The Ideal Organization

Gareth Jones: The research originated from our previous work on leadership which is written up in a book called "Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?" which has been quite successful, and the key injunction of that book is that authenticity is a necessary but insufficient condition for leadership, so we end up by saying that to be an effective leader you need to be yourself more with skill. And that message has resonated pretty well, but one perfectly rational response to that injunction is this, I'll be an authentic leader when I work in an authentic organization. Until then it's very hard for me to be authentic and I think that's a perfectly rational response, so in the last four or five years we've been saying to people well okay, you tell us what an authentic organization would look like, we want to set a kind of new agenda for organizations that if you want people to be themselves, if you want them to be authentic, if you want them to be their best selves at work you have to build an organization where that can take place. So we ended up with these characteristics of what we would call an authentic organization.

Rachel Salaman: So how did you go about your research?

Gareth Jones: I think if you work in business schools, and Rob works at the London Business School and I work in IE in Madrid, you're extremely fortunate in that your research walks past you every day. So we spent an awful lot of time with executives, but not exclusively with executives by the way, so we've dipped down a little bit lower in the organization, but it's mainly executives, and we've been asking them to answer this question what would an authentic organization look like. And of course they come back with lots of different things because context still matters, what they say in a law firm is a bit different from what they say in an automobile manufacturer. But when you get enough data, and this is of course the magic of social science, patterns begin to emerge, things begin to emerge and that's what's written up in the article.

Rachel Salaman: Where were the companies and the executives?

Gareth Jones: All over Europe, some in America, not enough in Africa and Asia, so one of the things we want to do when we turn this article into a book, which we are hoping we will do, is to enrich the data source by having some more African and Asian companies in there, but we've certainly tested it all over Europe and much of the US too.

Rachel Salaman: From your experience, how well do you think what you've found will transfer to for example an Asian context?

Gareth Jones: When we did the research for "Why Should," lots of people said well this is a terribly western view of leadership; it won't be like this in Singapore and Hong Kong. Well guess what, it is, so whenever we've run "Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?" workshops and seminars in Asia exactly the same responses come from people about what they're looking for in leadership. They're looking for a sense of belonging, they're looking for a sense of significance, they're looking for excitement and they're looking for authenticity.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned that you were mainly surveying executives but you did dip into other levels of the hierarchy, do you think the ideal workplace, or to put it another way authenticity in an organization, looks different to people at different levels of the organization?

Gareth Jones: Well in a funny kind of way no, the fundamental things that people want from work are the same, they want meaningful work in an organization that gives them meaning. So actually this doesn't matter really where you are in the organization, now I think the precise balance of what people want, that probably varies a bit with hierarchy, but we'd be absolutely naïve I think and presumptuous to imagine that executives desire this wonderful authentic organization and the rest of the people couldn't give a damn, because that's simply not true.

Rachel Salaman: But does authenticity mean a different thing for executives do you think?

Gareth Jones: Curiously I think it's harder for them because most executives describe their organizations as political and very often as negatively political, so that actually the risks of being themselves are quite high.

Rachel Salaman: So as you mention from your research you concluded that there were six characteristics that everyone agreed should be present in an authentic organization or an ideal workplace, do these apply to all types of organization, is there such a thing as a one size fits all in this context?

Gareth Jones: Yes, clearly if you're working in the housing department of the London Borough of Haringey, you are under different kinds of pressures from somebody working as the marketing director of Dove at Unilever, these are different contexts so you have to really understand the context, nevertheless, having said that, we would defend the hypothesis that people at work in these varying contexts desire certain things of their organization, they want a sense of fairness for example, that is common, they want to feel that there's a sort of procedural justice present in their organization, they clearly want the idea that they can be themselves, it's okay to be themselves. Now that manifests itself differently at Unilever than it does in Haringey Borough Council, but the desire is still there.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned there this idea of letting people be themselves and that's the first of the characteristics that you mention in your article, what's an example of this in practice?

Gareth Jones: Here's a rather interesting example, take a really wonderful retailer like Waitrose, now if you think about the retail business you think about tight procedures, processes, supply chain management, identical units of production, each supermarket delivering to the same standards as the next one, that's your image. Guess what, Waitrose understands that you need to keep characters in the business, tiny differences make a difference to the retail encounter. So one of the things that the HR director I thought very insightfully said to us is we need to make sure that when we put in place processes and procedures, the kind of things that ensure food is safe and fresh and healthy and all of that really good stuff, we must leave space for people to express their uniqueness, their characterfulness, and I think that's very powerful. Wherever customers come up against organizations, they don't want to be processed, they don't want to feel like they're following standard procedure.

Rachel Salaman: You do point out though in the article that it isn't always easy to allow for difference because a lot of organizations have quite prescribed recruitment policies and career paths that actually encourage conformity, so can you just expand on that and suggest some ways around it?

Gareth Jones: Okay remember we are not just saying be yourself, because being yourself might be completely inappropriate in that context, you have to be yourself skillfully, so that's a really important point to make. So you take a great company that we've known for a very long time, Unilever, it's become I would say world class at recruiting people who fit in, so they're really good at finding clever people who will fit the Unilever culture. One of the debates we've been having with them now for a long time is why don't they recruit a few people who don't fit in, a few people who challenge some of the organizational sacred ground, what's the synergy between food and soap? They're now recruiting people who now don't quite fit, they are the grit in the oyster, now once you recruit them and this is a rather HR kind of observation, you then have to defend them because otherwise the powerful culture of big organizations will repel them. So if you want to bring difference into your organization you have to recognize that that's going to bring some problems, and by the way we are absolutely clear that too much difference, things fall apart, so it's always a balance between the amount of difference which will encourage and promote creativity and innovation, and too much difference which means there's nothing that holds people together.

Rachel Salaman: So it is quite difficult for a leader I would think to encourage people to be themselves but also if they need to rely on their team to behave in a certain way, that's a balance that needs to be struck?

Gareth Jones: Absolutely, so you take one of the organizations that we mention a lot in the article that we're both very fond of, Ove Arup, the consulting engineers, well guess what, Ove Arup has very strict rules about things like safety, structural requirements, Arup is not in the business of building beautiful buildings that fall down, absolutely not, so at the same time as saying Arup is really good at recognizing the power of difference, they are equally good on very clear and strict standards around certain things.

Rachel Salaman: The second characteristic you talk about in your article is that companies should unleash the flow of information, they should tell people what's really going on and this ties in obviously with authenticity. How much information is too much information in your view?

Gareth Jones: Our view, and absolutely the view of the people for who we drew this research, is they're fed up with spin, they've been spun and spun, they don't want that anymore because in a sense it just makes you suspect all information. And by the way in the world of social media, of Wikileaks and Facebook and Twitter and so on, you can't keep secrets anyway. Now again let's be clear, you're a drug company who has just found a cure to migraine, you're going to do your best to maintain the secrecy of your new product, of course you are. If there's a problem with your product pipeline tell people because they will find out, and there's been some spectacular examples of companies who have got this wrong recently, BP in the Gulf, Kryptonite with the locks that can be opened with biros, so if you say no it can't be done, well guess what, some clever Wall Street journalist or whoever makes a video of them opening a Kryptonite lock with a biro and now you're in real trouble, you're playing catch up from the start. So we are very much in favor of, but this is what our research tells us, that organizations need to be much more open about information.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned there, there will always be some things that need to be kept confidential, how difficult do leaders find it to strike the right balance between maintaining confidentiality in some areas where it needs to be maintained and being radically honest?

Gareth Jones: Well this is a difficult judgment by the way, if we think about the recent travails of the BBC it's quite clear that not everyone is telling the whole story the whole time, you don't have to be a kind of detective from the Metropolitan Police to work that out, you can see that people have been, let's say, economical with the truth on more than one occasion. Now in a sense once you get into that game, we're into a kind of Machiavellian world in which it pays to be political, but it is not the kind of politics that enables organizations to get things done, it's the kind of politics that stops organizations getting things done, that's the problem.

Rachel Salaman: Moving onto the third characteristic now, that companies should magnify people's strengths, which seems such an obvious thing to do from a productivity and morale point of view, what stops this happening as a matter of course?

Gareth Jones: The dominant managerial theory of the 20th century is Taylorism, the work of an American industrial engineer called Frederick Winslow Taylor who divides work into two kinds of activity, the labor of conception, thinking, and the labor of execution, doing. His advice, concentrate thinking in the hands of managers and execution in the hands of workers, so in other words deskill work as much as you can. Well our view is that that leads to alienation and low productivity, not the opposite, so what we want to say is when you go to work you want to be able to do your best and if you are very bright and very clever you want the organization to give you the chance to show your brightness and cleverness and innovation and creativity, and if you are none of those things you just want to be made a bit better, you want to learn a new skill, you want to be able to do cheeseburgers as well as beefburgers, you need to be able to run a shift, you need to be able to lead a small team, these are really important things. Curiously by the way, one of the organizations I think that grasped this rather well is the armed services, so they take in young people often without high levels of education and they invest enormously in their skills and abilities, and guess what they find, they're good, they find things they're really good at. In fact if you go back to conscription for the second world war, they recruited large numbers of people who they previously thought had little ability, men and women, and they had to invest something called accelerated promotion to get them into positions of authority quickly, because they found out that when they gave them the chance and they gave them some skills, they absolutely flourished. Now curiously of course, allowing people to show their skill and flourish is exactly what builds a great business.

Rachel Salaman: So how do you execute that idea in practice, could you share an example?

Gareth Jones: It's very easy to see that if you're Rush Pharmaceuticals or Cisco and you recruit some high flying scientist, you want to give them the perfect context in which they can do all their wonderful stuff, so that's a really easy call. But think about a fast food operation like McDonald's which does operate with standard procedures, one McDonald's burger has got to look a bit like another McDonald's burger and so on all over the world, so they recruit mainly young people often with low levels of formal education and guess what they do, they invest a fortune in giving them skills, they invest a fortune in making this a very slick, and by the way profitable, fast food operation. So it's about giving those people the chance to learn new skills and if you can imagine someone leaving the education system without much formal education and they learn enough at McDonald's to lead a shift, imagine how that makes them feel.

Rachel Salaman: Doesn't McDonald's support them in studies outside of their area of work?

Gareth Jones: Yes they do and they have an elaborate system of trying to help them do that, a bit like Waitrose, if you work for Waitrose and you say I'd really like to learn the piano, they will say okay we'll pay half the fees, we'll pay half the cost of the lessons, we want you to be a rounded person, so that's really smart.

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Rachel Salaman: If we move on now to the fourth characteristic which is that organizations should stand for more than shareholder value, the trouble is that not all organizations operate in meaningful areas, so how would a paperclip manufacturer for example make its people feel part of something they can believe in?

Gareth Jones: Okay a really good question which we often get asked and when we're presenting this material, and I used to be in the music business and I used to work for the BBC, so I've got a kind of stock of really exciting examples about making a great natural history unit program or recording a Bon Jovi album or whatever, and people say ah but you see my business is boring. This is my view, very few businesses are boring. So let's take the insurance business, what's insurance about, insurance is about having your roof repaired in time for Christmas, it's about the disaster of floods and having a habitable home again, it's about having a courtesy car when your car has been stolen. What's banking about, banking is about giving your parents a decent retirement, putting your kids through college, floating your business, surviving redundancy.

Rachel Salaman: What's making paperclips about?

Gareth Jones: I don't know much about the paperclip business but my guess is there are things about paperclips, or if you like the technology that enables paper to be brought together, that's exciting. Now the task of leaders is to communicate that excitement.

Rachel Salaman: Your next characteristic that you talk about in the article takes that macro idea to a micro level and says that organizations should show how people's daily work makes sense, so it's kind of the other side of that coin, and you say that this requires nothing less than a deliberate reconsideration of the tasks each person is performing. In a company with thousands of employees that sounds like a bit of a tall order, how can it be done?

Gareth Jones: Just a caveat here, none of this is easy, believe me if this was easy organizations would have done it before. In fact when we present this research material now our last side says this is an agenda to stretch the very best, this is hard, and by the way it's not just an HR task. But let me just give you a rather odd example, it's from something else we wrote a little while ago in Harvard Business Review called "Follow a Ship, It's Personal Too." In it we tell the story of the late President Kennedy visiting NASA and he sees a guy sweeping the floor and he says to the guy "Hi, I'm President Kennedy, what are you doing?" and the guy replies, "I'm putting a man on the moon." Now I've no idea whether this story is true or not but if it's true someone has done a great job with that guy, they've taken the lowest level participant in the organization and they've connected it to its loftiest ambitions. We did some interviews with some hospital porters and hospital porters are pretty low down the food chain in hospitals, they're not neurosurgeons, they say things like we're helping the sick, we're making it more tolerable to have surgery, I try and chat to the patients when we're moving them from one ward to another, that's what they say, so there's a good story here, people sometimes feign cynicism about their work because it's the only choice left to them, but actually what they really want is meaningful work. Our view is that you can't have a healthy society without a healthy workplace, good work gives you good societies, which is why long term unemployment and we've got masses of research of this of course, is so debilitating for people.

Rachel Salaman: So if we think about how a leader might help his or her team to make their daily work make sense, what kind of things can they do?

Gareth Jones: I think they have to talk about purpose, they have to talk about how things are connected, and in fact this is true about people even relatively low in organizations, when they first become a team leader for example, let's say they've got a little team of salespeople, well of course their first task is to build a great sales team and the second task is to make sure that they interface with marketing or product supply or packaging, because if you don't put the interfaces in, all you get is our old familiar friend the silo. So you get the salespeople saying what will those idiots in marketing come up with next, well that's no good, so you have to build strong teams and then put the interface in to the next piece, so that's a crucial leadership task. And as organizations get more complex that value chain itself gets more complex, so if you take the pharmaceutical business for example, guess what, packaging turns out to be really important, so it's no good treating packaging as the people, urgh, we've done all the clever bit, all they have to do now is package it, well the packaging of pharmaceutical products turns out to be rather important.

Rachel Salaman: The last of your six characteristics is to have rules that people can believe in, or to put it another way not to have stupid rules. In your research how often did you come across rules that you thought were stupid?

Gareth Jones: Overwhelmingly, and by the way if you actually do this research, you say to people what's wrong with your organization, almost universally the first thing they'll say is we're trapped in this miasma of bureaucratic rules. Well actually to use the sociological concept, mock bureaucratic rules because most of them are never enforced. In fact I remember when I first joined the BBC thinking there are so many rules here that you can't possibly follow them all, you are bound to be in breach of some, and this creates what we sometimes call mock bureaucracies. So they don't have the efficiency of efficient bureaucracies, they're just sinking in a kind of mud of rules, now what we are arguing for is not the absence of rules, that's a naïve and anarchic kind of thought, we're saying you need a simple rule environment, you need as few rules as we can manage with and we need to all agree about them, and once we've internalized the rules you don't need to enforce them because we all agree that these rules make sense.

Rachel Salaman: In your article you imply that shareholder capitalism can get in the way of these six aspirations, what did you observe that led you to that conclusion?

Gareth Jones: I think again this is a rather long and complex answer, remember the nature of shareholding has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, so if we go back to the days of the foundation of the joint stock company in the early years of the 20th century we could get most of the shareholders of a company in a large room in London. I may get this number a little wrong but the vector is right, the average length of time a share is held now is seven seconds, so the notion of the shareholding democracy has fundamentally changed. Now this varies a bit between countries, Germany has kept the large and thriving, small and medium enterprise economy in which of course the nature of being a shareholder is rather different, so this is a rather difficult argument. If we go back to your original question of how did we pick this up, well Rob and I have been around organizations now for 30 years and we've heard these kind of conversations a million times, sorry I'll be home late tonight, we're on the verge of a cure for migraine, sorry I'll be home late tonight, the new Shania Twain album comes out tonight, I've heard those conversations a million times, but I've never heard sorry I'll be home late tonight, I'm increasing shareholder value. It's a kind of modern mantra but for most people it doesn't have any meaning.

Rachel Salaman: At the end of your article interestingly you say that very few companies display all six of the characteristics that we've talked about, which are the most commonly displayed and which do you hardly ever see?

Gareth Jones: That's a really good question and I have to say I find it quite hard, I need to go through my database, so if you take another company that's mentioned quite a lot in the article, Novo Nordisk, which is now the seventh largest pharmaceutical company in the world, so it's the world's largest supplier of insulin, it's a quite remarkable company.

Rachel Salaman: What nationality is it?

Gareth Jones: Danish, and it scores brilliantly I think on radical honesty. Difference, much tougher, I think of the top 20 or 30 executives probably 25 are Danish men, now I think it gets difference, it gets that that's what it's aspiring to, but actually making that a reality is much harder for them. Where is it on meaning, fantastic, it's about transforming the lives of diabetics and it really is. You can stop anyone in a Novo Nordisk office or a laboratory or a factory anywhere in the world and say what business are you in, transforming the world of diabetics, so meaning, fantastic. By the way when I first started working with them, which is quite a long time ago now, I was meeting a friend who was a partner at Pricewaterhouse Coopers, a really nice fellow, and in true London style we met for a beer, and he said Gareth are you doing anything interesting and I said yes, I'm working for a little Danish company called Novo Nordisk in my naivety. He said oh that's interesting, they save my life every day and he opened his briefcase and he pulled out what looked like a box of pens, of course they're not pens, well they're Novo pens actually, and I didn't realize this but he's a very serious type 1 diabetic, and they save his life every day.

Rachel Salaman: So if a manager wanted to move towards creating the ideal workplace or a more authentic workplace a small step at a time, where should he or she start?

Gareth Jones: That's a good question and a caveat again, context matters, some things will be easier in some contexts than others. One thing would be to start talking about it, because our article is not a description of where organizations are, it's an aspiration for organizations, we were trying to set an agenda for organizations for maybe the 21st century, so these are aspirations, these are things that people are going to have to work away at relentlessly, and by the way creating healthy organizations is pretty relentless, you don't ever fix them and then it's done, this is a sort of continuing struggle to make sure that organizations are places where people can do meaningful work and be the best of themselves. And once that happens, and this is why this isn't just dreams, these will be great organizations, these will be organizations that attract the most talented people, to get people to invest their full range of abilities and activities, these will be really successful businesses.

Rachel Salaman: You said that someone might start by just simply talking about these things because they are aspirations and need to be aired, how does that work, do they talk to their team, do they talk to their boss?

Gareth Jones: Yes, I think this is based on a really rather general principle in organizations, that when you ask people for ways of improving things, guess what, they come up with ideas. Many organizations have so knocked that out of people that when they ask people they say I don't know, nothing, but actually if you could turn that round people have lots of ideas about how things can be done better, and even if you think of big organizations like the BBC for example, you will find pockets of places where it's buzzing and that is really important. In fact one really practical thing about organizations is if you can connect these places that are buzzing, you start to get a bit of an organizational change.

Rachel Salaman: Gareth Jones talking to me in London. You can read more about this research which he conducted with Rob Goffee on the Harvard Business Review website and you can hear Rob Goffee talking about leading talented people in a different Expert Interview podcast on the Mind Tools site.

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