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The more we hear how important communications are the worse they get. Why? You will remember that I referred to communications in an earlier part of this series (Time is power). Mismanaged companies, I said, destroyed communications because of a perceived lack of time.

We hear about quality time with children and between spouses but seldom about quality time with staff. The behaviour of many businesses suggests that the opposite is happening – meetings, procedures and the press of work are making time for bosses and staff to communicate almost impossible.

And yet we all know that communication lies at the centre of the human race. It is what has enabled us to develop beyond instinct. It is what gives meaning to life and the chance to exchange information and ideas which form the basis of our development.

Unfortunately the word communications is not understood. The Seinfeld scriptwriters motto is “No hugging, no learning”. They are right. I’m not suggesting that all employers hug their employees every morning; some cultures discourage it. But the physical form of hugging – so important in many societies – can be replaced by mental hugging. I know; as an ‘email Mentor’ I do it all the time.

Good communication is when two people tell each other the truth without fear of misunderstanding or offence. Telling the truth requires you to trust the person in whom you are confiding. How do you establish that trust and, once established, how do you keep it? Paradoxically, as you trust others less, so you are even less able to trust them. The more you trust others, the more you will gain and keep their trust. But you then have to live up to it.

The huge success of the America economy demonstrates that openness in business is financially rewarding; there are no businesses in the world more open than theirs and no economy that has been consistently stronger. The belief that commercial secrets can be kept is mythical in today’s world. Since we cannot control it, we should encourage it. Inside information is no longer inside when it is outside.

What are the implications for employers and employees of the TAR (Talk And Relax) system of management?

1. Everyone has to listen. The growing cacophony of noise being directed at us means that we increasingly turn off the sound and fail to listen. I have seen a man’s life ruined because his boss refused him a loan and failed to listen to why he wanted it. The boss, in my opinion, bore more responsibility for the subsequent illegal behaviour of his employee than did the employee himself.
2. We have to make time. Any good organiser can free up at least thirty percent of the time wasted in a business on pointless ritual. A plea that we have no time is an admission of incompetence and false priorities.
3. We have to care more about the other person than about ourselves. That means we understand and seek to meet their needs, hopes, ambitions. And here’s another paradox. The more we care about the other person, the more they care about us.
4. We have to persevere. Communications isn’t something you do for half an hour on Friday mornings; it’s something you do 24/7.

What are the respective roles of the boss and the employee in communicating?

They both bear an equal responsibility. If your boss doesn’t talk to you, talk to him or her. If you colleagues don’t talk to you, talk to them. If employees don’t talk to their bosses, the bosses must talk to them.

Go on, have a good chat. It’ll pay you handsomely.

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Singapore is streets ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to workers’ unions. It always has been. That doesn’t mean that everything runs smoothly. Nor does it mean that the unions are necessarily compliant with ‘capital’. The history, size, culture and style of Singapore all contributed to the effectiveness of the unions but mostly it was the pressing need to survive at the time of independence that made working together essential. The custom has survived pretty well so far.

It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when recently reading the reports of meetings and conferences discussing the role of the unions to see little mention of their place in teaching and training their overseas brothers. Even the internet seems rather silent on the subject. You may think that unions in other countries are their business, unique to the problems they have inherited or developed. You would be wrong.

MNCs drive the union / management relationships for most of the world and as globalisation becomes an ever-pressing reality and corporate behaviour is increasingly scrutinised, the pace of convergence of those relationships between countries will speed up.  It hasn’t done so yet. Overseas unions have much to learn from Singapore’s effective harnessing of what originally was a social need turned so neatly into an important management tool.

We hear much of partnership between workers and managers these days. Nor are we short of helpful advice on human rights. In developing countries both of these are often dismissed as ‘not necessary yet’. Even when this is true, ‘yet’ is tomorrow, if not already today. The rapid advances in all sorts of relationships in the world are accelerating the rate of change. We are not prepared for the new work patterns they demand. My articles on The New Work Revolution develop one effect of this dramatic change.

The west is generally going steadily backwards in its worker / management relationships. Unions that accepted the principle of cooperation in the 70s and 80s have resented the outrageous wages now paid to bosses. People’s natural greed has led to envy when they should have been taught to aspire. Welfarism has demeaned the concept of an honest day’s work and the pride that should be taken from doing a job well. In time this will lead to a big shake-up in the union structures and practices. For the moment they are still stuck in a rut of antagonism. Don’t they understand that the old adversarial approach to worker / manager dealings is out of date? Singapore recognises this and has developed new structures to take account of it.

Is it working?

Clearly for much of the time, it is. Common objectives for both individual and company have shown a clear path to compromise. Human beings working together will always have occasional upsets and differences. Most of the issues that arise are resolved quickly and efficiently. But I wonder why it is that I get so many readers emails on the subjects of unfairness and disillusionment with jobs – often very soon after a job has been accepted. Are jobs and working conditions being over-sold? There will, of course, always be disgruntled workers and insatiable bosses. But so many?

Managers need training for partnership – I call it decent behaviour – but so do unions. While this involves understanding complex laws and interpreting tricky court decisions the lessons are more humanitarian than technical. Singapore has the opportunity to lead in this area and its centre of learning must surely be teaching others the road to success. Like all teaching, the best of it can be by example.

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Time is valuable and yet we squander it because we are frightened of having to do things we don’t want to do or haven’t the confidence to do. Chief among these scary activities is thinking. We would rather do things than think about them. Reflection on the information we have and on our plans for the future (immediate or longer-term) is not as much fun as looking busy and important. A major example of deliberate time-wasting is the proliferation of ‘procedures’.

Procedures are a waste of time but systems are not. The difference? Productivity.

Procedures are put in place to disperse the responsibility for what happens from the person in charge to one someone lower down. ‘The world may fall apart but it wasn’t in my job description to stop it doing so”. Procedures invariably slow business down.

I have just come from a bank in Europe where I was trying to transfer a modest sum of money. At their request I took them a perfectly cogent letter with all the facts they needed logically set out and all the signatures and security confirmations they required. However, they made me fill in a form, saying that it couldn’t be done without. So I filled in the form as best I could – forms seldom provide space for the vital matters you have to communicate. The bank clerk was happy that I had filed in the form. She didn’t check it (‘not her job’). She tore off the BANK copy and gave it to me. It seemed to please her. Whether the transfer will ever go through is a moot point. I doubt it. From the bank clerk’s point of view everything was lovely. She had her form. She had followed ‘The Procedure’.

Systems, on the other hand, are there to facilitate and speed up the work, to improve efficiency. They are not intended to make individuals less responsible but rather to make their work more productive. A good system significantly reduces the number of procedures.

If you want to see the perfect example of procedures wrecking a business study the National Health Service in Britain. A great social concept when it started, it now employs more managers than doctors and nurses combined. These managers cost so much and slow up the work so badly that towards the end of the financial year hospitals start closing wards and deferring operations just to push the expense into the next financial year. By doing so they will have fulfilled the procedure that is required of them.

Excessive systems can be unnecessary and wasteful, too. These four questions constitute the acid test about a new system:

[a] What benefits will flow, to whom and when?

[b] What work, effort or cost will be significantly reduced?

[c] What is the cost of introducing the new system, in money and additional work?

[d] Why don’t we leave the present system alone if it is working?

I don’t know the figure – nobody does – but I suspect that almost half the systems introduced would not pass the test of these questions. So why do they get adopted? To stop people having to reflect on the real opportunities and problems of their business.

If you were expecting me to talk about organisers, planning your time properly, punctuality and monitoring your daily work this article will have disappointed you. All those things are important, of course, but you know that without my telling you.

Good time management is about only two things: priorities and reflecting on the real issues.

Not enough time to do that? You’ve just made my point for me.

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Is your company entitled to more from you than the day’s work for which they pay?

The answer is a resounding yes. There’s an old saying that has stood me in very good stead in business: ‘Negotiate toughly, settle liberally’. It’s right that you hammer out the terms on which you are going to work. Everything is a negotiation from the moment you are sentient to the moment you die. The hard school of living teaches you that. It doesn’t teach you quite so easily when to stick and when to twist in the poker game of life. That you have to learn from others and from your own values. Here’s how you do it.

Imagine that the business for which you work is yours. What would you do to improve its performance? What new ideas would enhance the profits? Which products would you launch? What savings could you make? How would you motivate the workers better? What are the obvious future developments for the business? Can it be improved by devoting more attention to the Internet? Should it be looking overseas for new markets? Are there threatening competitors creeping up on the company? Is the technology getting out of date?

Can’t think of the things that would improve your business? Become an entrepreneur and apprach the question creatively. Use mind-mapping techniques to stimulate your inventiveness; pose outrageous suggestions about the company and see if you can persuade a reliable friend of their viability; note the new products or services coming onto the market and ask yourself ‘why couldn’t that be better’ and ‘why didn’t we do that’; question every aspect of the operations.

But it’s not your business, so why should you do all this?

Mistake! It is your business. You are working in it. You may not own the shares or the assets but you are a vital part of it, whatever your job. You should do everything you possibly can to make it successful, even beyond what you are paid to do. Looking at it as though it is yours will improve life in three ways for you.

First it will make you thoughtful; thoughtful people learn; people who learn get on. You will be equipping yourself for better jobs – and possibly to run your own business at some time.

Second, it will give you immense personal satisfaction. To think through what needs to be done is personally rewarding. It helps you to realise that making money is not as easy as you thought. It enables you to see the two sides to every possible development. That’s why I never did all the thinking in the business I built. Why should I grab all the satisfaction? Better to let others have some of it.

Third, you will be exercising your judgment. You need to do that because, like your body, your brain goes soft if you don’t stretch it. Just as a ghost portfolio helps you decide how to invest, so thinking about the future of the business for which you work helps you learn the critical points of business management.

Will anyone listen to your ideas? They will if you present them sensibly and rationally; they won’t if you are belligerent about them. You have to use all your emotional intelligence (EI) skills to get your ideas understood and accepted. That’s a challenge in itself. The rewards are high. Do it right and you will become invaluable to the boss. Invaluable people earn more, get more promotion.

Pie in the sky? When did you try it? Tell me it doesn’t work when you’ve had a go.

Go on – surprise me.

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May your God be in the eyes of the people you meet,

in the thoughts of those you love and

in the hearts of all who love you.

A Very Happy Christmas to all of you from Eliza and myself

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Money is the key element of motivation. However much you come to enjoy your work you will still do it mainly to keep body and soul together – yours and the family’s. Two questions – how much should you get and how should you get it?

We are told “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”  Sometimes it is an excuse for not paying more. Often it’s an attempt to obscure the negotiation. Occasionally it implies that we should be prepared to work for nothing. I’ve never heard the expression quoted to support higher pay.

The law of supply and demand should produce efficient market pricing. Unfortunately it is often distorted by events that rig the data. One way or another, it will determine what you are paid. Nobody has yet found a better system.

Be realistic about your worth. The factors that count are those that can be perceived – qualifications, experience, impression made at your interview – and afterwards. All your working life you are being interviewed, not just daily but hourly; never forget it. Look at other people and find out what they are paid, how they perform, what degrees they have. Pitch your requirement realistically. All my experience is that Asians do this better than some others, having a sharp, instinctive view of the market place. Don’t underestimate yourself, however. And don’t forget to take account of the sort of business you are in as well as the level of job.

Too much emphasis is placed by employers on experience. There’s not a lot you can do about that in the short term. We should teach the bosses that brains and intellect are infinitely more valuable but employers are – like the rest of us – often lazy and take the easy way out. A man with experience at least has that, if nothing else.

Discuss your salary needs with someone not too involved in the consequences of what you earn. A well-informed friend can help you to think through your strategy. In the end, you will negotiate. It’s important to remember that, from the moment you start dealing with a potential employer. Applicants have a tendency to become sickeningly self-deprecating and over-zealous about the boss-to-be. He or she is just a human being. Always treat them politely but don’t crawl. If you do they will get you on the wages. Hold you head up; you don’t want to work for an employer who can’t cope with self-assured staff.

At least as important as ‘how much?’ is ‘how?’ Pension needs will force some savings from your wage packet but not enough to see you into a comfortable retirement. For that you must save a lot more, get lucky on the gaming tables or win a fortune on the lottery. Don’t ever depend on either of the last two. On the rare occasions that they work they bring huge penalties with them.

Always try to get a deal which involves performance-related bonus payments. To do this you must have cast-iron criteria by which your performance will be judged. Personal handouts on the whim of the boss won’t do. He may think highly of you one day and poorly of you the next. Make sure your terms are clearly defined in your contract. You only do the deal once.

That’s not quite true. You should negotiate as if you do but re-negotiation is a big part of life these days and you must always be on the look out for opportunities to make a more demanding job more rewarding. Your workload will inevitably increase. See that you – as well as the company – get some of the benefits.

If you don’t nobody else will.

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We’ve all met them. Many of us have worked for them. I call them The Bully Boys. They rule by fear, not reason. They destroy the lives of those who work for them. In the end they ruin their own personalities. And when they do our human nature gets the better of us and we rejoice.

We shouldn’t. Rejoicing at the downfall of anyone is bad but rejoicing at the demise of a Bully Boy is worse. They are to be pitied more than hated. You see, they are inadequate people, insecure, unhappy, unbalanced. If the world seems to have dealt them a good hand it is a false observation. The world is laughing at them because they have been fooled, pocketed in a trap called power, wound in a coat called wealth.

How can we deal with them when they are so deluded that they think they rule us?

Not by overt fighting, that’s for sure. A head-to-head will leave you bruised and them, even more deluded than they already are. Our approach has to be more subtle than force. And its objective must be to win – and to get them winning, too. You do not kill a sick man, you help him recover. Here’s a five point plan for dealing with the difficult boss.

1. Set your mind on his problem. He or she is a sad, lonely person, adrift on a choppy sea without friends willing to come to the rescue. He needs you. Be prepared to help, whatever the effort required.
2. Study his behaviour, not in a critical, bemoaning way but objectively, analytically. Try to see the world from his point of view. How much does he listen, how much does he talk? Can you see when he is thinking deeply about the business? How much does he care about the business? Can you see anything in his behaviour that tells you what he really enjoys? What improvement in the business would make him happy? Look especially for the good points about him. If you think there are none, you are wrong. Nobody is wholly evil. Make a note of your observations about him. Do not make it a critical log of bad characteristics; make it a balanced record of pros and cons. Do this part of your work thoroughly. Knowledge is your most important weapon.
3. Ask yourself how you could improve the business. It doesn’t matter if your idea is something small – in fact, at the outset don’t look for major suggestions, find little, useful improvements that he could make and of which he could be proud. Ask him if you could have his views about an idea you have. Don’t tell him his job, ask his opinion.
4. Remember that he is going to get the credit for what you suggest. Don’t get irritated by that. If it was your idea, you will know it. Nobody else needs to – yet. Keep feeding him ideas, gradually introducing bigger issues from which the business will benefit. It will soon be obvious to everyone that the ideas are coming from you. Businesses have no secrets. Your stature will grow. He will start to talk to you.
5. Persevere. You may think the suggestions I have made won’t succeed. They will if you keep working at them. I have practiced this way of dealing with difficult bosses four times in my business life. It worked three out of the four times. Why not the fourth? Because I was too pushy. If I had set about it less aggressively, then it would have worked that time as well.

Let me know how you get on.

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When asked, in a recent survey, to say which word best described their company, most British managers replied ‘mismanaged’. It’s human nature to think we can do the job better than those in charge. Sadly, in business, it is often true.

What causes this situation? That, too, can be answered in a single word: Neglect. Children suffer from it, marriages often suffer from it but employees suffer from it more than anyone else. Why do senior managers neglect their employees? They are not stupid. They must know that neglect breeds dissatisfaction, contempt, hatred. So why do they do it?

The answer they will give is ‘lack of time’. What is worse, they believe it. It is total rubbish.  You might just as well say that when driving a car you don’t have time to look at the road ahead. There is plenty of time – or, rather, there would be if endless, pointless meetings and useless, wordy reports were stopped. Both promote lies; both destroy communications – the very thing they are supposed to build; both leave those who are bound up in them exhausted, frustrated and bored. So bored, in fact, that there’s a game called Bullshit Bingo for you to play to while away the hours of monotonous meetings.

How can you help yourself and, more importantly, motivate yourself in this apparently dire situation?

First of all, fight it. Not rudely or belligerently but politely and persistently. Ask to be excused meetings because of other work. Or ask if you can attend only a short part of the meeting – ‘the bit that matters’. Both requests, even if refused, will begin to concentrate the mind of your manager, especially when you ask for the twentieth time. Leave a meeting when you think it’s going nowhere – very politely, but leave. A strange thing will start to happen. You will find that the important part of the meeting is either assembled into one section of it, or the minutes will tell you all you want to know, in a fraction of the time it took to hold the meeting.

Second, write much briefer reports. Show the essential figures, explain any that look odd, leave the rest out. Your manager is (presumably) numerate. If he sees the figures he doesn’t need you to repeat them in the text. In my own business I banned most written reports and just looked at the figures. I even went further than that and had the figures that mattered – variances from budget – extracted by the computer so that I didn’t have to look at the rest.

Third, take the initiative and talk to your manager. Bother him, politely. Say you have some issues you’d like to chat about and get his advice on. Ask him questions about where the business is going. Take an interest in his problems as well as yours. Make the running to set up a dialogue. No agendas, no minutes, no formality. Just a chat. Do it often, preferably once a week, never less than once a fortnight. If necessary do it on the ‘phone – half an hour spent chatting is worth six hours of meetings, a time-saving of over 90%. That’s an offer nobody can refuse.

Easy? No, of course not. If it was, everyone would already have done it. Worthwhile? l promise you that when you have established the pattern of informal chats, fewer meetings and very brief reports, you will feel like a bird freed from a cage. You will stretch your wings; you will see the business objectively. Most of all, you will be in charge. There’s no greater feeling.

Next time: ‘what if the boss doesn’t play?’

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If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;

Kipling is describing his vision of a ‘whole’ person but these two lines sum up perfectly the requirement for a good leader – to know, to be known and to remain untainted. A great leader never puts his soul on display to those he is leading but he does let them see his emotions. Someone without obvious feelings may be obeyed in a slavish and disgruntled way for a while but he cannot expect to be followed. Those who respond unwillingly end up taking their revenge for real or imagined slights and wrongs.

Leaders are not born. Good looks, clear brain, smiling face, bright personality, athletic build and natural emotional intelligence are advantages in the early stages of leadership learning. I have seen many with these head starts in life fall by the way, just as the disadvantaged often become tremendous examples of light and progress. Indeed, a few good knocks early in life build better leaders than silver spoons and a charmed childhood. That is why parents should encourage their children to take reasonable risks rather than sheltering them from every danger.

A leader takes responsibility when others shun it. He can learn to do this systematically or he can force himself by simply getting on with it. Nike put it well: “Just do it”. The Chairman of ICI once told me that he handled his enormous correspondence by dealing only with those matters to which there were no solutions. If he could see an answer to a problem, he said, someone else could too.

Of all leadership traits the most difficult to teach is truly caring for others. When work gets removed from the context of whole life and becomes a pursuit unrelated to anything but profit, it has already acquired the seeds of its own destruction. Certainly, some profits may be made for a time; a few people, even, may get rich, but at a terrible price. To have failed to contribute to the wellbeing of your fellow creatures would be difficult to live with; to have positively damaged their careers must haunt you for life.

The world has tried hard in the aftermath of two deadly world wars to find a substitute for leaders, presumably because of the flawed decisions that caused such terrible slaughter. In its attempt to find an alternative it has come up with a peculiar form of democracy – a procedure for kicking out good leaders and substituting them with mediocre. Truly well led societies don’t need that sort of democracy because the leaders listen, care, communicate and dedicate their efforts to the good of their people. Any successful tribe knows this.

So it has to be in business. We hear the word ‘team’ used all the time. There must be a captain of the team. His job is to weld the other players together. One or two may score the goals but it’s the team as a whole that makes success possible.

The best lesson I was taught when learning to lead was to ask myself this question at the end of each day: In what ways have I lifted my colleagues’ eyes beyond the horizon today? The leader who offers a vision, however limited, to each of his fellow workers is teaching them self-motivation. Without it they will never follow and he will never lead.

Next time I will develop the theme of self-motivation to see how the employee can make the relationship with his employer truly symbiotic.

Eliza and I are taking a short break over Christmas. The Daily Paradox continues as usual with a series called Management, Motivation and You.

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What have Horatio Lord Nelson, the two hundredth anniversary of the victory of the Battle of Trafalgar and your management got to do with each other?

Quite a lot, actually. Two hundred years ago life on board a sail-rigged warship was, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. If you weren’t blown to pieces by the enemy you probably died of scurvy (lack of proper food) or venereal disease (caught on a drunken night ashore in a port) or other equally nasty ailments. That, or you were whipped to death by the Master at Arms who felt the best way to encourage the others was to make an example of you.

Why did people do it? The same reasons they do dangerous and daring things today – need and greed, plus sometimes a spirit of adventure that couldn’t easily be otherwise satisfied.

Two hundred years later we lived in an enlightened, civilised world, surely? Don’t bother to write and tell me the answer; I know it already. The below-decks deprivations have mostly disappeared. There is not a lot of whip-lashing. Most workers aren’t deprived of the Vit C they need. But life as an employee is still often desperately hard, unfair and, frankly, rotten.

Historians tell us that Nelson, for all his toughness, was much loved by his men – both officers and ratings. Why would that be? He was, after all, a High Admiral. Few of his men ever spoke to him. His commands were not couched in conciliatory terms: England Expects That Every Man This Day Will Do His Duty is not exactly an invitation to a fancy-dress party.

And there’s the rub. Soft suggestions about working nicely together do not make a leader. Quiet ‘words in the ear’ are not the stuff of command. The velvet glove may be kind to the touch; without the iron fist in it, it is nothing more than superficial sham.

In my next few articles I’m inviting you to come with me on a Journey to Good Management. I’d like your boss to come with us, too. If you don’t think he is on the train, cut the articles out, make them into a nice little folder and leave them on his desk for his next birthday. But keep a copy for yourself, too. Good management doesn’t happen without good employees. Your role is at least as important as his.

We define leadership too narrowly. We think of it as something ‘they’ are supposed to do for – or to – us. It is nothing of the sort. It is something we all are supposed to do for each other. Everyone is a leader – or ought to be – many times a day. Other people are constantly looking to us for example, for lessons in matters of which they know little, for decisions about timing.

So what is leadership?

I define leadership as the ability to encourage without bribing, the gift of helping without patronising, the beauty of caring without demanding, the fulfilling of another’s purpose without dominating.

You may find this strange. Not a word about profit; no mention of discipline; have I forgotten order, creativity, quality, hard work? Doesn’t routine, admin, procedure, system come into it somewhere? Of course businesses need all these ingredients. They need loyalty, commitment, focus, determination, single-mindedness, astuteness and many other inputs, too. And leaders have to work, so they need all these desirable attributes themselves.

But as leaders they need first and foremost to lead. They do that by distinguishing themselves from those they lead while at the same time remaining very close to them.

How they may do this we will discuss next time.