Category: Blog

How would your colleagues react if you lost your job?

Many of us would probably entertain some fantasy of everyone rallying to our defence, staging walk-outs, putting their own careers on the line to right such a flagrant injustice.

At Market Basket, a chain of some 70 grocery stores in the north-eastern US, that’s exactly what happened.

Arthur T. Demoulas, CEO, was ousted in June after his cousin, Arthur S. Demoulas, took control of the board and executed some kind of vendetta that’s not immediately clear from the outside. But we do know that employees of Market Basket were happy with the state of the company as it was, with above-average pay, good benefits and a boss that seemed to genuinely care about them.

What’s also clear is that as change management goes, this case must enter the canon as one of the least successfully communicated transitions in recent memory.

Shelves of produce have gone empty as staff have rallied by the hundreds for the re-hiring of their beloved CEO.

So far, about eight senior managers have been fired in the wake of the walkouts.

According to Boston Magazine, district manager Tom Trainor was one of them.

“I have no regrets—I would do it all over again, and I leave the company I love with my head held high in the knowledge that there wasn’t a single thing more that I could have done. I knew the risk but I also knew that I was fighting for something much bigger than myself. I was fighting for my family, for Arthur T. Demoulas, a man that I have tremendous respect, loyalty, and admiration for.”

It’s not often a wealthy corporate chief executive generates this kind of salt-of-the-earth image among employees. But Demoulas was intensely devoted to both customers and staff members. According to Trainor, when one new store opened, “it took him 4.5 hours just to get in the building because there was a line of customers and employees out there. He took time to speak with every one.”

Clearly, leaders who take the time to get to know and show a genuine respect for their followers will usually get the same kind of respect in return. And, clearly, the board had been quite tone-deaf to the leadership narratives going on the organisation before they ousted Demoulas and brought in two outsiders to serve as co-CEOs.

The plot continues to thicken; Arthur T. has recently said he will attempt to buy the remaining shares of the company with his own funds. Not only that, but a local band has recently composed a protest anthem.

“The storyteller”, Walter Benjamin wrote, “has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant”.

Yesterday was a bad day for humanity. A passenger plane was apparently shot down by a missile over a conflict zone in eastern Ukraine. In another part of the world, the battle over Gaza continued to escalate. It was day 93 of the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls. It was day 4,666 of the war in Afghanistan.

These are the ‘stories’ that surround us whenever we turn on the news, whenever we start up our browsers. But how much of these stories can we understand, how much of the human experience of these events is truly communicated to us?

Benjamin, a German philosopher and social/literary critic, was writing in 1936 about the effects of the Great War on the ways in which people were increasingly unable to communicate basic human experience to one another. “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”

It’s been just about one hundred years since that war began, and Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” deserves another look. You’re forgiven if the first section takes a couple of read-throughs before it starts to make sense, but it’s well worthwhile.

It describes what appeared to be the subversion of humanity amidst all the forces of modernity and war that defined the early 20th century. Every aspect of life that seemed authentic and human was corrupted by larger systemic processes took place above the control and comprehension of individual people.

“For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”

There are a lot of ways we try to describe what we do here at the Storytellers, but what I think it comes down to most of all is just injecting a bit of humanity and human comprehension into a world in which corporate, economic, and political processes tend to be valued more highly than basic human experience. And there’s nothing remarkable about that.

In 1936, however, that wasn’t the case.

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”

Like any bit of folklore, you could draw a few morals from this one. And in a way, that fact is an illustration of the moral I’d put forth for this story: that given a small bit of evidence, we naturally place that bit of evidence in the context of something we understand already. We’re not always great at constructing brand new concepts in our minds. We call this ‘narrative bias’, our tendency to situate new information within a narrative already going in our minds.

Six blind men in India were discussing exactly what they believed an elephant to be. Each had heard how strange the creature was, yet none had ever seen one before. So the blind men agreed to find an elephant and discover what the animal was really like.

It didn't take the blind men long to find an elephant at a nearby market. The first blind man approached the beast and felt the animal's firm flat side. “It seems to me that the elephant is just like a wall,” he said to his friends.

The second blind man reached out and touched one of the elephant's tusks. “No, this is round and smooth and sharp – the elephant is like a spear.”

Intrigued, the third blind man stepped up to the elephant and touched its trunk. “Well, I can't agree with either of you; I feel a squirming writhing thing – surely the elephant is just like a snake.”

The fourth blind man was of course by now quite puzzled. So he reached out, and felt the elephant's leg. “You are all talking complete nonsense,” he said, “because clearly the elephant is just like a tree.”

Utterly confused, the fifth blind man stepped forward and grabbed one of the elephant's ears. “You must all be mad – an elephant is exactly like a fan.”

Duly, the sixth man approached, and, holding the beast's tail, disagreed again. “It's nothing like any of your descriptions – the elephant is just like a rope.”

They were all right, and they were all wrong, but it’s tough to imagine coming to an understanding of something so strange as an elephant without being able to see it.

This week's story strikes at the profundity of values that inform the actions of great leaders.

As a young boy in a small Alabama town, Tim Cook had an experience that continues to shape his leadership to this day. Cycling home past a black family’s house one afternoon, he saw a cross on fire, and a circle of hooded Klansmen around it.

He yelled “Stop”, and one of them turned around and lifted his hood. It was the deacon of a local church. Fast forward nearly half a century, Tim Cook is now the CEO of one of history’s most successful companies.

When he talks about what Apple does, he doesn’t just say it makes computers and phones. Instead, he draws from his personal experience, and articulates a “respect for human dignity” as Apple’s guiding principle. He sees Apple not as a tech company, but as one whose primary business is actually “advancing humanity”.

“Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s”, he said, “I saw the devastating impacts of discrimination. And it would change my life forever. For me, the cross-burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred, and a fear of anyone different than the majority.

“Regardless of the path that one chooses, there are fundamental commitments that should be a part of one’s journey. I found at Apple a company that deeply believed in advancing humanity – through its products and through the equality of all of its employees. Now much has changed since my early days at Apple. But these values, which are at the very heart of our company, remain the same.”

Cook explains how Apple’s engineers always strive to prevent people with disabilities from being left behind by technological advancement. “And we never, ever analyse the return on investment. We do it because it is just and right”.

Great leaders articulate compelling visions that set their company’s mission in the context of the wider world. This vision does not necessarily need to be as altruistic as Cook’s but it must be deeply felt – and communicated to the organisation in such a way that employees are inspired to share the journey.

Read more about great leadership in our new report: Leadership for the New World.

Continuing on this sports kick this week, today’s story comes as an excerpt from James Kerr’s fantastic new book Legacy, which presents leadership lessons drawn from the exceptional success of New Zealand’s rugby team, the All Blacks. But fear not, a knowledge of or interested in rugby is not a prerequisite. This particular story illustrates how one of the best things leaders can do is simply cultivate other leaders. 

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A local resident was having problems with petty crime. A gang was breaking into his car, a rather pretty Saab 900 Turbo. Every time he changed the locks, the car was broken into again. One day he decided not to lock it – and so the gang began to use the car as a toilet. In despair, he approached the local police. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he demanded. ‘We don’t have the resources,’ the constable replied. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

Teenage Kicks was born.

A five-a-side football tournament for disaffected youth, the purpose of Teenage Kicks was simple yet powerful: to turn gangs into teams.

In a community suffering from no jobs and nothing to do, the idea was to create a structure of meaning: a sense of purpose, belonging, teamwork and, most importantly, personal responsibility. It relied on a concept of ‘Pass the Ball’, defined as ‘enabling and empowering the individual by entrusting them with responsibility for the success of the team’.

It worked like this.

The organisers took care of the venue, the referees, the equipment, the stewards and the schedule, and then set about handing over responsibility – passing the ball – to the area’s disaffected youth.

They targeted existing gang members, and those likely to fall into the gang lifestyle. The first targets were alpha males, aged between nineteen and twenty-five, who displayed qualities of natural leadership, courage, respect, and the ability to involve and motivate others.

These natural leaders were invited to become Managers – a role that resonated in a community sandwiched about halfway between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur Football Clubs. The Manager’s first responsibility was to find a Captain for their team – to pass the ball to them. And the Captain’s first responsibility? To pick a team.

And the team’s responsibility?

To turn up for every game on time. If they didn’t the team was disqualified; not just from that game, but from the whole tournament.

In this way the responsibility was passed on and caught by everyone involved.

Perhaps a dozen teams were expected to turn up on the first night. Fifty-two teams arrived on time and ready to play. Over the next four weeks no team was disqualified.

Ten years later, Teenage Kicks is still going strong.

Pass the ball.

This has been an extraordinary World Cup so far.

I won’t pretend I saw this coming, but in retrospect there was some writing on the wall. A year ago, in the Confederations Cup – a sort of precursor to the World Cup – Spain did beat Tahiti 10 to nil, but then lost to host Brazil 3-0 in the final in unimpressive fashion.

Spain has dominated international football for quite some time, winning the World Cup in 2010 and the European championship in 2008 and 2012.

Last night, Spain fell 2-0 to Chile after a remarkable 5-1 loss to the Netherlands in the opener. After just two of three matches in the group stage, Spain is out.

Several attackers and fixtures of Spain’s midfield engine room – Xavi, Xabi Alonso, Andrés Iniesta, David Villa – are into their 30s. And more importantly, their signature tiki-taka style of play, which relies on an endless, dance-like series of short passes, seems to have been figured out.

The Dutch and the Chileans rather impolitely refused to allow the Spaniards to knock the ball back and forth and constantly find open space the way they’ve been used to doing all these years. That crestfallen look on the Spanish players’ faces seemed to suggest they knew they’d lost something quite fundamental to their success, their trusty ace in the hole.

It may be too soon to say that tiki-taka is dead. But what seems apparent is that Spain found a winning system that worked for them. While they were milking it for all it was worth, the world around them was changing.

Then again, perhaps it was simply the pressure on the players to keep winning, whether in the World Cup, the Euro, or the Champions’ League. These things are of course cyclical; maybe it wasn’t age or tactics at fault but a psychology that says someone will always rise, eventually, to take your place. This kind of thinking might make the Apples and Googles of this world quiver just a bit.

Either way, Spain’s defeat reminded us that change is always happening somewhere, whether it be within the institution or surrounding it. There’s nothing permanent about a winning formula. Change will happen; the best institutions can do would be to manage it, to stay proactive, to keep making decisions – even if they’re wrong decisions.