Managing Talent

Rob Goffee: Initially we started with a slightly lighthearted definition which was "people who are cleverer than you, smarter than you and don't want to be led", that was our brief definition. Now obviously that was slightly humorous and if you want a more serious, although actually this is the way they often feel – smarter than you and don't want to be led – an interesting question is whether or not they really feel that, whether or not one should take that as inverted commas but the serious definition that we develop in the book is that these are people that who produce disproportionate value on the back of resources which organizations make available to them. So the point to bear in mind as we go through our discussion maybe is that we were only interested in clevers that needed organizations to express their talents.

Most clevers these days, if you are a pharma researcher and want to produce the next brilliant drug, you ain't going to do it on your own. If you've got the next brilliant derivative product, you need an investment bank. Clevers need organizations, so we were interested in those individuals inside organizations that were able to produce disproportionate value on the back of those resources.

Rachel Salaman: Another thing you clarify in your book is that clever has a slightly different meaning in the US than in the UK and you took the UK meaning in your book.

Rob Goffee: We deliberately chose the word clever because it's provocative, so I think even in English-English as well as American-English there is that notion of "too clever by half", "not as clever as you think you are", it's kind of a word which gets people going, it makes them think a bit about, well, who is clever and we deliberately avoided management jargon speak type words like talent, professional, knowledge workers, etc. We are interested in the book, clearly, in people who have exceptional talents and skills but I think we were asking our readers to think hard about where are these clever people and to cut a long story short, they're kind of all over the place.

We started our research in investment banks and, not so clever now maybe, but investment banks, consulting companies, pharma companies and so on, creative businesses, all the places where you'd expect us to write a book on clever people but I think if you came to the conclusion that that's the only place you're going to find clevers that would clearly be simplistic and naïve, there are clever people everywhere – museums, schools, hospitals, everywhere, fast moving consumer goods companies – but the issue is, do we know within our organization who these people are and are we doing our best to sort of lead and manage them and connect them inside our organizations?

Rachel Salaman: How do you spot a clever?

Rob Goffee: I think what I would say is cleverness surely is something which should be attributed to you rather than you claim for yourself. Most reasonably well run, managed places, if you said to people who are the people who are really valuable to you, most of us probably do have an answer to that and it doesn't necessarily equate to exactly the same population as who's in the so-called talent pool or whatever, but I think managers with decent antennae and good situation-sensing, should be able to spot who their really important assets are inside their organization.

Rachel Salaman: Well going back to the book now, why did you feel there was a need for a book like this?

Rob Goffee: There are several answers to the question. Technically, there is a very big literature on leadership, there's a very big literature on the so-called knowledge economy, there's not much that joins the two. Second point, the knowledge economy, is it growing? Almost certainly. Does our future in the UK and what we used to call the advanced industrial economies, does it rest upon a healthy, prosperous knowledge-based economy? The answer is almost certainly yes. How did we get into the hole that we're in as a result of the last nine months? By some clevers in so-called clever organizations going in the wrong direction and maybe doing some rather silly stuff and maybe not being rather as well managed or led as they should be. How are we going to dig ourselves out of it? We're going to dig ourselves out, I suspect, through clever organizations. The UK's economy, North America's economy, many advanced industrial economies will not recover by producing more motor cars. We will recover by focusing on the clever, creative, innovative, professional type businesses which the advanced economies have in some abundance and I suspect will have more of in the future. That's where we will create value and that's where recovery will come from I think.

Rachel Salaman: Now the war for talent was a hot topic before the recession, is it still really raging today given the multiple lay offs which have put a lot of talented people out of work?

Rob Goffee: Clearly I think it is still the case that really valuable people, who often have tacit skills that you can't easily extract from the more routinized or systematized, they are still really valuable. This is almost a trite example but football clubs still pay lots of money, you know, have transfer fees been going up or down? As far as I can see they are still going up and I suspect that the really talented good people will still be sought after, and I think the real warnings for most organizations is the moment there is a bit of an upturn, the moment there is a bit of a growth, the moment clever people have more options open to them, that's the moment you are going to lose people. It's a more general point but one of the things that we say in the book is that clever people like going to work and having fun, and going to work and working for an organization which has a sense of meaning and purpose. If in your organization you've been using the last year to make life miserable, to take fun out of the workplace, to – I don't know – transgress against your core values, don't be surprised if you start losing some of the talented people that were the source of your values. So we should never be complacent that just because labor market conditions are tougher, that we are able to for long periods of time hold on to those really good people.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned the research that went into this book a little bit earlier, can you tell us a bit more about that?

Rob Goffee: Yes, we talked to people all around the world. I mean our previous book Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?, had exemplar organizations like the BBC, WPP the media services giant, Roche the pharma business, these organizations are stuffed full of clever people and these are precisely the people who ask the question why should anyone be led by you, that was one of the things that triggered our interest in the current book but the research which led up to it, if you look at the preface or the opening chapter of the book, we list the people we have interviewed around the world and we have conducted interviews systematically around the world, in North America, across Europe, Australasia. I think that one of the problems with quite a lot of management books is that they are excessively North American, quite frankly, even if they are written in Europe so we worked quite hard to try and get representation around the world.

If you have a look at the book we have tried to cover very different kinds of organizations, professional service firms, what we call "clever collectives" like Google. We systematically tried to put in more mainstream organizations like fast moving consumer good companies like Nestle, so we made a deliberate attempt to get a range of materials from a range of organizations around the world and also from a number of different levels, so the first part of the book is about individuals, the second part is about teams, the third part is about organizations and, for example, on the team front, we made deliberate efforts to select some interesting teams like the McLaren racing team, which at least up until this season had been rather successful and, for example, the team in Electronic Arts that produced Spore which is a rather ground-breaking new computer game, led by somebody called Will Wright who produced Sims and Sim City which is I think I'm right in saying still the most successful computer game franchise in the world.

So we sought out – one more example, Arup, the people that built the Sydney Opera House, the Millennium Bridge in London, many of the buildings which populated the Chinese Olympic Games. We tried systematically to seek out what you might call exceptionally clever and creative individuals, teams and organizations and conduct the interviews there and we obviously use our own experience as well.

Rachel Salaman: And briefly, can you share the headline findings from your research? I appreciate you go into in detail in the book but just the headlines.

Rob Goffee: I think the headlines would be the following: at the level of the individual, clevers are often quite difficult to lead and manage and they are difficult because they are often scarce talents, you can't extract their skills, they are well connected in the labor market, they move easily, they know their own worth. That makes them a challenge, they often don't like hierarchies, they are obsessed with what they do rather than who they work for. In the book we said one way of summarizing it is to act like a benevolent guardian, give them resources, give them space, give them time, protect them from a lot of the bureaucratic rubbish that goes on inside organizations and let them express themselves.

We think that is probably three-quarters of the solution but you have to balance that with discipline. So I think a headline issue is how you balance that freedom and autonomy, recognition for great work, with discipline required to work with others in organizations and we say in the book that you might get discipline through simple rules, not complicated ones, not ones that people don't believe in. You might get discipline through shared values or a sense of purpose, you might get discipline through professional standards, you know, discipline in hospitals is exercised through consultants and doctors adhering to certain professional norms and codes, but I do think that's a vital issue, that balance between discipline and space and time is important.

Elsewhere in the book we say that clever creative teams, there's another kind of tricky balance going on between being cohesive: if you are in a drug development team you have got to work together for six years with people around the globe who half the time you won't see, on a drug that in year four is turned down by the US regulatory agencies. You need cohesion to deal with that, yet what do we know about creativity and clever teams? It comes from serendipity, ad hoc-ery, lots of emotional as well as cognitive conflict. How do you mix together those types of characteristics with the need for cohesion? That's a particular challenge and lastly, the last headline I suppose at the level of the organization, is that we are argue in the book, and I think this is a big issue, that we're moving from a world where I employ you, Rachel, and I try to extract as much value from you as possible, which has been the world we have lived in since Taylorism and scientific management. We are moving to a world which is about Rachel, you are already valuable, you are already motivated and highly skilled, the only issue is can I create an organization which is of value to you?

That is a complete reversal I think of the way we have thought about the relationship between individuals and organizations and I think we are only just coming to terms with what does this mean in terms of management and leadership. I think one of the things it means is we need to work harder at creating work places which are fun, going back to something I said earlier, which give people a sense of meaning and purpose and where people trust each other and talk to each other and of course we all value that but I think it seems to be particularly important for what we call the really skilled, talented people that value comes from.

Rachel Salaman: How much of what you suggest in the book is a new way of looking at this topic?

Rob Goffee: I think the idea of being a benevolent guardian is not entirely new so I think that idea was knocking around in terms of the way we used to think about managing scientific researchers in the 60s and 70s and 80s, so I wouldn't claim it was all necessarily all novel but I do think that actually we need to be sensitive about the different contexts in which clevers work and adjust accordingly, so in the middle section of the book when we are talking about teams, we contrast professional service teams with creative teams in an ad agency, or I don't know, Marc Jacobs redesigning Louis Vuitton handbags, we've contrasted those with techie teams, the IT people, the so-called nerds and geeks. These are very different contexts and it goes back to something I was talking about earlier, the skill of situation-sensing and adapting accordingly.

So I think we had the gist of the benevolent guardian thing but I think we need to adapt according to context. We need to work really hard at how you create the sense of discipline because I think we forgot that in previous treatments of leading clever people, that all we thought about was indulging them whereas I think what we have got to think hard about is how you bring that discipline in without spoiling everything. If you want me to use a contemporary example, the whole debate that's going on about financial services and regulation is absolute core to that debate is the issue of how do you balance the creativity, the entrepreneurship, the skill, the talent, all the wonderful thing that the City of London and the great financial service centers have, how do you balance all that with a sense of external regulation? Too much regulation and you kill everything, no regulation and you destroy value very, very quickly, as we've discovered to our cost.

Rachel Salaman: In your research did you see any good examples of how people get that balance right?

Rob Goffee: Yes, and some of this is not rocket science, I don't [sic] think. This is an over-cited example but Google clearly has been able not just attract wonderful people, give them space and time to have wonderful new ideas and resource them but it also has been successful up until now of providing some sense of a higher purpose: I quote, "do no evil". Now of course that occasionally leads you into hot water as an organization as we all know but at least it has those aspirations. Arup as an organization, the consulting engineers, tries really hard to inculcate this culture where individuals are important and diversity is celebrated. They almost go out of their way to recruit people that don't quite fit, to avoid performance measures that close down all options of creativity, of doing something new, getting people to relate to each other in ways which are kind of non-hierarchical and very consensual.

So I don't think it's always the Googles, you know, Arup has been around a long time but deliberately runs itself in a rather different kind of fashion. But alongside those examples of rather innovative examples, I think you should never forget that the traditional places which have been good at this. So in the book we talk a lot about the health sector and Great Ormond Street, I think, is a hospital which retains its strong sense of mission and purpose which is something I was alluding to earlier in terms of the significant things that clever people are looking for, talented people are looking for when they go to work.

Some organizations, you might not expect me to use an example like this but we talk about them in the book, Nestle I think is a good example of a company which okay, it's in the business of producing in many respects systematically standardized products called, I don't know, coffee or chilled dairy or something, around the world and at the same time it has been able to make breakthroughs like Nespresso, by creating space inside its organizations, by being quite tolerant actually, despite its strong culture of all sorts of diversity. What we know is that creativity is linked to diversity but diversity is difficult to manage. The great danger in some companies I think, is that, and this is a result of maybe our obsessions in the last ten or twenty years is that we have encouraged organizations to develop so-called strong cultures. The more you develop strong cultures, the more you make people look similar rather than different. That works against I think in a way the questioning of assumptions, different kinds of mindset and so on, so it's another kind of balance. how you get a decent, strong culture alongside acceptance of diversity. The good organizations seem to be good at doing that.

Rachel Salaman: Now your book is largely about how to lead clever people. Are you suggesting that clever people should be treated differently from non-clever people?

Rob Goffee: Well when we wrote the book, some of our colleagues said we look forward to the next book about stupid people. I said earlier on we deliberately used the word clever to provoke thought as to who is clever and, to go back to your good question, how do we spot them. We've got to come to terms to head back to your question head on really, I think we've got to come to terms with the fact that not everyone is the same. Life isn't always fair and some people get treated differently to others. We all know this don't we? We know that in your industry we know about star broadcasters who we will indulge. In the pharma industry we know about brilliant, brilliant, brilliant researchers who we will indulge. In my game, there are professors who can sometimes be extremely naughty and we allow them to be naughty because they've just written a Nobel prize-winning book and they're going to write another one and we are naïve I think to suggest this doesn't happen. You have to balance how far you allow brilliant people to be brilliant with warts and all, and how far you ask them to conform to certain standards or norms alongside others and that's always going to be a point of conflict but I don't think we can step aside from it, we just have to accept that that's life.

Rachel Salaman: Can someone be too clever? You mentioned the financial services earlier, did people who were too clever get us into this mess?

Rob Goffee: There are very clever people in financial services doing very clever things. I mean it raises a couple of interesting questions about whether or not the managers or leaders or senior executives of those organizations had a matched kind of cleverness to understand what was happening. I think there has been interesting coverage in the press since, contrasting for example some of the financial services organizations which were run by "bankers", people with experience and feet on the ground. There does seem to be some difference between those organizations and some of the other organizations which hit trouble, which were led or managed by people who had virtually no industry experience in banking or financial services and I think there is something in there about you may not know the ins and outs of the technical detail of some of what your employees are doing, but you have some sort of sense of, in a way, what the appropriate business model is in a bank, because you've been there and done it. I think some of that seemed to be missing. If you want me to be simply more pedantic than that, I think in some organizations maybe the audit committees or the risk committees weren't entirely doing their job correctly, maybe again because they weren't entirely informed of what was really happening inside their organizations so I think there are some issues there. I mean there are some other issues, the incentives inside those organizations were also something we should be thinking hard about.

Rachel Salaman: It's interesting that the characteristics you identify for clever people, things like the propensity to ask difficult questions and a disdain for corporate hierarchy, used to be classic grounds for firing people who didn't quite fit in. Have you encountered any situations where organizations actually get rid of talented people because they don't recognize their potential? They just think they're misfits.

Rob Goffee: Yes, I think that happens all the time and this is again why it is such a difficult area and there's no black and white, you have to balance this. How far are you prepared to accept misfits or the polite word I was using earlier on was diversity, how far do you accept diversity and how far do you want conformity? There is no neat answer to this but going back to the fundamental theme that I was talking about a little while back in our discussion, how do you balance this sort of allowing clever people to do things they are interested in with other clever people they like working with, with discipline?

To use some simple examples, you and I can think of I'm sure, award winning film directors or film producers that produce three fantastic hit movies, they've all won Oscars, then they get over resourced by their studios, over indulged and they produce a complete disaster movie – not one that is meant to be a disaster – but a complete disaster movie which loses the studio billions and almost breaks it. There are endless examples of that and what's going on there is over indulgence and not enough discipline.

Now I'll give you the reverse, over disciplined, not enough indulgence. In the book we talk about these people a bit but back office IT people, not front office. If you are front office IT in Apple or Google, you're a star. If you are back office IT, our overwhelming impression is that these people are not indulged, they are excessively controlled, they tend to be excessively controlled by people who don't understand what they're doing but know that it's costing them a lot of money and want measurable outcomes from extremely complex processes so frankly some of the most dissatisfied clevers that we spoke to in the book were some of these back office IT people who felt completely devalued and misunderstood and in fact often, and we do it all the time, stereotyped as the geeks and the nerds that don't understand the organization in the first place.

Rachel Salaman: In the book there are two groups that you talk about all the way through which is leaders and clevers. Can leaders ever be clevers?

Rob Goffee: That's precisely the kind of question that clevers often ask, it goes back to my original light definition, you know, clevers regard themselves as smarter than you and don't want to be led. How do you get legitimacy as a leader? The first thing to do is acknowledge how clever these clever people are, spot them and celebrate them. The next thing they need to do very quickly, once they've decided "yes, you're really clever", is to communicate or demonstrate their own cleverness. Now what does their own cleverness look like? Sometimes it's I've been there, I've done it, so in academic institutions like this one, we often like our Deans, our leaders, to be ex-professors. Consultants in hospitals like to be led by people that know what an operating theater looks like or have been a doctor.

You can look clever, I think, by communicating the fact that you were once doing that kind of work even if you aren't any more but you don't have to do that. It is clearly the case that some people are able to demonstrate what you and I might understand to be leadership or management, not that prior technical knowledge and skill but simple good leadership and management, the ability to understand what turns people on, to develop people to build good teams, to strategize, to do good organizational design. Clearly some people get into leadership positions on the back of that kind of ability.

I think the challenge for them is to communicate what they are doing to the clevers that they are trying to lead because the clevers won't often spot it because all they'll spot a lot of the time is professional knowledge and you once were a professor so you must be okay. So I think sometimes clevers don't really understand what's going on when they are being well led and managed and we allude to this in the book, which is you can be a great leader or manager but you are not going to get much credit from the people you are trying to lead because you're not even on the radar, they are not even thinking about leadership or management, the are just thinking about what they're obsessed with which is often their professional and technical skills and talents which is what they should be obsessed with but it is rather frustrating for good leaders to do all this work and then not be acknowledged. The best compliment you'll get is you stayed out of my way or you weren't on my radar screen, you just let me get on with things. That might be the best reward you are going to get.

Rachel Salaman: How much can leaders take credit for the success of clevers in their teams?

Rob Goffee: That's a really good question. In a way it's a fatal flaw if a leader does try to, in these organizations, excessively tries to grab the limelight. I think you need leaders who are prepared to be in the background, in a way pulling the strings but in a less overt way than we might sometimes expect and if they grab too much of the limelight, they are grabbing the kind of reward which clever people like, which is public recognition. So I think maybe we're looking for relatively low ego people that are prepared to do a really difficult job and not gain the credit. We struggled with words in the book to try and describe what this role is all about. A popular word that's used these days is orchestrating other people's efforts and maybe we should think more of those kinds of things, connecting clevers with others, networking between them, these words might better describe what's really going on and what maybe clevers don't want is a leadership in your face kind of model that's too strong, too much of the limelight grabbed by the leader.

I think there are really good examples of people who are able to do this and you don't need to look too far, I think if you look at some creative areas of work like, I don't know, the music business or films or even sport, some of the greatest managers of football teams stay in the background and let the players take all the glory.

Rachel Salaman: But in your experience, leaders are nevertheless instrumental in the success of the clever people in their teams.

Rob Goffee: I think so. If I can use just a really mundane example which I suspect that you and hopefully people listening to our discussion might relate to, if you go to a hospital and walk from one ward to another, I suspect you can tell with your own eyes the wards which are well led and the wards which are not well led. Are hospitals full of clever people? Yes, some areas are better led than others. If you are a mum or a dad, can you tell the difference between a well-led school with clever teachers in it and a poorly-led school with clever teachers in it but poorly led? I suspect you can. Gareth and I, my co-author, we are absolutely firm naïve believers in the idea that individuals can make a difference, they can make a difference anywhere in a leadership role if they do the job well, particularly with clevers.

It's easy to get to the end of a discussion like this and think my God, it's difficult, it's hard, it's almost impossible, why on earth would you want to do all this? I think you want to do it all because at the end of the day you produce wonderful things. Great Ormond Street saves more lives if they do it well, Electronic Arts produces absolutely brilliant creative breakthrough games like Spore and Arup produces the Bird's Nest Stadium or the Beijing Cube swimming pool. Breathtaking new brilliant pieces of work. McLaren produces a car which is faster than any other car in the world, these are fantastic things so if you get it right, it's a good news story.

Rachel Salaman: Rob Goffee, talking to me in London. The name of his book again is Clever – Leading Your Smartest Most Creative People and it's co-authored by Gareth Jones.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.