Difficult - Moi!

This latest “Deep Thort” article is inspired by recent events that reminded me of just how many “difficult people” we have in the world and the trouble they can cause the rest of us.  People like Vladimir Putin who delights in causing mayhem for western democracies and then takes even more pleasure from flatly denying it has anything to do with him.  Boris Johnson blusters on regardless of collateral damage and as for Donald Trump, well “you cannot be serious”.  Alarmingly it looks like he is.

We all encounter difficult people from time to time.  These are the people who can make our lives, work and everything more difficult than it needs to be; from mildly irritating to completely horrendous.  For some of us this is just a few people who we avoid if we possibly can, whilst for others it can mean nearly everybody else.

The difficulty we have in dealing with difficult people is that their behaviour usually triggers an emotional reaction from others.  “These completely unreasonable, aggressive, downright b**t**ds who are making my life a misery and screwing everything up.  Someone ought to do something about them.  They should learn to behave better”.  Whilst this is a natural reaction and response it is not much help to us in finding an answer to the problem of “difficult people”.

So this latest “Deep Thort” comes from our book “The Z to A of Success – The Art of Thinking Backwards”  (https://www.z-to-a.com/) where we have a chapter on Behaviour that contains a section on “difficult people” and poses this question.

If “difficult people" are the problem then the next question is, "for whom?"  Answering this question contains the secret of handling "difficult people" effectively.  This secret is that.

Most “difficult people" don’t see themselves as difficult at all.  It is other people who find them difficult.

So who has got the problem?  Not the "difficult people" because they see no problem and have no incentive to do anything about it; so they don’t.  So it is the rest of us that have the problem.  So the reality is they are not the ones who are going to do anything about it – only you can.  You need to make something different happen, they don’t.

So the next time you encounter a difficult person who is causing problems for you and those around you try controlling your emotional reaction and accept that it is you that has the problem and therefore only you have a reason to do anything about it.  You will be pleasantly surprised by how much more effectively you deal with situations caused by “difficult people”.

Hail to the Chiefs

There has been a growing trend in both the private and public sectors to enhance the titles of their top management with the words “Chief” and “Officer”.  We have had Chief Executives for some time of course but then the word “Officer” was added so now we have Chief Executive Officers or “CEO’s”.  This was followed by Finance Directors becoming Chief Financial Officers (CFO’s) and good old “Operations Directors” becoming Chief Operations Officers (COO’s).  I haven’t actually seen an example of an HR Director becoming a “Chief People Officer” but I bet somewhere we already have a “Chief Talent Officer”.

I read in the business news this week that Alex Baldock the new boss at Dixons Carphone has created a new role in the business of “Chief Customer Officer” (CCO).  Fair enough the perception of Dixons Carphone’s customer service is so dire that he needs to do something but I have my doubts that appointing a CCO will make much difference unless much more changes.

My “Deep Thort” on this is that the words “Chief” and “Officer” are symptomatic of and reinforce a top down management culture where the people with these titles are positioned at the top.  When it comes to looking after its customers these people at the top TELL the people at the bottom what customers want and how they want it.  The people at the bottom then TELL the customers what they can have and how they are allowed to have it.

In an "upside down" culture the people serving the customers are at the top.  They LISTEN to the customers and continuously advise the people below (their management) what is needed.  The people below LISTEN to their staff, supply resources and help remove problems and obstacles to meeting customer needs.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out which culture you need to support improvements in customer service.  I don’t see any signs of the necessary change happening at Dixons Carphone from the announcements so far from their new “CEO”.  So the bloke I feel sorry for is Antreas Athanassopoulos – he’s just been given the CCO job!

Winner takes it all - or do they?

This is not about the release of two new songs from ABBA after nearly 40 years.  Rather it is about “winning” and strangely it was Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal that caused me to start thinking about “winning”.

“When I make promises, I keep them” he trumpeted (see what I did there) when he made his announcement on the Iran deal.  Now, previous Mrs Trumps might disagree with that, however for Trump himself doing what he said he would do means he has “won”.

Trump likes winning and certainly believes he is a winner as the numerous books he has written/had written for him will testify.  Titles like “Think like a Champion” and “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business Life” are not for the faint hearted.  When it comes to dealing with any kind of conflict with his own views his style is right at the “confrontational” end of the scale.  Whilst this was OK for the rest of us when confined to his business dealings (as long as we weren’t involved) it is causing a lot of concern now he is President of the USA.

There are some useful insights into this from the work of Kenneth Thomas, a leading expert on motivation at work and related matters, one of which is “conflict resolution”.  He identified five conflict resolution approaches and that using the approach that was most suited for the particular situation would produce the best result for all involved.  However in practice most people habitually use a limited number of approaches (usually just one) so it is not surprising that success in resolving conflicts is so often hard work.  A simpler derivative of Thomas’s five approaches which many of us may be more familiar with are:

Win/Lose – Lose/Win – Lose/Lose – Win/Win

Clearly Trump favours Win/Lose.  But the funny thing is that this confrontational approach is often actually what is needed to get other parties to recognise that there is a problem and it is a problem for them so maybe we had better start the argument.  This is what Trump has done with Iran and with North Korea.  With Iran we will have to see what happens next but with North Korea, so far at any rate, a remarkable turnaround has apparently been achieved.  It is still early days but just maybe Kim Jong-Un has worked out that he can now go for win/win, even if it means giving up his nukes, because then he can go down in history as the man who brought peace to the Korean Peninsula.  This would do more to cement his regime in power for the foreseeable future than any sabre rattling of the kind he has indulged in so far.

So my “deep thought” is does Trump actually know what he is doing and can he be flexible in matching his approach to the developing situation?  If he does and he can then we just may be in for some pleasant surprises.  If he doesn’t and therefore won’t then – oh dear!  The tragic events on the Israeli Palestinian border on the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem are the direct result of an approach based solely on win/lose.

https://www.z-to-a.com/

http://www.changeworld.co.uk/

http://www.teamofequals.co.uk/

Mission Impossible

What do electric car manufacturers Tesla, fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and the Home Office have in common?  They have all attempted or are attempting to deliver a big change of a type, size and scale that is much greater than anything they have attempted before.

Tesla are trying to achieve ambitious production levels for its first mass production vehicle, the Model 3 sedan.  Last week for the second time this year they had to shut down production completely to sort out problems and they are still way off hitting the targets.

In February KFC switched its UK delivery contract from Bidvest to DHL, even though DHL had no experience of handling food service delivery.  This was expected to deliver big savings.  However within a few weeks KFC had to close half its outlets due to shortage of supply and switch the supply contract back to Bidvest.  Even now it is still unable to offer its full menu in more than 20% of its outlets.

The Home Office has a long track record of failure and incompetence on immigration, the latest of which is the Windrush scandal that was revealed last week.  In spite of this the Home Office is being charged with developing “from scratch” the UK’s post Brexit system for managing immigration from the EU.

Now I am all for setting ambitious targets and going for challenging goals.  This is how breakthroughs and real progress are achieved and we need those people who push us to do more than we thought possible.  However before we charge off waving flags and blowing trumpets perhaps we should pause for a “deep thort” and ask ourselves this question.

“Have we ever actually done anything like this before, on this scale, in this time frame and do we and our partners have experience and expertise we really need to succeed”?

Only by making an honest assessment of where we are starting from can we work out what we will need to succeed.  Even then we won’t have all the answers and we will make mistakes so we need to be ready to manage these and learn from them.  In big change if something can go wrong, it almost certainly will.  Balance enthusiasm and ambition with hard headed pragmatism and robust process.

https://www.z-to-a.com/

http://www.teamofequals.co.uk/

http://www.changeworld.co.uk/

The Apprenticeship Levy - another "New Coke"

In 1985 the Coca Cola Company reformulated its 100 year old recipe for Coke and launched it as “New Coke”.  Consumers did not like it and not only didn’t buy it but they mounted vociferous and very public campaigns to bring back the original Coke”.  Sales plummeted whilst the adverse PR became a raging and uncontrollable forest fire.  After 77 days Coca Cola recognised they had got it horribly wrong and reintroduced the original Coke.  “We learned that the consumer, not the company, owned Coca Cola and our other brands” said the Chief Exec.

In April 2017 the UK government introduced the Apprenticeship Levy with a target of 3m starting apprenticeships by 2020.  In the first quarter after its introduction the number of people signing up for vocational training dropped by 60% year on year.  Figures due out shortly are expected to show a further plunge of almost a third for the three months to February.  Of 19,150 companies paying into the levy only 11,900 have registered to claim it back.  The levy has been criticised for being too complex and inflexible for companies to engage with it, so they are not.

So my latest “Deep Thort” is:

After a lot more than 77 days should the government have now recognised that perhaps “it’s the employers and apprentices that OWN the apprenticeship system, not the government”?  Not according to Anne Milton apprenticeships and skills minister.  “Our reforms have fundamentally changed what apprenticeships are and the long-term opportunities they can provide.  The apprenticeship levy is a really important part of our changes to raise the quality of apprenticeships in this country”.  Oh dear, she has clearly never heard of “New Coke”. 

http://www.z-to-a.com/

http://www.teamofequals.co.uk/

http://www.changeworld.co.uk/

Team working and the EU

Amongst the wide variety of work we have carried out over the last 17 years helping clients learn how to work effectively in teams is an area where we have a great deal of experience.  One of the key lessons that both we and our clients have learnt is that when it comes to effective team working "size matters".

We have found that the number of people in an effective team is from 2 to no more than 8.  Once numbers get above this team effectiveness starts to diminish.  Now 8 seems quite a small number so how can we justify our assertion?  Well we have discovered that there are 7 fundamental dimensions to how people can work together that constrain what is or is not possible.  These are:

1.  Group Dynamics - Human beings are social animals, we naturally tend to do things with other people, but  not always very effectively or consistently; one major variable is how many of us are in the acting group.  Experience and observation tell us that wherever there are more than 8 people in an acting group, everything can all become much less easy and harmonious.
2.  Behaviour Management - 8 people or fewer have the potential capability to manage their own behaviour together (which does not mean that they will), a larger number cannot.
3.  Agenda - It is very difficult for more than 8 people to share and take ownership of a single agenda.
4.  Motivation - Once again more than 8 people are unlikely to find and sustain a mutual motivation together; more than 8 have to be manipulated or controlled in some way.
5.  Direction - 8 people working together can maintain direction towards the outcome they all want to achieve.  With more than 8 this gets progressively more difficult.
6.  Method - Sticking to an effective process requires self-motivation, self-discipline, open communication and a tight focus on shared objectives.  All of this is possible for small groups but gets much more difficult for larger groups.
7.  Language - The ability to think clearly can be distorted by the use of language.  Because personal communication is the safest way to prevent this happening small groups are more likely to develop and use an effective language together than large groups.

I hope this has given you something to think about with regards to your own team working.  But what has this got to do with the European Union?  Well, when originally formed there were 6 member countries.  This increased to 9 when the UK, Ireland and Denmark joined.  Today there 28 member countries!

Can this ever actually work?  A "deep thort" I leave you to ponder on.