The joy of being a great deputy

Hello and welcome to Working It.

This week we celebrated the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award at a very smart event at Claridge’s. The top prize went — for the first time ever — to a management title: Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson.

Amy is the Harvard Business School professor who popularised the important concept of “psychological safety”. This new book transforms how we think about failure at work (and in our lives). Amy recorded a Working It episode a few weeks ago, giving some great practical takeaways from her research 🏅. You can listen here to the episode.

Read on for why every chief executive needs a brilliant deputy, and in Office Therapy I tackle the (non) etiquette of doing virtual meetings in public places 👩🏽‍💻.

In praise of dynamic leadership duos

I don’t often cite other newspapers’ coverage but this piece in the Wall Street Journal made me think hard about the relationship between the investment legends Warren Buffett, now 93, and his deputy Charlie Munger, who died last month aged 99.

It begins: “Charlie Munger was Robin to Warren Buffett’s Batman, a business equivalent of the Edge rocking with the Bono of investing.” These great duos are legendary and I wonder why aren’t there more of them in business and the workplace. Why do so few of us actually aspire to become a deputy?

Part of the issue is ego. Nearly everyone with ambition wants to get to the top. A few years ago, while working as the deputy on an editing team, I wrote an FT column about what it takes to be a good subordinate. At the time I did not want to be any kind of subordinate, mainly because (ego!) I thought I should be in charge of the department.

There is also the issue of temperament: when we find someone we trust and get on with, the alchemy of the partnership can be magical 🧙🏻‍♂️. I wrote: “A good subordinate, one wise person told me, is engaged with their work, with the team and with the wider aims of the company — but is not afraid to tell the boss what is really going on in the ranks. Even when that is bad.” This still strikes me as incredibly good advice.

Tracey Camilleri, co-founder of consultancy Thompson Harrison, works with a lot of corporate leaders. I asked her what qualities she observes in a great deputy. “All leaders are incomplete. To have a deputy — or a co-leader — who completes the suite of leadership capabilities is the dream. Classically deputies are completer-finishers, process-orientated and deliverers. Often they are people who deliberately eschew the limelight. At their best, they provide challenge and act as valuable sounding boards.”

So a particular kind of person works well as a deputy, and their work is vital. Why isn’t it more talked about? Here’s Tracey: “Possibly because they are very often women. We still tend to have the image of leaders as heroes in our minds and so partnerships like that of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett don’t fit our mental model.

“This is slowly changing. Leaders who have the self-awareness to recognise their own shortcomings — and who see themselves as enablers of others, as part of a leadership team — ‘we’ not ‘I’ — are glad to share the limelight.”

I’d never considered the depressing idea that the prevalence of women as deputies might have played into the non-narrative around that role 🦹‍♀️. It’s time to change that.

We also need to remember the importance of the personal relationship at the heart of the CEO/deputy dynamic. As Tracey suggests: “Get out of the office sometimes and give one another permission to be human, forgive one another — and laugh now and then.”

And on that personal note, my thanks to Anjli Raval, FT management editor, for steering me towards this week’s topic. (Never take credit for someone else’s ideas💡.)

Are you a great deputy? Why is it such an undervalued role and how do we shift that perception? All comments are very welcome so email me at [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

My desk is heaving with business books — does the world actually need any more of them 🤷‍♀️? That’s one of the questions I put to Roula Khalaf, FT editor and chair of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year judging panel on this week’s podcast episode. Spoiler: yes, we do.

I also talked to Andrew Hill, who has presided over the awards process for the past 19 years. We chatted with some of the 2023 shortlisted authors at the prize ceremony, and heard from Amy Edmondson, this year’s winner.

Find the full book award shortlist here.

📢 Freebie if you are quick: I’ve got a set of all six shortlisted books to give away — the first person to email me at [email protected] with their postal address gets the goods. And a cool FT tote bag, too. 📢

Office Therapy

The problem: Why do so many people attend virtual meetings or make loud work calls on public transport🤨? I also have one colleague who talks loudly about workplace things while we are on trains together. I am reticent about gossiping about colleagues in public. Have the rules shifted? Are virtual meetings/work discussions on the move now totally normal?

Isabel’s advice: I am also not a fan of train meetings but see them as the inevitable post-pandemic evolution of the shouty calls (“JUST ON MY WAY HOME DARLING”) that drove us mad in the early days of mobile phones. Even sitting in the quiet carriage no longer guarantees an escape from hearing about other people’s marketing strategies. Or their dinner plans.

What can we do about it? Nothing. You are right: the unwritten rules have shifted. Smartphones and laptops mean we now do lots of things in public that used to be kept safely behind closed doors 🙉.

My personal boundaries, should this be helpful, are never to do/say anything on public transport that might be recorded and appear on TikTok. So it’s a “no” to ask people to stop shouting on their Zooms. And I reckon you are right to be circumspect about your own workplace in public places. (I have heard juicy things about office politics in other newspapers while travelling on London’s media-heavy Northern Line.)

Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Why staff loyalty is not always a good thing: Staff loyalty can be both a plus (better work comes from those who are engaged) and also a liability, according to Anjli Raval’s fascinating column. The concept may end up being outdated, as Gen Z have a very different attitude to loyalty . . . 

2. How alcohol became a crutch for professional women: Christmas party season brings the issue of heavy drinking into annual focus. Emma Jacobs talks to successful women whose drinking — often to alleviate stress — got out of control, and to the people who help others to quit.

3. The true extent of damage to schools from Covid-19: A deep dive into the data on students’ attainment worldwide. Former star performer Finland suffered in the pandemic, while Singapore and Japan did well. Amy Borrett finds that global teacher shortages are damaging children’s chances.

4. City veteran Rupert Soames to head scandal-hit CBI: The British business lobby group continues its reinvention — after a series of scandals that threatened its viability — with a big-name appointment as its president.

5. The FT’s 25 most influential women of 2023: An annual FT magazine tradition, these short profiles of outstanding women are written by other big names. Featuring Mary Barra, chief executive of GM, by the FT’s Rana Foroohar, and author Barbara Kingsolver by fellow writer Ann Patchett.

One more thing . . . 

When the Oxford English Dictionary chose “rizz” as its word of the year for 2023, there was a collective 👀 from anyone over 25. I had heard the word used by my son but had barely grasped what it meant (a frequent issue when we talk).

Rizz is in fact defined as “someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic”, according to the Atlantic, which has a great explainer article on why words of the year so often come from current internet culture: “The project of naming a word of the year highlights the dictionary’s role as a descriptive project rather than a prescriptive one.”

Dictionaries, in other words, don’t have to be fusty. Look out for the FT’s own choices of the words that sum up 2023, coming later in December. (My guess is that rizz isn’t one of them, though I did suggest “Swiftie” to the organisers.)

A call out to the Working It community

We are looking ahead to January, and new year’s life and work resolutions. What are your best productivity and pacing tips? The ones that have stayed the course for you, rather than the shiny gimmicks and apps that don’t stick?

I’ll start: I met someone this week who makes a practice of logging the extra work they do on top of their contracted hours. It helps them to realise why they might be feeling tired and unfocused at the end of a working week that’s been 50 rather than 40 hours long, and they try to course-correct the following week. I like that idea and will try it for 2024.

Please send us the resolutions you have kept, your tips and tricks and anything else you think might help other readers in 2024. I am also very keen to hear from readers using AI to help them work smarter. I’m [email protected]. (You can be anonymous if you want.)