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The dog has learned to climb the stairs – all three steep flights of them. Getting down is tricky, though, given that Deerhounds have long, gangly legs and as any climber will tell you, the last thing you need when beating a hasty retreat is four long legs to arrange in sequence.

The thing with dogs, or at least your Scottish Deerhound, is that they are persistent, especially when hungry. And they are persistent with a very narrow range of tactics for success. When Fizz (sic) is hungry she works in strict sequence of opportunity according to which resources are accessible to her. It goes something like this:

1. Food bowl
2. Kitchen work surfaces
3. Waste paper baskets (apple cores, sweet wrappers, used tissues, anything else worth shredding/eating)
4. Ask to go out and patrol garden for duck eggs – especially straw bedding in duck houses
5. Final resort – eat anything spongy and filling (car washing sponges and pot scourers are more filling than they look)
6. Rest in front of the fire
7. Go to step 1

“Ha-ha, look at the silly doggy” we laugh.

“Cute but dumb” we think.

Really? Is that really a dumb routine?

Repetitious it certainly is, but dumb it is not. The fact is, it always produces a result that gets something into her stomach which is more than you can say for some companies who have perished in the last few years. So whilst the actions in themselves might be ill-advised, the continuity and persistence requires a closer look.

Innovation, we are always being told, is the stuff of survival. I agree – to a point. New ideas that solve problems or create some life improvement are indeed a fabulous feature of our evolution as humans and of our evolution as humans in commerce. However, one shortcoming of our appetite for innovation is that it leads us to keep switching approaches – sometimes with catastrophic consequences. We rarely, it seems, test anything new for long enough to discover the upsides that follow the opportunity costs.

Consequently, many strategic directions set by company boards and governments are ever worked through properly, often because the initiative is either not an instant crowd pleaser or because it simply entails steady, consistent, tedious-yet-skilful repetition. The consequence is almost permanent upheaval as change is introduced and then dropped and replaced by another strategy. So every time a change is about to bed in and perhaps yield some progress, someone comes along with another ‘good idea’. The result is no progress but tiring upheaval, unsettled teams and individuals who cease to apply themselves to anything because they can be pretty confident that their efforts will be redirected before they have had time to become fruitful.

“We’ve tried everything” the leaders utter. “Yes!” comes the reply – “everything except sticking to the plan!”

But how long should one stick to the plan that is costing time and money and yielding nothing? Is it not true that some strategies really should be abandoned as quickly as possible because they were bad from the outset?

“Yes!” comes the reply, now at a shout, “so stop coming up with the stupid stuff!”

So what does the dumb doggy say? She says: “keep it simple and keep it up”. And then she goes to bed.

So you managed to escape from thinking about work over Christmas and the New Year – well, almost.

Well done you!

Now you just have to muster the will to engineer the reverse exercise. This is when you find out whether you are, what some people refer to as, a ’self-starter’. The magic property which enables you to get on with it all by yourself.

Me? I completely failed to start learning to touch type and I am now having to resort to the loser’s tool of choice: the New Year’s Resolution. My current excuse for five-finger-typing-whilst-watching-the-keyboard-and-still-misspelling-every-third-word is that my friend Tom who promised me a superb, ‘best in class’ book on the topic has not delivered, and frankly, until he can, I’m stuck. Job done. No need to continue with that one.

Part of the problem for me of course is that there’s no one giving me stress about my productivity; I just type, work and play at my own pace. I turn up to work when I feel like it and stop when I like. But, alas, like any company owner/diligent employee, I do far too little skiving/goofing off/resting. I don’t take breaks much, I often forget to have lunch, consider train journeys to be golden times to work on things and have to make conscious and specific efforts to stop having ‘brilliant ideas’ at weekends. But then, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I really like my job. So the most damaging aspect of not having a constant boss (I have as many transient ones as I have clients) is that when it comes to something that isn’t important to me, or at least important/urgent enough, I delay or just drop it from the list. So, I seem to have it taped. Lucky me. Well not quite actually. My self-starter approach has come with a high price: there are many things that I just haven’t stretched myself to do. I could say that I haven’t, until now, been very brave and so have played things rather safely. Here is where mentors come along.

I, like everyone else, need someone sometimes to chivvy me along; to help me to get into a difficult, higher gear. Some people depend on their manager to help more than others in this respect either because of the way they are or because of the circumstances in which they live and work. Many of us would show up to work only reluctantly if things were going wrong at home or if work was getting on top of us; repetitious or stressful jobs exact a personal toll which I can only guess at. In these circumstances we positively need leadership. And people who want to be stars at anything (think: athlete, ace pilot, politician, top academic etc.) also need some sort of leadership or at least people around them who perform elements of leadership on them – even when not requested.

We need to know there is someone there looking out for us, giving us an outlet for discussing work-based problems and the occasional home-side catastrophe. We also need someone to give us feedback (a nudge, or stronger) when we are about to take a backward step. So some of us need a leader to get us out of bed, others need one so that they can excel and still others need a leader for self-preservation: because of what the job takes out of them.

So what do we need this precious leader to provide us with under any of these circumstances?

Many things, but a few critical ones are:

1. Set the vision and communicate it to us
2. Determine direction and strategy and pass it on
3. Facilitate progress – make it as easy as possible
4. Provide consequences

Were you expecting number 4?

If you stumble across a poor performing team or a place where morale really stinks it will almost certainly be because there are few consequences to either good performance or poor.

Just reflect upon how you feel when you’ve done something really difficult and no one says anything.

How does it feel, when a little while later, someone fails to do something or gets it wrong (the notion of ‘fault’ is not relevant here) and there is no response, no consequence?

Even those of us who profess to be utterly self-sufficient and to not require formal leadership need consequences to our own actions if we want to get anywhere special. And we want to see consequences for those around us whose actions affect us.

Without consequences events and outcomes just don’t make sense. Fulfilment is never achieved, the will to improve or alter something doesn’t materialise within us. The worst consequence of the lack of consequences is that we give up trying because, when things are really difficult, anything bearable will do. The consequences provide the point. No consequences; no point.

So, I still can’t type and it’s a big waste of time and energy; I get tired and frustrated. I get documents done but without the satisfaction of doing it quickly. I waste brain power on doing corrections instead of using it to be creative, to write better. So the lack of external consequence for me not learning to type, far from freeing me up to remain a free agent, binds me to a situation I don’t like. It’s not big, but then again, it is a bloody pain. My only hope is that Dr Bill Baker will call me to embarrass me about his virtuoso Ukulele playing. At lunch, a few weeks ago, the deal struck between us was: “you learn to play and I learn to type”.

So what does all this mean to you and your team?

You might give them 1-3 as above and much besides. But if you don’t provide consequences for good and poor performance they will never, ever perform anywhere near their best, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may give a lot less than that because they will assume that it really doesn’t matter to you. And if it doesn’t matter to you, they will find a way to cope: making it not matter to themselves (cognitive dissonance).

So what are you going to do about it? That is up to you.

What am I going to do? Well, since my boss refuses to administer any consequences of note, I’m going to call Bill and get myself a consequence that I care about: his good opinion. That should nail it.

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.

It is quite normal now for us to be working daily with people we rarely meet face to face, with people of different cultures mother tongues. Inevitably problems arise just as they do with people with whom we share a workspace and culture.  But toss in geographic and cultural boundaries to the usual list of obstacles we encounter when things are getting tense around the single location organisation and you have a much increased potential for situations to get out of control. In the absence of eye-contact and of the comfort blanket of shared culture we surely must rethink, in fact, really work at ‘making contact’, bridging gaps between the different people involved in the enterprise.

A few days ago I invited Tom Buehlmann to join me on PEC’s monthly teleseminar. I wanted someone there who had done the whole managing scattered teams for real. This Bulletin is largely a report of the nuggets of that conversation.

Tom has managed teams across multiple geographies for about 25 years for brands like Procter & Gamble, Lindt & Sprüngli, the famed Swiss chocolate maker and Catalina marketing, the company credited with the invention of the now ubiquitous card loyalty scheme.

I began our conversation by asking Tom what sort of scale of operation he had dealt with in the past. A few hundred here, fifty there, three hundred over there. Big, then. And here is the first mistake that Tom has encountered time and again. He started life with Catalina with twelve direct reports, scattered across half a dozen countries. Far too many he laments, “I ended up with seven in the end – much more manageable.” So first lesson. Keep the number of direct reports down. Seven – tops.

I then ask him about his top tips for managing long-distance, aside from the cultural stuff which we will come to later. “I’d prefer to think of it as a list of mistakes I made the first time – so what I would do differently next time is…

1. Don’t assume it’s easy managing at a distance – it’s not. It takes a conscious effort to get to know people and not just the business.
2. Don’t assume that a solid reporting line on the org. chart means that you have a relationship with that person. You don’t.
3. Don’t try to do everything – prioritise and let them do their jobs.

I am curious to know what a conversation between Tom and a direct report might sound like when things are going wrong and the person is hundreds, if not thousands, of Kilometres away (Buehlmann is Swiss). He asks me to quantify ‘going wrong’. I reply, “Not catastrophic but bothering you a lot, over a few months”. He needs no time for reflection, “When can I come and see you?”. He adds, “you have to be prepared to get into your car, train, plane or whatever and get in front of them – fast. It is time-consuming but you have to do it. Spend as much face to face time with them as is feasible and desirable – on their home territory where they feel safe and at ease”.

According to Buehlmann, when communication is not face-to-face, different methods of communication have a different effect on the dynamic – specifically changes in power and intimacy levels. According to Buehlmann, different methods carry different messages too. He goes on to specify: “A personal, hand-written note is very special, very powerful, very personal”. A text is about as impersonal as you can get – it’s about the worst. No, actually email. I really don’t like it. It is so open to misinterpretation.” The message is: choose the medium for the message carefully. If in doubt: talk or travel.

I want to get an idea of how to tackle situations where cultural boundaries are being crossed and I ask him for a top tip on what to do when you are starting out in this new territory of working across national boundaries. He sighs: “I learned a lot from working in Japan. For me the number one thing is to try to understand the local codes and rules.” I prod him for a little more detail. “When I first went out there I just turned up to the regional office and met with all the people at the top of the org. chart for that country. I asked all the right questions and thought I was doing just fine. Then I found out that I had terribly offended the Chairman of the company. He didn’t appear on any chart but what I should have done was to get off my plane and get in the car straight to his office. I would only have needed to spend twenty minutes with him. Word would have gone round very fast that I had done the right thing. My visit would have shown that I had manners – that knew how to behave. Big mistake”, he frowns and shakes his head in self-criticism.

Buehlmann tells me another story, this time about his former top manager in Japan. When Buehlmann first arrived in Japan he recalls that he was keen to show the manager and his own Board colleagues back in the U.S. that he was managing the global business, getting things repaired, helping to make the Japan operation profitable. But after months of doing business with his No.1 in Japan, endlessly going out in the evenings for meals to discuss the business and to get to know the local problems, the manager out-of-the-blue, over dinner one evening, suddenly tendered his resignation. “I was really shocked. I’d had no warning at all. I asked him, of course, what was wrong. He replied with words that I will never, ever forget: Tom-san, you don’t even know the names of my children.”

But not all cultures are so extremely removed from our own Western European way of doing things. I suggest to Tom that there are mistakes to be made much closer to home. He agrees. “France is a good example. In France there is a formal and informal organisation. The informal is arranged according to where you went to university – where you grew up intellectually, really. There are strong bonds between people who share educational experiences and backgrounds. You have to get to grips with these unspoken links and relationships before you can really figure the rest out and get things done easily.”

It seems from my time with Tom Buehlmann that what we say we do and value is not always played out in the office even by someone whom I regard as a seasoned international player; someone who really gets the people bit. Talking about the value of relationships is easy and it’s in all the books. Resisting the temptation to focus one hundred percent of one’s attention on the running of the operation is the tough part, it seems. Buehlmann: “Developing human relationships is critical. No one wants to be a name in a box, a human resource.” It’s an obvious but illusive point: developing relationships is an essential part of keeping people with you, especially when you don’t see them often. They will forgive all sorts of cultural and linguistic transgressions if you have gone to the trouble to get to know them, to show them respect as people. Buehlmann concludes: “Talking about business all day is not developing relationships. That is done separately.”

I was doing a spot of wiring at the weekend and whilst grovelling around through piles of dusty (and terribly itchy) ceramic insulation, in a part of the attic that I had never to, I stumbled across a large control panel bolted to the wall.

This shoebox-sized box sprouted a wild assortment of about twenty cables and was covered with an array of red LEDs – all lit. This large gadget had evidently been hanging there for the past three years, since we bought the house, fully powered up, doing it’s thing. What’s its ‘thing’ was I have not discovered but I do know that it did it quite without anybody’s help. No reset buttons to press, no dials to adjust, no displays to monitor. How clever of it, how resilient and independent; what a little stalwart. Not all machines are like this. The more we design machines to do, the more help they seem to need from us. Computers need upgrades, software needs patches, cars need servicing (oh, how they need servicing), bikes need mending and microwaves, well they just get thrown away – sorry. But we fully accept this maintenance burden; when we buy a machine we buy an uncertain future and usually a big fat warranty to ‘protect’ us from that future. But people, ah, now you’re talking.

"Come on ol' girl"

The beauty of buying, or as we like to say these days, ‘hiring’ people is that you just get them in the building, tell them where the coffee machine is (they always manage to find the toilets by themselves) and let them get on with whatever it said in the advert. Job done. Sometimes. The tricky ones need maintenance (oh gawd, here we go – should have bought another bloody machine instead).

Fear not, here is the Quick Start guide to help you get the best from your new person or ‘human’ without wasting valuable business hours.

1.  No need to read a book about ‘leading people’ instead ask it what it needs to operate properly: what turns it on and what makes it malfunction. Then believe it and do as it asked.

2.  Be aware that it will need a reasonably nice place to work properly: space for its cables and attachments, daylight, access to fresh air, a chance to eat and freewheel for a few minutes a day; in essence, somewhere that it is pleased to come to.

3.  If you are going to connect it with other people units make sure that all of them know why they are being connected and find out from them, or at a push, tell them, which person is going to do what. Of course, do make sure they are talking the same language. It doesn’t matter that they are different (you probably chose them that way), it does matter that they can make sense of each other.

4.  If they start getting dusty or crusty it is probably because you haven’t been near them for ages. As with any good machine, the better you get to know your person (and the better they come to know your preferences), the more productive and maintenance-free you and they can be.

5.  Preventative maintenance. This comes in a variety of forms; here are 3 critical ones:

• Communication. If there is an instance of good productivity or a malfunction – talk (like with the car).
• Time to think. If you load your machine with ‘stuff’ don’t expect great results. Like a washing machine – put too much in and it all comes out dirty.
• Be nice to it. We all talk to our cars and that works really well on an icy road or on a cold morning doesn’t it? (I hum to the microwave too – it helps the food to heat quicker). So be nice to your person and they will be nice back to you.

But if you are not entirely satisfied with your person, whatever the model, simply return them to where you got them and there is a good chance that there is someone out there who can successfully give them a more suitable home where they can function at their peak.