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Fired or Fired Up
I
long ago abandoned any idea that The Apprentice might give people an
insight into the complexities of leading teams of disparate, ambitious
people. I decided to accept it for what it is: essentially a game show.
With each series it becomes more and more a parody of itself. And is
it my imagination or are the contestants getting more ridiculous?
It may be good entertainment but, to use Sir Alan’s vernacular, an insight into good management ‘it ain’t’.
When I worked for a major UK retailer, we had a saying that summed up how the business dealt with bright young things. It was termed ‘the bag of rats’ approach to management. In short, the competing guys and girls were, metaphorically speaking, put into the same bag, kept in the dark about things and then encouraged to bite lumps out of each other. The effect was not pretty but the bag kept jumping forward and the fittest survived. I was never very enamoured with this approach and it’s at the very core of The Apprentice.
It is a return to the dark ages and Sir Alan’s gruff, aggressive style of leadership is similarly anachronistic.
The one truly accurate thing about the show is that the ‘thrusting, ambitious young things’ have big expectations about their careers. This is representative of the majority of people starting out today. It is symptomatic of the challenges facing today’s leader and it is why leadership in the 21st century needs a very different set of qualities to deal with business than ever before.
What are those qualities and what is it that has changed business so dramatically from Sir Alan’s heyday?
1. Today’s working environment is a more nurturing one than 20 years ago. When I started work in the 1980s, someone like Daniel Goleman and his ‘Emotional Intelligence’ idea (or EQ as it is often known) would have been laughed at. Nowadays the idea that how we get on with and work through people (EQ), can matter more than how clever we are (IQ), is not so wide of the mark. In fact the ability to work through people and influence them positively has never been more critical to success. Look at the first ever winner of The Apprentice, the likeable Tim Campbell, and you see this quality in spades.
2. Work-life balance really matters. In a March article on women as leaders, Sir Alan remarked that “It’s the government’s responsibility to provide childcare. You pay a person a salary and they cut their cloth accordingly.” Hmm. Well it doesn’t work like that anymore. If you want your people to provide serious discretionary effort, then you need to treat them as people and not commodities. One of my clients, the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, provides exceptional benefits for their people, from flexi-time working to longer holidays for mothers with young children. It is no coincidence that they are a highly successful company and regularly feature in the ‘Sunday Times list of ‘Best 100 Companies to Work for’.
3. Valuing people is not simply a financial exercise. The mantra ‘people are our most important asset’ has been overdone over the years, but woe betide anyone who does not actually practise it today. If you want to recruit and retain the best, and boy do you have competition in that arena, then you had better value your people every minute of every day. Charles Handy once wrote that employees are the fleas on the back of the elephant. Well, the fleas are now in the ascendancy. It is the fleas who can sell their expertise to the highest bidder and arrange working life as they see fit. This could mean more room for family and leisure. It could mean six months of working and six months of travelling. It is far more flexible and built around ‘me’ - not the company.
4. The 24/7 global village. Not only do you need to be careful how you manage your people; you also need to keep them motivated to deliver everything to everyone, right now. We all know that situational leadership is about adapting your leadership style to the task in hand, and it is absolutely on the money. You have to be adaptable with your people and you have to empathise. You have to know when to instruct, when to coach and when to delegate. Barking out orders and intimidation does not equal productivity in today’s world.
Have another look at point one again.
5. ‘Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage. Both because it is so powerful and so rare.’ These wise words, by Patrick Lencioni, are all too true and I will write more about teamwork in our May newsletter.
So, if there is anything to be learned about business from The Apprentice it is that weak leadership of teams leads to dysfunctional behaviour which leads to poor performance. Which ultimately leads to Sir Alan’s boardroom and the firing squad.
Leading in today’s world takes more than simply wielding the stick
and the carrot. At the end of each episode of Sir Alan’s game show
the victors get a trip to the moon while the vanquished frequent the
greasy spoon café to ponder the meaning of life after celebrity.
It makes compelling television viewing. But as a commentary on the business
world it is more representative of a time when great dinosaurs like Robert
Maxwell roamed the earth. We don’t want that time back thank you.
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The next issue of our newsletter, Sharpening the Axe, will go out at the end of May.