The Resilient Manager

Adrian Furnham: Well I think of the topics that I've been asked to talk about and the best training courses and so forth, there are a few which never go away, some become very fashionable like emotional intelligence, but the one more and more people want to know about is resilience, it's the opposite of neuroses, it's about coping with stress. A large number of jobs from driving a bus to being a policeman to being a banker are very stressful and organizations know the cost to their organization of those who break down under stress, make bad decisions under stress, go absent under stress, and so the question they ask and they want to know is what is this thing called resilience or hardiness, how can I select for it and how can I encourage it in my staff.

Rachel Salaman: Could you explain your method for writing this book and the ones that came before it, which involves putting together a lot of reflections on different aspects of management?

Adrian Furnham: Yes, the reason for this is partly because I am a newspaper columnist, I've been a columnist in the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, and I'm used to writing 800 or 1000 word articles, and I go to a great number of academic conferences and business conferences and I hear people talk about things, sometimes incoherently, sometimes very coherently, and I jot these down and while traveling abroad or at airports or whatever I write 1000 words, my reflections on them. The advantage from my point of view is being an academic, these are not academic papers, so I don't have to say Smith and Jones said the sky was blue, I can simply say the sky was blue and I tend to in a sense offer my opinion about this, a sideways look, I think of myself as an informed skeptic, not a cynic. So these are articles on topics of current interest where I offer some observations and sometimes provide some academic data or some review statistics.

Rachel Salaman: What do you hope managers will get out of this book?

Adrian Furnham: I never know quite what they get out of it, I get all sorts of responses, I suppose there's a bit of myth busting that goes on, I think a lot of consultants do hype that the silver bullets lies in just getting engaged workers or just finding the key to this or just finding the key to that. I think that is not true, I think like business, like management and leadership it's much more difficult than that, but I'd like to inform them about what some of the new ideas are, what their limits are and what their possibilities are. It's a sort of dip in book, it's a book you don't read at one session, it's a book you might refer to now and again, and I hope leaves managers not only with some information but also with a wry smile. It's meant to be serious but not overly so.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned a little earlier that your starting point for the discussion on resilience is stress in the workplace and that's the main reason why managers need to be resilient, so what are your observations about workplace stress and how has it changed over the years?

Adrian Furnham: I think workplace stress is a sort of stress industry and stress industry is dependent on persuading many workers that they are stressed and that they need all sorts of help. I think stress is a bit like death and taxes, it's inevitable, but what I have noticed over the last ten years is the assumption that stress always comes from the outside, stress is something that is done to you, a nasty manager or difficult work or demanding clients or something causes stress. Well that is indeed true, but it's also true that people react to stress rather differently, that some people are much more vigilant and hypersensitive about these issues and of course it's a combination of both, something to do with the individual and something to do with the work situation and the theme I have noticed is that the assumption is that it's got nothing or very little to do with individuals, everybody gets stressed with nasty bosses, well it's not entirely true. If you look at an individual's personality and make up you can see how dramatically individuals differ in their reactions to and coping with stress, so I think it's the movement from what I call an external blame or an environmental explanation for stress, rather than taking sufficient cognizance of an individual's personality and the way in which they perceive the situation as possibly stressful.

Rachel Salaman: In the book quite early on you make the point of saying that you're not a fan of stoicism, so what is the difference between being stoic and being resilient in your view?

Adrian Furnham: I used to believe in stoicism, it's the sort of Captain Oates, it's the tough Aussie, it's the coming out of a Japanese prisoner of war camp smiling. I think it's the repression of emotions, I think it's a male thing, the British used to believe in the stiff upper lip and I think the problem with that is that it's often glorified by people who can't deal with emotions as opposed to won't deal with emotions, that is that the various things at work make us frustrated and stressed and frightened and angry and so forth, and the stoic believes that one shouldn't show any of this, one should have a sort of Buddhist karma and ignore all these things and suppress them, and this can I think lead to a considerable amount of illness, that you see men don't go to their doctors until symptoms are extremely bad believing that only sissies show pain, it's that sort of thing. I used to believe that a stoical attitude to life was rather a good one but I'm not so certain any longer, I think as long as you're able to access and talk about your and other people's emotions, then I think some control is a good idea, but celebrating entirely the repression of all emotions, particularly negative, is not a good idea and in that sense I think stoicism isn't a good thing.

Rachel Salaman: And so that kind of stiff upper lip approach that you were talking about doesn't play any part of your view of resilience, your definition of it?

Adrian Furnham: Yes it does and it doesn't, I think having a tough mental attitude, being hardy, being able to at times suppress your fear and your anger is a very good thing, as long as you can deal with it appropriately when you need to. The trouble with stoics is they don't know the difference between when it's appropriate to talk about emotions and to deal with them, your own and others, and when it's not. In a sense a lot of stoics are emotionally inadequate in my view, rather than emotionally courageous.

Rachel Salaman: So you might say that your view of resilience would be taking the best of stoicism and adapting it?

Adrian Furnham: Absolutely yes.

Rachel Salaman: You dedicate one section of your book to building a team, so that's more or less about recruitment, and you point out that actually your team can be your greatest source of stress, so it's very important who you choose. What can a manager learn from having lunch with a candidate, I thought that was an interesting section?

Adrian Furnham: Yes, I went to a conference and this man said that he chose to interview candidates over lunch and his explanation was that he was interested not in the way the person pushed their peas up on the fork or ordered wine or whatever, but rather it was the way they dealt with the waiting stuff and the way they dealt with him, so it was a little test of social skills, so if he ate fast, they ate fast, if he wanted to do something, would they go along with it, in a sense did they mirror his behavior, but more how they treated those around them. Now I thought it was an amusing idea and I wrote 1000 words on what the benefits of going to lunch would be, but what you want to do with many candidates is get them off their guard a bit, in the interview it's often a smokescreen where both interviewees and interviewers are lying to each other, we call it impression management but it's not much different from lying. You want to get them more natural and more relaxed and a long lunch might just do that, and to watch their behavior and for them to watch your behavior and to see to what extent they are able to where necessary mirror your behavior or challenge your behavior or go against it or whatever. What was interesting is I got an email from a man who said he runs a company and that is their only selection criteria, it's how people behave at luncheon. I think that's a bit extreme but I think it's quite a good idea.

Rachel Salaman: What about some of the other tips in this section, because you have quite a few, what are your favorites?

Adrian Furnham: Going for a walk is an interesting one, geographers have recommended this, so the idea is the interview will take place over a half an hour walk and the candidate chooses the route, and the question is what route has he or she chosen and why. Again the problem with the interview is the discomfort and the unnaturalness of the situation and I can remember doing a very successful coaching session with an individual once and we walked round and round a very big square, and he seemed to rather like it and I thought it worked as well, we weren't looking at each other, we were taking part in a semi co-operative activity and it rather worked and the next time I saw him he said can we walk like we did last time, and I said yes if you like we can. so that was that observation and I think these are a bit quirky, I think they're a bit of fun and I think in some instances you can learn the moral of the story, in other words you can look at the activity and say well what is it about the activity that makes it quite useful and can we help any selection interview have some more of that.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned earlier emotional intelligence and in the book you advise managers to hire when they can emotionally intelligent people, how can you assess a candidate's level of emotional intelligence?

Adrian Furnham: There are lots of academic debates about this and I think as I said in the book, when I was at university we used to call emotional intelligence social skills and my dad probably called it charm. What is emotional intelligence, it's the ability to monitor and manage your emotions and to monitor and manage other people's emotions, so the question is, and there are questionnaires and little tests you can give them to do that and that will half indicate to you, but I pose to people situational judgment tests. So you provide people with a hypothetical scenario and either you can say well how would you respond in this situation or here are a number of responses, which one do you think is the best one, and there are few which seem to be more emotionally intelligent, in other words what people are doing is picking up and understanding the difference between what the behavior is that they see from somebody and what the emotion is underlying it, and the extent to which they have some of these counseling skills, what do you say to somebody when they say this, how do you respond best, and it works reasonably well, I don't think it's enormously difficult to detect. The worry with emotional intelligence is there are people who are extremely good at certain jobs, and I'm thinking particularly of technical men who are a bit Asperger's who are really rather low on emotional intelligence but make excellent scientists and researchers, they don't usually make very good managers because they are very uncomfortable around emotions and work is an emotional place.

Rachel Salaman: It's horses for courses then, so you don't have one set rule about oh I need to always hire emotionally intelligent people?

Adrian Furnham: Absolutely not, you don't want an emotionally intelligent long distance truck driver, I don't think it makes much difference and I don't think it makes much difference in a number of occupations, it's the extent to which they have contact with and manage and have to subtly deal with other people, and if you have anything to do with serving stuff then you do want emotional intelligence, anything in the service industry.

Rachel Salaman: Another section of your book is about getting the best out of people, how important is it for the resilient manager to build resilience in their team members as well as in themselves?

Adrian Furnham: Oh very, I remember dealing both with the military and people like ambulance crews, you will go to incidents and you will see and experience very horrible things, you will see mangled bodies and so forth, and the question is what do you do afterwards, do we big chaps go away and deal with it on our own or do we sit around and talk about it and do we talk about our fear and our horror, it's post-traumatic stress stuff. The most successful teams that I've ever seen are those where things go wrong and things go wrong badly, and the question is how you model the team and how you deal with it as a group, not as individuals, I mean one can have blame storming sessions as they are called, but on the other hand I think what a good manager needs to do is to build resilience and resilience is not the desire to ignore emotions and to repress them but rather to bring them out and to make use of them and to learn the experience, and I think you can see resilience teams. I was working with somebody who was a nuclear submarine captain, I mean you have to have a resilient team under those circumstances, you have to have a resilient team in airplanes, in other words when things go wrong you need everybody to know what to do and to pull together and to communicate very clearly. I think it's no different in management, there are enormous frustrations that occur and when things go wrong, and indeed also when things go right, people need to know how to deal with it, how best to ensure that this won't happen again in the same way or that the experience doesn't break people, it rather makes people, and that's where resilience plays a very important role.

Rachel Salaman: So should managers be actively putting resilience on their own agendas as something that they need to build in their team?

Adrian Furnham: Yes I think they should, they call it stress coping, there's a lot of words for it, you can call it hardiness, you can call it toughness, I don't particularly mind what people call it but consider the stress of a bus driver or a taxi driver, very stressful jobs, or indeed a cook where there's a lot of time deadlines, there are a lot of fearsome, powerful emotions that happen in kitchens and other places that can lead to disaster and there are television programs where we see this. Now a good manager anticipates that it's going to happen, that it does happen, but how to deal with it and how to coach people around dealing with their stress, in that sense it's terribly important to pay attention to resilience because stressful people make bad decisions, they get ill, they cause mayhem around them, customers won't come back and all those are very negative consequences for people who don't have resilience.

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Rachel Salaman: Let's move onto the topic of motivation now, can you explain your observations on how to motivate team members, and particularly your view of Herzberg's theory of job satisfaction which some Mind Tools members may be familiar with?

Adrian Furnham: Yes, I think that motivation is the topic that everybody wants to know the answer to, I'm asked to talk about money and motivation a great deal, I think there are two really important points here. One is, it goes back to Herzberg and we now call it intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, he called it hygiene factors and motivators, in a sense Herzberg said some things prevent dissatisfaction, so if you don't get things right, if you treat people badly or pay them lower than market forces or you don't provide certain facilities, then you demotivate them, but these factors simply prevent dissatisfaction. If you give people a bad working environment or bad tools or whatever then they're going to become dissatisfied. If you give them good tools and nice working spaces and all the rest of it you're not going to get satisfaction, you simply are going to prevent dissatisfaction. The question is how to take it from there, what are the factors which Herzberg calls motivators? I wrote an article a few years ago called the Peanut Monkey Manager and I said if a supervisor comes to you and said if you pay people peanuts you get monkeys, you must sack him immediately because he has no idea about motivating staff. I think the role of money is not as important as people think, money is not a motivator, Herzberg pointed it out very clearly, it prevents dissatisfaction. People say it's different in the public sector to the private sector and I say yes, but there is one other sector, and it's called the voluntary sector, now in the voluntary sector you have to manage without carrots and sticks and you've got to learn something about motivating people where you don't have the ability, well I suppose you have the ability to sack them but you certainly don't have the ability to reward them in the usual sense of the word. So how do managers work in the voluntary sector, how do they motivate their people, and I think what you need to do, and of course it's easier said than done but to find out the aspects of the job that are intrinsically satisfying, in other words that are fun to do and to make it much more of a fun exercise. I was watching, in fact I think I'm going to write another article on how to motivate sniffer dogs, now sniffer dogs are extremely effectively and of course it's all fun, it's based on fun, they get a fun reward, now the extent to which a manager or a leader can understand what part of the jobs are most fun and turn it into and give people an opportunity to have a fun choice, you can empower them with some choice and you can understand the difference between an extrinsic motivator, something that is given in compensation for an unpleasant task as opposed to that which is pleasant, and then you begin to understand the issues around motivation.

Rachel Salaman: What's your view of appraisals as a motivational tool?

Adrian Furnham: Everyone hates appraisals because they are so badly done, but then I would say to you well what's the use of feedback as a motivational tool, everybody is very eager to know how they are doing, they want some feedback, and appraisals are a mechanism, usually a bureaucratic mechanism which attempt to force bad managers to do some management. I think if you have a good manager he or she gives you regular and consistent feedback. I said the other day what is management and it's really three things, it's setting you goals and target and challenges, it's giving you feedback and it's giving you support. Now the whole idea of the appraisal system is that you set people KPIs, that's called targets and you give them feedback and you go through this process, and what human resources people try to do is to get data on this and hence you have all the bureaucracy of the appraisal system. If you change the word appraisal into feedback or change the word feedback into coaching then the whole thing has a completely different slant. I think there are some organizations that have tried to do that, they talk about coaching and feedback rather than about appraisal. I can't imagine how you can learn anything or be developed by a manager without getting a lot of feedback, and if you want to call it appraisal do so but appraisals have got a very bad name because of the bureaucratic standardized way that they are put in place, and they are nearly always there to insist that managers who won't do management have to do it.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that talent is a myth, why do you say that and why is that useful for managers to think about?

Adrian Furnham: The idea that there are a few of these mega wonderful wunderkind talented people and you've got to go out and find these amazing people who will save your company in the end I think is a myth. There are a number of myths that are associated with talent management, first of all I think talent differs significantly, so a talented bus driver, a talented nuclear scientist and a talented brain surgeon are rather different people. The second thing is that looking for a quality and this quality requires not only a quality, i.e. maybe high intelligence or a particular body shape, but it also requires a great deal of learning and practice. And some people have put forward this 10,000 hour rule, that for every one hour of performance you need 10,000 hours of practice. In other words practice is very important and you might have a very talented person who has all the right things in place but who doesn't have the motivation to put in the practice. I think there is one other factor that's important and I'm particularly interested in this whole issue of leadership derailment and management failure, and that is the paradox that many talented people come unstuck and derail, and sometimes the very concept, the very characteristics that seem to be associated with talent, such as self-confidence, actually in extremis lead to derailment and in that sense sometimes when you look at the talented group in an organization, the golden group or whatever they call themselves, but they are often full of narcissists who are demanding and selfish rather than giving back to the organization. So talent is an issue which is one of considerable interest to organizations and of interest to me, I know that the top people in an organization produce the top 10 percent produce on average two and a half times that that the bottom 10 percent present and one is therefore very eager to find this particular group of individuals, but it's in a sense this idea of the magic bullet, of the searching very hard for these wonderful people who have it all in themselves, you don't have to do anything to them and that they will come right for the organization later and that I think is a myth.

Rachel Salaman: Just picking up on your point about narcissism, this comes up in a number of places in your book. In your view how does narcissism relate to self-esteem, the former being undesirable in a manager, the latter being desirable?

Adrian Furnham: Yes, narcissism is just extreme self-esteem, the psychologists and the psychiatrists have got into bed over the years with regard to mental illness, and the psychologists think extremes of normal are abnormal, so if you are 6'11" you are abnormally tall, now you don't want to call that a mental illness but it is an abnormality, and so it is with self-esteem so you can imagine it goes from very low to very high and the question is what happens after very high. So if you have very, very high self-esteem well I think you could probably call that a form of clinical narcissism, and that is that you switch over from a normal self-confidence with a certain amount of doubt and a certain amount of concern about a number of issues to this very unpleasant grandiosity that you find with some people in organizations. The trouble is we like people with high self-esteem, we assume that it's very health and that they have something to be very proud of, so if somebody bounces up on stage and says I can run this company, I can improve the share price, I can take us forward, you think very good, you seem to know what you're talking about, you seem to have that confidence. The question is when they are simply grandiose and that is that they are selfish, now a narcissist makes bad decisions because the decisions are all about me, they're not about you or the company, they are about me and the requirements of those working for the narcissist are simply to recognize his or her ability, so very difficult to coach and very common in many organizations. I think in some industries like the fashion industry it's almost a core requirement to be grandiosely self-obsessed, it's very unattractive and very dangerous, but I think people do cross over the line, I think people with very high self-esteem if they go into organizations and they are successful, people treat them differently and they believe their own propaganda and they cross this line between becoming self-confident and being arrogantly narcissistically self-obsessed.

Rachel Salaman: And related to that one of your sub headings is ‘Whatever Happened to Humility?' What are your thoughts on that topic?

Adrian Furnham: The greatest leaders I've come across have not necessarily in public but certainly in private been really rather humble people, there is something in the literature called servant leadership and one likes very much, one admires, and there's a whole range of these people, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and so forth, who do not come across as arrogant selfish individuals but the opposite. By having humility they have a humility in the faith of other people, they are for instance very happy to give others the credit for their success rather than themselves, and there's a difference between low self-esteem and humility, I think the British play a game of course of false humility where one pretends, people say oh I was terribly lucky to win the Nobel Prize, no you weren't, you were very clever to win the Nobel Prize. But there is a genuine humility and let's go back to Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela or people like that where they are astonishingly humble and it's a very attractive trait as the opposite of arrogance.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose in the same way that someone with high self-esteem needs to try and avoid narcissism, someone with humility needs to avoid being so self-deprecating that it's damaging to their career?

Adrian Furnham: Yes, I can think of my first boss who was a very competent man and he was not a pushover in any sense, so his humility didn't lead him to becoming incompetent or unable to make decisions but he recognized human foibles and his own foibles and he was happy to admit them, and that made him a very attractive individual, he felt like a human being, his humility encouraged humility in others and as a result the people who worked with him liked him and understood him and trusted him a great deal.

Rachel Salaman: In more than one place in your book the subject of lying comes up which I thought was interesting, could you share some of your reflections on this like the different kinds of lies that appear in the workplace and how to catch a liar?

Adrian Furnham: There's a number of distinctions one can make but the one that is most commonly made is between what is called impression management and self-deception. So impression management is I put my best step forward, I portray myself in a particular light, I sense various things about myself, so I in the same way that people do on their curriculum vitae, show off in a particular way and in a sense that's lying. Either they are lies of omission, they don't tell you something or they are lies of co-omission where they over-exaggerate. The other type is self-deception where people are effectively lying but they don't know they are, they tell you things about themselves which are untrue and they are untrue in the sense that they are wrong, they are not as talented as they genuinely believe they are, they are simply wrong. Now the worry in organizations and particularly in the business of selection, is around this issue of lying and let's call it impression management, and as I said in an interview both parties are lying, I'm lying to you about what a wonderful organization this is and you are lying to me about yourself and how much you want to be in this organization, so let's try and break down this and try and understand where this self-deception happens because you might believe me when I tell you about the organization and I might believe you when you tell me about yourself and together we make very bad decisions. I think one thing I do say in the book is a related concept, because people talk about authenticity in the workplace and this is terribly important, well I'm not sure it is and let me give you the example. If you're in the service industry you can't be authentic, let's say I have had a hangover and my cat has died and I'm very miserable and depressed, I can't show that misery and depression when I'm serving people, my requirement is some sort of emotional labor, I'm required to be upbeat and jolly and personable, and I think the whole call for authenticity is to try and reduce the amount of impression management that happens in a workplace, and particularly with selection and selection to very important jobs, jobs that do make a difference. If you are selecting an airplane pilot or a brain surgeon then you do want to know certain things about them, you want to make certain that they are properly trained and so there's detection of lying verbally and there's detection of lying on paper and there's detection of lying face to face, and it's a topic of considerable interest and I've worked in it for some years.

Rachel Salaman: The last section of your book is about balance, what are your key observations here?

Adrian Furnham: I am very uncomfortable about what some people call work-life balance, I don't think the opposite of life is work and I don't think the opposite of work is life. I think balance is an important concept, we have 24 hours in the day, we sleep eight, we work eight and the other question is what do we do in that other eight, what is the nature of our lives, what is the shape of our lives. I think it's terribly important, people talk about a balanced individual, he or she is meaning that they are sensible, that they can't be thrown off a great deal. I was talking earlier this morning to somebody about the concept of rumination and the idea is that some people take their work home, I do not, when I go home, I go home and I do not have a mobile phone for this particular reason, so when I'm at home, I'm at home. I am going to teach a group of people tomorrow and I demand that they turn off their mobiles and their BlackBerries and they do not look at them while I am talking to them, I want them to be there, not be somewhere else. Now the trouble with work is that with modern technology work never goes away, your bedroom turns into an office, the train turns into an office, and that I think is very bad, in that sense you don't have a work life balance. There was a book written recently by a nurse and it was about talking to people who were dying and what they said, and it was a very interesting book. There were five observations and the most common observation was I wish I had worked harder, and the idea was that they had spent more time with their friends and more time with others and less time at work, now I am an exceptionally hard working individual and I believe strongly in the power of work but I equally believe that you recharge your batteries outside the workplace and it is important that you get things in priority. I think the all work, no play makes Jack a dull boy is true, I think it is important to have other sources of energy and enthusiasm other than in the workplace, so I suppose that's what I mean by the balance issue.

Rachel Salaman: Adrian Furnham thanks very much for joining me.

Adrian Furnham: My pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Adrian's book again is "The Resilient Manager: Navigating the Challenges of Working Life." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.