The Rest is Work

Fantasy letter to a Chair from a board evaluator:

Dear Chair,

While I’m sure you will find a way of asserting in next year’s annual report, as you did last year, that your Board complies with FRC/QCA/Wates codes and principles I feel I should draw your attention to the following seven statements by members of your board made during the course of my evaluation:

In an ideal world, boards should focus on fixing the matters arising from their board evaluations. They don’t because the purpose of board evaluations of many boards, despite pleas by regulators, is to tick boxes for annual reports and/or to use them as sticks to beat colleagues.

Even organisations who pride themselves on carrying out rigorous board evaluations including on behaviour issues can miss important systemic weaknesses because of the key limitation of written board evaluations: fear of writing down, for example, the belief by most directors that the CEO, CXO or Chair is a narcissistic bully who brooks no challenge. Delete as appropriate.

The collapse of Carillion is a chilling example of the limitations of written evaluations. Its annual report in 2016 noted that its board evaluation had “confirmed that the board, each of its committees and directors continue to be highly effective’.

My Mum is 90 today. She was born on 22nd September 1930. The Irish Times that day reported widespread gales, a tramcar accident in Dublin and the activities of a man called Hitler.

Mum was nine at the outbreak of World War II, a teenager at a boarding school in the forties, married in the early fifties and had seven children by the early sixties of which I was the sixth.

She ran two small businesses in her lifetime. Her husband, our father, died over 34 years ago. Her daughter, our sister, died aged 57. She lived a full life against a backdrop of global and local socio-economic change the pace of which was unprecedented.

As soon as I came of age, and over the years since, I noticed one consistent pattern in her behaviour:

"Mind-ful-ness"

Imagine if the UK were a Plc and the Prime Minister its Group CEO then I would, this week, be pitching to him my facilitated virtual off-site program, which I piloted successfully during lockdown with a financial services client:

Dear Prime Minister,

UK Plc currently lacks a shared purpose (P), a shared strategy (S) to achieve that purpose and an agreed behaviour (B) plan to implement its strategy – a PSB, if you like an acronym.

This means that, even with your large majority, your administration is likely to end in tears in Downing Street as so many have done before you.

The difference this time is that not only do you risk failure on an unprecedented scale but in becoming the worst UK Plc Group CEO of all time because COVID-19 raises the bar considerably on how history will judge your legacy.

My virtual off-site program could help you avoid this disastrous outcome for UK Plc

Last week a client told me that people desperately need support returning to work.

They usually use the summer to refresh, she said, but were instead preparing kids for school/university which will be entirely new and different experiences; deciding to home-school or not; parents of children with special needs are especially struggling; there’s a constant anxiety about job losses or loss of colleagues; young people starting careers need help, she said. The list is endless.

That stress is exacerbated when people at work are in distributed teams where there is little opportunity to seek or find support. Leaders have to lead across back to back virtual meetings at a time of constant anxiety.

How are things? Are you having a good pandemic, "actually"? Was lockdown "great, in a way"? Did you get in touch with your inner sourdough, learn your kids' names and zoom "back-to-back"?

Is your business "hugely" benefiting from the pandemic, "as it happens"? Sales up, like, who knew? Is "managing growth" your main problem, "frankly"?

Or are you waking each day feeling sick about "Q4"? Have you stopped "furloughing" and started exiting "your people"? Are sales down, "massively"?

Have you had a break, yet? Away from your screens, room, and routine? Have you had a chance to think? Or, better still, feel? You do not live, most likely, in a one-bedroom flat in a high rise with several children. You can afford to philosophise. I encourage you to use that privilege.

The many tributes to John Hume's life in all media over the last week all confirm that he achieved what many CEOs talk about in terms of toe-curling tautology but rarely deliver: "transformational change". It's as if, as Sandy Toksvig once quipped, "there's no change in ordinary change". 

Yesterday, Paul Gilbert, CEO LBCWisecounsel, UK’s doyen of commentary and advice to and on in-house lawyers wrote an important blog which, I suspect will have been read by many lawyers but not so many “COVID-19 CEOs” - that is CEOs waking up this morning faced with the task of leading their organisations through an unprecedented global pandemic.

Paul’s blog concerned a conversation he had last Friday “with a lawyer who told him such a gruelling story that I have not thought of anything else since.”

The lawyer spoke of “his loneliness when first fighting for what was right, but then resigning from a company in which he had discovered systemic fraud.”

So, another day another story of a in-house lawyer brutally forced out by “the business”. So what? Everyone knows this occurrence is commonplace, nay, “business as usual”.

Sir Keir Starmer recently completed his first hundred days as Leader of the Opposition in the UK's Parliament. Commentators have assessed these according to their political bias.

But none disagree on his chief achievement: his "forensic" approach to "calling out" the government on its behaviour.

CEOs can learn much from his approach. Keir Starmer is a barrister and, as Nigel Pascoe QC explained in BarriserBlog (2013), there are four rules in cross-examining a witness...

During lockdown, I started reading - or more accurately listening on Scribd on my run - to David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln.

In Chapter 16, he describes Lincoln's fury at General Meade's failure to prevent General Lee's escape into Virginia.

Frustration fuelled the President's anger.

Modern CEOs and leaders will recognise these deeper feelings if they take time to pause, stay in the present moment mindfully, and to acknowledge that anger is a much shallower feeling than the deeper unheard inner screams of frustration.

"...I fear that the "emerging from the crisis" industry will result in leaders repeating the errors made during the 2008 Global Financial Crash after which they pathologised "their people" and introduced a raft of downwards focused "reforms" to "fix them" without pausing first to look at themselves in the leadership mirror".

Everyone is talking about post-COVID. This is wishful thinking. There will be no post-COVID. Ever. Vaccine or no vaccine. As one client put it: it will be forever "cum-COVID", not post. We will live with this pandemic and its impact for the foreseeable future.

As after World War II, nothing will be the same again. Only worse. At least during that war the foe was in plain sight and the pubs were open.

COVID-19 has changed everything. All the assumptions in your organisation's target operating model are now up for questioning.

• How, will your customers' needs have changed? For they surely will.
• How therefore will your strategic resources required to meet those changing needs, in turn, need to change, especially your people? And how will these have changed, irrespective of changes in your customers' needs?
• How, therefore, will you alter your strategic processes to apply your resources to your customers' new demands?

On the morning of June 11th. 2020 The Centre for Ethics and Law, University College London, published a report written by Professor Stephen Mayson with the title: "REFORMING LEGAL SERVICES - REGULATION BEYOND THE ECHO CHAMBERS - FINAL REPORT of the Independent Review of Legal Services Regulation".

This Report almost certainly did not form part of the bedtime reading of most CEOs, board members and management teams that evening.

It should have done.

Or, at the very least, they might have read or yet might read to their advantage pages 147 to 152 which relate to "Corporate legal departments and in-house lawyers".

Feelings of shame, hurt & anger, to name just three, were merely business as usual ("BAU") at and after pre-COVID meetings at which people were physically present...

Last week I worked with a CEO who leads a rapid growth multi-site retail business trying to figure out how to "re-launch" after his employees come back "from furlough". If you are in a similar situation, I propose:

Step 1: Bin all previous plans

Don't be tempted to re-forecast the current financial year's P&L in the light of COVID-19 using your pre-COVID business plan's revenue and cost budget. They're out of date. Everything has changed.

You are the CEO because you are demanding on yourself and others. When the going gets tough, the tough become bloody unreasonable. Don't.

The novelty of lockdown has long worn off. It's now a grind; an economic nightmare looms; the possibility of a second wave, real. The divorce pains of Brexit, whether you voted for it or not, unavoidable.

The early days of Zoom awkwardness are a distant memory; interest in your bookshelves, a tired joke; early genuine politesse, now just faux.

You haven't changed. Your life situation has. If you were a bully before COVID-19, you're still one. If you were extremely passive-aggressive before the pandemic, rest assured the virus hasn't cured you.

But bullying and extreme passive aggression are poles on a spectrum upon which we all sit, somewhere. We all bully, sometimes. We are all passive-aggressive, sometimes.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument and I know there are some flaws in the analogy, that Mr Johnson is the equivalent of a COVID CEO and Mr Cummings the equivalent of a COVID COO in business.

In normal times the CEO/COO relationship is tricky. In times of pandemic, it's positively problematic. COVID-19 CEOs and COOs are like no other CXOs, whether they like it r not.

At the risk of teaching granny to suck eggs, here's a reminder of what a CEO and COO are, and what they should be doing:

Simon Sinek is unlikely to shout out "Start with the FRC Code".

You won't find a Ted Talk titled "FRC - The Cool Code out of COVID City.

Nor will #CorpGov be trending any time soon.

J A Sutherland writing in his book Ensuring General Wisdom: The critical role non-executive directors and trustees play in executive performance says "No-one leaps out of bed in the morning, breathes deeply and cries: "today I am going to govern corporately".

Let's face it; the term corporate governance is a bit boring. J A Sutherland believes corporate governance is about good leadership. He's right.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there's a secure link between good leadership, good governance and getting your organisation through the crisis and out the other side.

If you're lost, you need a map. And many CEOs, although they wouldn't necessarily admit it, are lost as to how to lead their organisations at this time. They need a map. The UK FRC Code on Corporate Governance 2018 is an unlikely map for CEOs, even for SMEs and those organisations not obliged to comply with it. Here are seven reasons why:

There is anecdotal evidence that some early stage and rapid growth organisations have decided they "no longer need a General Counsel" relying instead on more junior and potentially more biddable in-house lawyers or more arms-length external law firms; that CEOs and senior executives are not inviting in-house lawyers to crucial meetings and finally that some lawyers are pulling back from their usual habit of checking that their advice is being followed because they feel such probing is not welcomed.

Based on my and other consultants' experience in working, writing and speaking with and about lawyers and their relationships with CEOs, their boards and teams I suspect that the actual situation is far, far, worse than the anecdotal evidence suggests.

I’m noticing an increase in boardroom tension since lockdown. Boardrooms are always full of human drama but, based on calls I ‘m receiving, and what I hear on the Zoomvine, COVID-19 is bringing way more heat than light into our C-Suites than usual.

Roughly speaking, the rows are about three issues:

• the other person isn’t doing want I want them to do
• the other person is behaving appallingly towards me/others but mainly me
• the other person “doesn’t get it” meaning they don’t get me

Does this sound familiar?

Everyone is talking about the 'new normal" meaning that "things" will never be the same again and we'll have to bally well get used to it.

Yet the same commentators talk of recovery and reopening as if it will merely be a case of removing dust sheets and shutters and opening the doors to unchanged customers as if nothing fundamental has changed.

It has.

Here we go again – another crisis another “in-word”.

After a previous crisis the word ” engagement” which, by the way, was code for you engaging with us, not the other way around – was all the rage.

Now it’s “resilience”.

You can’t turn a page, scan an online newspaper or website without the R-word screaming at you. And I don’t mean that other R-word, the virus reproduction rate, I mean “resilience”.

Andrew Hill at the time of the report observed in the Financial Times:

Nick Cohen’s piece three years ago in The Observer (Jan 5, 2017) was mainly about Mr Trump but, to my mind, it was also one of the best general essays on leadership I have read and remains highly relevant.

A flavour of the piece:

“Least likely to say”  is a great board game, it’s easy to play and, although I facilitate these, you don’t need a facilitator.

You can play this at home, as it were, in your own boardroom.

Here are the instructions:

Step 1: It

Choose someone to be “it”.  Say, the CEO.

Step 2: Shout out

The CEO stays quiet and everyone else shouts out at once what the CEO is least likely to say the first thing on a Monday morning.

Step 3: Repeat

Repeat the process for everyone on the board.

It’s hilarious.