But I never heard the builders!

Space is not necessarily about solitude, as I said before. Constantine P. Cavafy, a poet who died in 1933, wrote a little poem called Walls. This is how it goes:

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind, because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

Many people in our organisations reach late age surrounded by walls (their own career pathways, the single track pursuit of success, the 365/24/7 busy-ness as leader), only to realise that there are walls when it is too late. Those people will shout, “But I never heard the builders! I was doing my emails on my Blackberry and there was nothing in Outlook about any walls of any kind. Did I miss a meeting about walls? What’s happened to me? Julia! (calling his last PA) Julia!” Julia can’t answer. She is not deaf but those walls are so thick!

►Those who hear the builders

People who leave an organisation do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is sometimes the feeling that ‘the walls’ are getting thicker and taller. They realise at some point that their personal or professional development requires that they push themselves outside those walls. In some cases, it means the next job, next context. In many cases, it means to start a business on their own. In the last decades, there has been an explosion of people ‘going solo’, ‘liberating themselves’ from corporate life, ‘becoming their own boss’, etc. This has been particularly noticeable in the US. There is a healthy, entrepreneurial, adventurous side of this that fits very well in the traditional ‘American dream’, in whatever version there is these days. But there is also a sad side for ‘the company’.

And I will discuss that a bit more in my next post.

Sitting quietly alone

The French philosopher Pascal said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. It is a valid statement today. Modern life, organisational life, business life is not terribly conducive to letting ourselves be with ourselves ‘in a room alone’. But the need to find that ‘lost space’ is greater than ever.

All this stuff about psychological spaces and protection of time will also sound incredible stupid to the always-on executive, the one who never switches off. As Michèle’s husband says, this kind of leader and the company’s server are a continuum via a wireless umbilical cord recently called, amongst other names, Blackberry.

As leader, or leader-to-be, or leader in development…. you should look into all these issues seriously. Some people take a view that it is simply logistics, a question of good time management. Other people however tend to think that there is a more fundamental problem behind the pervasive and ubiquitous busy-ness of executive life.

There is little question that concepts of reality are different depending on what view you take. And - as I said in the introduction of my book Leader with Seven Faces and repeat in my Leadership seminars - the answers to these questions are personal. Unfortunately, the consequences of the answers are not.

As a leader who builds organisations (ideas projects, common purpose around a vision), how you choose to answer matters. And not only to you but to everybody else depending on you. Not a minor burden.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

‘Social space’

Mothers are very often trapped in a vicious circle of child-feeding, nappy-changing and sleepless nights (My general practitioner says to them, “YOU will understand why sleep deprivation is barred under the Geneva Convention”). They are a good example of always-doing-not-much-time-for-being. Sometimes this period of their life becomes a-social (!) with baby-talk occupying much of daily airtime. Their need for ‘space’ is often translated not into need for sleep, isolation and tranquillity as you would have expected, although those are, of course, also very welcome! But into the opposite: opportunity to talk to other adults, socialise and recover a sense of connection with the world!

Also, people mistake this issue of protecting time and space with the famous ‘work-life balance’. It is often assumed by people that a work-intensive environment with not much flexibility for those protections must surely be compensated by a non-work one full of ‘space’ and ‘time’. (Watch the language! We call ‘life’ the other side of ‘work’ in the work-life balance, which says a lot about our concept of work.) But being trapped in an environment with perhaps reasonable ‘place’ but no ‘space’ and ‘no’ time is not exclusive to work. Family life with its commitments and challenges (and not only for mothers!) may equally be one of non-space, and the same principles apply. So, let’s not get this wrong. Space is not necessarily about solitude!

I make no apologies for my insistence on the protection-of time-and-space despite the fact that, statistically, only some privileged managers, executives, leaders, employers or employees have access to mechanisms such as the ones that create or protect them. Many people are trapped in jobs and levels of freedom and autonomy where their flexibility to seek a protection of space is limited. If they read this, they would think that you and I - lucky fellows who could still craft some spaces of freedom - are…well, just lucky! But everyone at every level should – and can - work at protecting whatever little time and space they can!

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

Leadership is creating spaces

As you may remember, in a previous post I said that the ultimate responsibility of the modern business leader was to protect time and to create ‘spaces’.

As a leader, the protection of time is intimately related to the creation of ‘space’ and possibly ‘place’. Space and Place are not the same. Space is mainly psychological. It gives people the ability to make the most of their ‘being’ by stop ‘doing’. People can work in a big place, like a big office, and have absolutely no space. All space and time may have been swallowed by Outlook, for example! Other people may work in not-very-big places and still enjoy (psychological) space.

As leader, a possible trap to avoid is to declare universal ways to create those spaces, the equivalent of telling somebody, “It is Thursday afternoon, have your space, think!” What leaders need to do is to be sensitive to our diversity and allow or create opportunities for a somehow tailored approach. However, ‘generic measures’ may work as a symbolic behaviour. Statistically, they may also reduce the amount of ‘trapped time and space’ for people. Some of them may look terribly simple such as a rule that says, “Do not reply to any email unless you are the main recipient”. That would exclude all replies in ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ situations. Some organisations have tried ‘no meetings on Friday’ for example or ‘email server down’ for fixed dedicated hours. People may have a bit of laugh about these but sometimes this is the only way to instil new behaviours.

If you live a corporate life – corporate of a certain size, that is - you may have experienced the nuisance of ‘the server is down’ at some point. It starts as a small irritation because it is implicit that it will be solved soon by the IT department. The irritation grows enormously when this is not the case. Three hours later you are told that, in reality, you have a serious problem and it may take far longer than expected. Suddenly, people around you start looking relaxed!

There is a strong case for breakdown-time-by-design! The contagious beneficial effect of these otherwise simplistic micro-management measures is that people realise that, contrary to expectations, the corporation doesn’t go under, the sky doesn’t fall, projects continue and one was not as indispensable as one may have thought. General De Gaulle was quoted to say that cemeteries are full of indispensable people! Significantly, email traffic does not increase or bounce back after the blackout period, and the number of meetings on Monday to Thursday does not increase either.

How each of us interprets, feels and ‘uses’ space is perhaps different and can’t be imposed or dictated. You and I know people who seem to have ‘no space’, their constant ‘doing’ occupies their life. We also know other people who seem to manage to ‘protect themselves’ from the corrosion of non-stop-doing. When in my leadership seminars I ask people to reflect upon their own mechanisms and ‘label them’, they come up with long and in many cases amusing lists. Here is an example:

* Just-give-me-Space
* Inner space
* Space-Space
* Time-space
* Think-space
* Break space
* Parenthesis-Space
* Outside Course-Space
* Gone-Fishing-Space
* Beer-Space
* Awareness-Space
* How-are-you-Space
* Don’t-push-me-Space
* Embrace-silence-Space
* Doing-nothing-Space

People describe their ‘concepts of space’ in multiple ways. In some cases it means to physically transplant oneself to a ‘place’ where psychological space can be felt and experienced. One executive described his ‘gone-fishing-space’, meaning, don’t try, you’ll not find me, that’s it… Actually, he had never been fishing in his life but stole the concept from a movie where somebody stuck a sign outside the shop window. He liked the idea so much that he has used the ‘gone fishing’ since. Beyond the light idea and language that he used, what he portrayed was a genuine sense of a need to protect his individuality and ‘disappear’.

Another executive who described her ‘how-are-you-space’, told us (the group attending the seminar) that her daily business life did not have a moment for, what she described as, “a normal conversation with a normal person.” (Obviously she must have had a particular view of the normality of her business colleagues!). For her, the protection of her space, her individuality and her being meant almost the opposite of ‘gone-fishing’. In fact, her space creation and protection was about engaging herself with other (normal!) people in conversations that she qualified as ‘real life’. And that had to be done outside the office!

Which brings me to ‘social space’, which I will touch upon in my next post.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

New Leaders now even easier to find

In the current business environment, success requires different skills, different mental models and different approaches to reality. So why do organizations still recruit people with the same skills they needed in the past?

Leandro Herrero’s book New Leaders Wanted explores the new skills and new approaches to reality. It maps the 12 kinds of people that can literally make or break a company's success and will guide you in your search to find those people. New Leaders Wanted will help you create the conditions for extraordinary success in your organization.

The book has been available in paperback from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, meetingminds and many other (online) retailers since July 2007.

It is now joined by the brand-new Adobe e-book version which is available from the following online retailers:

Powells - Diesel ebooks – Ebooks About Everything

You can read more about the book here.

Leadership and the End of Time

A consequence of the ‘no time’ ethos is the ‘fast ethos’. There is no time, so you have to run fast, be agile, be first, etc. Society, and therefore business, is working on a ‘time-space compression’. The American driven fast-food industry has known it for a long time. As it has been expressed, they have “taught us to eat standing, walking, running and driving and above all never to finish a meal, all in favour of the endless snack”. Eating has been reduced to “a purely instrumental, no-nonsense utilitarian activity which exemplifies a ‘re-fuelling ethos’, rather than an intrinsic source of pleasure to be anticipated”. No wonder the ‘Slow Food movement’ became a truly international one!

The ‘fast ethos’ goes hand in hand with the ‘ephemeral ethos’ that takes for granted that things will not last. It is a common feature in fast-cycle businesses where products become obsolete quickly, but it has also been extrapolated to the ethos of the entire new, 21^st century enterprise. We all have friends somewhere who have started their own company with the idea of selling it as soon as possible. Most of the ones I know, do not intend to stay with their own baby for long.

Venture capitalists and investors have long incorporated the ‘exit’ aspect as central to the deal. How to exit is as important as how to enter, and it is part of written business plans. I know of somebody who could not give me the name of his new company but had already thought out the ‘exit’. He is a young guy for whom this is the normal way to set up business. He did not know of any other, and looked at me puzzled at my suggestion of creating something that could last ‘forever’.

The end of time
A quick Amazon.com search will tell you that there are 800+ book titles which start with ‘The end of’. Affluence, man, distance, work, politics, nature, sanity, the future, ideology, capitalism are some of them. From those, there are more than twenty recent ones entitled The end of Time. This lot includes slow-digestion physics books sharing shelf space with more dubious ‘time management books’, which are an industry of its own. It’s funny to see what lives on the same shelf!

This ‘End of Everything’ may just reflect the fact that things have changed at an unprecedented pace, producing quantum discontinuity. In this accelerated time, fast is good, slow is suicidal. The fanciest business magazine is called Fast Company. Business Week, referring to the new start-up companies, announced a few years ago that it takes on average 10 days from idea to business plan and launch. It used to be months. Today, perhaps it’s an afternoon. Venture capitalists tell us that “whilst it used to be that the big eat the small, now the fast eats the slow”. ‘Speed’ is considered the new revered capability, a crossroads for new corporate competencies that include ‘surprise’.

This connection of no-time/ephemeral organisation/run fast in the meantime has profound implications on the reflection of your leadership style. Perhaps you have never stopped and reflected upon this (Ooops! I see, you can’t stop, you don’t have time, hm!).

Here are two different views on speed:

1. John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc.:

"Companies that are successful will have cultures that thrive on change, even though change makes most people very uncomfortable. In the end, you might just have speed, talent and branding. Those things may be the only differentiators”

Note speed first in the list!

2. Now meet Andy Grove, ex-CEO of Intel:

“This business about speed has its limits. Brains don’t speed up. The exchange of ideas does not really speed up, only the overhead that slowed down the exchange. When it comes down to the bulk of knowledge work, the 21st century works the same as the 20th century. You can reach people around the clock, but they won’t think any better or any faster just because you've reached them faster. The give and take remains a limiting factor.”

What I find interesting about those quotations from public statements is that they come from two leader executives of hi-tech industries, certainly involved in … making information flow faster, to say the least. They represent two legitimate views of the (business) world. What ‘side’ leaders take, matters because, as architects, the houses they build will be a reflection of their concepts of time and speed.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

The ‘always on’ leader

You’re probably wondering why I find it so important to protect time. Well, time is an endangered species in the business world.

Meet Michèle. Born in France, she is a successful senior executive in an American company and has been living in the UK for the last five years. She is married to an Englishman, has no children, one big dog and a large country house close enough to Heathrow airport. She is first-and-last in the car park each day (first to arrive, last to leave) like a punctuality check for the security staff – “if this is Michèle, it must be 7 o’clock”. Because of the time difference with the USA, when she gets home, Michèle connects to her email system via the company-paid home broadband.

Evening glass of wine in hand, she often picks up the phone to talk to an American colleague if she sees something on screen that needs immediate attention. When travelling, she uses, of course, her Blackberry and laptop so flow of email is more or less ‘all the time/always on’. She uses all possible wi-fi spots in airport lounges or wireless internet in hotel rooms. She checks her voicemail system several times a day. Michèle has staff reporting to her in Germany and France and a boss in San Francisco. The latter likes to call her at ‘any time’. Michèle’s mobile is never switched off – it is not the number of calls from her boss (not many, to be fair) but the necessary feeling of ‘just in case’.

Michèle is a case of a 365/24/7 connected employee. She is an always-on executive. Her husband, an IT manager, told her once that she was in reality an ‘extension of the network’. Michèle’s contract says something about 38 hours a week but she is in fact working for her company ‘all the time’. She is part of a tribe of global managers with an unofficial, unwritten 365-days-a-year commitment who are ‘permanently on call’. Whether in the middle of cooking fettuccini or in the bath, Michèle is ‘never disconnected’. Her favourite verbal stereotype is “I have no time.” She usually means she is in a hurry but, in reality, the statement is actually a pure representation of her reality. She literally has NO time. She does not possess it anymore. She is part of an era described by Jacob Needleman, professor of Philosophy at San Francisco University, as ‘the time famine’. Michèle has given up her most valuable asset. Her last.

► 21^st Century Presenteeism

We all know one Michèle or two. Perhaps she is you? Forget all that stuff about work/life balance. The Michèles of this world have an all-in-one package. Corporations have reinvented ‘presenteeism’ (the old insistence that you must be at your desk, every day, clock-checked, etc.) in the form of a ‘365/24/7 on call, online, wireless, Blackberry, real-time manager’. In fact, for many senior managers, there is no longer the expectation of a nine-to-five physical presence at the office and the ‘rules’ have been ‘relaxed’(!)or replaced with occasional or, indeed, pre-agreed working-from-home days. Nine–to-five is no longer a good sign of commitment. 24h-open-shop is. What is largely perceived as liberation is nothing more than a sophisticated form of dependence. Place has been traded off for time. The company office or module has been traded off for a mobile telephone, a Blackberry and a fast internet access line at home.

Far be it from me to draw a picture here of malicious corporations with Machiavellian plans for a slave workforce, a subtle form of 24h control of people’s lives, written down by the Board in a secret black book. If there is any guilt at all, it is three-fold: employers, employees and the nature of the Information Era.

In the current knowledge economy, it is difficult to escape the multi-task, multi-assignment, any-place, any-time job. Technology allows us to be ‘anywhere’. Emails have brought an ‘end-of-distance’ to our desks. They bring to you instant data, and ask you for an instant answer from your instant knowledge pool (whilst you are probably drinking instant coffee). It is real-time business, a ‘24 hour society’. To be a successful manager progressing towards a bigger corporate destiny has become incompatible with a nine-to-five job or, indeed, a Monday to Friday one.

Airports on Sunday afternoons are full of executives ready to fly for a Monday morning meeting somewhere far away. Michèle does that. An additional problem is that she had not realised that fact until a colleague asked her recently to spend a few minutes on her own calendar. Michèle’s perception was: “Leaving on a Sunday evening? I do it occasionally.” In reality, for the previous six months, she had hardly had a full weekend at home. ‘Insight’ went out of the window in the company of ‘time’.

There is a real danger for organisations today to allow or promote the progressive evolution towards an entire always-on managerial and leadership class. Time-less leaders will be no good to anybody, corporations or families. When there is no time to think, there is no time for being. Time-less leaders are doing all the time, they have no time for being. If it sounds a bit New Age, so be it! Intelligent corporations, large or small, deserve intelligent leaders.

Intelligent leaders will have to encourage the protection of employees’ time as opposed to the absorption and further commoditisation of their last remaining asset. The more they act to protect a sort of endangered species, the more they will benefit from people with a functional brain who are actually capable of using their minds, as opposed to logarithmically multiplying the email traffic and skilfully contribute to the internal information pollution of the company. There is still time. Isn’t there?

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

Protecting time

For my first post in the New Year, I'd like to pick up the thread I started in my previous post.

I already touched on the time aspect in another of my posts and I'm going to continue with this post on protecting time.

I am not calling it ‘creating time’ because time is already there, we just need to ‘see it’ and protect it from all the usual physical and psychological invasions. Physically protecting time may look like a ‘close the door’ or ‘don’t come in’ behaviour, if you can do it! Psychologically, it means to carve out your own ‘space’ to be able to – and here the terminology is very personal - reflect, think, ponder etc. Those who ‘can’t’ because the simple constraint of pre-scheduled-time-to-think-and-reflect would block them from thinking and reflecting on anything, are the very same people who need protected time (and, incidentally, have back-to-back meetings in Outlook until 2023), and who have to learn to create those spaces. Period. Part of leadership development is to be able to become architects of those spaces, for oneself and the organisation they work for.

For many, the initial confrontation with ‘free time’ may look scary above all! But there is no other trick. Practice! In a recent seminar that I ran, I met somebody who disclosed to us that he organises ‘fake projects’ in his Outlook calendar and project-manages them accordingly. This is the only way to ensure that his time is not cannibalised by the thousand and one ways of time being used and commoditised in the organisation!

Managed by my calendar
Life in many organisations today looks like devolution of responsibility to Mr Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is in charge. (Apologies to the three or four other sole users of alternative systems!) It is the real boss. We may kid ourselves by thinking that it is a tool but, in reality, we report to it, which automatically makes Bill Gates our boss. Scary thought. ‘Managing my calendar’ has become a management term, de facto making the calendar and you one single entity. I am me and my Outlook.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer a joke that people ‘can’t find gaps in their calendar’ for many months in advance. Whatever you think of busy business life, it tells us a lot about the kind of organisations that we are developing, perhaps the one you are working for. I believe that time is man’s last asset. If this is true, and you have been booked until five p.m. on Wednesday 23 May 2016, you, my friend, have no assets left whatsoever and are mentally bankrupt.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization. You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.