When Jeroen van der Veer took over as Shell CEO in 2004-05, he made a number of keynote changes to the Group. One theme was an increase in professionalism around the company. Typical postings were to increase to four years to enable incumbents to develop and deliver fully within a role. One expression I recall him using was that Shell had been too much the preserve of “gifted amateurs”. Considering myself something of a gifted amateur and a beneficiary of the Shell way, my initial resistance to his analysis was rather personal. But now, having had fifteen years to reflect (does that make me a professional?) I still think he was more wrong than right.
I could see where Jeroen’s position came from. He is an engineer, and engineering is a professional’s career, full of modules, accreditations and defined career paths requiring long, specific experiences. In other disciplines, he saw in the opposite, especially among a cadre of protected leadership candidates. If you were deemed to have senior leadership potential you were able to drift quickly between positions and had very little accountability. Often such folk became rather arrogant and selfish, until they reached the top and were able to lord it over the mere professionals who did the real work, while getting in their way.
I came across many such creatures in my time at Shell, a lot of them Dutch. But I could describe my own career in a similar way. I was recruited based on very general attributes and thrown into a series of jobs for which I had no discernable professional competence. Although I hope I wasn’t too arrogant or selfish, I was certainly a gifted amateur, and often not terrible gifted.
The problem with Jeroen’s analysis, I believe, is that typical professional training is very narrow, and not very useful beyond its niche. In his own position as CEO, I needed many competences that he will only have acquired via experience or innate ability.
Here are four such competences. Line management is critical, including motivating others, assessment, selection, delegation and setting a team culture. Strategy is central as a CEO, including some analysis, goal setting, visioning and prioritisation. Major project management and deal making are also important, the latter less about negotiation or sales and more about forming and managing relationships with partners and suppliers.
There is very little formal professional development available in any of those categories. Line management is a black hole, project management and strategy are taught via process, tool and case study, and deal making is too often equated to sales. While in each case more could and should be done to create professional paths to accreditation, it is not simple, but the disciplines are applied, experiential and contextual. These constraints also mean we will gain precious little feedback or coaching on these through our careers, and what we do receive may do more harm than good.
It is tempting to conclude that this is a failure of business and academics, or the interface between them. But amateurism is the natural state for most things in life. Most of the difficult things we need to do to make successes of our lives are areas where getting help or training is almost impossible. The most obvious area is parenting. Wow, parenting is difficult, especially early on. But we throw ourselves into it, supported only be love and hindered by lots of poor advice.
Parenting is hardly unique. Driving a car does offer some initial training, but the real skills are honed the hard way and without support. Managing the small business that is our personal finances is usually an unsupported, amateurish affair. And what about sex, dating and marriage?
No, it is the professional disciplines that are anomalies. And perhaps that is partly because the insiders want to protect their positions, creating all sorts of trade unions, language and certifications to bolster their status. Professionalism has its place (I really hope that the guy who designed the RFK bridge and the woman who performed a biopsy on me had some qualifications), but can be overrated.
Further, consider deep professionals you have come across, usually engineers or finance or legal experts. While they are necessary to any endeavour, and often impressive in their skills, too often they make terrible leaders, and even become weak at their own discipline once the requirements become more nuanced at senior levels. For the most senior engineers need most of all to integrate with other skill areas, to manage complex projects and to manage others. These are not typical strengths of passionate experts, indeed they often see them as getting in the way and will resist roles with such requirements, only accepting them for status and money and because other avenues are closed.
It is hard to escape this dilemma; indeed the Shell “gifted amateur” approach pre Jeroen may be a good option, so long as some humility and accountability is built in. Shell also developed a leadership framework, which was great for assessment but too late in careers for development. There is much scope for developing professional theories for all of these general areas. Paying world-class professional specialists better without requiring them to do things beyond their competence also makes sense.
But I also have another idea, which comes from some inspiring articles I have recently read about in the field of psychology. In Zimbabwe, one of the very few trained psychologists did an amazing thing. Rather than bemoaning the absence of fellow professionals and glorying in his unique status, he found a creative way to make a difference. He noticed that grandmothers in villages tended to have some useful amateur psychology skills, being good listeners, experienced in life, caring and respected. So he set up a network of these grandmothers, gave them some tools and tips, and put them to work. The stressed people of Harare have some amateur relief, and are grateful for it.
This story has started to spread around the world. New York City has implemented something called Friendship Benches. I love it. Perhaps what I love the most is the humility of the psychology professionals, being prepared to embrace amateurs to generate better outcomes for patients.
This line of thinking has potential in so many other fields. Imagine if most classrooms had volunteer amateur assistants available. Imagine if people could have access to financial advice that was not tainted by the greedy incentives of the financial services sector. Imagine if folk requiring everyday had not just scarce professionals and overburdened family members to rely on, but also a army of amateur volunteer carers.
I think this sort of thing will spread in the coming years, enabled by many trends: the gradual weakening of unions; the availability of online training and supervision; and a supply of willing amateurs with time on their hands being past retirement age or working in the gig economy. Professionals surely have their place, as do unions, but both should put outcomes ahead of job protection, and be humble enough to accept that others can be modestly trained to contribute.
The humble psychologist in Harare might change the world more radically than even he could conceive. For me, that makes him a Nobel Prize candidate. Jeroen van der Veer and his disciples, I have a lot of respect for you, but please take note.
No comments:
Post a Comment