Episode #445: The Clever Leader's New Year Resolutions

It is an irony that in the most technologically advanced era, the human dimension is so much more critical to success in business. When I was first entering business, the boss knew every aspect of the company and knew it better than everyone else. Education was working on the basis of limited access to information, so a lot of memorization was required. An entrepreneur was a rare bird in those days. A mainframe computer was huge and housed in it’s own hermetically sealed environment. Only a select few had access to the machine itself or the computations it was possible of. A telex machine, something the size of a washing machine today, sat in a corner of the floor spitting out large sheets of paper with perforated edges, as a means of semi-automatic communication. All the eligible young women sat in the typing pool on their own floor, so any excuse which could be found to head down there was a major opportunity to be seized.

A lot has changed, but the importance of human to human relations, has only become more vital. Sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement, power harassment etc., have become part and parcel of the dividing lines around what is acceptable boss behaviour. Work and non-work have become blurred. Once upon a time, a boss would never dream of discussing an employee’s private aspirations. Today, the boss is expected to take an active interest in what the staff want, when they want it and how they want it.

All of this means that the communication skills of the bosses have become so much more vital. One of the problems though is that the tried and true usual boss route to the top, has been to claim all of the successes as their own genius ideas and lay the blame for the failures at the feet of their “incompetent” staff. Staff who were smarter than the boss were seen as competitors for the incumbent’s job, so getting rid of them early was favoured. That won’t fly today. The boss has to become an engine of staff development, populating the organisation with talent, so that the boss can move up and be given bigger jobs.

Matrixed organisations means you might be the President of the operation in Japan, but with hardly any people directly reporting to you and so much dotted line stuff going on, it looks like a pirate map to the buried treasure trove. In this modern era, the power to control has been replaced by the power of persuasion and coordination. Fine, but are the modern bosses preparing well enough for these realities, by really working on their communication and persuasion skills?

In the cut throat world of professional sports, the successful coaches make a lot of extra money be giving talks on how they have managed to be so successful. A common thread is usually their ability to understand the individual motivations and aspirations of their team members and coach them accordingly, so that they achieve their individual and team goals. How many bosses in business are proactively doing this?

Often the will may be there, but not the time to invest in their people. The bosses do a “once over lightly” job on this front and are not really effective in building the trust with the team. To really understand the direct reports needs requires a lot of time to be invested yet the reality of modern business conspires to make this very difficult. I have had a mobile phone for many years, recalling the brick sized models that were then a rarity. Today they are light weight, small, powerful and ubiquitous, but do I have more time as a result, to invest in getting to know my team better? I would say I have become progressively busier each year in proportion to how much the phone has shrunk and the technology has improved.

“Our key assets go down the elevator every night”, is a clever reflection on the modern reality that our people are the key to our success. People really do make a difference. If we have the right people, on the right bus and in the right seats, we are well on our way to getting a one up on our competitors. If we have great teamwork and have crushed all attempts at having politics in our organisation, we are really sprinting ahead of many firms. If the boss is well organised and is spending quality one on one time, with the key people, then a big moat is being dug around the company.

Is any of this easy? No. That is why it has so much potential for clever bosses to steal a march on rivals and to outperform their targets. Moving the focus from the tech to the people is a very good start. A sustained effort here will pay huge dividends. Will this be a year with these goals firmly in mind or another lost year? If the people are the key, precisely when will your boss schedule reflect that fact? This is the reality. The time has either been allocated in the schedule or it hasn’t. Forget about all the flowery words, the lofty rhetoric, the ardent commitments – are the slots in the diary or not? This is the boss challenge this year – master the time allocation required, so that you can get the people focus right or else!