It’s not me, it’s you

I have been the victim of workplace bullying.

Members of my family have been victims of bullying, as have many of my friends and colleagues, as well as people I have worked with over the years as a trainer and coach.

These examples range from mild and ambiguous to serious abuses of power leading to job loss and health problems.

The one thing they have in common is that the bully sees it as the victim’s fault and, after months or years of this treatment, often the victim starts to think they are the problem too.

The thing is, the opposite is true: if you’re a bully, you’re a problem.

If you can’t manage people – even if there is a performance issue – without bullying, then you are (at best!) an unskilled manager and an incompetent professional.

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Key tips for really good professional writing and stuff

They say that success is 10% technical ability and 90% communication ability*.

I doubt this is accurate, but despite its dodgy scientific foundation, it makes the point that how we impact the people we work with is often more important than the tasks.

How we communicate is the main way we judge each other, and this makes it open season for our unconscious biases to get stuck in. If someone sounds waffly and incoherent, we jump to the conclusion that they don’t know what they’re talking about. If they sound doubtful, then we assume they’re probably wrong because confidence is so much more convincing. If they’re difficult to understand, then most probably we will make the leap that they’re not worth listening to.

The same is true for writing: bad writing makes a bad impression.

Here’s a real-life example from the Plain English Campaign’s Golden Bull Award 2020:

The Executive Team concluded that it was appropriate to adjust our plans for the transition to blended learning, by rephasing the commencement of the transition phase for two weeks.

They could have just said it was two-week delay.

It’s so easy to sound muddled and confusing, to find your argument lost in poor structure, bad grammar and inappropriate tone. How often do you read something that sounds like a hyperbolic appeal to the emotions, a superficial waffle of opinionated bluster, when what you really need is an objective evidence-led explanation that will help you make a more informed decision?

Professional writing skills are key to our personal impact at work, and avoiding words like “key” is a good start. Unless you’re talking about an actual key, it’s a lazy cliché of a word that is really just an opinion dressed up as a fact.

So I asked some professional writer friends of mine to share some advice for a webinar I was running. They include a publisher, a communications expert, a (retired) consultant, a professor of creative and professional writing, and the director of an international NGO.

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Marcelo Bielsa’s leadership made us love again …

If you are interested in leadership, and the impact leaders can have on organisations, then a great thing to observe is the world of professional football and the impact of the manager.

OK, I am biased, and still emotionally raw, so this won’t be the most objective piece of writing in the world, but hear me out.

Marcelo Bielsa was the manager of Leeds United for three-and-a-half years. His recent dismissal triggered unprecedented displays of anger and heartbreak for someone most of us have never met or even heard speak English, and all the more surprising considering that us Yorkshire folk are not exactly famous for our demonstrative approach to human emotions.

The point I want to make about his leadership isn’t the onfield success – the beautiful sparkling football and promotion to the Premier League – because other managers have achieved impressive sporting results too (as his critics never tire of reminding us). The point I want to make is how he transformed an organisation and connected emotionally with the club, the fans and the wider city on a level none of us have ever known before.

He transcended the function of his role (the football) and embodied values that were hopeful and pure, giving us something unique and more important to care about than a game with some goals in it. He was visionary without ever really mentioning a vision; he just lived it, with humilty and grace, and it captured our hearts.

How did he do it?

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Changing Out Loud

At the risk of accidentally creating a smash hit for Ed Sheeran, during a recent conversation with a colleague, we came up with the idea of “Changing Out Loud” – consider this post an assertion of copyright!

We were thinking how to meet a need around change leadership in a work situation, and were finding the usual change management models (Kotter, Lewin, Bridges etc.) to be missing the point for what we wanted. This wasn’t change management, it was change leadership, and we didn’t really want leaders banging on about refreezing or creating a sense of urgency or sketching out force-field analysis diagrams, we wanted leaders to be telling us what we’re supposed to be doing, and then showing us that they are doing it too.

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How is performance-truth decided in your organisation?

Many of us work in roles where our performance cannot be represented by an objective measure that neatly sums us up, and yet many of our performance management systems demand we do just that.

A lot of what we do has a fuzzy impact, with ambiguous barely-detectable results; results that ripple over longer timelines than the yearly appraisal cycle. In some cases our impact might be negative in the short-term because we want to make a lasting change in the long-term: change curves go down before they go up.

This is especially true when learning new skills, because there are phases of incompetence you have to struggle through if you want to gain competence at something new.

Even without these complications it is difficult to judge the full range and quality of what our colleagues do. We might see them dealing with a difficult customer so skillfully that they make it look easy, so we under-value how much legwork they put in to achieve this level of performance and so we mentally tot it up as routine. Then we move on, only catching glimpses of other people because we’re busy with so much else, those glimpses being more memorable if they ping a bias (or heuristic) such as “confirmation” (it confirms what we thought anyway) or “effect” (we have an emotional response to it) – but these superficial glimpses don’t stop us jumping to subjective judgements and thinking we’re seeing the objective truth about someone’s performance.

If that so-called “performance truth” is decided by people “thinking fast” (Daniel Kahneman), and confirmed by hierarchy rather than expertise, then we’re in trouble.

To quote Ryan Holiday (from The Daily Stoic):

because our senses are often wrong, our emotions overly alarmed, our projections overly optimistic, we’re better off not rushing into conclusions about anything

And this doesn’t change when you get promoted.

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Longbow learning

There was a period in the Middle Ages where the English decided they should be ruling France as well as England.

They had a decent claim. Royal marriages were mainly about alliances and land grabs, but they came with consequences because if one line runs out of heirs, then what had looked like a useful marriage of convenience a couple of generations ago, suddenly becomes the senior surviving line and if that line is also the line of the Kings of England, then they have their own army and might want to pop across the Channel and do something about it.

Despite England being smaller, poorer and less-populated, they did just that and managed to rule large parts of their continental neighbour for the best part of a century.

How did this happen?

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Some people bring happiness wherever they go, some people bring happiness whenever they go …

I worked with a boss who saw his role as to challenge people’s thinking.

He had a keen analytical mind and was world-class in wrong-spotting, he could unearth a gap in anyone’s thinking from a hundred paces, and tease out anything and everything we hadn’t thought through properly with a few clever questions.

Everything he touched got an intellectual kicking to check for road-worthiness, and he was rarely off base in his eternal quest to discover anything that might be wrong with everything we ever thought of.

It was a nightmare.

He probably saw his role as being a guardian of quality, an invaluable cog in the production machine, a well-respected thinker who people would joyfully seek out to test their ideas before daring to expose them to the wider world … but in truth he wasn’t illuminating us with the warm glow of comfort and joy he thought he was, he was casting a dark shadow of persnickety pessimism, deflating and demotivating with his pedantic challenges and “but the problem with that is …” response to almost anything we ever tried to do.

Maybe we were over-ambitious at times, certainly naïve, reaching for too much with our attempts to achieve as many as six impossible things before breakfast, but by the time he’d finished with us, we were just trying to get through the day.

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Humour is often about misunderstandings, so don’t complain if you’re misunderstood

Kentaro Kobayashi got fired from his job as Creative Director of the opening ceremony at the Tokyo Olympics for making an inappropriate joke in 1998.

That might seem rather harsh, he was a young comedian going for – in his words – “cheap laughs”, but the joke was about the holocaust, and if you are going to make racist jokes, you have to accept that that comes at a price.

He apologised: “It should never be the job of an entertainer to make people feel uncomfortable.”

I disagree.

I think comedians should make people feel uncomfortable but only if the people are deserving of it, which we all are sometimes (our hypocrisy should be exposed and mocked), but we should not be made to feel uncomfortable because of our ethnicity or gender or religion or whatever.

I aspire to be both an anti-racist person and a forgiving person, so I’m not quite sure where that leaves me in Kobayashi’s case, but I tend to be more willing to forgive mistakes if something has been learnt, and we all have a youth dotted with things we’d rather forget.

Well, I should only speak for myself, although I am lucky to have grown up before everything was videoed and put on TikTok, so I can (and will) deny a lot of it.

As with Kobayashi, my use of humour has been a source of workplace blunders over the years.

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Sixty-six degrees north

The word “express” used to mean that it was “quicker” than something that was “not express”.

In the world of travel it implied a more direct route with fewer stops, meaning a shorter journey time.

Unfortunately for fans of the word “express”, marketing people got hold of it and used it to try to put lipstick on “worse things” by making a virtue of the speed-advantage of having “less choice”. A Tesco Express is smaller than a normal Tesco, so you spend less time there, ergo it was an “express” experience, as was choosing a DVD in my local Blockbusters Express because there was hardly anything to choose from.

Iberia Express have taken this definition-drift one step further by retaining the concept of “worse” but losing the bit about “quicker”.

This means that the Express brand of the Spanish flag-carrier is the same as the normal Iberia, but worse. It is not quicker, it does not have fewer stops on its way to its destination, and nor is it smaller with less choice like a Tesco Express; it’s the same but with less legroom.

It is the “low cost” arm of the Iberia group, but like all “low cost” airlines, it isn’t necessarily “low price” for the passenger.

I was flying to Reykjavik, a fairly lengthy four-hour flight to a pricey destination that seems to jar with the “same-but-worse” Express brand. This wasn’t a highly competitive route where a low-cost alternative might garner some untapped market share, nor is it much of a tourist destination, at least not the sort for people looking for a bargain getaway, but there you go, that’s Iberia Express for you.

I limped off the plane, legs frozen from being shoved in the tiny gap between my seat and the one in front, happy to have avoided a thrombosis. I marched through the airport as quickly as I could, trying to get my circulation going; it was 2am, and I was desperate to get to my hotel. I am not a late-night person any more, those days have gone … I used to adore boozy nights in clubs or sitting around with friends chatting into the small hours, but not any more. I have stumbled through my midlife crisis and come out the other side, accepting the non-negotiable fact that I’m fifty … accepting it and embracing it because you don’t mess with people who are fifty, we’re too grizzled with experience, we’re too fucking hard. I no longer mourn my lost youth, there’s a lot I regret and things I would love to do over, but I’ve got better at living in the present and looking to the future and spend much less time redesigning my past. I don’t want to pretend my age isn’t true – it isn’t “just a number,” as so many people say – it’s a number that means I don’t want to stand in crowded bars at 3am drinking gin just to show I’ve still got what it takes. If that’s what it takes to show you’ve still got what it takes, then I haven’t got what it takes. If I’m not tucked up in bed by eleven with a good book I’m not happy … and so, marching through a chilly airport at 2am after a four-hour flight, I feel no sense of adventure at being in a new country, I just want to rush to a cosy hotel room and jump into bed.

A disadvantage of being middle-aged is failing to remember the age-perspective rule. This means that from the perspective of someone younger, age difference is magnified by a factor of ten. For example, to the very attractive and charming immigration officer who checked my passport and Covid documentation, I probably looked to be about a hundred years old. She was young enough to have never seen an iPhone 5 when I showed her my digital vaccination certificate – she called it “cool” – and yet from my perspective, the age difference is diminished by a factor of ten, and so although she was obviously younger, to my eyes we were all adults and roughly-speaking were all pretty much in or around the same age bracket.

I have learnt that the best assumption to make when women are friendly and nice, is that they are a spy hoping to lure me into some poor decision-making that will be used against me later. This may not always be true, but even if not, I have worked out that friendly-and-nice women are not being friendly and nice in the hope that the aged stranger in front of them will try to get off with them; better outcomes await the man who responds to friendliness and niceness with a respectful friendliness and niceness in return.

This is just as effective even if they are a spy.

I smiled, “Cool? Not sure about that! Just old!”

I hope she realised I was talking about the phone …

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Emotional Intelligence

Leaving Madrid was emotional.

I don’t normally get emotional. I feel human emotions, and have read that book “Emotional Intelligence”, so I know my stuff, but I don’t tend to get overwhelmed by my emotions and so it comes as a shock when I lose control … but then it’s not every day you drag your daughter from the loving embrace of her friends and boyfriend and take her to University.

For the past 18 years I have sacrificed almost everything I’ve got in order to try to provide sufficient predictable income that I can give my two daughters a good education and a decent crack at life.

That’s 18 long years of having little cash and – more importantly – little time or energy. I don’t begrudge them any of it, what’s life about if not to leave a positive legacy, ideally in the form of happy well-balanced non-racist decent human beings who, if one is lucky, like decent music and support Leeds United.

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Everyone needs to calm down

There’s a patch of waste land off the car park next to Madrid’s Chamartín station.

It’s an unceremonious back door to this major rail terminal, widely used by people who need to cut the massive corner to get to and from the northern end of the Castellana main street. It’s a rutted bare patch of mud, often filled with deep puddles and parked cars, and, until recently, a tiny shanty town of makeshift sheds.

I walked through, carrying my small case, and noticed for the first time that the area had been cleared. I often thought it odd that such a settlement had been tolerated by authorities not always known for their deep sympathy to those who live on the margins of society.

A policeman friend of mine once described the role of the police as “to control the people” and I thought how this attitude clashed with my own (British?) understanding of their role. A policeman came to speak at my school when I was a kid and his description always stuck with me: the police, he said, were there to protect the people. He didn’t say control the people. This is an important distinction, and leads to an important change of mindset.

I once pulled over on to the hard-shoulder of a busy motorway because the back door of my car wasn’t properly closed – within seconds the police had pulled up (actually the Civil Guard, but it’s the same principle) and a young officer jumped out his car, already shouting at me “Why have you stopped?!”

“Because the door was open,” I said, completely calm, because I knew I had done the right thing.

He must have known I had done the right thing too, but he was too high on his own petty power, unable to calm down because he saw his role as there to control me, not protect me, and so he couldn’t back out without losing face: “Well, get moving. Now!” he hollered unnecessarily, ordering me about like I were a new recruit on the parade ground (we were only one step away from him screaming in my face: “only two things pull over on the hard-shoulder because their back door isn’t closed properly, steers or queers, which are you, boy?”).

That was years ago and it still annoys me that I meekly got back in my car and didn’t challenge him on why he thought it was OK to shout in my face.

Perhaps it was the better decision to swallow my pride and move on, but it rankles.

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Riding the Iron Poultry

After so long not travelling, and feeling nervous about failing a PCR test next week and not being able to fly, I edge out the house like a bear groggily emerging from hibernation.

I am under-dressed. How can I be leaving the house on a cross-country journey wearing shorts and a t-shirt and carrying nothing but a backpack? It just feels wrong.

I must have forgotten something nags the dark angel on my shoulder. I hate my anxiety, it does nothing other than make me check multiple times that I have got my tickets and packed my glasses, which I know I have, but there he goes, nagging away, and I just need to check again …

The first train is a commuter train, and so it’s uncomfortable, as commuter trains must be. As someone who grew up in Leeds, I am just grateful it’s a modern train and not a two-carriage converted diesel bus. At least here the trains are made out of trains.

It is surprisingly busy for a pandemic, but maybe everyday is like this and I just don’t know because I rarely use public transport these days, so different my life has become.

It doesn’t feel like the start of a journey. This may be the familiarity of the Cercanias trains that shuttle passengers in and out of the city, an experience now so mundane after doing it five times a week for a decade, that any glamour associated with train travel just doesn’t stick to these trains. Even a year-and-a-half of working from home doesn’t change that, it’s immediately familiar – and boring – as if I’d been there the day before.

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The Ferrol Express

I’ve driven this route dozens of times before.

I’ve driven it in winter, in summer, in the midst on heavy Easter traffic, and probably at every other time of year at some point over the last two decades. I’ve driven it in both of the crappy cars I’ve owned over the last 18 years, and before that I have driven it in countless different hire cars; once even in a rented van when I went there and back in the same day to collect some furniture. That was a long time ago when I was younger, I couldn’t do that now.

The start of the route is the same as the school run, so it’s not just familiar, it’s tedious. It reminds me of the very life-draining routines that smother me for eleven months of the year. The very routines I’m trying to get away from for the next two weeks. I console myself: when I take my daughter to school on sunny days like this, I imagine ignoring our exit and continuing on through the lengthy Guadarrama tunnel, turning our tiresome commute into an exciting adventure. On schooldays I don’t to do that, I do what I’m supposed to do and take the exit I’m supposed to take. I’m not asking for thanks for this selfless act, I’m just saying that the temptation is always there: take the exit for tedious routine, or continue straight for freedom and adventure … that’s the good thing about today, the fantasy gets real and I ignore the school exit and keep on going through the tunnel. As soon as I do, I start to feel the delicious buzz of the freedom of the road. I shout “road trip!” but my family ignore me, they know I am full of crap and they are right. It’s not a road trip, it’s a drive, and there’s a difference.

A “road trip” is about the journey, a “drive” is a functional activity that you need to do if you want to relocate your body and suitcases to a different place.

If I had my way, we’d take a few days inching north, taking the backroads, stopping along the way in different towns and villages and beauty spots … but I don’t have my own way (I never have my own way) and we peg it up the motorway as fast as we can.

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Whatever can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

It is an unfortunate truth that whatever can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood.

As inevitable as death and taxes, this Murphy’s Law of communication is especially true when the message is unwelcome. Whoever is in charge of sayings probably needs to change Bullock’s famous quote to include this:

’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes and Misunderstandings

Leaders – especially when trying to change something (because pretty much all change is unwelcome for at least some of the people some of the time) – must factor this into their thinking.

We must assume that, whether by genuine accident or convenient design, even our most-beautifully crafted and benevolent utterances will be misunderstood.

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Babyleaders: five types of immature leader

Leadership isn’t easy, it demands a level of self-awareness, self-control and maturity that not all of us are able to muster.

In my experience of working with humans, I have noticed that they have faults. If you are not in a leadership position, maybe these faults are no big deal, but as you rise in the hierarchy and your influence broadens, the impact of those faults is amplified and the probability of them doing harm grows exponentially.

So leaders need to be vigilant about which of their traits are helpful to their leadership role, and which aren’t!

There are many ways to get leadership wrong, and I have certainly been guilty of a few of them (and am certainly guilty of a few more that I’m unaware of – and some I am aware of, it’s a work in progress …). These are linked to many different things, such as personality traits that may mismatch the context of the moment (such as Asquith’s guiding chairmanship being unsuited to the decision-making demands of World War One – more here), or personality traits that just don’t suit leadership so well, or maybe just the leader not being mature enough because leadership is – like good wine – something that often gets better with age.

Here are five immature leader types I have spotted, sadly it’s not an exhaustive list:

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Change management: simplifying change projects

I used to get asked to do “change management” on projects that were not change management projects.

This is annoying if, like me, you really love doing change management projects, and there are so few opportunities to do really proper change management like those you read about in change management books.

The projects I was asked to work on were often the very opposite of change management projects, they were projects designed to minimise change while something disruptive happened. They were business continuity projects with the aim of avoiding the impact of changes happening elsewhere.

The most common example I was involved in was an office relocation, where you want the impact of the move to have minimal impact on the operation. You might want to take advantage of an office move to improve some things about how you work together, but the point is that they are peripheral, you are not changing how people work in order to improve your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and therefore, although it’s a bit change-management-y, it isn’t really driving transformation of the organisation.

If we look at an organisation’s performance over time (using the KPIs as the performance measure) then a successful organisation will probably be happily motoring around the amber/green lines most of the time.

The purpose of this type of “change management” (i.e. business continuity management) is to keep the Organisational Performance (OP) line as consistent as possible despite being buffeted about by disconnected external factors (i.e. disconnected from the KPIs, and so not central to the performance of the organisation).

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Three ideas for making the most of 70:20:10

A few years ago the L&D world was abuzz with the sound of people explaining that 70% of learning comes from experience, 20% from other people, and only 10% from formal learning events.

Thus the 70:20:10 model became the flavour of the month, and was used by Consultants everywhere to try to ram it into the stubborn heads of managers that a one-off tick-boxy training course is not a good way to help people get better at doing their jobs.

Like all things that are fashionable, it suffered the roller-coaster of fashion bias one minute, then anti-fashion bias the next, in turn exaggerating then obscuring the wisdom within the model.

Fashion Bias (noun, origin: just made it up): the tendency to overestimate the value of the latest thing because it is in fashion

Anti-Fashion Bias (noun, origin: just made this one up too): tendency to underestimate the value of the latest thing because it is in fashion

And lo, what had once been the answer to all L&D woes faded into the background to become yesterday’s news: a slightly awkward gimmicky sounding tool that people often took to mean that you should do a bit of job shadowing and watch a TED Talk once you’ve done the training course.

The problem with throwing out a model because it gets misunderstood and misused, and through familiarity ends up sounding a bit simplistic and old hat, is that one can accidentally also chuck out the good bits. I believe the metaphor to use here is the one about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I’ve always thought that a rather dramatic and unfamiliar analogy: who hears that metaphor and thinks, “ah OK, now I understand thanks to my vast experience of accidentally throwing babies away“?

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Delegation: the art of getting stuff done without being too annoying

The whole point of managing other people is so that we can be responsible for more than we can do.

This inevitably means that we have to ask other people to do things, and ensure that those things are done to the right quality standards, at the right time, and within the right budget, and all without being too annoying.

This creates a tension because although we can delegate the task to someone else, we cannot delegate the responsibility – so as much as we might want to empower people and leave them to it, we also need the task done properly … which is where things can go wrong …

… if we delegate but cling on, staying too involved, then we not only set off the Annoying Manager Alarm, but we undermine their confidence and motivation. They will be left feeling frustrated and bored, and will be less willing to take risks and make decisions because they will just be waiting for us to pile in with our big fat red pen anyway.

Over time they will become more and more detached, slowly morphing into robots that follow instructions rather than creative individuals who engage with their work …

… but if we do the opposite and delegate too much, walking away and leaving them to it, again the Annoying Manager Alarm jangles as we undermine their confidence and motivation. They will be left feeling abandoned, they will be frustrated and bored, our disappearing act creating the impression that the task is unimportant and unappreciated.

Over time they become more and more detached, taking less and less care as no one seems to be that bothered, slowly morphing into mediocre employees operating well below their abilities.

One way to bring the worst of both these options is what I call the Occasional Demon, the manager who mostly wants nothing to do with our tasks, only to pop up out the blue and tell us what we’re doing wrong. They are absent, then suddenly too involved, usually demonstrating little more than their ignorance.

Occasional Demons are a walking Annoying Manager Alarm.

So how do we hit the sweet spot and get the balance right?

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Pale, male, and pissed off at being called stale

Today is my birthday and so, according to tradition, a higher number is now my age.

I am now unequivocally middle-aged, almost certainly closer to the grave than the cradle, but I don’t mind too much. I like being middle-aged, it suits my personality: being young was fun, for sure, but it was a chore compared to the don’t-mess-with-me-I’m-over-50 vibe that comes with the middle-age gig.

This is not just me making the best of the unavoidable march of time.

I have come to appreciate that the best things in life: good conversation, good wine, good books, are not so available in the noisy discotheques of my youth where I anxiously tried to fit in and appear attractive to women. Now I can relax and enjoy the conversation, the wine and the books and not get all antsy about looking idiotic dancing to Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” at the Chocolate Factory.

This, according to the phrase coined by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in 1992, makes me “pale, male, and stale”: a self-deprecating description cooked up by a middle-aged white man to make the point that filling your top jobs with middle-aged white men, year after year, is a myopic leadership strategy.

Goldin didn’t describe the individuals as “stale”, just the organisation’s leadership as a whole, but the “stale” tag has become a synonym for “middle-aged” when used in conjunction with “pale” (meaning white) and “male” (meaning man).

This is a bit annoying.

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Equal treatment doesn’t always lead to equal outcomes

As a Leeds United fan, I was horrified to see a tweet by the club contributing to the online abuse directed at football pundit Karen Carney.

Carney had expressed the oft-repeated view that Leeds might not be able to keep going with their fast-paced game throughout the whole season.

She went on to opine that, in the previous season, the Covid-lockdown break had insulated the team from burnout by allowing them time to recharge their batteries and come back to the last ten games full of renewed vigour: “I actually think they got promoted because of Covid in terms of it giving them a bit of respite. I don’t know if they’d have got up if they didn’t have that break,” she said, with ex-Leeds striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink nodding along beside her.

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