Are your team ‘playing you’?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

It’s the Easter holiday 🐣, and that means fewer workers in London, but plenty of tourists. To escape the crowds, I’ve been eating lunch on the office rooftop. I’ve finally taken the advice of my friend, FT consumer editor Claer Barrett, to save money by bringing a packed lunch to work — she does this most days. (My goal: not to reappear in the top 1 per cent of Pret sandwich buyers in my bank’s “end-of-year” spending summary 🤦🏼‍♀️.)

And at least office workers get a break — for many home-based staffers, the lunch hour is a thing of the past.

Do send us your “working lunch” photos — can you beat the FT’s views? Photos, thoughts, ideas: [email protected].

Read on to find out how leaders can make sure they’re seeing the world from all perspectives. And in Office Therapy, we counsel someone bruised by a corporate reshuffle 🤕.

Blind man’s bluff: when leaders can’t see the world clearly 🙈

I wasn’t sure whether to mention blind man’s bluff (or buff — really?). This ancient game might have been cancelled since, erm, the 70s, when I last played. But it remains a good metaphor for how leaders can be at the centre of a crowd (in this case, their boards and senior teams) and yet not be able to see what’s really going on.

Kate Lye, founder of the Savoir Group, appeared in one of our recent Working It films (on CEO succession planning). She works with senior leaders at Goldman Sachs and other big companies to keep them performing at their best 🏋🏼‍♀️. So I asked her to outline the recurring issues she sees among people at the top of organisations.

Kate observes that business leaders are often changed by the job and the power that comes with it — without realising it’s happening. “Being in that rarefied air changes how you see the world, and how you see yourself.”

She gives an example of a externally recruited chief executive who was also well-known to be a keen cyclist. After six months, Kate asked him how his senior team was doing: “He said, ‘great — and you know, amazingly, all the team are into cycling as well 🚲, and we all compare data’. And I looked at him and he looked at me — and he said ‘they are playing me, aren’t they?’”

As Kate points out, the system in corporate life is set up so people will try to play it to their advantage — you can’t blame anyone for trying. In this instance, she told him: “[The team] are trying to influence you, they are trying to curry favour, they want to be in your inner circle, and if you are going to speak to them about your [cycling] times, you’ll speak to them about other stuff; it’s currency 💸.”

How to get past this problem? Partly, by protecting yourself. Kate says “you just can’t show that much of yourself. Because it would be used against you.” (So maybe keep your cycling data private.) More widely, she suggests, “you need people around you who see the world differently and have had other experiences. Not that you have to agree with them, you just have to supplement and refine your own thinking. You cannot do that by yourself. You are just a little echo chamber or, with your executive team, a bigger echo chamber.”

And finally, if you are in any leadership position, Kate suggests you force yourself to accept “really high-quality challenge” from people unafraid to speak to you (this could be a coach, mentor, or a brave peer). This can stop us falling into the trap of believing that what we see is the whole truth of our organisation.

Want more? The work of the late Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow is relevant here, particularly his theory of “What You See Is All There Is” [WYSIATI]. Unless we check ourselves, we will only use the information we receive immediately, without seeking or taking in more information. (Job interviews are a good example of WYSIATI, as too often we make our minds up very quickly about candidates on sight, failing to consider additional information.)

Office Therapy

The problem: We had a reorganisation at work and I have been moved sideways, to put it charitably. I do still have a job, unlike some, now former, colleagues. I am adrift. How do I recover and move on — and maybe out? How do I keep showing up when I feel like I am being judged as “wanting” every day? [To be clear, some people kept the “status level” of their positions in the reorg.]

Isabel’s advice: Oh, this is a rough one. You may also be experiencing the guilt that’s common among “survivors” when peers have been laid off. My recommendation (apart from taking a holiday if you can — just switch off for a week 😴) is to read Alison Fragale’s excellent book, Likeable Badass. It’s aimed at women but you don’t need to be a woman to find it useful.

In the book, Alison outlines the difference between power and status, and it’s the latter that is far more important. Power exists when you have control over something that someone else values — so at work that might be pay and promotions. Your managers have power, and perhaps also those who kept their “status” in this restructuring.

But that’s ephemeral — real “status” is rooted in how other people see you, your personal integrity, and whether you command their respect or not. And you can work on this — it’s a long-term goal. Alison’s book outlines how to become a “likeable badass” in this way 💪🏼.

For more “on-the-ground” advice, I turned to Dani Grieveson, a coach who has worked with many people affected by restructuring. She acknowledges how hard it is, but suggests you can frame this adversity as a positive turning point: “This can be a moment for discovering inner strength and vitality to fuel your growth. Dig deep, call upon the greatest energy within you — and activate it.” Good luck 🍀.

US workplace insights from Charter: challenging times for new graduates 🎓

With the end of the university year approaching in the US, I asked Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief at Charter, a future of work media and research company, to pass on what he’s hearing about the graduate recruitment market.

Kevin told me that a few months ago, prospects seemed good for the roughly 2mn students preparing to graduate. Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster 🤯: “An unfortunate conflagration of factors — including increased business wariness of hiring with a recession now expected and dramatic cuts to US federal employment — has pretty much dashed any optimism. Students have had internships and job offers rescinded, and others are considering graduate school as a shelter amid the economic and political storm.”

Hiring has been especially slack in industries such as consulting and finance that traditionally scoop up lots of graduates. And, Kevin reminds us, “young white-collar workers have another reason to be anxious: artificial intelligence is good at a lot of the tasks often assigned to them, such as customer service and basic research analysis.”

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Jamie Dimon video interview with Roula Khalaf: The JPMorgan Chase CEO talks to the FT’s editor about trade war, tariffs and the markets. From 29 minutes in, there’s some great stuff for Working It readers on how Dimon sees leadership and succession planning.

2. AI praise-giving tool promises ‘authentic’ insights: AI is stepping in to help staff praise their colleagues with more finesse. Jude Webber reports on Workhuman’s continuous feedback tool — is it taking the humanity out of connection and praise for our co-workers?

3. The problem with workers who can’t think for themselves: Margaret Heffernan writes for the FT about younger workers who have been taught to respond to instructions — but lack imagination and creative thinking. It’s a powerful call for a revival of arts subjects and creative careers.

4. The pain of doing business with Trump: Pilita Clark outlines the striking deference that business leaders had shown to Donald Trump and his policies, until the tariff announcement caused some pushback. And, as she shows, there’s a long history of business leaders refusing to speak up.

5. How Nvidia became the driving force behind the AI revolution: If you (like me) have been baffled by Nvidia’s recent rise as the world’s most valuable company, this review by the FT’s Tim Bradshaw of two new books is a great primer.

A word from the Working It community

Last week, I highlighted a newsletter by Tina He talking about the “Jevons paradox”, as it applies to AI. (A recap: when coal became more efficient in the 1860s, people burned more, not less of it. Increased AI efficiency and productivity, like increased coal burning, is not a good in itself.) So, I wondered, what exactly are we optimising for?

One Working It reader, who wants to remain anonymous, says that in their experience, “many managers seem to get hung up on improving efficiency, but my point always was that you could achieve maximum possible efficiency and yet be ineffective. (Very efficient at doing the wrong thing!)” I think we’ve all met those managers ☹️.

So, in short: “Maximum or even optimal efficiency will not achieve maximum effectiveness if the focus of the output is not correctly set.”

As they go on: “The other important word in this context is ‘optimum’. And optimum effectiveness is probably the best goal, as this implies maximum benefit from minimum or maybe optimal/most economic input. Let’s chuck out ‘efficiency’ as the go-to management goal and replace it with ‘optimal effectiveness’.”

I like this a lot. Optimal effectiveness incoming 🤞🏼.

Before you log off . . . 

Have a look at Uber’s annual list of the most common and most unusual items left behind by passengers in its cars. Phones and wallets are the most frequently lost items, of course, and between 11pm and midnight is the most common time for people to leave belongings behind. More esoteric lost property includes a Viking drinking horn and a urinal.

Hat tip 🎩 to The Knowledge for including this nugget in its free daily news round up. The newsletter is a useful digest for busy people, covering news, politics, comment — and pleasingly quirky stuff.