Receive free Management updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Management news every morning.
A significant spike in mortality rates at a hospital’s neonatal unit. The disappearance of more than 2,000 valuable items from the British Museum.
Two recent UK stories are a reminder that noticing what is going on remains a core and basic management task. “Attention must be paid”, as Linda Loman, Willy’s wife, declares in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman.
Managers should not need reminding of this. In the past, the term “supervisory management” was used to describe the central task.
Perhaps that label feels a bit heavy to modern ears. Supervision might seem unduly intrusive, and it is only a short step from that to surveillance, which does not sound very empowering.
Seen more neutrally, however, supervision is just management taking its responsibilities seriously. When disasters strike we ask, “Who was in charge?” and, “Why didn’t anyone spot what was going on?”
This was certainly the case during the financial crisis of 2008. Then, the reckless actions of poorly supervised traders became known as “casino banking”. Although, as Chris Brady, a former business school professor, observes, this may have been unfair to the gambling industry: in well-run casinos, the behaviour of both customers and staff is closely scrutinised.
This is the point about good managers: they are attentive. As customers, we know the difference between businesses that recognise what we want and those that don’t. As employees, we know when a manager is taking a healthy interest in us and attending to our concerns.
Management, in this sense, is a high maintenance activity. That is hard, especially in the digital age when messages, or noise, are relentlessly pouring in. Noticing requires effort: one 2011 McKinsey paper recommended mastering the three Fs of focusing, filtering and forgetting to avoid the pitfalls of doomed multitasking, constant distraction and exhaustion.
How else might we succeed in keeping our attention levels up? In a recent award-winning book, leadership coach Nicholas Janni draws a distinction between bosses he calls “executors” and others who are “healers”.
Janni recognises the problem of detached and distracted bosses, who fail to recognise or understand the challenges their people are facing. “It is indeed a cruel irony that, while we live in a time of accelerating digital connectivity, we have never been more isolated,” he writes.
For him, executors are leaders who are “detached and emotionally unavailable, who are incapable of truly relating or listening, and who remain restricted to a narrow bandwidth of linear thinking”. Healers, on the other hand, are “fully engaged, deeply attuned and receptive”.
Paying full attention requires effort. “When did you last sit in silence for five minutes before a Zoom call in order to feel more embodied, composed and available?” Janni asks. “When was the last time you chaired a meeting and paused to ask how everyone was feeling?”
There is hope, however. “The good news is that attention is like a muscle,” he writes. “The more you use it, the stronger it gets.”
For some, this sort of discussion strays too far into the territory of so-called “therapy speak”. A manager is not a therapist, and should not pretend to be one. Work is about completing tasks.
The question is, what is the best way of getting things done, of having new ideas and improving productivity? Managers who pay attention in the right way at the right time are likely to achieve better results. Rejecting the role of pseudo-therapist does not mean chilly neglect is a better option.
The psychologist and philosopher William James argued that “the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated”. Taken too far, that also could make management seem like a nonstop, demanding and therapeutic activity. Not everyone is so needy.
But it is not a bad guiding principle, or at least a reminder, that until all our human colleagues are replaced by artificial intelligence, managers still need to notice and recognise the people they are working with.
John Garnett of the Industrial Society, which was founded in 1918 to support managers and workers, talked about the challenge in a more homespun, less grandiose way. “If you care about what they care about, they’ll care about what you care about,” he would say. Reciprocity is the reward for paying attention.
NHS managers at the Countess of Chester hospital in the north-west of England failed to listen to what senior doctors were telling them about suspicious death rates in the neonatal ward where the now convicted killer Lucy Letby worked.
Really good managers will have all their “senses working overtime”, in the words of a 1980s pop song. But if you are looking for a mantra or slogan to guide you in your everyday work then the one offered unwittingly by Loman still holds true: attention must be paid.
Read the full article here