Get out of the way!

Sometimes at workshops I have been asked what is my single piece of advice for aspiring leaders. I’ve usually responded by quoting Martien van den Wittenboer, one of my better Shell bosses, with “Be Yourself”. I do love that as generic advice; we all spend far too much time trying to work on improving our weaknesses, and not enough building on our strengths and contributing with our unique assets. But now I have had a bit longer to reflect on my whole career, such as it was, and I have changed my mind. Now I would say: “Get out of the way!”

I believe this advice can apply to almost any manager. Like dysfunctional families, all of us are bad bosses in our own unique ways, but I don’t think very many of us err by being insufficiently intrusive. A bit like the famous epitaph for no one “I wish I’d devoted more of my time to work”, “I wish my boss had intervened more” would be a rare plea indeed.

I also believe this advice is especially useful because it is rarely offered. We all receive lots of advice about what we should do more of, but not enough about where we should be doing less. Finally, I think back to all my own bosses, and how they could have helped garner better performance from themselves and from me. Staying out of the way is a recurring theme.

Many of us are given a manager job because we have proven ourselves performing the jobs of subordinates. So we become a boss, and we can do what our subordinates do very effectively, probably better than them since we have more experience to bring. So we end up trying to do their jobs for them, since that is our comfort zone, and it has disastrous consequences.

First, no matter how dedicated we are, we can’t do ten jobs well at the same time. We become a bottleneck, as we are late doing one job while we are doing all the others. Worst of all, we get tired but there is no time left at all to do the one job that we actually have to do, the one of manager. The team leader job involves prioritizing resources, coaching, a lot of politics and interface management, and some skills requiring more distance such as future planning and creativity. These things are totally sacrificed while we are busy doing the jobs of our subordinates, so the team fails to go forwards. We are busy and tired, but we are not doing what we need to do at all.

Then we should consider the impact our behaviour has on the team members. How are they supposed to develop and grow if they are not allowed to face all the challenges of their job? What does it do for their confidence if they see their boss stepping in all the time? And how much initiative are they likely to show, if they know that everything they try is likely to require rework and may even duplicate someone else’s effort? In the end, such subordinates tend to shut down and do the minimum. What a waste of talent that is, and what a loss of upside for the business.

This is all very obvious stuff – we could never fall into this trap ourselves, could we? Well, that is one of those examples of asymmetry in boss relationships. It is extraordinary, and I have tested it many times. If I ask people to rate their bosses, they tend to score them rather poorly. But if I ask people to rate themselves as a boss, they are rather positive. There must be one or two really bad bosses out there who are skewing the numbers! Either that, or many of us are far less effective than we think. And a good place to start would be to look out for warning signs that we are in the way.

I think the most telling examples are often in progress meetings for projects. These can range from formal stage-gate type meetings with steering committees, to informal progress meetings between a boss and one or more team members trying to achieve a project task.

What are the most common outcomes of such meetings? Sadly, my experience tells me that the most common single outcome is to have another meeting in the future. Usually, the team is asked to check up some extra data or work stream, to correct a few errors, and to come back and re-present later on.

This outcome is a classic symptom of not getting out of the way. The extra data might help, but is it really necessary, or is it just that the person asking for it is demonstrating what they would have done if they had been doing the work themself? Do those errors really justify re-work, or is the one pointing them out just trying to justify their seat at the table by being clever? If the presentation is lacking, might it be that the original instructions were not clear enough, or that the team has really only done a partial job because they suspect that however complete a job they did, there would be some complaints and re-work demands?

Of course, such outcomes only serve to delay and extend projects and to demotivate project teams. Whole organisations become mired in meetings when this is the prevailing culture. How often are you in such meetings? Might you be the problem here? Don’t just consider the formal type of meetings, but extend your thoughts to informal progress meetings with team members. If instead, you can force yourself to let something move forward as good enough, even if not perfect, you will help everyone.

The second major symptom of being in the way covers excessive secrecy and protection of hierarchy. “Need to know” has its place, but in my opinion confidentiality and restriction are overused in business, sometimes just as an unconscious way of making something or someone feel important. Ask yourself if you could delete the word “confidential” from some documents, or if you could share things more with your staff. Are you uncomfortable when your staff talks directly with your own peers or your boss? If you encourage this, you avoid becoming a bottleneck and you open the door for more creative and agile solutions: in most cases you’ll find it reflects well on you too, as your staff will want your team to look good in front of others. Your team will also benefit from greater exposure and thank you for it.

Another area you can get out of the way is in team discipline and administration. Rotate chairmanship and agenda setting for team meetings. Set down the standards, but then watch the team enforce them for you via peer pressure. You can even involve them in recruiting. Don’t worry, you won’t lose control, you’ll just create a more productive and motivated unit, one which will often surprise you with ideas that you would not have thought of yourself.

I am not advocating the absent manager, and indeed there are important responsibilities to perform. If you have to sign something off, take your own signature seriously and don’t just be a rubber stamp – but then be very clear what you expect and be ready to accept something as good enough. A key role is to represent and defend the team and its members when required: that is one area where they will not want you out of the way at all. Also, it is important to be available if team members ask for help, and to put as much time as you possibly can into coaching and developing them.

As with so many good practices in business, there are useful parallels elsewhere in life. As parents, perhaps our toughest and most valuable responsibility is to let our children learn to fly solo, which means getting out of their way whenever we can. Then there are governments: most attempts to meddle in markets do more harm than good, as Brazil is finding out now. One great feature of capitalism is to leave the market to its own devices whenever possible. Mind you I laughed when the Economist recently ridiculed the latest Chinese five-year plan – which business would try to operate without one of those?

Lastly, getting out of the way can help in foreign policy too. I can argue that Obama has learned that, even though patience can be hard and have consequences. His Syria policy is slowly forcing others to face up to their own responsibilities – I could argue that Russia intervening is actually a triumph for the US, rather than the disaster portrayed by the macho commentators.

One of my proudest Shell legacies is a programme called Applied Leadership, in which leaders attempt peer couching in teams without much of an imposed agenda. What I forget at times is that the real architect was not I but Greg Lewin, a rare master at getting out of the way. I had proposed some heavy leadership programme, but he had the courage and foresight to see that Applied Leadership would be more effective. Well done Greg – a lesson for us all.

We can end corruption in a generation

There was a long article in The Economist last week about the technology behind Bitcoin. I have to confess I barely understood a word of the description of how the technology works. In essence, it uses an incorruptible permanent readable record for a transaction.

What was interesting in the article was its discussion of other uses for the technology. The claim was that this fairly simple technology could transform things like land registries and similar public services, rendering them transparent and cheap. And hence ended the potential for corruption.

The next round of UN development goals has recently been published. As far as I am aware, nothing is included about corruption, but it may be that a good single goal for the next twenty years might be to end corruption. With technology it may just be feasible, and its positive effect on humanity would be enormous.

I’ve been blessed with a life probably as free from corruption as anyone’s could ever have been. I’ve been coerced into paying minor bribes at border checkpoints. I’ve been scammed a couple of times. But most people in the world live with a degree of systemic corruption.

I’ve seen it in some of the places I’ve worked and I have seen how it drains the spirit of everyone it touches. I’ve tried to coach people to follow good commercial practices like guarding every dollar, and seen the blank looks on their faces, as they consider how such values are violated daily by those in authority over them. It hurts in the heart. You take it home. You lose faith in humanity and in yourself.

I wonder what a global corruption index would look like. We can track diseases and preventable deaths and infant mortality and see great improvements over recent generations. What about corruption? What gets measured gets fixed, say management gurus. While there are some useful league tables, I am not sure anything comprehensive really exists.

Just in the last couple of weeks, I have read of many chilling examples. I read an article about life in Eritrea (why do not hear more about this broken country?), and in Iraq. The VW scandal rumbles on – not corruption in the strictest sense, but I choose to define it very widely. Politicians pandering to lobbyists and defending perks like carried interest are corrupt by my definition. We have the never-ending disgrace that is FIFA, and cheating in athletics. Most depressing of all comes the scandals about Vatican finances. How can any priest promote positive values when represented by such a cesspit?

Therein lies part of the issue with corruption. It is closely linked to power; indeed, it can easily be defined as the abuse of power. If even the Vatican is riddled with it, then which powerful bodies are likely to be free of it? Anything military or any dictatorship is likely to be equally corrupt, as supported by evidence through the centuries, and over-powerful corporate boards likewise.

So we can start by challenge excessive deference. Yesterday was veteran’s day in the US, and a day of reflection around Europe too. I have full respect for the military, but the excessive deference it receives in many countries is surely an invitation to corruption. There are heroes in the military, but just as many working in care homes or rehab centres. Who are the greater heroes, the ones who bombed the Kunduz hospital or the MSF workers inside it?

I was watching ESPN yesterday, and heard LeBron James speaking: “It is what you guys do that makes it possible for guys like me to do what we do”. Oh yes? So without the military, there would be no basketball? I don’t accept that. Surely we would all be much better off if we made sure such jobs were paid properly (which in most places I think they are, considering pensions and perks) and then hold them in a less deferential light? At least in the US you are unlikely to be stopped by a military or police patrol and required to pay a bribe – unless you meet them in Iraq or happen to be black perhaps?

Because corruption in linked to power might explain why there is not more concerted international effort to fight it. Even groups like the Gates foundation rely on access and donations. Fighting diseases makes us reach for our wallets and host governments will not get in the way. For corruption it would be different story.

I have seen some heroic attempts. The current Aquino administration in the Philippines is making a valiant effort. The only place I have seen corruption all but eliminated in Sweden. In that land there exists a beneficial alignment of forces: a collectivist public attitude; ample technology; and intense transparency of all public financial matters.

The technology point comes back to The Economist and Bitcoin. A good article the Guardian last week argued that technology was a wonderful opportunity for humanity, and could be even better if humanity found a way to set its agenda. Currently, what gets developed and implemented is driven by power, nation states and commercial interests. The military can guide its drones with ever-greater precision, and Silicon Valley can tempt us with ever smarter entertainment. But any advance against corruption comes as a bi-product not a purpose. Power does not want it and consumers will not pay for it.

The transparency point carries a dilemma. Do we want transparency or privacy? That trade off prevents a lot of technological advance that could help to fight corruption. Sweden has had a national identity card system for twenty-five years and it links most aspects of life, and close a cashless economy. Further, anyone’s tax accounts can be made available to anyone else. When I first lived there, I found it weird that citizens had been prepared to surrender so much privacy – but I came to see the system as sound, and the results in terms of eliminating corruption are impressive, as is the nation’s performance on a whole range of other indicators.

The last people who want to lose privacy are the powerful elites, so always be careful when you hear passionate arguments defending the right to privacy. These arguments carry merit, but they come with expensive trade offs attached.

I do believe modern technology has the potential to destroy almost all corruption within one generation, if only humanity set that out as a goal and demanded steps towards achieving it. The economic and social benefits would be enormous – indeed we might look back on the current period as the age of corruption.

The enablers are mainly technological and eminently attainable. The blockers relate to power – of elites and nation states benefitting narrowly from the corrupt status quo. Deference and unaccountability are the enemies of progress. Most elites are corrupt, though many are not aware of it and don’t practice it knowingly. And a protection of privacy is a powerful argument used by the corrupt elites to prevent progress.   

Boole and his Booby Traps

A mathematician called George Boole was born two hundred years ago this week. He was the first to reduce parts of mathematics to yes/no switches, leading to many advances in probability. Then the same logic became the grounding for all modern computers, with its reliance on zeros and ones.

I owe George at least one small gift. In my O level mathematics course, I recall Boolean algebra as an optional subject, one where there was an exam question in a section where you needed to answer only some of the questions. This was a nice example of how systems favour the privileged. Most schools presumably did not have the teachers trained for optional subjects, and many struggled to complete even the regular curriculum. Mine had no such constraints and those of us in the top classes were duly taught Boolean algebra. Now, I suppose guessing that many students would not have had much opportunity for classes, they always made the Boolean question ridiculously easy. For me it was a gimme every time, the first question I turned to, one I could do in five minutes and could always get right. So, much like modern taxes, those with advantages were handed out more. The world is not a fair place.

Key to most of Boole’s logic was that it required variables to be independent of each other. Therein lies the rub, for in the real world less is independent than we like to assume. In the last century, game theory and other advances came along to try to understand what happens when variables depend upon each other. The most common mistake with Boole type logic is to assume either that switches are fixed at zero or one and cannot change, or that two switches are independent when they are not.

I have three examples to demonstrate this, two from business and one from today’s politics. I hope they are useful cautionary tales for people who tend to oversimplify life.

My first example recalls a piece of market research we did in Shell UK in the early 1990’s. Someone came up with a beautiful simple pie chart dividing consumers of motor fuels in price conscious ones to whom price was a major component of buying choice, and those that bought relying on factors other than price.

Lo and behold the first version of the pie chart was split almost 50/50. Ah ha, said our Boolean managers, let us focus on the second group. They are half the market, they offer higher margins, they are amenable to our splendid marketing offers, and the other group probably doesn’t buy from us already. And a fair share of 50% is plenty to maintain or even grow our market share.

What a tragic mistake this was. This occurred just as Tesco and other hypermarkets were starting to put fuel stations in their car parks and pricing well below everybody else.

There were many mistakes in our logic. First, we were used to a segmented market where the only discounters tended to be dirty places where consumers couldn’t trust in fuel quality. We made the mistake that consumers were lured by our positive marketing rather than buying habitually with us out of convenience and because there was no realistic choice, at least for the “good” 50%. Tesco and the others changed all that. Their marketing and convenience was as good as ours, so consumers flocked to them, and not just the price conscious ones.

The next time we did the same research the pie chart segments had moved, maybe to 60/40 in favour of price. Not a disaster yet, but a story foretelling disaster. Our own pricing behaviour relative to the hypermarkets had educated consumers to change their buying criteria, and this accelerated as the hypermarkets built out their networks and were allowed to maintain ever-greater price discounts, and in the end even make more money than us because of their high sales volumes (and low buying costs, because our own colleagues were selling to them more cheaply than they were supplying us, which is another story). There are many factors in this disaster, but it all started with that blissfully simple Boolean pie chart.

The second example is similar and also centres on market research. In the early 1980’s, just when I was a new bank account holder, the banks did some research that produced a pie chart between consumers who switched banks and those that did not. Lo and behold, more than 90% of consumers never changed bank, most of them remaining lifelong customers of their first bank.

Once again, the brilliant managers drew a sweeping conclusion. If only we could lure college kids to bank with us, we’d have them for life! All of a sudden the market was flooded with adverts and special offers aimed at people like me. There was a brilliant one for NatWest by a punk Adrian Edmonson that I still remember.

At college, when we had time between flirting and getting drunk, we all compared the offers and chose the best one. Then three months later many of us would receive another promotion from someone else and switched. We then repeated our switching behaviour throughout our banking lives: I have been at various times with all the UK majors and many of the minors – not chasing offers, but usually responding to some crass disrespectful behaviour.

Of course the marketing geniuses at the banks had let a terrible genie out of the bottle. They had assumed that their research indicated fixed behaviour, and then their own behaviour invalidated their assumption. They created a generation of switchers, and every generation since has been the same.

The third example comes from today’s politics, and concerns Western and especially US attitudes to refugees, especially Arab Muslim ones. The US has a reasonable record for accepting refugees, but in the current case they are very concerned about letting in terrorist infiltrators who will then attack the homeland.

This is fair enough, and some screening makes sense. But the practical outcome is a degree of screening that takes more than a year to complete and means the US cannot do enough to clear the terrible backlog of displaced people from Iraq and Syria, who end up in transit camps or trying to get into Europe.

Can you spot the Boolean error? The US divides potential refugees into terrorists and non-terrorists, and considers the split to be permanent. Then its own behaviour changes the ratios.

At any moment in time, I guess most potential asylum seekers either have an intent to do damage to the US homeland or don’t. Probably the percent of potential terrorists is very small. But what does the US behaviour achieve? While waiting in the poor conditions of a transit camp being subjected to all sorts of interviews and background checks, some of the non-terrorists might change sides. If meanwhile they hear of family members killed by US drones or perishing in the Mediterranean their attitudes might become more hardened still.

Indeed the whole US policy towards the Middle East suffers from the delusion that opinions and positions of others are fixed. Nothing created more terrorists than the invasion of Iraq. The only way to really defeat IS, and all the other groups, is to deal with their grievances. This is tough to achieve, sometimes impossible, but at least policy could focus on avoiding making things worse.

George Boole left a wonderful legacy. It is just a shame that so many of us fall into his booby traps.