January 7th, 2024

 I hope this turns out to be less than a rant post, but I suspect it will be. I participated in a "Journey to Excellence" training program at work. Now I was the one who awarded this contract to a rather suspect individual who was an Arabic speaking man of Lebanese origin that somehow resided in Hungary. It was an expensive contract and I was not sure of the material or the deliverables. After a long discussion, we settled on a discount and the contract was his. What it ended up being was a series of lectures and faux-activities for all employees done in week-long segments across executives, and middle managers. I am not sure if it was jsut me or the facilitator but everything came up to me as so much fluff. I understand it is a leadership course, so we are not expected to be solving differential equations, but still. I guess I have had several of these at INSEAD and then later in Shell and so was amply jaded by the vacuous and banal pronouncements like "Groupthink" or "not walking the talk" or "not adhering to leadership values" or "team building and conflict resolution". 

The idea was noble and ambitious- to transform the "culture" in our company to bring it into the 21st century and it started, ofcourse with leaders. This much was well accepted, and even welcomed. But the methodology to me was highly dubious. Sitting in these sessions and listening to the obvious does not do a damnedest thing in improving culture. Nor does mouthing off leadership principles in every conversation. The main malady that existed in the organisation, one that I could now conclude after spending a reasonable amount of time, was a lack of trust and transparency. This starts with the Executive Team- and it cannot be fixed by a leadership course. It needs to be fixed by individual interventions with each leader, starting with the big boss. The person doing the intervention can well be this external party - seeing as he has been workign with the organisation for years. The only issue is that I am not so sure of his independence. His dollars come from the individuals in the Exec team who have been pushing work his way- and so can he be trusted to intervene with his providers? This seems to me to be the overall problem everywhere really. If you look at the Media, it perpetuates narratives which suit its providers. The same can be said for Auditors, Raters, Consultants and whole host of external bodies that are hitherto employed to provide an "independent" view. All that seems to happen is that the narrative of the most influential person in the context gets corroborated, irrespective of whether it is true. And to top that, an organisation pays copious OPEX to these companies- which tends to be compensated by reducing manpower or some other stupid idea. 

Hello colleagues- the way to reduce OPEX is to stop paying external parties for useless activities that only waste employee time. It is really as simple as that and yet it is impossible. Because there are wheels within wheels. There is an entire ecosystem of Board Members who do nothing but engage consultants to do studies, who therefore dont trust anything management says unless it is ratified by a 3rd party. There is a nexus, between leaders and consultants that goes beyond what is visible. There could well be consideration of some kind to seal this fate for organisations in perpetuity. 

I think the only type of joint that can hope to steer clear of this pseudo intellectual rumpus is the family run organisation. Here, it really is about dollars and cents of the owner- there is no agency problem- or atleast the problem is much more minimal. The only issue if the family run form wants to raise funds from the "system" or wants to go public - all of which will make it foray into this noxious club of corporate prodigality, a deep and esoteric oligopoly, certainly at one level nothing short of a "deep state". 

Coming back to the leadership program, notwithstanding criticism of the program and the facilitator, I also must admit that this type of tripe does not move me at all. I literally cringe the entire time. It has never been an energetic experience for me each time I have gone through it. It always seems to me to be too obvious, too inane and utterly ineffective. I feel I am a decent leader, although I have my own patient style- which may not be in lock step with the promulgations of the bulk-standard leadership program. This is evidenced basically by the overall performance of the team and the overall spirit within it. To me, people tend to work with you if you are a nice person, transparent, empathetic and fair. You dont really need to do much more if you are these things. The rest follows. You do have to take sides sometimes and you do have to fight for your troops. But you dont need to make a song and dance about it. Everyone knows what is within the realm of possibility and what the constraints are. If you acted human and were open about it with your team, I think they might chastise you less than you imagine. And yet there are so many traditional leaders who have to project an outsize personality, an outsized charisma and make visible all their machinations towards sticking up for their team. Even if they did this, they would piss off their peers- who are obviously stakeholders in their success. So it really is about being a genuinely nice person, and striking an overall balance with the ether. If I was HR, I'd get this right in my leaders and then save money on these types of programs. But it is a dynamic world. HR departments are led by different people with different views over time and so at any given point in time you may have differently oriented leaders on seat.  As usual, a post with some answers but more questions.