let business leaders thrive as unfettered as possible, because that is the path to recovery.
what do look for when you need someone to help?
One of the problems with leadership thinking is that a lot of what is currently being put around comes from people who have studied the subject, but who have never really done it themselves. Would you take golf lessons from someone who had never played? Or someone who had bought a set of clubs and a video and taught themselves the rudiments? Hopefully not.
This difference gets further amplified when someone who has been shown how to do something gets to try and do it. Take a musical instrument; lots of people can get a tune out of one, but how many can really play one? Does someone who does a decent karaoke turn make a good singer? I can drive a car, but whilst we share the same initials, I’m no Jensen Button.
What makes the difference is talent. Good leaders can take the tools and use them to best effect in the same way that any virtuoso does with an instrument.
Most of these self styled leadership experts put across a one size fits all solution which, if you think about it, is fundamentally flawed. Leadership is about leading people. People is plural; it refers to a group of individuals. And that is the key word; individuals.
People are different, and this leads to a real dichotomy for leaders. One the one hand current social thinking is that you should treat everyone equally, but how do you do that when everyone has different needs?
Leadership involves a range of techniques to motivate people according to their own needs. I don’t respond well to people getting angry with me; One of the most effective things ever said to me when I screwed up badly was a very quiet “Bowen, you’ve let us all down. You’ve let me down, but, most of all, you’ve let yourself down”. Other people would treat that with contempt though, and the guy who delivered it knew the difference; there were others on the team who, in similar circumstances, would have been blasted against the wall by a withering stream of invective, but he knew me well enough to know that that would not work on me.
That leader didn’t deliberately set out to teach me how to do it, but the example was there for any of us to follow and adapt for our own use. And I did.
A good leader will know what makes each member of the team tick and will apply the right techniques, but then there is the question of what to do when you face the team all at once. Gung ho speeches don’t do anything for me, but I’ve seen first hand how they can get a team going, and there is a synergy factor that comes into play in those situations, but you have to get it right and catch the mood. No-one can teach you that. It’s about working an audience and you learn by doing (and getting it wrong a few times).
A potentially good leader will have latent talent that can be developed. They then need the opportunity to lead and, for those who get the chance, they have the opportunity to hone their skills. Not all will make it, but it’s better to have tried and failed.
Good leaders don’t necessarily make good teachers, (but someone that teaches classes successfully will be a good leader). If you want to learn about leadership you first have to have the opportunity to do it. If you want help in learning, you need someone who can pass on to you the benefit of their experience.
Perception and reality; are they mutually exclusive? Discuss.
It’s a funny old world at times. People talk about their rights; their right to be told; their right to the truth and all that, but what is it that they want to know? What is the truth, and will they believe it?
Over the years that I have trod the planet I have had, at times, to judge. I have been a soccer referee, I have done jury service, I have investigated accidents, I have investigated complaints and grievances, I have interviewed people for jobs and promotion, I have judged for awards and I have been a parent.
In all of these roles I have had to arrive at decisions and to decide what I believe to be right, or wrong. Judgement and experience play their part and, yes, I have made mistakes. At least, in the case of some decisions that I have made, I know in hindsight, that I made my decision on the basis of something that I now know was not as I believed it to be at the time.
People will believe what they want to. Take the flat earth mob; there was clear evidence that the world could not be flat, but they believed it for a long time after some had realised the truth (it isn’t round either of course). Conspiracy theorists love to ignore the reality that many others hold true, and there are those who will always believe in an ulterior motive for any action.
People’s expectations can colour their judgement significantly. Take the Obama situation. He was swept to power on a wave of optimism and yet now is rated possibly the worst US president. Is he really that bad? Almost certainly not, but compared with expectations the gap is so big. The bloke probably didn’t have a chance from the start; he was never going to live up to the hype.
When we put in place business deals, we set out all of our expectations in the form of a contract, we have key performance indicators and service level agreements and all those fine things, so we are going to be basing our monitoring of service delivery against reality aren’t we? Well we usually think so, but how many times does it all go wrong? We’ve seen a high profile one in recent weeks where two big organisations have parted company only a couple of years into a contract.
So what is the problem? I see it as one of not having used the right base for the agreement. The usual basis for working things out is on the basis of prior experience plus what we think that we want in future. The first problem is in measuring; that hackneyed old phrase “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage” gets trotted out without any understanding of what that means. Measures get taken from what can be measured rather that what should be measured, and then, because there is the desire to compare year on year, and to prove that the new contract is an improvement, it will be the same measures as last time.
I’ve been placed in the position of being drafted in the manage contracts like this. You can turn up at the review meeting and show that you’re delivering what the contract demands, but in the full knowledge that it isn’t what the client needs, or that you are delivering the latter, but failing the contract.
Perception and reality. They can be the same, but only once we get clients and suppliers working towards the right sort of deals and measures. We’re not there yet.
if we want the best to choose from, someone has to make a difference
We often choose something; sometimes because we want to, and other times because we have to, but how do we choose? There has to be some form of measurement that helps us to compare. It may be as subjective as colour or style or more objective as in, say, performance or size. These choices may be personal or business, but we all make them every day.
Those who try to influence us in these choices will strive to pander to those choice triggers. The world of advertising had a field day in the post WW2 eras as the production capacity switched from military needs to consumer goods and fed an increasing affluent society.
From the 1970s onwards a series of events; oil crises, financial downturns and such saw the boom years come to an end and competition to persuade us has become more and more sophisticated, these days with social media and the like playing their part in parting us with our cash.
Some of all that is on a personal level, but business has seen a parallel experience although the choices here are normally much less subjective. Whether we are in facilities management, logistics or any other business discipline we are much more performance related in our decision making and so those who would sell us have looked to raise the bar in that area.
We talk of excellence in what we sell and what we seek. Consider this quotation; “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away” Antione de Saint-Exupery sums it up well there, but what is this state to which we aspire?
Does competition drive excellence? To some degree it does, but if we take sports as an example of competition, there are those who will demonstrate how to win with minimum effort; Sir Jackie Stewart will tell you all about winning at the slowest pace for example. Following this example there are a lot of companies that are content to just be better than the rest rather than to excel.
Am I suggesting that we abandon the quest for perfection just because of this? No I’m not. The point I’m making is that what happens when we look at competing solutions is that we pick what we see as the best to fulfil our need as we see it at the time. Now that may not be a great solution, but better than what we have now and better than anything else so we choose it. If it helps us achieve something then it may well be worth accepting but, if not, we probably won’t, or shouldn’t bother. Hobson’s Choice, as we used to say.
What we want is to have great things to choose from, and that is what those of us in the service industry try to create and deliver. It is what competition should be all about in this context, and there will be times when we have the right thing for the moment; when we catch the wave and ride it in. It will be a transient moment, sure, but getting it right and creating the thing of choice is such a buzz that you’ll want to do it again and again.
If we truly want to make a difference we have, as my friend Ian Berry down under will tell you, you have to change what is normal.
Perfection made be hard, even impossible, but doing something extraordinary is within reach of us all, so why not try? Make a difference.
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