If you’re a manager, here are 4 questions for you.
Question One, Is the engagement of your staff with the organisation you work for (let’s call it your firm) any part of your responsibility?
If you answer No to that, you can stop reading now and get back to those all-important spreadsheets and columns of numbers.
If your answer is Yes, Question 2, Would you value a steer on the thing of the moment that’s switching people off, distancing them from their firms, more than any other factor?
If you’re still reading, I’m assuming a ‘Yes’, so I’ll tell you the Bad Thing is saying one thing and doing another. Many firms don’t just say they do diversity, they stand on a high hill and trumpet about it. Work/ Life balance, they’re all over it. Meaningful staff appraisals, they have intranet pages, flow charts and glossy posed photographs to demonstrate the depth of their commitment. I even know of one firm (there must be many many more) that boasts it recycles 100% of its rubbish, when the reality isn’t quite like that.
Every time your firm’s leaders boast about ‘values’ or about ‘what this firm does’, they put themselves under a spotlight to be challenged and assessed. Eagle-eyed cynics (aka the staff) are ready to judge. If the truth is that all your bins are labelled ‘recycling only’ but you ignore the reality of what’s piled into them (there’s nowhere else for the other stuff to go), you can’t sit back satisfied, safe that your system is established, that your values are being ‘lived’. The truth, and you know it, is you’re cheating, by turning a blind eye to what actually goes into those bins. Or, worse still, you know full-well your system doesn’t work, but that doesn’t matter to you because you’re paying lip service; your job stopped at labelling and announcing.
But it’s worse than that. By saying you have values and a policy when you really just have words, you’re either trying to fool your staff or you’re asking them to be complicit in a cover-up. You’re clever, so you know I’m not just talking about recycling.
For the staff, it’s the lying that gets them. They find it patronising or even insulting. It separates them from the firm.
And the more you say it and don’t do it, the worse it gets.
Question 3: You’re not a bad person; what makes you, as a manager, fall into this trap?
We don’t see many examples of business leadership to follow. We don’t see business leaders doing their business leading on television. The ‘leaders’ we see are politicians. We confuse the job of business leadership with what we see politicians doing. But those two jobs are very different. Politicians say stuff and expect praise just for saying it. What makes business leadership different is that you have to stick around and be judged by whether you actually make things happen. And the wider the gulf between what you say and what you do, the greater the distance you place between yourself and your colleagues.
Question 4 is one for you to ask yourself each time you make that proud announcement about ‘What we do’. Are you drawing people proudly together under the firm’s flag, or are you driving that wedge between the firm and its people a bit deeper?