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Empowered must not mean abandoned
The most stressful experience in my entire career was when I felt truly abandoned. A very long time ago, I was trying to run a project which was dependent on the work of many other teams - but those teams weren’t interested. The system I was building needed new infrastructure - but the infrastructure wasn’t even ordered. The budget I had inherited was clearly insufficient for the task - but no-one was prepared to provide more money, or change scope, time or quality. And, although I have not always been fast enough to ask for help, this time I did not hold back: I took every opportunity to make sure that everyone around me knew the problems the team was facing and the help we needed, including my boss. But no help came. We were abandoned.
I like autonomy and don’t cope well with micro-management. But the feeling of being truly abandoned was far worse - I ended up leaving that job and have never forgotten the lesson.
Are you making a difference? Managers must tell correlation from causation
Does eating chocolate make you smarter? In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2012, Franz Messerli demonstrated a correlation between the amount of chocolate which a nation eats and the number of Nobel prizes its citizens win. Unsurprisingly, Messerli’s findings were deliberately playful: he was not really attempting to assert that eating chocolate leads to prize winning research - he was illustrating the difference between correlation and causation. Chocolate consumption tends to correlate with national wealth, which also correlates with those factors which create an environment suited to Nobel prize winning research.
We might think that we already understand the difference between correlation (factors which co-exist and which may change together, but which have no causal link) and causation (one factor which drives another through a causal mechanism), and would never fall into the trap of mixing them up. But I think that if you are a manager you are at risk of mixing these concepts up all the time - I know that I am.
If you’re a manager, you’re a role model (whether you realise it or not)
Today, after five years of leading the Technology team at HSBC on a journey of profound transformation, our Group CIO, Darryl West, leaves the bank. We will miss him.
I’ve worked with Darryl for many years in different companies, and have learnt a lot from him, especially about leadership. It therefore seems appropriate to mark his departure by sharing one of those lessons.
This lesson came several years ago, when we both worked at another bank. I didn’t know Darryl well at that time: he was Group CIO, and I was leading architecture for an area called Central Functions (all the back office heavy lifting of the bank - operations, payments, finance, risk and so on). Darryl was holding a meeting of senior managers, and was speaking about our role in leading our teams, when he said something I had never considered before: ‘When your team members go home at night, they talk about you.’