The bosses who silently nudge out workers

 By Alex Christian in BBC.com

Employers are often reluctant to fire employees for myriad reasons. But quietly side-lining them in the hope that they’ll quit often leads to even greater harm.

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When marketing manager Eliza returned from holiday, she received an email from her boss asking her to arrive at work early the next day. “I instantly feared the worst,” she explains. “I knew the job wasn’t the best fit. I’d had my probation previously extended; there was an expectation of weekend working and post-work drinking that didn’t suit me. I thought he’d used my time off as an opportunity to fire me.”

However, when Eliza arrived at her boss’s office, she wasn’t immediately let go. Instead, she was informed of a company restructure – her job description was being completely rewritten. Someone else would take over her tasks, and she would be expected to work remotely in a new admin role. 

In the weeks that followed, Eliza’s professional life became much quieter. Instead of formulating the London-based events agency’s marketing strategy from the office or attending live shows as part of her remit, her main duties now consisted of simply being available between 0900 and 1800, sending the occasional email and completing the odd routine task from home. 

Eliza had effectively been frozen out by her employer. Barely a month later, she quit. “It was humiliating – I was made to feel worthless,” she says. “It was the worst experience of my career: I’d rather have been just fired on the spot and paid off than have to go through that.”

There may not always be a good fit between jobs and the workers hired to do them. In these cases, companies and bosses may decide they want the worker to depart. Some may go through formal channels to show employees the door, but others may do what Eliza’s boss did – behave in such a way that the employee chooses to walk away. Methods may vary; bosses may marginalise workers, make their lives difficult or even set them up to fail. This can take place over weeks, but also months and years. Either way, the objective is the same: to show the worker they don’t have a future with the company and encourage them to leave. 

In overt cases, this is known as ‘constructive dismissal’: when an employee is forced to leave because the employer created a hostile work environment. The more subtle phenomenon of nudging employees slowly but surely out of the door has recently been dubbed ‘quiet firing’ (the apparent flipside to ‘quiet quitting’, where employees do their job, but no more). Rather than lay off workers, employers choose to be indirect and avoid conflict. But in doing so, they often unintentionally create even greater harm.

The path of least resistance

For myriad reasons, bosses have long tried to nudge workers they perceive as underperforming or being a bad cultural fit out the door. “This has been happening in workplaces for decades,” says Christopher Kayes, professor of management at the George Washington University School of Business, based in Washington, DC.

The tactic means firms and managers can end up saddled with workers they don’t want, leading to managers engaging in behaviours often seen as passive-aggressive

The reasons for this are complex. If workers behave in ways that violate their contracts, for example, companies can terminate their employment. But if bosses simply dislike workers, or see them as middling or mediocre performers, taking action to remove them is more complicated, often requiring lengthy processes involving performance management programmes and multiple warnings.

“Companies are usually reluctant to let a worker go,” says Kayes. Firing leads to an “immediate sense of sides being created” which, at worst, can land the company in court if the worker contests it, potentially generating negative headlines about the working environment. “It’s often easier to simply let the underperforming employee stay in the job than to go through the process of firing and potential litigation.”

Employers often don’t want to expose themselves to risk or conflict, adds Suzanne Horne, partner in employment law at legal firm Paul Hastings, based in London. “Subtly encouraging someone to leave is seen as the easier option. If the employee eventually resigns, it’s the ‘no-fault approach’: severance doesn’t need to be paid, conflict is avoided and both parties are ultimately happy.”

Managing perceived poor performance, working with the employee to improve their output and turning them into a useful resource for the company would be an alternative way to deal with the problem. However, Kayes says bosses are often ill-equipped to do this, whether through a lack of time or training. “Organisations tend to be bad at preparing leaders to take on the responsibilities they’ll need in the job. So, they often find themselves without the resources they need to be effective and deal with employee underperformance.” 

In this situation, with firing seen as a last resort and managers unable – or unwilling – to turn the employee into what they want them to be, they often follow the path of least resistance: quiet firing. “Much of it is ultimately an avoidance behaviour and comes down to procrastination: managers in most cases are wanting to avoid having difficult conversations,” points out Kayes. “Ironically, they worry that firing a worker will reflect poorly on them, so they quietly fire them instead.”

To push out workers, managers may sometimes set up workers to fail with impossible tasks, or take away their jobs altogether (Credit: Getty Images)

Why it often backfires 

By engaging in quiet-firing behaviours, managers are likely to be playing the long game. In theory, it’s low risk and minimal effort; the hope is that by withdrawing support, the worker soon realises they don’t have a future at the company and moves elsewhere.

However, this approach can have collateral damage. The tactic means firms and managers can end up saddled with workers they don’t want, leading to managers engaging in behaviours often seen as passive-aggressive, says Kayes. “You stop offering the employee opportunities to advance; you stop inviting them to certain meetings; you stop providing them important work and feedback.” 

There is also the risk of creating an ‘us and them’ mentality, potentially harming workers not targeted for quiet firing. “You have the engaged employees, and then those just quietly left there, sometimes without their knowledge,” says Horne. “It doesn’t create an inclusive or high-performance workplace culture.” 

Quiet firing can affect a firm’s reputation, too, even if a worker departs without apparent conflict; employees may well share their experience in an online review. “There’s a greater awareness of employment rights today,” says Horne. “People are now more willing to call out workplace issues, especially following the pandemic.” 

An employee subtly nudged out the door isn't without legal recourse, either. “If you were to look at each individual aspect of quiet firing, there’s likely nothing serious enough to prove an employer breach of contract,” says Horne. “However, there’s the last-straw doctrine: one final act by the employer which, when added together with past behaviours, can be asserted as constructive dismissal by the employee.”

More immediate though, is the mental-health cost to the worker deemed to be expendable by the employer – but who is never directly informed. “The psychological toll of quiet firing creates a sense of rejection and of being an outcast from their work group. That can have a huge negative impact on a person’s wellbeing,” says Kayes. 

Eliza agrees. “I was made to feel worthless and useless being quietly fired,” she says. Now happily employed elsewhere, she’s realised that her experience “was a reflection of having a terrible boss, rather than me”. But other people who experience quiet firing over the longer term, in more insidious ways, may not see things so clearly.

I was made to feel worthless and useless being quietly fired – Eliza

“Over time, an employee may figure out something isn’t right if their one-to-one meetings are always cancelled, their manager never makes time to talk about development and performance or they’re always overlooked for promotion,” says Horne. “They face a daily drip feed of their employer trying to make them resign – it’s absolutely gruelling.” 

'A self-fulfilling prophecy'

Quiet firing may be the easiest option on the table for bosses – especially in a remote-work world, where excluding employees is even easier – but it’s not a good solution for firms or workers.

“Employers can end up damaging their business’s morale, productivity and culture while risking litigation proceedings anyway,” says Horne. “For employees, there’s a mental-health impact of feeling excluded, frustrated or angry. They can lose their confidence and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: their performance declines even further.” 

Fixing it requires better-resourced managers, greater HR support and the acceptance that workplace confrontation is sometimes best. However, the time and cost needed to educate managers on how to better motivate employees and deal with difficult situations means that, realistically, quiet firing may be here to stay. “Training is expensive,” says Kayes. “It takes huge investment and requires leaders to be open to it; an acceptance that they need to ask themselves hard questions.

Human psychology plays its part, too. Ultimately, quiet firing is the avoidance of difficult emotions. “There can be the implication that the manager is being nasty or manipulative when they quietly fire an employee, but there is a person on either side of the table,” says Horne. “And people generally like to avoid hard conversations.” 

Eliza is using one name for career-security reasons

The stark truth about management and power

 Stefan Stern in The FT

 

“If you want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.” 

This quotation is usually attributed to Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University’s graduate school of business. Pfeffer himself is more modest about its origins. He cites it at the beginning of his new book — more on this later — but describes it simply as “a quote attributed to me”. 

This slightly sheepish opening sums up an intriguing paradox about the man. He tells stark truths about management and power and what it takes to get to the top, which some may find unsettling. But, fundamentally, his purpose is compassionate. The challenge embedded in his famous aphorism is this: it is little use criticising the excesses of terrible leaders but then being too squeamish to engage with and win power yourself. 

When I call Pfeffer at his Californian home he sounds a bit distracted, for reasons that become noisily apparent. “I need to move my car,” he says. “My garage is about to be . . . I’m having some construction work done . . . I’ll be back in a minute.” 

He is true to his word, and proceeds to offer a tutorial on the realities of power, revealing why his course on the subject at Stanford, where he has taught for more than 40 years, is so popular with students. 

“Exercising power and being a leader is not about winning a popularity contest,” he says. “It was Gary Loveman [former chief executive of the Caesars casino business] who said: ‘If you want to be liked, get a dog. A dog will love you unconditionally.’ 

“A lot of leaders are not necessarily nice people,” he adds. “Many of the things that leaders have to do are not necessarily nice . . . There is very little overlap — I mean, almost none — between companies on the ‘best places to work’ list and companies led by leaders who are on the ‘most admired leaders’ list,” Pfeffer says. 

His new book, published this summer, is called 7 Rules of Power: Surprising — but True — Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. His seven rules are: 

Get out of your own way — that is, speak with confidence and do not undersell yourself. 

Break the rules — do the unexpected. 

Show up in powerful fashion — with conscious body language and actual language. 

Create a powerful brand. 

Network relentlessly. 

Use your power — do not be afraid to wield power once you have it. 

And, finally, remember that “success excuses (almost) everything” — the powerful attract and retain support. 

These rules are not simply plausible-sounding assertions but are in fact based on deep research and decades of social science experiment and observation. These are “the realities on the ground”, as Pfeffer says. 

While clearly not a fan of former US president Donald Trump, Pfeffer notes that he was a skilful follower of these rules. “He was seven for seven,” he says. He describes the winning Trumpian mentality in these terms: “You tell me what I need to do to win, and I’ll do it. I will say anything, I will do anything. The question is: are you willing to do what it takes?” 

This may sound Hobbesian and bleak. But note, too, that Pfeffer’s last book was called Dying for a Paycheck, and was a strong attack on the worst forms of modern management and the harm it can do both to employee health and company performance. An earlier book was called “The Human Equation: building profits by putting people first”. There is a touching passage in the book’s acknowledgements about the author’s late wife, Kathleen, who died last year and to whom the book is dedicated. 

Our call is once again interrupted by an off-stage crash. “Pardon the background noise — they must be doing something serious here — they should be, for what I’m paying them . . . ” 

In this latest work, Pfeffer writes: “One reason why people fail to achieve their objectives or lose out in competitions for high-status positions is their unwillingness to do what is required to prevail.” 

This is his reality check for aspiring leaders and those who want to get on in the organisation. You have to take responsibility and put yourself in a position where professional advance is possible and likely. “Happy talk”, or “leadership BS” (the title of another of his books), will not get you there. 

“I don’t think anybody is going to say that Elon Musk is sweet,” Pfeffer says, “or that Jeff Bezos is sweet, or Steve Jobs was nice, or Jack Welch was going to be picked by anybody to be stranded on a desert island with. Many leaders are narcissists,” he adds, “although their ‘autobiographies’ say that they are lovely human beings . . . ” 

Pfeffer looks power in the eye and does not flinch. He tells it like it is. Can we handle the truth? If we want power to be used for good, more good people need to have power.

Lay-offs are the worst of the bleak options facing recession-hit companies

Some groups are becoming more creative, offering short-time working rather than redundancies observes Andrew Hill in the FT

From the videotapes to the workplace hugs, much of Broadcast News, the 1987 satire on media, looks old-fashioned. But when I watched the film again recently, as an escape from pandemic-provoked gloom, the scene where the network announces a round of redundancies seemed raw and relevant. 

“If there’s anything I can do,” says the network director, relieved at how a veteran newsman has accepted the news of his forced early retirement. “Well, I certainly hope you die soon,” responds the departing colleague. 

Similar scenes are playing out at companies around the world. Marks and Spencer, the retailer, Melrose, which owns venerable manufacturer GKN, New York-based Macy’s department store, and European aircraft-maker Airbus have all announced potential cuts in recent weeks. Manufacturing trade group Make UK has warned of a “jobs bloodbath”. Newsrooms have been particularly hard hit. 

One added twist is that some of today’s lay-off conversations with unlucky staff will take place by video link rather than in person — easier for nervous managers, but crueller for the people they are laying off. 

Another, more positive, development is that companies are becoming more creative as they brace for recession, turning to short-time working rather than lay-offs. As governments remove subsidies, what was a simple decision to hold staff in reserve, rather than fire them, will become more complicated. But avoiding permanent cuts makes sense, according to David Cote, former chief executive of Honeywell. The sheer cost of severance — in time, money and administrative hassle — mounts up. Often you have to hire the staff back to meet demand as the economy recovers. 

“If someone told you that it would take you six months to build a factory, six months to recover your investment, you’ll get a return for six months, and then you’ll shut it down, you’d never go for it because it would be ridiculous,” he writes in his new book Winning Now, Winning Later. “Yet somehow leaders think it makes sense to do the same with people.” 

Honeywell’s reliance on furlough — combined with its commitment to customers, sustained long-term investment, and attention to supplier relations — helped it bounce back.  

Research also backs up the hunch on which Mr Cote acted 12 years ago. A 2011 OECD review of 19 countries’ experience of short-time working confirmed such schemes preserved permanent workers’ jobs beyond recession. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta applaud US companies such as Tesla and Marriott for using furlough to soften the blow of this crisis. Such schemes let companies “maintain connections with their employees, cut costs while still providing employee benefits, and create a path to a seamless recovery”. 

Yet defending the decision in 2008 was one of the toughest points of Mr Cote’s tenure as Honeywell’s boss. 

Management, employees and investors were not “trained” to accept short-time working as a solution, he told me. Laws differed from country to country, and even state to state. In regions where furlough was put to a vote, support varied in line with the enthusiasm of managers for the measure. Elsewhere, while workers backed short-time working publicly, as Honeywell pushed through successive rounds of furlough, Mr Cote received private notes from staff urging him to “lay off 10 per cent of our people and have done with it”. As one FT reader commented when we asked recently about individuals’ experience of furlough: “Loneliness, anxiety, depression and guilt are hourly occurrences.” 

“All recessions are different,” Mr Cote says, “but they all feel miserable.” He remains convinced, though, that irreversible job cuts would have undermined Honeywell’s ability to respond to an economic upturn, ultimately harming staff, investors and customers.  

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has declared that “this is not a normal recession”. Mr Cote suggests, rather, that 80 per cent of the actions companies take to respond to recession are common across downturns, whether triggered by oil crises, inflation, terror attacks or mortgage mis-selling. To managers, he offers this advice: don’t panic; think independently; keep investing for the long term; communicate; and “whatever you do, let people know you’re sacrificing too”. 

Some things, though, don’t change. “This is a brutal lay-off,” remarks Jack Nicholson’s smug anchorman, visiting the newsroom in Broadcast News, supposedly in solidarity with his colleagues. “You can make it a little less brutal by knocking a million dollars or so off your salary,” says his boss, before rapidly backtracking in the face of the trademark Nicholson glare. 

The ‘Yes sir!’ society

THERE are two lessons from the tragic PIA crash in Karachi, and if we don’t learn from them, the almost 100 victims would have died in vain writes Irfan Husain in The Dawn.

Firstly — and more easily fixable — is the business about pilots flying on fake licences. There is nothing to suggest that the captain of the ill-fated PIA flight was one of them, but his mishandling of the aircraft is an indicator of the culture of incompetence that rules our skies.

When an Airblue plane crashed a few miles from Islamabad a decade ago, killing all on board, the inquiry report shone a laser on the relationship between the captain and his first officer. Although the latter informed the captain that their approach was too low, and they should pull up, he was ignored because to have agreed would have indicated that his junior knew more than the captain did.

Then there was the near-tragedy at Islamabad airport some 30 years ago when the PIA Jumbo scraped home on its belly. Initially, the pilot was praised for executing a masterful belly landing, saving many lives. It then emerged that he had switched off the sensor that warns pilots they were too close to land without lowering the undercarriage.

I’m sure there are many other examples of why PIA is considered such a dangerous airline to fly on. The powerful pilots union (Palpa) prevents any meaningful punishment for blatantly dangerous manoeuvres.

But fake licences should not surprise us: remember the recent Axact scandal where millions of dollars were coined by the Karachi-based firm selling fake degrees around the world? After a flurry of arrests and court cases, the whole affair seems to have been forgotten.

Perhaps even a dysfunctional country like Pakistan can fix the problem of fake licences. But if this happens, it’ll be due more to foreign pressure and our image abroad than any concern for the lives of Pakistani passengers.

However, it is the second problem that is far more pervasive and deeply entrenched. As the Airblue report highlighted, the rigid hierarchy, even on a three-man flight deck, was such that the first officer could not do more to convince his captain of his dangerous approach than utter emollient words like ‘Sir, are too low’. The captain was apparently too full of his authority to agree, and insisted on maintaining his course: any change would have implied that his junior officer knew more than he did.

Now multiply this attitude across our entire society. When the boss is convinced he (seldom she) knows best, you will never get the optimum outcome. Take Kargil as an example of poor planning resulting from this rigid hierarchical approach.

When Musharraf cursorily ran the broad outline of his madcap adventure past Nawaz Sharif, there were few of the obvious questions that should have been asked. The kitchen cabinet reportedly saw the prime minister’s mild approval, and kept quiet. Musharraf’s team, for their part, only spoke out against the enterprise after they had retired. They, too, were prisoners of the ‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’ syndrome. To this day, the report of the debacle has not been released, even as an internal case study, as far as I know.

But it’s not just the military that operates on this principle. When I was president of a private university, I used to call weekly meetings of the teaching staff. At these sessions, I put forth my ideas for changes, and asked my colleagues to give counter-arguments. Although these were educated, intelligent people, they almost always stayed quiet, or agreed with me.

And when I monitored classes from the back of the room, I noticed that students hardly ever asked questions. Although I hated interfering, I would almost urge them to query or criticise. Again, silence. So clearly, the senior/junior hierarchy was at work. This is why we produce so few inquiring, curious minds.

Sucking up to the boss for promotions is a global malady, but mostly, it ends at the end of work. Here, we live with it each moment of our lives.

Our brainwashing begins earlier than the classroom. Boys are deemed too inexperienced to choose their careers, so their fathers decide. Girls aren’t practical enough to choose their husbands, so their parents use force, if necessary, to select a ‘suitable’ spouse. I know things are changing for the younger generation in a certain class. But for the majority, these major decisions are still made by parents.

Much of Asia is prisoner to this paternalistic approach, and is the poorer for it. Individuality is crushed, and bad decision-making is just one result. When people end up in the wrong career, or a disastrous, abusive marriage, relations between parents and their children can be ruined for life.

I am informed by a friend that Japan Airlines trains its pilots to overcome their childhood conditioning, and stand their ground. But how do we transfer this to our entire society?

No Kings in the workplace

23 Signs You're about to be Fired

Aine Caine in The Independent


Getting fired can be a real shock to the system.

But there are usually signs that your termination is pending. You've just got to know where to look.

Maybe your boss is out to get you. Maybe you've been embroiled in some recent controversy at work. Or maybe your organization is undergoing a massive transition or merger.

Either way, it helps to be prepared.

Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," tells Business Insider that the savviest professionals always keep an eye out for the classic signs that their job is in danger. This way, if and when they notice red flags popping up, they can attempt to turn the tides before it's too late.

Here are 23 signs you may be getting the boot:

You receive a bad performance review (or two, or three)

A negative evaluation is not always synonymous with being fired, but, in conjunction with other bad feedback, it can mean trouble, says Taylor. "Your employer needs to create a paper trail, so along with warnings, your employer will use a performance review to document the problem areas."

More than one poor performance review in a row is an especially bad sign, adds Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "The Humor Advantage."

"Depending on how bad your first performance review was, you may be given a chance to make corrections and improve, but a series of critical performance reviews could be a major sign that your job is in jeopardy," Kerr tells Business Insider.

If it's because of a lack of experience or lack of training in a certain area, then there's always a chance to fix it. But critical phrases to be mindful of during performance reviews include, "You're not a good fit for our culture," "You're not a team player," "Your personality or style doesn't seem to mesh with the team," or "You have a major attitude problem."

"If you hear any of these types of criticisms then it's time to break out your résumé, since it's often assumed that attitudinal issues are deeply engrained and unfixable," he says.

You're left out of the loop

If it's suddenly hard to access important data that would help you perform well in your job, or you're not invited to important meetings or included on key emails, a pink slip may be coming your way, says Taylor.

"There could be other reasons for this happening, but certainly one may be that your leadership has lost the trust or confidence in your abilities, making you vulnerable when and if layoffs happen," Kerr says. 

Your job has become mission impossible

"When you first assumed the role, you had your marching orders and could accomplish them. Now it seems that you're tasked with projects akin to climbing Mount Everest blindfolded," says Taylor.

"You're being set up to fail," Kerr explains. "Sometimes this is due to lousy leadership, but occasionally it can be because a company wants to get rid of you, but they need solid evidence to do so, and setting you up for disaster is one way of getting the 'proof' you longer belong there."
Your boss has 'warned' you (more than once)

Formal warnings are never a good thing. "You may have received a verbal warning, a written warning, and maybe even a second written warning," says Taylor. If you have, know that more bad news may be coming your way.

Your relationship with your boss has deteriorated

You used to be friends (or friendly, at least) -- but now there's tension whenever you're in the same room. "Once your relationship has deteriorated to the point of being toxic, then how your boss treats you -- from ignoring you to publicly berating you -- can be obvious signs that your job might be in peril," says Kerr.

You're asked to provide detailed reports about time or expenses

"Increased scrutiny is a phenomenon that is rarely initiated by the accounting department," Robert Dilenschneider, author of "50 Plus!: Critical Career Decisions for the Rest of Your Life," tells Business Insider. "The boss believes that you have wasted time or inflated expenses. Even if you are 100% innocent, it doesn't matter. Find out if you are the only person being scrutinized."
Fewer projects are coming your way

Here's a bad sign: You suddenly have a lot of time on your hands because not a lot of work is being assigned to you. "As you try to secure normal work, it seems it's hard to get cooperation from your boss and other managers," Taylor says. "They're suddenly making your work life difficult."
Teamwork isn't your strong suit

It's important to fit into the company's culture. That means taking one for the team sometimes, as HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann tells Reader's Digest: "If we ask you to travel for your job or attend a conference, it's not really a question. Say no, and it can be career-ending."

You've lost resources

When you lose staff, budgets, and access to certain outside services and/or office space -- or any number of tools that would enhance your performance -- it could be because your employer is trying to push you out. 

Your boss is on your case all the time

Are you constantly being asked for progress reports? Do you find that your boss constantly monitors your work?

If so, you may want to start looking for a new job, says Dilenschneider.

You're being micromanaged or ignored

It seems that you're working in extremes. Either your boss is watching your every step, or they're nowhere to be found. "Either way, it makes for a highly uncomfortable environment," Taylor explains. "If they're watching over you, you feel a lack of trust. If they're ignoring you, then you are in a seemingly endless state of inertia on your project status."

You have fewer responsibilities

Do you feel less important? Have your subordinates been transferred to other managers? Have projects been reassigned to your colleagues? If so, you could be getting the boot sometime soon.
Your perks start to evaporate

"Your colleagues are all sent to a conference in Marrakesh, but you aren't invited. You are told to fly coach after years of flying business class. Suddenly, you lose your corner office and are relocated to the bullpen," says Dilenschneider. "Perks are an important part of the job, and if you sense yours are being eroded, you have every right to worry."
You're no longer praised for your work

Even if you performed a miracle never before witnessed by a mortal being, it seems your boss wouldn't acknowledge it now. "To do so would run contrary to the campaign underway to remove you from the company," explains Taylor.

You've received a pay cut or been asked to take time off

If you've been asked to take a leave of absence, you probably have something to worry about. "This is a major sign that things aren't well, even if it's under the guise of being what's 'best for you,'" says Kerr. "It's the equivalent of a dating couple 'taking a break for a while' -- and we all know how that usually ends."

You notice more gossip and strange behavior from your coworkers

When people seem to shy away from you, and you notice it most from people with whom you shared a friendship, it probably means something's up. "Oftentimes when coworkers hear rumors about someone being fired or even reprimanded, they stay away to avoid 'guilt by association,'" Taylor says.

You report to new or more people

Suddenly you're reporting to more junior people or more managers in a matrix environment. "There's more red tape and bureaucracy whereas before you could get your work done in a streamlined way," Taylor says. This isn't a great sign.

You've made a major mistake that causes your company external embarrassment or a lot of money

"Depending on the context and how your leadership team treats failures and setbacks, especially in the realm of experimenting with innovative ideas, then you might be allowed to file a major mistake under the heading 'learning experience,'" Kerr says. "But for some, this will mean an early exit out the door."

Your boss goes directly to your subordinates

This sign is similar to "being left out of the loop" -- but even worse. "Most organizations have a chain of command, and when it is disrupted, it is a clear indication that you are no longer needed," says Dilenschneider.

Your access to certain data is limited

When a company is preparing to let someone go, they sometimes limit or revoke the employee's access to certain accounts a bit prematurely.

Beware if your email password no longer works or you've been locked out of your company's intranet, says Taylor.

You're no longer asked for input on key decisions

Not being asked for input means your boss no longer values or cares about what you have to say, Kerr warns. "Freezing you out of the loop is often the first sign of a slow slide out the door."
There was a recent merger, but little information

After a merger, it's not uncommon for a company to make layoffs -- sometimes even massive layoffs, Kerr says.

"If you're feeling that your job was at risk already, then a merger could put the nail on the proverbial coffin," adds Taylor.

Your instincts are telling you something's wrong

"If you feel you've done everything you can, but still have that 'I might get fired' feeling, you're probably right, and it's likely time to move on," Andy Bailey of business coaching service Petra Coach tells Business Insider. "You may be an 'A' player, but it might have to be somewhere else. Begin seeking out other positions that better reflect your personality and work ethic."

Ketti Salemme of TINYPulse, an employee survey product, also tells Business Insider that it's important not to disregard your own instincts.

"Sometimes the sign can be nothing more than a gut feeling," Salemme says. "Whether it be a shift in the company culture, your job duties, or your relationship with colleagues, this can be indicative enough that you may soon be let go."

London School of Economics - Shame on you

Owen Jones in The Guardian

It is a university that prides itself on being a forum for debate about social injustice and inequality. The London School of Economics was founded by Fabian socialists at the end of the 19th century: they believed education was key to liberating society from social ills.

Last week I was due to attend a debate at the LSE on the expansion of secondary moderns (which is what selection in education really means). At the request of cleaners on strike over their terms and conditions, I withdrew at the last minute. And here is the perverse truth: well-paid speakers will turn up at this prestigious institution to debate the great injustices of modern Britain. Then in come the cleaners – all from migrant or minority backgrounds – to clear up, victims of some of the very injustices that have just been debated.

Like most universities, LSE outsourced its cleaners years ago. It’s cheaper, you see, because the cleaners can then be employed with worse terms and conditions than in-house staff. In this way a university with a multimillion-pound budget can deviously save money on those who clean the libraries, the lecture halls, the offices.

An in-house LSE worker has up to 41 days’ paid leave, six months’ fully paid sick pay, and good maternity pay and pension rights. Cleaners, on the other hand, have the statutory minimum. If they fall ill, they are paid nothing for the first three days, then just £17.87 a day. For a cleaner paid £9.75 an hour – living in one of the world’s most expensive cities – that’s simply not an option. “They can’t afford to be sick,” says Petros Elia, general secretary of the United Voices of the World (UVW) union. Cleaners turn up ill to work instead.

No wonder they describe themselves as “second-class”, “third-class”, or “no-class” workers. The response of LSE’s management is a sobering indictment of industrial relations in a society in which the employers have the whip hand. Cleaners and their supporters have been threatened with arrests and injunctions. “LSE’s mottos is ‘to know the causes of things’,” says Michael Etheridge, the Unison branch secretary, “and yet on the issue of outsourcing it has, as an institution, been wholly ignorant.”

That these cleaners have stood up for themselves – in the face of such hostility – is courageous, and an inspiring precedent for other workers in low-paid, insecure Britain. They’ve come from a variety of different countries; some have only worked at LSE for a few months. But they have organised, and thrown themselves into a determined struggle that now has the university authorities on the run.

Rattled, the LSE has been forced to offer concessions: beginning with 10 days’ full sick pay, then 15, then 20. But UVW and Unison – which represents some of the other cleaners – are clear. This is not a strike simply about improved conditions: it is about being treated the same as other workers. Only parity will do. Unison has been offered a package of improvements, including sick pay of up to 65 days and four weeks of additional maternity pay, and a pledge to work “to reach full parity … in the near future”. But continued pressure on LSE to accept the cleaners’ demands is clearly necessary.

It is a saga that tells many stories about modern Britain. It’s about how, disproportionately, some of the lowest paid and most insecure work is done by migrants and minorities. It’s about a race to the bottom in terms and conditions. It’s about how the law is rigged in favour of bosses. But it’s also about how – with determination and organisation – workers can indeed win.

Mildred Simpson was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain in 1989: she’s worked at the LSE for 16 years. A few years ago she was made a supervisor: back then, there were 25 supervisors, but the number has been slashed to 13. For no extra pay, she is expected to do the jobs of two people. This, for her, is a fight for equality. “We’re doing all the dirty work while they’re drinking their champagne and drinking their coffee,” she says. But she has a message to other workers too. “Fight as well as us as much as you can, for your rights, for pensions, for better working conditions, to be recognised.”

Britain’s universities grant their management lavish salaries: the Former LSE director Craig Calhoun was on a salary package of £381,000 a year and spent tens of thousands on overseas trips. It’s not just cleaners who are mistreated. Academia is becoming increasingly casualised and insecure. At Birmingham University, for instance, a shocking 70% of staff are on insecure contracts. Academics are overworked, struggling with bureaucracy, and often lacking the basic security of knowing how many hours they’re working each week.

Unions have been dramatically weakened in Britain. That has fed into a general sense that injustice is permanent, a fact of life like a weather system, rather than the consequence of human decisions. If there is no apparent collective means available to overcome injustice, then inevitably we become resigned. But if some marginalised, hitherto voiceless cleaners can put one of the world’s most prestigious universities on the backfoot, they set an example to others. This is a country that has endured the longest squeeze in wages for generations, while wealth at the top and in the boardroom has boomed; where our workforce is increasingly stripped of security and fundamental rights. That might be the current direction of travel, but it can be changed. And those cleaners at LSE show how.

Britain’s bosses fat and lazy? For once, Liam Fox has a point

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Liam Fox ranks among the chief fantasists behind Brexit, deplores gay marriage as “social engineering”, and thinks nothing of claiming 3p from taxpayers for a car journey of less than 100m. But even a snake-oil salesman sometimes speaks the truth and in criticising British business as “too lazy and too fat on our successes”, he has a point.

I know, I know. Why defend a Tory headbanger who otherwise thirsts for cuts to the NHS budget and the slashing of taxes upon the rich? Why entertain lectures from someone whose only attempt at job creation was the boondoggle he shamelessly awarded his former best man?

Yet when the international trade secretary says, “If you want to share in the prosperity of our country, you have a duty to contribute to the prosperity of our country”, I fail to muster up the outrage. I share neither Fox’s views on the causes nor his suggestions on the solution. But he is on to something.

For the past six years, the Tory party has barely paused from laying into British workers. From Iain Duncan Smith to George Osborne, senior ministers wrote off a sizeable chunk of this country as “skivers”. The screws were twisted so hard that jobseekers who decline zero-hours contracts are now penalised with benefit sanctions.

And the Tories did all this with the simpering connivance of Nick Clegg’s LibDems. If you think that era ended with David Cameron, remember that Theresa May’s cabinet boasts luminaries who wrote a report stating: “Too many people in Britain … prefer a lie-in to hard work. Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”

Ever since 2010, the Tories have tried to pin the blame for economic sluggishness on the shirking Brits. At the same time, their ministers have boasted, with all the regularity of a cuckoo clock, about how the number of British people in work is now at a record high. As a matter of logic, both things cannot be true. The British cannot be both workshy and working more than ever before. The Tories have been fibbing – and at last one of their number has come out and said as much.

The real problem in Britain isn’t its workers: it’s the bosses. By this, I’m not getting at the poor old line managers. I mean those right at the top of big business who have got away with paying themselves too much and investing too little in their workers, their businesses and their society.

Consider pay. While the average British worker is barely better off than in 2008, wages for those at the top of British business have just kept soaring. Researchers at the High Pay Centre recently went through the accounts of the FTSE 100 largest companies. They found that chief executives raked in an average of £5.5m in 2015, up 10% from the year before.

Bung in the lavish pension arrangements and generous bonuses and the average chief executive now earns the same as 129 of their employees. There is no justification for such a wide disparity: no one is as productive as 129 other people. We have gone beyond “Because I’m Worth It” to “Because I Said So” (and my mates on the remuneration committee backed me up). Even when shareholders revolt, as happened at BP over the £14m handed out to its chief executive despite huge losses, they are roundly ignored.

The TUC has just crunched the numbers on how much investment the private sector makes in this country. Of the 29 leading industrialised countries, the UK comes in at 27. Businesses in Estonia, the Czech Republic, Poland: all invest more in plants, equipment and the rest. The only countries that do worse are Greece and Iceland.

We have the same calamitous showing in spending on research and development. A few years ago, the Sheffield University physicist Prof Richard Jones went through the figures. He wrote: “In 1979 the UK was one of the most research-intensive economies in the world. Now, among advanced industrial economies, it is one of the least.” All of our competitors – the US, Japan, France and Germany – have maintained or increased their spending on research. South Korea and China are breathing down our necks. But the British capitalist class prefers the safe bets, the quick bucks – and the mega handouts to the senior executives and the shareholders.

Vice chairman of Stronger In campaign calls off Liam Fox after saying is Britain ‘fat and lazy’
Friday afternoons on the golf course? Fox may have watched one too many episodes of Terry and June. But what’s clear is that Britain’s bosses pay themselves far more than is justified either by comparison with their workers or on their performance. They have spent years relying on taxpayers to top up poverty pay and on the regulators to allow pensions holidays – just so they could hand out more money to shareholders.

They take what academic Kevin Farnsworth estimates at £93bn a year in corporate welfare – cash handouts and subsidies. But they react with horror to the notion of decent wages or chipping in for apprenticeships, rather than treating them as the normal overheads of doing business in a developed country. If that’s not fat and lazy, I don’t know what is.

Of course there are good and non-greedy bosses. But I have spent six years hearing the view that the British are lazy spongers with barely a demurral from most of the media or the political classes. It is high time to push the pendulum back a little.

Fox sees the answer to all this as more slash and burn: of taxes, of red tape, of public spending. That is delusional. Britain has spent 40 years making the burden on business easier, and the results have been to create a capitalist class so sluggish and short-term that it now threatens the continuation of capitalism.

Better, by far, to have a more honest capitalism: in which the responsibilities of business – on taxes, on pay and on investment – are laid out alongside their rights.

Sexual favours at work: A menace nobody talks about

Tanuj Khosla in the Times of India

The topic of sexual harassment at work has again come to fore in recent times thanks to Tarun Tejpal. Flick to any news channel, you are likely to come across a panel discussion on the same (only displaced by one on elections). Reams have been written on the subject and how the guilty gets away more often than not while the victim lives with trauma and stigma for years to come not to mention damage to her career.

However there is another workplace menace that never gets the same print space or even mind space for that matter – use of sexual favours to rise up the career ladder.

Before I proceed any further, let me clarify that this topic has nothing do with the incident at Tehelka. I am as disgusted by Tejpal as everybody else and I hope that he pays for his deeds.

With that ‘disclaimer’ out of the way, let us come back to this phenomenon that happens often but is seldom discussed.

Pick any industry, media, banking, education etc., all of them have their version of ‘casting couch’.

Unfortunately there are no laws against this as the relationship is ‘consensual’. No one talks about the trauma and frustration faced by deserving employees whose career growth is unfairly stalled because they chose to keep their pants on. They suffer dual humiliation from the boss and his ‘pet’ and are saddled with HR mumbo jumbo in the name of explanation for denial of promotion/opportunities. I am sure that most readers would know at least one person who has suffered this fate.

What compounds this problem is that the existence of these clandestine relationships can’t be proved and organizations are only too happy to look to other way as long as results are being delivered. Employees treated badly have little recourse and it is not uncommon for them to lose their drive and motivation.

However this weapon of ‘sleep your way to the top’ is not only used by women alone. There is no dearth of young men willing to be ‘toy boys’ in the hands of their female bosses. Even providing ‘spouses’ to bosses is something that is not completely unheard of, as sick as that is. 

The first move towards initiation can be made by either party. In some cases, a senior manager with a ‘roving eye’ is all the invitation an aspiring junior needs. Conversely in many organizations, top bosses choose management trainees to serve on their team based on how the level of flirtations and accidental ‘free-shows’ they received during the orientation program. In cases of lateral movement or inter-department transfers, necessary ‘feedback’ is taken from fellow partners in crime.

In conclusion, corporate world is far from fair and many idealistic individuals get a rude reality check once they enter it. While I don’t have any statistics to back my claim, I am certain that the menace of using sexual favours for career advancement is as if not more rampant as sexual harassment at workplace. Unfortunately for many, it doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.

------

Pritish Nandy in the Times of India

The tosh men speak when accused of sexual misconduct always makes for funny reading. The reason is simple: Most men think it’s their birthright to sexually prey on women. They are brought up to believe that’s what all men, if they are real men, do. It has been said in a million ways, in books, songs, popular movies and yes, repeatedly in advertising, the most persuasive foreplay of our times, that when a woman says No, what she actually means is Yes.  

Not only men say this. Women do too. That there’s no woman ever unwilling for sex; all they need is a little persuasion. Perhaps Mae West was just being her usual witty self. But men, I suspect, have largely taken the advice to heart. Different men ofcourse look at persuasion differently. So while someone may clobber a woman on the head with a baseball bat and drag her to his bedroom, another will drop a 4 carat solitaire in a champagne flute. It’s just a difference of technique, not intent.

There’s no real difference between the guy who sneaks flunitrazepam into his date’s Bloody Mary when she goes for a quick loo break and the one who clumsily gropes an unwilling woman in an empty lift in the hope it may lead to something more exciting. It rarely does. A grope remains a grope. A groper, just a groper. He never quite graduates beyond that. But the most tragic figure of all is the pigtailed Romeo in the corner office flaunting his authority all day long and then, when the sun drops, tries to lunge at his juniors. That’s not seduction. It’s crass power play.

If our flamboyant editor has done what he is accused of, his crime would list in the last and most despicable category. But my intent here is not to tar him. There are enough people around to do it. My concern is that at some stage an actual trial must begin. It must assess the evidence coherently and come to a just conclusion. Currently we are putting the cart before the horse. While the truth may look obvious, facts have a curious habit of flipping themselves. So till the case is heard and justice dispensed with, it may be a good idea to stop playing a lynching mob. 

Discussing and dissecting every salacious detail of the alleged crime also rarely helps the victim. She has been brave enough to come out and seek justice. Probity now demands she gets it quickly. Without the BJP or the Congress trying to muscle in.  

As for Tejpal, he has shot himself in the foot. His journalistic career, always overhung with too many unanswered questions about his ethics, is as good as over. So is his life, as he has known it till now. Charges of rape, even when unproved, are not easy to live with. They are neither forgiven nor forgotten easily and even in jail, such convicts are often welcomed with a sound thrashing and flick knives.

Much of this, I believe, could have been averted if Tejpal had simply apologized to the victim and offered himself for trial. His flamboyant letter, where he claimed to be lacerated by guilt and offered to recuse himself from office for six months was so offensive in its tone that it enraged even those who were ready to give him some room for doubt. The florid language and cheeky tenor of the letter set everyone off. Purple prose from a rape accused is the last thing one expects. But no, he didn’t stop at that. He kept bombarding the hapless victim with more such messages. Without the slightest hint of remorse.

Tejpal may think he’s Christian Gray. That’s what he tries to sound like as he seeks recourse to every ridiculous subterfuge to hide the simple truth from himself, that the girl just did not want him. His messages, laced with arsenic and delivered with the flamboyance of a local pizza boy denied his tip, killed the possibility of any sympathy that may have come his way. Slighted stalkers are known to do stupid things. But nothing can be stupider than his attempts at correspondence. They were not just inapt. They are inept.

The 88-year-old Narayan Dutt Tiwari, caught in an equally embarrassing situation, that too in the Raj Bhavan, got away by simply lowering his head and keeping his silence. No explanations. No purple prose. No stupid heroics. The man may not know when to zip his dhoti. But he sure knew when to zip his mouth. Tejpal could have taken a lesson from him.

The real cultists are CEOs

The real cultists are not Maoists, they're CEOs

It is not only in religious or political circumstances where people are made to follow a leader unthinkingly

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 30 November 2013 18.04 GMT

Fred Goodwin is portrayed as a tyrant in a new biography. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

The great leader's followers know he goes "absolutely mental" at the tiniest deviation from the party line. He screams his contempt for the offender in public so that all learn the price of heresy. Go beyond minor breaches of party discipline and raise serious doubts about the leader's "vision" of global domination and that's the end of you. "You're toast," he says, and his henchmen lead you away.

In private, his underlings mutter that the leader is a "sociopath" with "no capacity for compassion". Even though he terrifies them, their hatred of him is far from complete. When he relaxes, the great leader can be charming. His favour brings reward. The further you move up the hierarchy, the more blessings you receive, and the more you believe the leader's propagandists when they hail his "originality" and "rigour". History is vindicating the leader. His power is growing. The glorious day when the world recognises his greatness is coming.

I could be describing Stalin's Soviet Union or the "Church" of Scientology. With last week's allegations that Maoists in south London kept women as slaves, I could be going back into the lost world of Marxist-Leninism. The British Communist party demanded absolute intellectual conformity. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's Workers Revolutionary party and the Socialist Workers party wanted absolute submission, including sexual submission from women. The UK Independence party meanwhile is looking like a right-wing version of a Marxist sect. Nigel Farage's cult of the personality allows no other politician to compete with the supreme leader and no Ukip official to talk back to him.

As it is, the portrait of a tyrant comes from Iain Martin's biography of Fred Goodwin(one of the best books of the year, in my view). Like a communist general secretary or religious fanatic, he was enraged by the smallest breach with orthodoxy: not wearing the company tie; fitting a carpet in a Royal Bank of Scotland office that was not quite the right colour. The propagandists who praised his rigour and independence worked for Forbes magazine, the Pravda of corporate capitalism. Goodwin took RBS from being a sleepy Scottish bank to a global "player". So history did indeed seem to vindicate him – for a while.

With Britain hobbling in to 2014 like a battered beggar, we should accept that corporations can be as demented and dictatorial as any millenarian movement. People resist the comparison because businesses seem such modest enterprises. The godly persecuted heretics and apostates and the communists punished all dissent because they believed the kingdom of God or workers' paradise could be theirs if believers followed the one true course.

Businesses don't want Utopia. They just want to make money. Dennis Tourish, Britain's best academic authority on how hierarchies enforce obedience, has no problem with the comparison, however. His latest book, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership,puts the Militant Tendency alongside Enron, the mass "revolutionary suicide" by Jim Jones's followers at Jonestown with the mass liquidation of Britain's wealth by the banks. The ends of an L Ron Hubbard or Fred Goodwin may be incompatible, he says, but the means are same.

In any case, the language of business has become ever more cultish. In the theory of "transformational leadership", which dominates the business schools, the CEO is a miracle worker. In Transformational Leadership, by Bernard Bass and Ronald Riggio, he is described, not by some gullible Forbes hack, but by two supposedly intelligent American academics. The transformational leader "inspires" his follower to "achieve extraordinary outcomes", they say. He "empowers them" to "exceed expected performance" and show ever greater "commitment to the organisation".

I don't see why anyone should find the comparison with fanatics so hard to accept and not only because the idea that CEOs can manufacture new and better subordinates matches Trotsky's belief that the revolution would create a "new man who raises himself to a new plane".

The nearest you are likely to come to experiencing life in a dictatorship is at work. Unless you are fortunate, you will discover that the management is the source of all ideas and all power. Executives will have privileges that bear no more relation to real achievement than the fat and ugly cult leader's expectation of sex. In 2012, the median pay for CEOs in the USA was $14.4m, the average salary for employees $45,230. In Britain, the High Pay Commission found that the average annual bonus for FTSE 300 directors had increased by 187% in 10 years even though the average year-end share price had gone down by 71%.

Above all, whether you are in the public or the private sector, John Lewis or Barclays Bank, you will learn that if you challenge authority you will lose the chance of promotion and if you challenge it in public, you will lose your job. To prosper in the workplace, as in the dictatorship, you must tell leaders what they want to hear.

Since the richest executives on the planet brought the west down, there has been an understandable interest in the psychology of corporate power. One experiment stays in my mind. Researchers divided volunteers into groups of three and gave one the title of "evaluator". Half an hour later, they gave each group a plate of biscuits. The evaluators grabbed more cookies and sprayed crumbs as they ate with their mouths open. After just 30 minutes, the conviction that they were managers produced greed and the belief that normal rules did not apply to them.

I do not doubt that, if required, the courts will deliver justice to the alleged victims of the Brixton Maoists. Justice is harder to find elsewhere. It is not merely that the banking scandals have not led to one prosecution. With the honourable exception of the coalition's push to protect NHS whistleblowers, there has been no interest in making public and private hierarchies less cultish. The left is not saying loudly enough that we need worker directors on all boards as a non-negotiable minimum. The right does not admit that the old way of doing business failed.

In these dismal circumstances, you must look after yourself. If you work in an organisation where you cannot challenge your superiors without fear of the consequences, get out. Stay and you will become a paranoid flatterer. You will suffer all the psychological consequences of living a frightened life in a playground run by strutting bullies. Dennis Tourish's words should be your prompt: the corruption of power may be bad, but the corruption of powerlessness is worse.

Don’t think you have to shout loudest to find happiness in life

TERENCE BLACKER in The Independent

 

Monday 3 June 2013

The role models here are ruthless figures like Sir Alan Sugar or the sneering bosses on Dragon's Den. There is, boys and girls, another way - one that shuns the limelight

In pursuit of the great god Growth, the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has been urging a new spirit of thrust and entrepreneurial hunger upon girls and young women.

Following the publication of a report by the Women’s Business Council, which estimated that if a million more women become entrepreneurs, the nation’s productivity would increase by 10 per cent in 17 years, the Government is to take action. An advice pack for girls is to be sent to all primary schools.

“A vital part of future career success is the aspirations that girls have early in their lives,” Ms Miller has said, and that sounds sensible enough. Who, after all, would not want members of the next generation to live up to their potential?

If only it were not for the niggling suspicion that the Government has a particular and limited view of what constitutes aspiration. Career success is increasingly perceived in the way it is presented on television – as a matter of power, money and visibility. The aspirational models for schoolchildren are ruthless, kickass bosses like Alan Sugar or Mary Portas or the panel of smug, sneering bullies on Dragons’ Den.

There is, girls and boys, another way. Politicians and other public figures may find it hard to believe, but the greatest achievements are not necessarily those reflected by fame, visibility and power over the lives of others. Some people, women and men, not only derive more satisfaction working away from the limelight but often accomplish more than those who are centre stage.

I’ve been reminded recently of how much can be achieved by a subtle, indirect, collaborative kind of power when reading a newly published memoir, Fiz: and some Theatre Giants, by Eleanor Fazan, a director and choreographer who is something of a legendary figure in the theatre but is relatively – and contentedly – unknown in the wider world. Now in her eighties, “Fiz”, as she is known, has had an extraordinary career working at a high level with an impressive, varied list of brilliantly talented, often difficult men, from the music-hall star George Robey to Herbert von Karajan and including, among others, Lindsay Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Schlesinger , Barry Humphries and Laurence Olivier.

It was Fiz who, in 1961, directed Beyond the Fringe, turning a 55-minute student revue at the Edinburgh Fringe into a full-length show which triumphed in the West End and Broadway. I first met her when I was writing the biography of Willie Donaldson, who produced Beyond the Fringe, and discovered that she had written unpublished essays, now included in Fiz, about working with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, and a portrait of Willie himself.

What was striking about her insights into these complicated men was that they were utterly individual, and often at odds with the accepted view, but always perceptive and interesting.

The extraordinary career described in Eleanor Fazan’s book – a fascinating theatrical memoir in its own right, incidentally – has relevance to Maria Miller’s campaign to raise the aspirations of girls at primary school. Without headlines or shows of aggression and ego, Fiz has clearly contributed more to theatre, dance, opera and cinema than many of the show-boating stars who are now household names. “I have always been drawn towards those who needed to kick up, those who just couldn’t toe the party line,” she writes, and that strength and bloody-mindedness has served her as well as the stars with whom she has worked.

Not everyone finds professional fulfilment being a boss, and pretending that they do, or even that their role is less important than those who get the attention and publicity is misleading and unkind. There is certainly a case for getting primary school-children to aim high when thinking of their futures, but presenting success solely in terms of winning with sharp elbows and competitiveness, as if everyone should aim to be like the deluded, over-ambitious idiots on The Apprentice, is unhelpful.

Girls and boys could learn a more nuanced lesson in career fulfilment: that it is not necessarily those with the loudest voices and on the biggest salaries who achieve most, both for themselves and for the big world beyond.