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.

Anyone who wants to be prime minister should have a course of therapy first

Our toxic political system rewards all the wrong traits and produces the worst possible leaders writes George Monbiot in The Guardian 

 

‘Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments.’ John Bercow (centre) mediates during a Commons debate on the EU withdrawal bill. Photograph: Mark Duffy/AFP/Getty Images


Who in their right mind would want the job? It is almost certain to end, as Theresa May found, in failure and public execration. To seek to be prime minister today suggests either reckless confidence or an insatiable hunger for power. Perhaps we need a reverse catch-22 in British politics: anyone crazy enough to apply for this post should be disqualified from running.

A few years ago, the psychologist Michelle Roya Rad listed the characteristics of good leadership. Among them were fairness and objectivity; a desire to serve society rather than just yourself; a lack of interest in fame and attention; and resistance to the temptation to hide the truth or make impossible promises. Conversely, a paper in the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy has listed the characteristics of leaders with psychopathic, narcissistic or Machiavellian personalities. These include: a tendency to manipulate others; a preparedness to lie and deceive to achieve your ends; a lack of remorse and sensitivity; and a desire for admiration, attention, prestige and status. Which of these lists, do you think, best describes the people vying to lead the Conservative party?

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits. Sigmund Freud claimed that “groups take on the personality of the leader”. I think it would be more accurate to say that the private tragedies of powerful people become the public tragedies of those they dominate. For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain. What we appear to see in national politics around the world is a playing out in public of deep private distress.

This could be a particularly potent force in British politics. The psychotherapist Nick Duffell has written of “wounded leaders”, who were separated from their families in early childhood when they were sent to boarding school. They develop a “survival personality”, learning to cut off their feelings and project a false self, characterised by a public display of competence and self-reliance. Beneath this persona is a profound insecurity, which might generate an insatiable need for power, prestige and attention. The result is a system that “consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are”.

The problem is not confined to these shores. Donald Trump occupies the most powerful seat on Earth, yet still he appears to seethe with envy and resentment. “If President Obama made the deals that I have made,” he claimed this week, “the corrupt media would be hailing them as incredible … With me, despite our record-setting economy and all that I have done, no credit!” No amount of wealth or power seems able to satisfy his need for affirmation and assurance.


Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it

I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn’t change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others. I’ve had two courses: one influenced by Freud and Donald Winnicott, the other by Paul Gilbert’s compassion-focused approach. I found them both immensely helpful. I believe almost everyone would benefit from such treatment.

The underlying problem is the system through which such people jostle. Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments. Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that the group of psychopathic traits known as “fearless dominance” is associated with behaviours that are widely valued in leaders, such as making bold decisions and bestriding the world stage. If so, we surely value the wrong characteristics. If success within the system requires psychopathic traits, there is something wrong with the system.

In designing an effective politics, it could be useful to work backwards: to decide what kind of people we would like to see representing us, then create a system that would bring them to the fore. I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?

It would not be a purely representative democracy. This works on the principle of presumed consent: “You elected me three years ago, therefore you are presumed to have consented to the policy I’m about to implement, whether or not I mentioned it at the time.” It rewards the “strong, decisive” leaders who so often lead their nations to catastrophe. A system that tempers representative democracy with participative democracy – citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, the co-creation of public policy – is more likely to reward responsive and considerate politicians. Proportional representation, which prevents governments with minority support from dominating the nation, is another potential safeguard – though no guarantee.

In rethinking politics, let us develop systems that encourage kindness, empathy and emotional intelligence. Let us ditch systems that encourage people to hide their pain by dominating others.

‘Wealth creators’ are robbing our most productive people

George Monbiot in The Guardian

There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most useful workers tend to be paid least and treated worst.

I was reminded of this while listening last week to a care worker describing her job. Carole’s company gives her a rota of, er, three half-hour visits an hour. It takes no account of the time required to travel between jobs, and doesn’t pay her for it either, which means she makes less than the minimum wage. During the few minutes she spends with a client, she may have to get them out of bed, help them on the toilet, wash them, dress them, make breakfast and give them their medicines. If she ever gets a break, she told the BBC radio programme You and Yours, she spends it with her clients. For some, she is the only person they see all day.

Is there more difficult or worthwhile employment? Yet she is paid in criticism and insults as well as pennies. She is shouted at by family members for being late and not spending enough time with each client, then upbraided by the company because of the complaints it receives. Her profession is assailed in the media as the problems created by the corporate model are blamed on the workers. “I love going to people; I love helping them, but the constant criticism is depressing,” she says. “It’s like always being in the wrong.”

Her experience is unexceptional. A report by the Resolution Foundation reveals that two-thirds of frontline care workers receive less than the living wage. Ten percent, like Carole, are illegally paid less than the minimum wage. This abuse is not confined to the UK: in the US, 27% of care workers who make home visits are paid less than the legal minimum.

Let’s imagine the lives of those who own or run the company. We have to imagine it because, for good reasons, neither the care worker’s real name nor the company she works for were revealed. The more costs and corners they cut, the more profitable their business will be. In other words, the less they care, the better they will do. The perfect chief executive, from the point of view of shareholders, is a fully fledged sociopath.

Such people will soon become very rich. They will be praised by the government as wealth creators. If they donate enough money to party funds, they have a high chance of becoming peers of the realm. Gushing profiles in the press will commend their entrepreneurial chutzpah and flair.

They’ll acquire a wide investment portfolio, perhaps including a few properties, so that – even if they cease to do anything resembling work – they can continue living off the labour of people such as Carole as she struggles to pay extortionate rents. Their descendants, perhaps for many generations, need never take a job of the kind she does.

Care workers function as a human loom, shuttling from one home to another, stitching the social fabric back together while many of their employers and shareholders, and government ministers, slash blindly at the cloth, downsizing, outsourcing and deregulating in the cause of profit.
It doesn’t matter how many times the myth of meritocracy is debunked. It keeps re-emerging, as you can see in the current election campaign. How else, after all, can the government justify stupendous inequality?

One of the most painful lessons a young adult learns is that the wrong traits are rewarded. We celebrate originality and courage, but those who rise to the top are often conformists and sycophants. We are taught that cheats never prosper, yet the country is run by spivs. A study testing British senior managers and chief executives found that on certain indicators of psychopathy their scores exceeded those of patients diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders in the Broadmoor special hospital.

If you possess the one indispensable skill – battering and blustering your way to the top – incompetence in other areas is no impediment. The former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina features prominently on lists of the worst US bosses: quite an achievement when you consider the competition. She fired 30,000 workers in the name of efficiency yet oversaw a halving of the company’s stock price. Morale and communication became so bad that she was booed at company meetings. She was forced out, with a $42m severance package. Where is she now? About to launch her campaign as presidential candidate for the Republican party, where, apparently, she is considered a serious contender. It’s the Mitt Romney story all over again.

At university I watched in horror as the grand plans of my ambitious friends dissolved. It took them about a minute, on walking into the corporate recruitment fair, to see that the careers they had pictured – working for Oxfam, becoming a photographer, defending the living world – paid about one fiftieth of what they might earn in the City. They all swore they would leave to follow their dreams after two or three years of making money; none did. They soon adjusted their morality to their circumstances. One, a firebrand who wanted to nationalise the banks and overthrow capitalism, plunged first into banking, then into politics. Claire Perry now sits on the frontbench of the Conservative party. Flinch once, at the beginning of your career, and they will have you for life. The world is wrecked by clever young people making apparently sensible choices.

The inverse relationship doesn’t always hold. There are plenty of useless, badly paid jobs, and a few useful, well-paid jobs. But surgeons and film directors are greatly outnumbered by corporate lawyers, lobbyists, advertisers, management consultants, financiers and parasitic bosses consuming the utility their workers provide. As the pay gap widens – chief executives in the UK took 60 times as much as the average worker in the 1990s and 180 times as much today – the uselessness ratio is going through the roof I propose a name for this phenomenon: klepto-remuneration.

There is no end to this theft except robust government intervention: a redistribution of wages through maximum ratios and enhanced taxation. But this won’t happen until we challenge the infrastructure of justification, built so carefully by politicians and the press. Our lives are damaged not by the undeserving poor but by the undeserving rich.

The world is run by sociopaths – but we still demand honesty at the till

The worldview of Which? has a moral clarity that is missing from nearly every other sphere of life these days

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Sunday 16 November 2014 16.29 GMT

‘Somehow we’ve retained this elemental demand for fairness. “Buyer beware” doesn’t cut it: the seller also has a responsibility not to con people.’ Photograph: Larry Lilac / Alamy

As supermarket giants puzzle over their profit warnings and the nation readies itself to spend a household average of 800 quid it doesn’t have, here’s a quick rundown of festive scams. I don’t mean drunk people in reindeer horns pretending to have lost their wallet and asking for two pounds; that’s next month.

No, I mean the ways we are ripped off in shops. I quite like an old-fashioned swindle, it gives me a sense of continuity: the person who designed the chocolate finger packet so it contains more air than finger is descended on a direct moral line from the grocer of olden days who used to hide a clog in a bag of flour. It is reassuringly simple: most of gangster capitalism is only barely understood by the people perpetrating it, and makes the victim feel foolish, not only for having been the mark in the first place but also for the sudden spotlight on their ignorance. I personally would like to see someone go to prison every time one of us is required to learn a new acronym: if we’d instituted that after the Libor scandal, would there ever have been a Forex?

Clearly, retailers couldn’t stay competitive if they didn’t keep up with the modern world of the corporate predator. Not every consumer shakedown is a period piece: the great cheese swindle, in which wholesale prices have gone down while supermarkets – apparently by wild coincidence, and certainly not because anybody thinks they’re operating as a cartel – put their prices up, has a lot in common with today’s energy market. What we need is some kind of regulatory body to monitor the undulations of milk protein. We could call it Ofcheese. I will happily take charge of that, when the time comes.

But back to the shops, where a new Which? survey suggests there are three broad categories of swindle: making you buy a thing because you think it’s better quality than it is; because you think it’s better value than it is; or because you think it’s healthier than it is. The tricks are so craven, it’s a little embarrassing to name them. The own brand might be designed to be indistinguishable from the branded version. Goodfella’s pizzas print calorie counts based on a person eating only one quarter of a pizza, which nobody has ever done since pizzas were invented. Biscuits loaded with sugar are called “light” because they have reduced their proportion of fat (what with the scandal of the air-Fingers on one hand, and McVitie’s “lite” digestives on the other, I think we could also make a case for the creation of Ofbiscuit). Fruit juices that are mainly apple are adorned with two strawberries and called “strawberry smoothie”. This has solved two mysteries that have plagued me throughout my child-rearing years: how can anyone afford to produce 300ml of pure strawberry juice? (Because that’s not what it is.) And what is the point of the word “smoothie”? (Unlike “juice”, there is no widely understood definition of the word, separate from the product. So you don’t have to name it after what it’s actually made of; you can name it after something it reminds you of.)

Department stores hunt bigger game, packaging things as “gift sets” in order to stick an unwarranted 20% on their prices. We’ve known that for years. And they engage in affective propaganda, trying to manipulate your gift-giving mindset to include people like cousins. You can snort at this, confident you will never be so sheep-like as to buy a pepper grinder for someone whose name you have been known to get wrong. But consider: do you do Halloween? There is no such thing as the successful refusnik of marketing strategies, only variations of late adopter.

What I really love about Which? surveys – indeed, the existence of Which? as an institution – is the sense of moral clarity. There is very broad-based agreement, across the political spectrum, that people selling things ought to be open and honest about what they’re selling. There is total consensus in the shopping universe that markets are social spaces, and like any other social space will only function if people treat others as they themselves would want to be treated. This certainty has gone missing from conversations elsewhere: a banking scandal always comes garnished with people arguing that the financial sector is so wedged with talent that it should be unleashed from moral codes, the better to dazzle us with its heady ambitions. Business is increasingly presented as a quixotic, ungovernable process, upon which we all rely so heavily, and to which we should render such gratitude, that it is not for us to question it. Inevitably, this comes with the expectation that the successful entrepreneur or innovator will be sociopathic – indeed, that that’s what marks him or her out as so special: the ability to separate themselves from the muddled matters of trust and sympathy that beset the world of the non-entrepreneur. And yet, somehow, we’ve retained this elemental demand for fairness at the till. “Buyer beware” doesn’t cut it: the seller also has a responsibility not to con people. Granted, it’s not a responsibility they take very seriously, least of all at Christmas, but it’s heartening that we’re still bothering to articulate it.

Incidentally, the way to prevent overspending in supermarkets and department stores is to wear headphones piping extremely loud, motivational music; it doesn’t have to be anti-consumerist in content, just bouncy, the kind of thing joggers listen to. It does more than speed up your progress around the shop, it taps into a part of your psyche that doesn’t need unnecessary stuff because it already feels great. Complaining about shops and their moral deficiencies is necessary but insufficient. I would like to see shops treated a bit more like shoplifters – prosecuted for dishonesty even when it seems petty – and shoplifters treated a bit more like shops.

For now I just need an iPod, and my red-blooded resistance will commence.

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.