SCRIPTS OF THE AUDIO RECORDINGS

 

Good Management

Part 1

 

INTERVIEWER: What would you say are the most... most important things a manager has to focus on? What makes for success in managing a business or organisation?

PY GERBEAU: Well, briefly I think the product has to be right. You need a brand that consumers will connect to your business. So that’s the first thing – the product – brand management. That has to be first.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

PY: The second thing is obviously people management. Because if you hire the right employees, if you hire the right management culture, management attitude, you’ve also got a winner.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

PY: The third one is relationships. No matter what you do, you know you’ll have relationships with your investors, relationships with your peers, relationships with your employees, relationships with your consumers.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

PY: Relationship with your suppliers. It’s all about this. And the last one which, which comes back to people, is knowledge management.

INTERVIEWER: Hmm.

PY: You have information, you have to get the right information and use it in the right way – we call that knowledge management. It means you learn from the past. You can take advantage of the past, know it and use the past. Use what you know – what you can find out.

 

Good management

Part 2

 

PY: I’ll tell you something else. Managers can get more respect from people by being completely straight with people. You know, everybody makes mistakes. What’s important is that you can learn from them. If nobody makes mistakes then nobody’s taking any risks, which is no good. People have to be free to make mistakes.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, I get you.

 

PY: And we have to encourage employees to try things. To say, to encourage people to try out ideas. If you kind of encourage people to be autonomous, to take a risk and to be accountable for it then suddenly you create a culture which is very hard to manage. You want people to take risks. You cannot then, you cannot be the traditional boss – ‘Do what I say, no questions.’ So it’s more difficult, but you let your employees be autonomous. You can’t just say, ‘I’m the boss’, you shut up and you listen.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

PY: Which is very challenging. I accept that. Now what I said before about relationships, the people... you have to manage all that. You have to build relationships, look after people, know the people, talk to everyone, talk to your employees, your suppliers, all your colleagues, your consumers. You have to be there and not stay away locked up in your office looking at balance sheets. You have to talk to your shareholders too. Everyone.

INTERVIEWER: So tell us more about experience then. Where does that come in?

PY: Well, you can do a course, do an MA, read the books. You can read all the management gurus. You can read about all the management functions...

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

PY: Marketing function, finance functions, planning, leading, all that stuff. Ah, but if there’s one thing you don’t learn, it’s management.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

PY: You know and ... you can learn HR, i.e. you know you need to have the kind of remuneration package to attract the right people...

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

PY: ... an incentive to keep them. But at the end of the day there’s one thing in those books that you’ll never learn, because it’s taken from the field, that’s management by experience. You can’t learn experience from books.

INTERVIEWER: Of course not.

PY: Managers should manage by experience and lead by example. It’s called ‘Management by walking around’, you learn from doing things, being there. So you don’t learn management. I hate management gurus.

 

Leaders and managers

 

INTERVIEWER: What do you think makes a great leader as opposed to a great manager, because they’re quite different things, aren’t they?

RB: I think I’ve worked in a lot of places where a lot of senior people haven’t really been leaders, they’ve been managers, and I think I’d say probably a ... a good leader has vision and can see how to develop and take things forward and is inspirational. Really, a manager, I think, is more about the implementation of that vision, and I think too many people who are in leadership roles get bogged down with the nitty-gritty management side, which is probably not what they should be doing, but I suppose it takes a strong leader and a confident one who believes in their team to take a step back, um, and I think really they should. I don’t think they should be too hands-on.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe a bad leader to me?

RB: I think someone who ... has a team of quite experienced, good people who won’t give them the space to get on and do their job and is overbearing and involved, um, and doesn’t take a step back and give ... give people the responsibility to get on with their role, and I suppose who doesn’t give a person room to grow and the opportunity to develop their career, because I think that happens a lot, that you just are expected to tick along and not expect anything back from your job. Whereas if you’re good at it and reasonably ambitious, you want to know you’re going somewhere.

 

Empowerment

 

INTERVIEWER: What... How would you describe empowerment? And how can workers be empowered, do you think?

RB: I think empowerment is ... um ... giving someone the opportunity to decide the directional strategy of a job and agreeing on it, and then leaving them to get on and do it and be in the background to help them if they need it, but not to be breathing down their neck. Um, and I suppose it is that feeling of responsibility and ownership that makes people feel empowered. I think if you work with someone who really lacks confidence to give their team responsibility, it’s very difficult to break out of that cycle.

INTERVIEWER: And has managing techniques, or have managing people, changed over the last... in the last ten years?

RB: I don’t know, I’m probably a bit cynical, but I think there’s a lot, certainly, that I have noticed in the organisations I’ve worked in, there are a lot of steps that are taken and to be seen to be empowering individuals, and so I think things ... probably at a superficial level look to have changed, but whether they really have deep down, I’m not so sure.

INTERVIEWER: How do you think people could be managed in order to get the very best from them?

RB: I think to get the most out of them, you want them to feel empowered, that they’re achieving, that they’re, they’re um, developing, that there are opportunities ahead of them that they can strive to work to, that they’re ... um ... under a manageable amount of pressure, um, that they’re getting the right kind of support. I think what a lot of people lack is a kind of mentor and someone that’ll help them develop in their career, and you can become very stale if you don’t have that. So I’d say that would be important to people as well.

 

Work-related stress

 

Sue: Good evening and welcome to Business Night. Now, stress has been a favourite topic amongst workers and employers for a good number of years, and according to recent figures published by the Health and Safety Executive, it’s still on the increase. The government is worried and has issued new guidelines to employers on how to deal with it. Tonight, we have in the studio Mariella Kinsky, an occupational psychologist who’s just written a book about stress. Mariella, who is most likely to be affected by stress?

Mariella: Not an easy question to answer, because stress is such a subjective thing, and one person’s stress is another person’s excitement. Rather flippantly, I might suggest that housewives suffer the most from a fatal combination of boredom, isolation and low status, but there are no figures on this, because of course housewives don’t come into data on work-related stress. The people who statistically come top of the league are routine office workers, which is surprising when you consider that, in many ways, their working lives are more comfortable than their predecessors’ lives ever were. In general, their bosses seem to thrive on it, which perhaps explains in part how they became bosses in the first place. It also shows that it has its positive and negative sides. Positive stress is seen as a challenge which gives you a ... a zest for living and doing more. Negative stress comes, I think, often from a perception one has of lack of control over one’s life.

Sue: Mm ... interesting. What is stress exactly? Can you give me a definition?

Mariella: Not easily, and that’s the major problem doctors have when faced with a patient who says he’s too stressed to go to work. I mean, how do you diagnose something you can’t measure or examine? In that sense, it’s a bit like pain; I mean, if you say you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

Sue: So, what do they do about it?

Mariella: Well, you can’t just tell someone they’re not really stressed and that they should pull themselves together and get on with things. Doctors do have a number of things in their armoury, though. They give people time off, they prescribe pills, in extreme cases they send them to a therapist...

Sue: Like you.

Mariella: Like me.

Sue: And are these things effective?

Mariella: In some cases. Not many.

Sue: So, how is stress affecting productivity, Mariella? Is it a major industrial problem or just something we all like to complain about?

Mariella: It’s certainly something we like to complain about nowadays. In the old days, people had other ways of letting off their stress, I think. They weren’t so supervised, so they could get their own back on their employers, you know, by not working too hard, perhaps even by stealing or damaging things at work, though I like to think that those were extreme cases, and this was part of the sort of ‘them and us’ battle which was fought out in the workplace. That’s not so easy to do nowadays – I mean, it’s socially frowned upon, and people can get found out more easily, especially as most of them spend their days sitting in front of a computer, not operating a machine at the back of a workshop. On the other hand, people change their jobs more frequently than was possible in the past, though it’s hard to say what part stress plays in this, or whether it’s due to other factors. After all, starting anew in a new place must be at least as stressful as staying put. What we can measure and what shows a sharp increase is sick leave due to workplace pressure.

Sue: Mm ... and what’s causing it? Is it boredom, or surveillance, or overwork, or what?

Mariella: Again, there’s plenty of debate about this amongst occupational psychologists. We certainly don’t spend so much time at work as we did in the past. All the figures will bear me out on that one. While we’re at work, the pace has certainly hotted up: they give us perks like laptops and mobiles, and as a result we’re always on call and we end up working very much more intensively than we did in the past. I think it has to be that. I mean, you mention that Big Brother bugbear – they can monitor your computer activity, they can record your phone calls and so on – all technically feasible, but it only happens in large companies with the resources to do this. Most companies really don’t have the time or the personnel, while reports of workplace stress are pretty much across the board. So the cause has to be what I mentioned before.

Sue: Do you think the way our work is organised has changed, and that that’s a stressor?

Mariella: Well, that’s an interesting point. There’s no doubt that our parents and grandparents in general lived harder lives, they worked more for less, but their work gave them a social cohesion which isn’t so evident now. They got companionship from work, they were protected by their trade unions and professional associations in ways which disappeared 20-or-so years ago, and when they stopped work, they stopped thinking about it and really devoted themselves to their family and freetime activities, and I think that last point is the one which has really made the difference.

Sue: Mm ... we often hear the consumer society cited as a reason for stress. What part does it play in the equation?

Mariella: Clearly, we’re better off than our parents and grandparents, and this means that we’re liberated from a lot of the routine drudgery which they had to put up with in their non-working time. This means we have more time to worry, and not only that, I think we even expect and want to worry about our work. Strange isn’t it, considering that in most ways we’re safer and more prosperous than was ever the case in the past?

Sue: Mm ... you say we’re expected to worry. What exactly do you mean by that?

Mariella: Yes, our work has become very central to our identity, who we are as people, and work-related stress has become an acceptable, even a respectable thing to complain about. You can do it, and the fact that it’s stressful is almost a sign of how difficult the job is and how hard you have to work, and therefore people will look up to you for doing something despite the difficulties.

Sue: So, finally, what can employers do to cut down on stress in the workplace?

Mariella: I don’t think you’re going to like my answer to this one, but, frankly, I think there’s almost nothing to be done. It’s a fashion and a reflection of our social climate. You know, you can, individually, get advice from professionals. In my experience, it’s hardly ever cost-effective, or effective in any sense. Giving people social support by organising them in teams might, you would think, bring a favourable outcome, but it often results in more pressure on individuals prone to stress. What the Health and Safety Executive, a ... government body, seem to think can improve things is getting people to take part in the change process within their workplaces. The idea is that they have a feeling of more control over their lives. I personally see very little evidence for this being effective; people were less stressed in the past when they had even less control.