It will be interesting to see if you can actually stop working when the moment comes.

Let’s be honest now. You and I have struggled to keep going the last couple of weeks; a mixture of fatigue (why now?? see last post), social and environmental hypnotic suggestion (twinkly Christmas effect – technical term) and a raft of business reasons have made it very tricky to keep the productivity machine from stalling altogether. But the day is approaching when we are actually going to have to stop ourselves checking our various electronic devices for updates, actions and trouble; we are going to need to divert our attentions to our own, personal lives. But like a sick dog who isn’t permitted to eat but habitually sniffs it’s bowl anyway, we will both, you and I, have to find ways stop sniffing the empty work bowl for 10 days.

Habit is one thing and wish is quite another. A habit can dry up quite quickly, in the space of 40-50 experiences, even quite close together. So if you do glance at your Blackberry or iPhone and then realise that there is no real need, you may not have to go through this ritual many times before you notice that you are doing it less and less within a day or two. The point here is not so much can I stop the habit but do I have something better (more engaging) to do? Something that brings me a stronger (nicer) feeling than the little kick that I get from checking my mail/voicemail to see if I have received good news or a lack of bad. That part is of course a matter of personal choice. We can each choose to fill our heads with what is happening right now or to worry about what we left behind (unfinished tasks and troubles) and what is coming up next on the 3rd of January (more tasks and trouble).

The challenge for busy people is to exist in the present whilst creating outcomes for the future; to do what we are supposed to be doing now and not what we were supposed to be doing yesterday or what we should be doing tomorrow. Whenever you have decided to stop work, your new ‘To-do’ is to work at doing the present well – keeping your head in the now as the saying goes.

This thing about concentrating on living the day, the experience, the moment is the most obvious recipe for returning to work as happy and rested as possible. Not to mention the most obvious way to ensure that you have something to give, beyond your physical presence to the people around you during the few days that you have at your disposal.

Bottom line: just as you and I can choose how, when and how well to work, we can choose to make a really fine job of switching off and having a great holiday season – even if we must at first work at it.

My best wishes.

Question: Did the boss of Kweku Adoboli, the 31-year-old UBS trader who has admitted to wiping out $2.3bn of UBS funds, ever have a real heart to heart with this trader? Did he even have a meaningful annual conversation with him concerning anything aside from the nuts and bolts of the job? I just can’t imagine it. You would notice something. Surely you would notice his behaviour changing over the months? Because we’re not even talking about noticing subtle change over years. We’re talking about picking up signals from someone who has got themselves into a major jam in the period of a few days – and only then over months and years.

The first day.

And there was a first day. There was a day back in 2008 where Kweku turned up to work happy, or at least feeling OK, and left in pieces when he realised that he should have closed a position at a loss and taken the rap on the knuckles. Why didn’t his boss or colleagues notice, and if they did, why was there not a next step? Something in the interpersonal DNA of that trading desk meant that it was a conversation that nobody could have. But there is worse – at least for his leaders. As if they don’t look incompetent enough, have a little think about this… What dynamic existed between him and his boss that meant that Kweku couldn’t countenance turning around to his boss at any time in the first few weeks to say: “I’ve messed up big time”. Reports suggest that had the trader reported the problem at any point in the first few months (even in the first year, some say) then he would have had to endure little more than the proverbial smack on the wrist. So why didn’t he take advantage of this amnesty period and be done with it?

Behind the scenes.

Things are of course never as they appear. If you or I worked at UBS we would know the answers to all of these questions. We would know what the culture of the place is and recognise the strict yet invisible differences between the acceptable and the unacceptable. We would both know the taboo subjects and the corporate attitude to mistakes. We would both know who to look out for and who could be trusted to admit something to – who we could ask for advice without fear of being exposed as being weak, dumb or incompetent. It will be interesting to see how the management of UBS react to this appalling fault in leadership in the coming months. Will they bulk up on rules and regulations or will they put all their management on intensive doses of emotional skills training? Neither I hope. A little and often. A slow in-depth change of culture is what is needed. But above all, positive, intelligent  help, not snap, remedial training. An even more interesting question is: will you do anything differently on Monday morning in the way that you treat your reports or colleagues? Are you confident that you know your people as well as you need to? Are you sure that they can come to you with a mistake and meet with an intelligent response or even support? Is the culture in your area of the office or organisation such that people help each other, share ideas and confidences or is it highly competitive to the degree that the members of your team aren’t much bothered who falls by the wayside as long as it’s not them? The chances are that you recognise elements of all of these cultural conditions.

No man is an island – wanna bet?

No office or organisation has got team cooperation and intelligent, compassionate leadership completely taped 24/7. Why not? Well, because even if you are a great leader and your team really do pull together, most of the time, you can never account for the one or two people who join the organisation and then never quite fit; never completely drop their guards and connect with the social system. These people cannot be helped easily because they have not retained the ability to show vulnerability alongside technical authority and knowledge. They have, in fact, developed a persona which makes them much less vulnerable to life’s knocks and yet equally renders them beyond the reach of help. We all know that when we pull up the drawbridge we shut out the cavalry as well as the enemy; and for some of us the drawbridge will always be up more often than it is down. So, for the sake of both happiness and organisational fitness-for-purpose, we should invest energy in learning to recognise these well-defended people and also in fostering a social environment that makes ‘real’ conversations possible. Because as Leeson, Kerviel and now Adobole have shown us: if I have a problem, you have a problem.

Life is complicated. Cultures are complicated. Traditions are complicated. Relationships are complicated. Conversations are complicated. We are participants in all these arenas, and many more besides and we are bound to get it wrong – a lot. The interesting question here though is what is ‘wrong’?

As children growing up in a complex world we labour constantly, often without knowing it, to work out what is going on around us. What does that frown mean? What do I say when someone says that? How do I stop the shouting? Why am I getting peas again?

So we guess. We develop ‘rules of thumb’ so that we don’t have to work things out from scratch every time. Much of this rule-making is done by the time we reach pre-school age or soon after, although our accumulated expertise might not always be evident because, at that stage, we often lack the words to describe our insights to our carers. But let us be clear, this expertise is just based on really good guesses and personal interpretation. Fact-checking features very little at this stage.

And then the tricky stuff really begins. From the first days in contact with other children it begins to dawn upon us that we don’t all think alike, or to be more precise, we don’t all believe alike. Each of us has by now developed a subtly different set of rules from everyone else in the group and here we face an even tougher challenge than before – deciding which of the competing rules is ‘right’.

Much of the time our need for an instant decision in tandem with a need for comfort leads us to one of the binary conclusions: either you’re wrong and I am right or you are right and it’s me who is wrong. It is this decisional dead-end that opens the opportunity for ‘mistakes’. Of course, mostly, there is no mistake, there’s a mismatch.

If there is a mistake it is one that we seem to often miss the lesson on – even as we grow into adults. The mistake in a given situation is not made when I fail to match your rule or you fail to match mine but when we both fail to notice that there is a rule. Or to be more precise, two. The follow-on error is to for each person to promptly decide that the other person is wrong/bad/thoughtless/horrible (add your own judgements here).

So, is the remedy simply rule recognition – noticing that we are just believing something different rather than being different, right or wrong? Partly. But first an example:

I am writing this sitting on the train to London. 10 minutes ago, as the train filled up with passengers a man drew level with the seat across the table from me and slammed his orange drink down as if to say “Mine! This is my seat – anyone got a problem with that?!” Now his version… “Oh no, I don’t think I’m going to be popular, three people at the table already and it’s very quiet. I hate asking ‘is this anyone’s seat? Instead, I’ll just put my drink down here and they will hopefully get the message that I’d like to sit down and if there’s a problem it won’t be so embarrassing as actually sitting down or asking the stupid question which often gets a negative reply…”

Of course I don’t know what he was thinking, I’m making it all up, his version and mine. The point is, which version of events do I need to believe to bring about the better outcome? Do I make the juice man nicer by treating him badly? Of course not. Do I make myself nicer by treating him badly after guessing nasty things about him? Definitely not.

Which brings me to the second part of the remedy:

Stop guessing like a child or guess something nice.

What does your life look like these days? Open your diary now and look at what’s in it for next week. Meetings? A few? How many? And how many will get added next week. I am hoping that in the next few lines I will get you thinking (and maybe even make you sufficiently gloomy/fed up) about how you spend your time to want to do something about it – especially with regard to meetings and how you handle that whole bit of business life.

How bad is it?

The nice people at Doodle.com reckon admistrators/PAs spend at least 5 hours a week arranging and re-arranging meetings for us to go and sit it – an eighth of their working week. The New York Times, a little while back, reported that men in the U.S spend on average 4.3 hours a week in meetings whilst women spend 2.3 – half what men do. Maybe I should have hired a woman to write this article? The same paper also reported, at the time, that of the people surveyed, 75% said that their meetings could be more effective. At the time of going to press the report suggested that 91 million US workers spent between one and eight hours in meetings each week. Wait for it… 11% reported surviving an astonishing 13+ hours a week in meetings. Is that you too?

What is your meeting schedule telling you?

Get hold of a piece of paper right now, draw a big circle on it and in this order, very quickly plot the slices of the pie according to time spend – don’t dwell – do it quickly.

1. Meetings
2. Supervising and managing people
3. Communicating and winning support
4. Organising and documenting thoughts
5. Thinking

I’ll bet the ‘Thinking’ bit is squeezed in. Why don’t we think more? Perhaps because it looks like we’re not doing anything? Perhaps because we accept silly amounts of tasks? A web time management website I visited suggested that its clients should devote a full 5 minutes a day to planning. 5 minutes?! I am aghast. Tell me that you are too.

So, why go to a meeting at all?

I think that there are only two valid reasons for committing to a meeting: to get value or to give it. Here are all the others:

• To stay in the loop
• To keep control of something
• To manage perceptions (I am interested, involved, a leader, omnipresent, I am working hard, I belong… add your own)

Magic Pennies (or ‘how to handle a meeting request)

So, you get your meeting request/demand/threat. Do this before you reach for your PDA or smartphone. Print off the next page and get 5 coins out of your purse or pocket. If you are getting this Bulletin in text form just go to http://www.pec.org.uk and download the page there.

Now allocate your 5 coins with the appropriate weighting in each of the four unshaded boxes. Now count up the coins and there’s your decision.

• Play the game whenever you get invited to a meeting. Never play it for more than 10 seconds for each meeting. The real answer will come quickly – everything you do after that is probably false justification.
• Do not email a refusal – call or walk to the meeting owner’s desk – it’s still quicker than going to the meeting.
• DO NOT APOLOGISE. They will be confused about your motivations. Explain that you are happy to help but not to meet. Ask for the agenda and for what the person would like your brief input on.

Adding value without being there

You’ve refused the meeting. Well done. Now, assuming they’re still talking to you you need to do the following:

• Get the agenda
• Ask the meeting owner what their priorities are (you may already know this because you may have refused on the basis of a conversation with them – even better.

Now pretend you had intended to go to the meeting but got stuck in a snow drift/sand dune/ (stay with me on this) and your mobile phone only has enough power for a text or 60 seconds of talk (it’s an iPhone 3 with iPhone 4 software loaded). What would you say? To help you decide bear in mind that your input will stand the greatest chance of being used if your representative feels comfortable about sharing your it. So, whatever you transmit to them it should:

• Be absolutely pertinent
• Add your input with a genuinely positive intention and in genuinely positive wording
• Be brief
• Obviously benefit the other people at the meeting (and least of all you)

Conclusions

1. Go to the meeting for a good reason. 2. Stay away for a good reason. 3. Add value and no one will ever chase you one way or the other (well, not for long). Recognise that avoiding meetings is not being lazy – it’s actually harder than following the crowd because you can’t hide behind looking busy. By reducing the number of meetings you attend you are saying: Look at me, I’m not playing the game and I am still delivering value. You are saying: I refuse to waste my time. You are saying: Look at my output not at how much or little I had to work to produce it.

Good luck with swimming against the tide. Grease up and get going!

Most articles about leadership focus on best practice. However, this piece is about worst practice – and how to avoid it.

1. Being the No.1 ideas generator. Most of the people we work with in leadership positions think that they are there to come up with ideas. They are living in the past to be brutal. That is the territory and luxury of the early shift – people early in their careers. As soon as you get people working with you as your team then the whole game changes. You have other mouths to feed with inspiration. It’s not just you who has to stay interested and excited – others do too. You can either help this to happen by giving them permission and encouragement to think or you can starve them and have all the fun and challenge yourself.
2. The ‘open-door’ policy. This is one of those things like ‘teamwork’ and ‘empathy’. If you are naming it it’s because you’re not doing it. When the doors to management offices opened all those years ago it was only the dinosaurs who didn’t take them off the hinges altogether. The new generation of leaders were encouraged (ordered) to get out on the floor to MBWA (Manage By Wandering Around). The expectation was now that we would leave our offices and get seriously interested in what all those funny little people out there, called ‘staff’, were doing with their time and the company’s money. Let’s not go back on that one by talking about the ‘open doors’ that shouldn’t even be there.
3. Buy-in. If you have begun a project or initiative and you are now looking to get buy-in you are too late. Involvement which produces ‘buy-in’ should be adopted at the conception stage – not after the birth.
4. Teams bigger than seven. Something strange happens in a group’s dynamics as soon as you have more than six people around the table. If you have fewer than four it can be hard to generate energy and ideas; things can get stuck. As soon as there are seven or more around a table then someone will almost certainly quieten down or shut down. Is this another manifestation of the power of the magical number 7?
5. Email to your direct reports. I’m not just going off email – I’m getting frightened about its capacity for messing up the message and the flow of relationships in general. Here are 5 reasons not to communicate with your team this way. Firstly a ‘good’ email takes time to compose and check – time is probably one thing you have little of. Secondly, ambiguity – can you guarantee its absence? – No. Thirdly, unknown reaction – how have you made the other person feel at that moment? You don’t know. Next: Depersonalisation – the email replaced the corporate memorandum or ‘memo’ – the dinosaur’s manager’s way of communicating bad news, orders and all the other forms of rubbish that floats around companies between people. Don’t ruin the email by making it do the jobs that should be done face to face. lastly… Relationships are about creating a feeling of closeness. Emails, in a team situation, tend to create distance.
6. Working more than 45 hours a week. The toughest consulting outfit I ever worked with had one really good rule: no working on client site after 6pm. The thought was that if you couldn’t get it done in nine hours you were deemed to be “out of control” as the saying went. The reality was that they wanted to make their consultants look efficient to the client which enabled them to constantly point out the inefficiency of the client’s staff. Nevertheless, here are three genuinely wholesome reasons to go home on time: The return on time invested dips more steeply the later you work. Secondly, your people will think they have to copy you – a daft competition is set up. Lastly, rest will make you more personally effective the next day.
   

   55 hours this week and still going wrong

7. PowerPoint. I like a good graph as much as the next man. But within a team I cannot think why anybody needs to even open their laptop other than to show off a new litter of puppies or exchange holiday snaps. The alternative? A pen, a flipchart and the minimum amount of data and information that you need to get the troops fired up.
8. Big words. Continuing on the theme of impact… this comes up again and again in PEC client sessions. Bottom line: everyone likes to listen to an expert who uses simple language to express complex ideas. People also trust simple language largely because people who have something to hide (like bad news or a lack of knowledge) mostly try to cover their tracks with big words (and lots of them). Go simple for maximum impact.
9. A client suggested this one: He wanted his boss to: “Stop trying to do my job for me – provide guidance etc. but then let me get on and do it myself.”
10. The same client sought some 360 degree feedback. His team gave him feedback about being more himself – here are his comments: “[they wanted me to] to switch off and just sometimes be myself, rather than by business-self. I suppose we get wrapped up in doing what’s right for the business and forget about the importance of emotional connections.”

My comment on this feedback would be that most people, both in our public and private lives, want to be given the chance to know us – to be trusted with the real person. To pretend perfection is to shut people out – to say to them: “I don’t trust you with who I really am.”

So that is the PEC take on what good leaders should give up. As always, please feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss the points we have made here.

Why does one part of the organisation (region 1) assume that the other part (region 2) has a bad attitude? Because in the absence of real data they have invented their own version of events.

When a job is delayed? “They’re lazy!”
When only bad news comes out? “They’re useless!”
When no explanation is forthcoming? “They don’t respect us!”
When their presentations are dry? “They’re boring…”

The reality?

When the job was delayed? The new machine falls over – it is leading edge stuff but in that part of the world they don’t like to boast.
When only bad news came out? The national culture is to get on with the job quietly and without fanfare – publish problems but handle success discretely.
When no explanation was forthcoming? The people involved are embarrassed and are working like hell to put things right before anyone notices.
When their presentations were dry? They hate doing them – they are seen as a distraction from creating solutions. Creating a PowerPoint presentation is low grade compared to creating ‘the new kick ass machine’.

Are the folks in region 2 lazy, useless, disrespectful and boring? Nope. But they are really lousy at PR and they are naive communicators who need to learn about the effects of their behaviour as perceived by others hundreds of miles away.

That sounds very fixable.

I confess at the outset of this post that I’ve never much been into the ‘cultural differences’ stuff – empathic communication and its breakdowns are my first love. And to tell you the truth, until last week I simply hadn’t been that interested in the topic.

The facts are that I like people from all over the place, I like traveling and I find different cultures, ways, foods, places etc. all fascinating. Full stop. I had of course failed to grasp how someone’s place of birth and the culture of their upbringing might impact on their interactions with other people other than because of differences in their accent, incomplete vocabulary and a quite natural suspicion of British food. A conversation last week has unearthed, for me, a more intriguing subtlety in this cultural difference malarkey.

I imagine that it is generally assumed (well, it was by me) that when a person, for whom English is not the mother tongue, sets out to express an opinion in conversation, any faltering on their part might be explained by a hole in their grammar or vocabulary and/or a misplaced unease about making themselves look daft by using the wrong phrase. According to the one person with whom I have had my only proper conversation about all this (not a large sample I grant you – bear with me) what invariably holds him back from expressing himself more transparently can more accurately be described as a strong dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of the second language and not any lack of his grasp of it.

So, it is not embarrassment that ‘le mot juste’ is, at that moment, beyond his reach but a deep-seated conviction that people from the culture in which he is the visitor would not get to grips with the essence of what he was trying to express, no matter what words he chose. He finds himself thinking: If I can’t get them to connect or empathize with this sentiment then I would prefer to leave the whole thing out. This barrier to expression therefore is not about a hole in idiomatic sharing as much as wider gap in cultural reference points such as what is funny, familiar or foul. The problem is only compounded when a person speaking their second language is skillful to the point that their colleagues believe that none of these problems exist. In such instances, it is possible that untimely failures to speak up might be misinterpreted as examples of ‘not joining in’ and therefore as signs of aloofness.

The conversation last week also shed light on something closer to home. I gave up speaking Italian to our first daughter, Vianne, after more than a year of persevering. I found that I was simply unable to express the subtleties of my feelings for her during the day-to-day ups and downs in a way that did justice to what was going on in my head – and heart. Although I had done my three Rs in Italian, and had been fluent in both English and Italian from first words, I was starting to feel cut off from Vianne. I should not have been surprised. I had, after all, only really been exposed to parent-child language in English and had thus acquired the subtleties of my own parenting vocabulary in that language rather than in Italian.

It seems that linguistic proficiency is only one superficial cultural bridge. The invisibility of other barriers should make us more wary about jumping to negative conclusions about the social faults that we find in acquaintances from other cultures. However, a question remains: In future, will I be quick enough to notice my lack of cultural empathy before they do?

PS. Thanks again to Robert for his excellent cartoon strip. www.robertthompsoncartoons.com