Is UK management just not good enough? Ever wondered why UK companies are still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, while their international counterparts seem to have moved on? Curious about why no UK company features among the world's top 25?
Join us on Bob and Jeremy's Conflab to explore these realities and delve into the heart of the UK's management crisis. We dissect the factors behind this problem, from the lack of tech giants and innovators, to a surprising satisfaction with mediocre financial success among the UK's entrepreneurs.
Imagine a scenario where 80% of senior positions are occupied by 'accidental managers'. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?
Well, that's precisely what's happening in the UK, according to a recent survey by the Chartered Management Institute and YouGov. These managers, unprepared for their roles, demonstrate poor leadership and are responsible for poor morale and plummeting productivity. The lack of appropriate investment in training managers and the resulting impact on employee performance and loyalty is another alarming trend we discuss.
What are the solutions? We discuss the role of 'accidental sales managers' and the harmful impact of short-term strategies. We highlight the importance of every customer interaction and the potential benefits of investing in quality managers with the appropriate skill set. Wrapping up this enlightening episode, we share a quote from the visionary Steve Jobs, encapsulating the essence of customer experience.
This conversation promises to be both eye-opening and thought-provoking, so make sure to tune in!
For more info, free resources, useful content, & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.
Reality Training - Selling Certainty
Is UK management just not good enough? Ever wondered why UK companies are still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, while their international counterparts seem to have moved on? Curious about why no UK company features among the world's top 25?
Join us on Bob and Jeremy's Conflab to explore these realities and delve into the heart of the UK's management crisis. We dissect the factors behind this problem, from the lack of tech giants and innovators, to a surprising satisfaction with mediocre financial success among the UK's entrepreneurs.
Imagine a scenario where 80% of senior positions are occupied by 'accidental managers'. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?
Well, that's precisely what's happening in the UK, according to a recent survey by the Chartered Management Institute and YouGov. These managers, unprepared for their roles, demonstrate poor leadership and are responsible for poor morale and plummeting productivity. The lack of appropriate investment in training managers and the resulting impact on employee performance and loyalty is another alarming trend we discuss.
What are the solutions? We discuss the role of 'accidental sales managers' and the harmful impact of short-term strategies. We highlight the importance of every customer interaction and the potential benefits of investing in quality managers with the appropriate skill set. Wrapping up this enlightening episode, we share a quote from the visionary Steve Jobs, encapsulating the essence of customer experience.
This conversation promises to be both eye-opening and thought-provoking, so make sure to tune in!
For more info, free resources, useful content, & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.
Reality Training - Selling Certainty
Bob and Jeremy's Conflab the reality podcast.
Jeremy Blake:Hello, you're listening to Bob and Jeremy's Conflab, and here I am, jeremy. And how is Bobby Boy on this very sunny day not?
Bob Morrell:I very well thank you it is October, it is grey and we welcome listeners to this edition of Bob and Jeremy's Conflab, which is really about what is growing and that is a crisis in UK management the way that UK companies are run and this has come up because we have seen some articles and listen to some podcasts by various people that have started to highlight this issue and we think it's something that we can talk about and perhaps come up with some solutions for, because it is a big subject. We've been working with companies now for 23 odd years in various forms most of them UK based, some of them abroad and so we've also witnessed lots of different types of UK managers and the way they run things, so we thought it would be good to do a podcast on that, highlight this issue and also see if we come up with some ideas. What do you think, jeremy?
Jeremy Blake:yeah, I think I just play into the last bit that you said. It's quite interesting since early September, every single conversation we're having with companies approaching us and discussing things with us are about improving their managers. So we are receiving inquiries from companies that are realizing they've got a problem, and one of the things Bob and I discussed before we pressed play or pressed record, rather is we're going to do our best not to make this political and look at sort of the wider context. We're going to look into the companies themselves. It's quite intriguing that a number of the firms we're working with are arms of international businesses, so they have headquarters in other countries and we're dealing with the UK arms of them.
Jeremy Blake:But there is a bit of a crisis in leadership in two areas and I think we'll divide the podcast in that way. We're going to look at, first of all, the senior leadership, the people who are tasked with running businesses in the United Kingdom, if you like, the board, you know the people making the big decisions growth, investment, employment, recruitment, investing finance, all of that. We're then going to look at the role of managers and, if you like, we might as well call the middle managers the people who are in charge of teams, whether those are sales teams, marketing teams or even creative teams, manufacturing teams because there's a problem there and I think we'll also talk about. We're coming across quite a lot of internal fighting. We're wading through in our discussions, diagnosis, design quite a lot of problems internally people putting more energy into their internal fights than actually trying to serve the customers and improve what they have. So where should we kick off, bobby?
Bob Morrell:well, I've got the transcript here from podcast that I highly recommend. It's called the rest is money and it's a podcast which is presented by Robert Peston, the famous journalist, and another famous economics journalist, steph McGovern. This was their first episode, broadcast on the 30th of August and is available on all the major podcast platforms. So remember the name the rest is money, and they talk about our economy at the moment and the fact we have low growth and low prosperity. And the quote is that the UK stock market is the only one not to have recovered from the collapse before the banking crisis. So this is going back 2008, that sort of period where we had the major financial crisis, and to give you the stat on that, the UK stock market has grown 72%, whereas Japan has grown 103%, europe as a whole 110% and the S&P 500 those are sort of top 500 companies have grown 267% in the same period. Okay, so our growth of our value, of our companies, is lagging hugely behind those major economies.
Bob Morrell:And his conclusion, robert Peston, is that British management just isn't good enough. Us companies generate way more from the same investment than British companies and the only explanation is that they've got better management. The other thing they go on to talk about is the fact that in the year 2000 there were three UK companies in the top 25 in the world. Okay, now, 23 years later, there's no UK companies in the top 25. There's two that just about make it into the top 50. That's AstraZeneca and Shell. But looking at their boards, those two companies have many, many foreign leaders, foreign managers, running those businesses too.
Bob Morrell:And the other point he makes is that we have the wrong companies. In the UK most top companies are tech companies and most are from the US. We have no tech giants who are driving growth. We haven't got many technical innovators that are playing in that market, and that's a problem because that means that if that's where the growth is coming from, from technology and and that sort of area, if we're not playing in that market, then over time that's going to diminish what we can offer as a country. So what do you think of that, jay?
Jeremy Blake:Well, it's intriguing because I often think back to. Are we talking about entrepreneurs we're trying to come up with something where they can grow a business, or are we looking at people who are just thinking what can they sell, sell on? There's another sort of appalling stat that states that the average British entrepreneur, compared to entrepreneurs in any other nation, love to sell their companies at only a price tag of a million. If someone offers me a million quid for this, I know I've only just started it, but that'll do, I'll check out and I'm wondering what that is, whether that's a kind of mentality of that's enough for me, I can look after myself. There's not really a huge investment in growth and in trying to build something.
Jeremy Blake:And you know, you're listening to a couple of chaps here who run a service-based business and we know that UK manufacturing peaked in 1954, which again is an extraordinary statistic. So we know we're already a service economy. But that doesn't mean you can't create services that take on larger groups of people, that it can be offered around the world, that can become something much, much larger than a sort of get rich quick scheme. So that is alarming to me. But if we do think of the tech companies. We also think of our clients. When we've worked in Germany and all these other countries, it is often a North American owner, a Japanese owner, a German owner, but very rarely have we we done much tech Work with UK ownership, have we not much?
Bob Morrell:No, and I think the point of this, these statistics, this fact also comes down to what you and I have talked about on a previous podcast short termism.
Bob Morrell:Yeah, now yeah we know that there are lots of senior people who come into organizations with the very best of intentions and what they want to do is to create a quick result over two, three years max, rather than come up with a plan which is five or ten years or 20 years. You know, a long-term, growth, innovative, focused plan for the long term. We have people coming in and say, okay, we need to drive up the value of an organization by adding customers. That means that we think about how we price things, which means we think about how we run things, which means we think about how we employ people, and all of that culture filters down and Creates a business which is run for very, very short-term gain.
Bob Morrell:Now some people might think well, two or three years isn't that short term, but actually, in a scheme of things, it is, because you know, two or three years means that I as a as a chief executive, and very likely to get a very nice bonus which I can easily retire on, and I leave the brand with lots of medium term problems to sort out. So a short-term solution could very easily give you medium term problems which will then damage that brand, damage your reputation, damage the integrity, and that's going to cause huge issues. And I think that that is a fundamental point where, if you're going to have leadership which doesn't look beyond two or three years very much, then that's where you're going to get an undervaluing of the longer term potential of the brand.
Jeremy Blake:I mean, I think it's all also connected to that an interesting article written by a telegraph journalist that there's this British thing of muddling through. We also talked on an earlier episode about this kind of activity, action bias. Let's get on with it. Let's get on with it, yeah, but not really strategic enough, and I think long-termism Doesn't seem very fashionable anymore to actually think well, actually, let's be realistic. We're not going to have double digit growth now. Let's think what we need to do. First, we need to improve our product, we need to improve our marketing. Then we need to really work on our On how we deal with warranties, with customers, or how.
Jeremy Blake:I think there's a lot of firefighting going on and just a lot of Quickly, let's refund them, let's get it back, let's order more of this, let's quickly change our website. There's a lot of very busy internal Trying to get a sort of golden bullet, trying to get a silver bullet, I should say trying to Come up with some Genius, single idea, and I think that that's not how it is. No, I think short-termism is a big problem. We think of LinkedIn and when we've researched some of the people, um, that we're either trying to win business from or whatever it. Linkedin could be three years in. Everyone seems to go after three years. It's just like a you're doing this job and then you're on somewhere else. I think British entrepreneurs are in for the long haul and I get very Motivated when I listen to people like julian richer, who are there for the long term, investing and trying to really create something. But I think lots of people are not necessarily in for the long term.
Bob Morrell:Well, also, you're talking about someone there who is very much at the end of their career. Yes, the future is actually in younger people starting up innovative and exciting businesses, and that takes risk, it takes money, it takes investment, it takes courage, and you can understand why some of those entrepreneurs might consider Doing some of that work in another country. Yeah, yeah, because there's better reasons to do that, there's better people, different conditions and that might become more appealing, and I think that's another thing that we have to be careful of. Now I want to pick up on what you talked about, because the article which underpins this discussion comes from a telegraph and was written by Melissa twig on the 19th of October, so it's quite recent.
Bob Morrell:And the first stat it talks about is 80% of senior positions are filled by accidental managers. Okay, now we'll come on to what that actually means in a minute. But 80% Now? The other thing is that another stat this is a survey that was done by the CMI, the Chartered Management Institute, and UGov, and they said here that it points to an avalanche, as their word, of bad leadership and the knock-on effect is on productivity, morale and job retention. So this is pretty serious. And the other stat is that we are a nation of bosses. One in four working adults in Britain is in a management position. Did you know that?
Jeremy Blake:No, that's outrageous Really.
Bob Morrell:It is, and yet only 27% of employees describe those one in four as highly effective.
Jeremy Blake:Yeah, yeah.
Bob Morrell:You've got all those people as managers and yet we think about a quarter of them are any good. So that means roughly 75% of them are pretty ineffective as managers. So if there is a crisis in UK management, if our businesses are not being run very well, then we've got a lot of managers there who their employees don't think they're any good. What's that doing to that employees morale? What's that doing to that employee's performance?
Jeremy Blake:I think the very fact that so many people have some kind of management position, team leader position, is going back to that invented pay scale, a hierarchical pay scale to give somebody an increase in their salary perhaps, or because they've been there for so long. We better make them have some kind of title. What that also sadly brings with it is all the management problems where people are just not developed as managers. They don't know how to lead, they don't know how to inspire, and we could go on and on. In that, I think what I find kind of bizarre at the moment is when I get my own marketing sent to me by other training companies.
Jeremy Blake:They're saying is if it's revolutionary that what is now required is empathy? Well, I think empathy has been required since mankind began. Yes, and isn't it sad that a training company has to sort of say in their sales pitch your managers need to be empathetic. This is new and revolutionary. Well, that clearly means that managers have been so didactic and, you know, horrendous to their people that they've lost the skill. They no longer care, they don't know anything about them and therefore they don't have a team.
Bob Morrell:Well, can I push that slightly further? We always made the point for years that we can train skills and we can train knowledge. Okay, you give people knowledge and you show them the skills and they practice the skills and they get good at them. And we always used to say you can't train attitude, because attitude is personal. I actually think that recently we have been training attitude because we have met a lot of managers who, to use the term in the article, were or are accidental managers. They've been promoted because they've been there long enough, or they've been promoted because they didn't want them to leave and so, with little training or natural ability, they've been put into these management roles and most of them and if you look at the list of things here which they say is how you spot an accidental manager most of these things are attitudinal. They're things which come from within, which that manager doesn't understand. That's the way they're coming across and that's what's driving out talent, driving out good people, driving out people with integrity and keeping people with poor integrity, and that's a really important thing.
Bob Morrell:We we've done a really good podcast on disloyal bonding, which is one of our most popular ones, and that's so entrenched sometimes where you know employees are using disloyal behaviors in order to hit a number. I mean that's just outrageous. And yet there are managers who encourage that. You know, and that's not from the top. That's right in the middle of an organization. That's damaging. Who's going to invest in the company where your employees are displaying disloyal behaviors? It's just ridiculous. So I think that's that's key. This podcast has been created by Reality Training. We're a UK based training and leadership brand who work across all sectors to improve businesses and their people. Our tagline is selling certainty, because that's what we do Give you more certainty in how you do things and give you certainty about how you sell things. Find out more at realitytrainingcom.
Jeremy Blake:I think one of the things I've got quite excited about recently and it's one of my new little hobby horses, because I have a daughter who's studying what do they call it in her school P and R philosophy and religion. I was given this lovely little book on you know, some of the world's top philosophers, and there's one that I've really hit upon that I think UK management really needs to comprehend. She's long dead, she's called to grouchy, and she writes all about modeling and modeling of behavior. The point that in some of the her writing that she makes is that if you receive the modeling of behavior from a bad manager, you don't know that that is the wrong behaviors, but you're receiving it, and so what a human being defaults to is imitation. So what we then do is we go right. My manager treated me like this oh there's, there's, kath, she's now retired. Oh, I'm now the manager. Right, this is what I must do. Then this is the same behavior I will show on.
Jeremy Blake:So if you have a culture in the United Kingdom of entrenched accidental managers Modeling really average crap behaviors, the people who are then going to backfill or take their positions when they go on are going to very likely continue those same behaviors, unless you put something in place To train them. And one of the points you've just made is that actually, we then get them in a room and we say look, look at your attitude, where does this come from? It's almost like they need to unlearn some of the Dreadful behaviors they've been given, and I think that is actually what we have been doing quite a bit of saying I don't know where you got this from. I don't know who showed you that this was the right way to talk to somebody in a one-to-one, to give feedback, but it's really not effective. How would you feel? Well, I just, I was just you know, I thought that's what we did. Well, you don't have to, and it's like we've been given a license. Here's some new methods. So I think modeling is massive in how people continue their behavior.
Bob Morrell:Well, I think, going back to what we talked about earlier, if there is a short termist Strategy in place, then from the top Will come down very, very strong directives on how things are to be done, how quickly they're to be done. It will affect targeting, key performance indicators, all those things that a manager has to respond to, and Without training or knowledge or the right attitude, they will choose any method they can To achieve them. Yeah, and actually, when I'm at the top, I don't really care what methods you choose to do this, because I'm gonna be gone in three years and the consequences of your actions Won't be anything to do with me. So I think that's you know, that's a big thing on this list I won't read them all out, because people could look up the article it was 19th of October in the telegraph the things that show you it's an accidental manager of things like you barely know them, ie, they don't know their team. The manager doesn't trust you as an employee.
Bob Morrell:Now, that's a big thing. We talk a lot about discretion and empowerment. Yeah, that's a clear reason. This is the new one. Of course, they're very accidental managers if they can't navigate a new working from home reality which most people are dealing with at the moment. You know if they can't get ahead around, that they're stuck in the past. They play favorites and never stick up for the team. They can't reprimand people, and we've done a lot of work recently on having difficult conversations which nobody's ever been trained in, certainly not in the last 10 years or so.
Jeremy Blake:Yeah.
Bob Morrell:They got a high opinion of themselves Are they aren't evolving? And I think that's a really big thing, that if you've got somebody who isn't evolving as a boss ie they're not developing their skills, developing their talents then what actually are they there for? Are they there to replicate and repeat and do the same thing again and again and again and force a result of some kind? Or are they actually there for a longer term thing which still has a result? And you know you and I have spent a lot of time talking about employee retention.
Bob Morrell:You think about the cost of recruitment and some of the organizations we work with, jay, I mean, you know the actual cost of advertising, interviewing, employing, training, developing and getting someone being effective for one person is so high these days. That's the cost of employing one person. Why would you risk engaging in that if you didn't have to? And of course, the way to do it is to have really motivated, good employees who don't leave, and yet sometimes that is seen as just a. It's one of those costs we have to put up with it. It's just one of those things there's always somebody we can replace them with. That's short term, is thinking. It's not thinking about the growth over the long term which is sustainable, profitable, better for everyone, keeps people happy and is ultimately what the country needs.
Jeremy Blake:There's so many areas to go off onto here. You just said something about the learning and again I'd say, on the modelling, if I think back to some of my managers at Yellow Pages, they would hand me articles about marketing. They'd send me an email about customer demographics. They were always learning. So I had a chap called Keith who's always learning and he'd say you might be interested in this. We were modelled the behaviour of learning more about sales and marketing. So all of us were quite keen on sharing ideas and discussing things.
Jeremy Blake:But how many people have managers who do no learning? They don't read a newspaper, they don't read a magazine. I know magazines, you know, might not be the right thing to say. Don't read a particular website, follow a podcast. There's lots of people who do no extracurricular revolving whatsoever and so their thinking can't change Unless a great leader comes in and instigates that. Then you've got companies that are highly static in their actions, in their creativity, in their strategy, which I think then creates what we're feeling A lot of this infighting this blame culture. The customer is all powerful and I must do their bidding or I forget the customer. I go to work to have arguments. I mean it's shocking how people can go to work and just be so uninspired, and so then what I think happens is people start to look after themselves and, you know, it becomes a sort of continual problem. It's not very cheery, is it? We're trying to be having some cheeriness here, but it isn't particularly cheery.
Bob Morrell:Well, I also think that quite often and you and I have heard this a lot so somebody is bumped, ie promoted and I've used the term bumped because I've been watching the Sopranos recently and if you rise up in the mob, you get bumped up a level and somebody is bumped. So in businesses you get bumped and they go oh you know, jeremy, you've been around for you know a few years, I'm going to make you a team leader and you go. Great, thanks very much. More money, more responsibility. You have to do lots of admin, you have to manage people and you might. If you're motivated, you might say well, can I have some training for that please?
Bob Morrell:Now, I don't think many new managers do ask for that. They just take on what they've seen other managers do and just start doing it. Ok, now they might say can I have some training? And the senior person goes oh yeah, we'll get some training sorted for you. Six months goes by, a year goes by, 18 months goes by and actually you're doing OK. So they don't bother to get any new training for you, and so what you've got is very much an accidental manager doing a role which they're not really trained for and they don't know how to lead people. They don't know how to inspire people. They don't know how to get the best from people, which is what so many organizations in other countries, like the US and others, would absolutely make sure they do. They'd know that the managers were there to lead their people to success, and so I think the term crisis in UK leadership is spot on.
Bob Morrell:Leading people to success is good. And then I think, if you go back to more senior roles, it is the same. We do executive coaching, and some people take personal charge of that and invest in their own development. Other companies will say well, you're going to have an executive coach as a senior person and that's going to help you develop and be challenged and improve the way you do things. Others have none at all, and so they will revert back to the behaviors that they've seen from senior managers in the past, and that means you get a kind of a legacy culture which is incredibly hard to get rid of, because it does come from the top. So there is development opportunities to absolutely change this and solve it and shake up what's going on. Otherwise, you are going to have more companies going abroad, more companies being bought and taken abroad, more companies being sold and floated abroad, and that is not good for us or the economy of the country in the long term.
Jeremy Blake:Yeah, if you've got a great product or a great service and there's a certain amount of demand for it, then aren't you in an amazing position to create a very happy, inspired team where managers are making your work better because they're able to change systems, processes, all sorts of things, and you're executing that as a customer relationship person, whatever you want to call it? I think the point I want to really touch on now, where we talk very simply about growth, is it's a bit of a trend, I would say, in the last 18 months. We're now hearing again conversations or having conversations with companies where we are not being encouraged to talk about sales. We're being encouraged to talk about relationship management, client success teams, trade support teams all sorts of language which is skirting around the fact that we're trying to sell a product or a service and make a profit on it and make the customer delighted that actually it was worth every penny, regardless of what we make on it. If it's a competitive price, it's in the marketplace and they choose to buy it. Let's deliver it, make them feel good about it.
Jeremy Blake:And let's talk about your accidental manager, who not only is an accidental manager but they're suddenly an accidental sales manager. And this is the last thing that they seem to ever want to do. They were happy to fill in forms, write reports, manage tasks, but actually hold on. You want to be to manage sales, profitability, quality of meeting, strategic thinking, forward planning. Helping me grow my customers' businesses if I'm B2B, or help me get my salespeople to make the consumers delighted with what they're buying, so they recommend us, so we get more, and so on and so on and so on. And so I think an accidental sales manager must be horrendous because they liked being a manager. But actually, profitability, margin, turnover growth, regional growth all these wonderful things that real sales managers just thrive on and get everyone excited about, it's just not their thing and that they revert back and so they decide to behave very, very dangerous.
Bob Morrell:Yeah well, I would refer people back to our other podcast on we are all sales people, now that we did a little while ago.
Bob Morrell:We are all sales people and I think, if you work in customer service and what you do results in some form of transaction IE the customer parts with some money or keeps on spending their money with you okay, that's what your outcome is at the conversations you're having. I'm sorry, you're a sales person. You're selling the value of what it is that you're there to do, and to say that you're not selling is just, you know, semantics. The fact is that that is what you are doing for a living.
Jeremy Blake:Well, let's come in on that. We had a quote. I'd love to share it as a quote, but I haven't got permission. But one of our clients said to us the other day you think you've got to realize, guys, is we're a retention business now? I don't know if you know who I'm talking about said it the other day now if the wrong leadership and that person is involved in that. But if the wrong leadership behind that says, hey, we're a retention business now, that just means we just need to reply keep them happy. That isn't enough. You are constantly selling back to them the brand, what the brand is innovating, what is coming next, why it's worth every penny. What products have you not got with us that you could now add?
Jeremy Blake:And we see lots of people. They think let's employ people with less skills, let's employ people who we can pay slightly less to. I've heard recently about email only teams. I've heard teams that we can pay a bit less to get people just to reply on email. But if you flip that to when we did some work in the US with travel lost to the chat teams we're working with the US were higher paid because they realize that to use text effectively. And we've dealt with this wonderful old English university lecture who was in that team, who was semi retired in the sixties but he crafted such great messages. The chat team were paid more than the phone team because they realized executing language is a high skill.
Jeremy Blake:So again, is that senior leadership short term is? And what can we get away with to increase the profit by diminishing the skills internally? We don't need such good managers to manage those teams that we won't really make themselves. Managers will just have, you know, chat team managers, or whatever it might be. It's really not looking at the bigger picture. And so then what happens is they get outsourced, isn't it?
Bob Morrell:And also, if you think about employee inductions, you employ people for these roles. They have a few days, a few, maybe a week or so of inductions learning the systems, learning the IT, learning how things work, and off they go. That's their training. And I wonder, for team leaders and above, for more senior division and directors, that sort of level, what sort of induction do they get? What sort of induction do they see about the medium and long term future of the organization, the integrity that they need to get across, the important values that are at the heart of what this brand is trying to do?
Bob Morrell:Now we saw a thing the other day where the late Steve Jobs was talking about. You know, there are there are deposits and there are withdrawals. You know, every time a customer has a good experience, regardless of the channel, it is a deposit in the strength of your brand. Every time the customer has a poor quality, disloyal, rude, shortcut conversation, that's a withdrawal. You know people feel worse about the brand, they don't want to invest in it, they don't want to buy from you. You know these things are so obvious and yet I think there is a culture in management which doesn't go. Wow, we really need to get this right. It goes well. Maybe we can get away with it and, of course, you keep on thinking you're going to get away with it.
Bob Morrell:in the end, you are going to be found out, everyone's found out, and you're just trying to push it for as long as you can. Well, I think we have been found out. The time has come to think okay, we need to reset how we do things in this country so that we have fantastic managers Of which there are many, many, many more of them who know what they're doing, who know how to lead, who know how to develop people, know how to coach. That's going to change the culture, which is going to change the output trajectory of these businesses, which is going to make them more attractive, more investable, and is going to really save our economy.
Jeremy Blake:And if I was to just offer one value, if you like, that I think would transform the leadership. If you're listening to this and you're a small business, you might be just a few of you, but a couple of you are managers. Or even if you're a large business and you're just one in a string of managers, the huge shift in the last few years is you're not seeing your team all the time. Half the time they're at home. Three days are at home.
Jeremy Blake:What some people have modeled to you is you can't trust them, roge, you can't trust them, susie, and so they've modeled behavior to you that you need to check on them, and so you've taken that as a brief and you're starting to micromanage and you're putting in calls and you're joining them on their teams.
Jeremy Blake:If you all just trust each other more than people generally reciprocate by giving you more back, everyone needs to trust each other more. Stop micromanaging, checking everybody's work. Just trust each other more to get on with it, and then people will all play to their strengths and be happier rather than trying to fix their weaknesses. So if we all come to work and we're playing to our strengths, we feel so much better about ourselves because we're doing the work that we thrive on and that we like, and so that's what managers have really got to do. They got to look at the team and what's your strength? How can I help each member of my team If they play to their strails, run reprimanding them about some of their weaknesses? If I trust people more, I'll have a thriving internal team. Simple as that, really hard to do, but simple on paper.
Bob Morrell:So this is a subject that I'm sure we'll be returning to in this season. It is a current theme that will be coming back, and what we might do is look at some more individual topics. When it comes to management and how people can improve. In the meantime, we'd love to hear your opinions on the state of UK management, whether you've got really great managers or not so great managers or things you've experienced in the past that you still see. That's the sort of stuff we're really interested in hearing about. But for now, thank you for listening to Bob and Jeremy's Conflab and we look forward to seeing you on other episodes very soon.
Jeremy Blake:Cheers for now.