Бесплатный фрагмент - People Management

Author’s Profile

Svyatoslav Biryulin, born in the Soviet Union, worked for many years in Russia in senior management positions. Svyatoslav’s total management experience exceeds 25 years, 14 of which he worked as CEO of companies with an annual turnover of 200+ million euros ($200+ million US dollars) and a staffing level of more than 1,000 people.

His managing experience was acquired in the former countries of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe and this distinguishes his books from standard American textbooks written mostly for U.S. readers. However, when managing people, one must consider local specifics including cultural characteristics and values that are not always the same as those of the U.S.

Since 2014, Svyatoslav has been developing its own consulting company operating in Russia, Slovenia and the ex-Soviet Union countries. Since 2016, he has lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The company is engaged in consulting in the field of strategy. In Slovenia, it works under the KVAN Svetovanje brand.

Svyatoslav Biryulin has already published four books in Russian. All of them are devoted to strategy and organization management. Here we are presenting you one of those books which addresses issues of leadership and people management.

This book is devoted to human resources management, but it is written not from the point of view of an HR-director, but rather from the position of a person who has led people most of his life. The book is not a compilation of popular industry theories, but rather a comprehensive exploration of the management experience, including the honest narrative of his own mistakes and failures.

The book is addressed to a wide range of managers, i.e., people who manage other people. The number of subordinates does not matter. It will surely be interesting both for beginners and experienced directors.

See more: http://www.eng.sbiryulin.com

Translator – Dmitry Beschetny

Editor – Nick Sabin

Chapter 1. Introduction. Are Books Useful?

There are thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands, of HR books in the world. This comes as no surprise. Peter Drucker said that people and money are the two main sources of resources for business. People bring ideas and competencies that, with money, become tangible and intangible assets. All other resources are obtained by some combination of these two. All the major business books are either financial or human.

You have to read these books. Many popular HR books have great ideas that you can use in your work. Many books have published millions of copies in Russian.They have sold well and, apparently, have been at least partially read.

However, in my life I have met only a few or maybe a few dozen people, whom I can definitely refer to as really professional leaders. During my tenure as a manager and general director of large industrial and trade enterprises, the biggest one of which had more than 3,600 employees, I hired and fired dozens of top-managers, and only a few of them were true professionals. In my life, I have met many businessmen and CEOs who managed major companies but only a few of them really taught me something.

My own experience of effective people management also consisted of trials and extremely painful mistakes, rather than “book” knowledge. Why is that the case?

A lot of books are written in the U.S.

We, liberal and educated people, like the idea that all people are equal. Including me. We are outraged when people are harassed because they belong to a particular group, whether it is a group based on skin color, place of residence, eye shape, religion, or political opinion. We like a world in which every homo sapiens has a complete collection of human rights, which they enjoy within the rule of law.

But equality of rights does not mean similarity of souls, minds, views and characters. Nature didn’t make us the same. It made us equal in rights, but not identical in personage. We should all, whatever happens, have the right to express our views on elections, to choose the gender of our partner and to move freely around the world. But these rights do not yet make a man and a woman the same: a Japanese and a Brazilian, a Russian programmer and a Swiss watchmaker, a Serbian journalist and a New York artist. God made us different, and that’s good. Of course, we are almost identical biologically, but our way of thinking and behaving was much influenced by our parents, our societies and the cultural environment in which we were born and raised. And not only the cultural environment of the country, but also that of the city, family or community in which we grew up. For example, I was born in Russia, so the Russian language is my native language, but I do not feel comfortable in every community in my home country.

But not only is each individual person different. People living in different countries have different characteristics. I have lived, visited and worked in different countries and I know for a fact that every country, despite the fact that it is usually inhabited by millions of different people, has its own peculiarities. In particular, the peculiarities of doing business and how to behave at work. Doing business with the Chinese is not the same as doing business with the Poles or Germans. Not in the sense that some of them do business badly and one of them does business properly, but in the fact that they do it differently. They don’t treat their jobs the same way either.

I like to read American human resources literature. Some books describe the relationship between subordinates and superiors that I would love to build myself. I used to build it as a young MBA graduate full of fresh ideas and illusions. But life has made a drastic adjustment to my ideas about human resources management around here, and I will share this experience in the book. Of course, I never fully believed that all companies in the U.S. are set up like Google, or that Google’s top managers are driven exclusively by humanism. Some of the corporate scandals that broke out clearly indicate that it is not the angels who run the place either, and not the lambs who work there. However, on the whole, the average American employee’s working capacity and responsibility are higher than those of employees in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union. The approach to work of European employees is different than those in the USA. And the experience accumulated by American managers cannot always be applied on our soil.

This does not mean that reading foreign literature, particularly American literature, is useless. In some ways people from Connecticut are different from people from Zagreb, but in other ways, they are similar. Good American books have something to teach, which we will talk about below. But one cannot blindly accept everything written in them as a guideline written in stone. You should parse the ideas outlined in them through your own experience and through the culture of your country.

Chapter 2. The Most Important Lifehack in Human Management

The most important lifehack in human management is that there are no lifehacks in human management. And if you’re offered one, don’t believe it! There are many useful (and not very useful) hacks, but the techniques for applying them depend on the specific team you manage and the situation you are in. In other words, you can master hundreds of techniques related to human resources management, e.g. feedback, goal management, non-financial incentives through competitions, but this is not enough. You need to be experienced, intelligent and wise enough to understand which one is appropriate and effective at the given moment in time. And that’s very, very difficult.

Why is this the case? Because all people are different. This assertion often irritates entrepreneurs who think that all people are the same, just one lazier or more motivated than the other, but they are wrong.

If you’ve been running a construction company and you’ve been doing it very effectively, your experience isn’t good for managing a team of programmers. If you managed a young, ambitious and creative team, your experience and self-confidence might be shattered when you take on the team of pre-retirement managers. If you read at least a hundred of the best books, it will be of little help to you if you are moved from the office in the capital’s metropolis to the backwoods.

As it was mentioned in Chapter 1, all people are different. Each of them has their own interests and background which is different from yours. Each of them has been influenced by their own environment, and if one of them has completed a florist’s course somewhere in Berlin and the other one in Mathematics and Cybernetics in Belgrade, they have different views on many issues. There’s no single lifehack to run this whole motley crue.

A manager who tries to apply his previous experience in completely different conditions will fail. Managing people is a separate science, a specialty that you will have to study for life. Each new team, each new generation will, if not overturn your previous experience, then at least significantly expand it, and, no matter how successful you have been before, new management situations can raise questions to which you have no answers.

Moreover, the bad news is that even the same team will have changed over the years, and the methods that have been applied for 20 years may not work now. Once, we advised a company that was created by an ambitious student who hired a number of guys who were just as hungry for success. Together, they created one of the most successful companies in their industry, turning the market upside down with their innovative ideas. But now the founder of the company lives abroad most of the time, and his top managers, who have grown passive, only pretend to agree that change is necessary, yet internally they strive to preserve the status quo and hamper any conceivable reforms. The team is almost the same, but the people in it are not the same anymore.

The good news is that, despite everything, management experience tends to accumulate. A man who has led people for over 20 years adapts faster to a new team than an inexperienced one. But this is not because he has more managerial life skills or methods in his head, or at least not only because of that. He just, as a more experienced and wise man, already understands that all people are different, and spends more time supervising subordinates and trying to understand their inner motives and attitudes than forcing them to his own comfortable patterns of behavior. He listens more than he speaks, and he looks for ways to use the strengths of the team he has been given, rather than fighting their weaknesses”.

In other words, he understands human nature.

What is, in essence, human management? It’s an influence on people to get them to act in the desired way. And if you don’t live in an era of slavery, there are very few ways to force people to do what you want them to do. They can easily disobey your orders, write a resignation letter and leave, and it is not yet known which one of you will be worse off. That is why the formal control levers, such as position, status, a “Director” sign on the office door are of less and less importance. Moreover, the situation is deteriorating. We are still accustomed to discipline, and subordination to leadership is in our DNA. We’re easy to manage. But teenagers argue even in schools with teachers, questioning their knowledge and experience. We wouldn’t dream about doing that when we were their age. And when they grow up, they will argue with you and your leadership, and your exclamations of “Well, who are you to argue with me?” will be answered with, “Well, who are you to be in charge of me?”, as they sign their resignation notice.

One day, I left the company where I had put together one of the best teams in my career. I had worked hard to create an atmosphere of open dialogue there, and we had tried to avoid bureaucracy wherever possible. I had a small office, and my staff often came in to seek advice or discuss a work-related issue.

At my new job I was given a room the size of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, one of my assistants (there were three of them) brought me a cup of coffee on a gold tray, and papers to sign in a red velvet folder with the letters “CEO” engraved on the cover in gold.

I wasn’t a very experienced director at the time, but I was smart enough to realize that any altruistic offering of democracy here would be interpreted in exactly the opposite way. In the eyes of the staff, the director was supposed to be lazy, self-confident and a bit of a jerk. Of course, I gradually managed to change some of the local culture, but it took a long time.

The art of human resources management, unfortunately, will have to be mastered for the rest of our lives. Not forgetting that yesterday’s experience can be erased in a new country, in a new city or just in a new company.

Chapter 3. A Person Cannot Be Trained

Cats don’t submit to training. Well, at least that’s what the experts say. I have never personally tried to train cats, but I have tried to train people, and I can say with authority that this activity is absolutely empty and pointless. People don’t submit to training either.

What I am talking about in this chapter may seem obvious at first glance, and many experienced managers know it for sure. But personally, I have spent many hours trying to get people to act in a beneficial way that they are not accustomed to, so you might find it useful.

An important caveat concerning not only this chapter, but also the entire book, is that I’m not asking you to be saint-like. You don’t have to be Mahatma Gandhi to be a good manager. Personally, I am not against a degree of healthy cynicism in management. We can dislike some of our subordinates, be of a not very good opinion about their mental abilities, but still effectively manage them and achieve results.

If you are an entrepreneur and manager, what is more important for you to achieve results or to be in harmony with others? If the latter, in my opinion, you’d better change your field. And if the first, you will have to accept the idea that one of your subordinates will not make you feel greatly admired. If you, according to the classic management theory, have six to eight subordinates, one of them will inevitably be less sympathetic to you. But you must still influence them so that they act in the company’s best interest.

Another thing is that managing people who make you feel depressed just with their presence, is exhausting. In such a case it really is better just to let them go. And from a practical point of view, you will not be able to effectively influence the employee you want to eliminate. But in general, you need to get used to the fact that some of your subordinates will be difficult for you to communicate with.

An inexperienced manager puts more emphasis on formal staff management tools: orders, staffing and instructions. They try to squeeze the employees into the box of the organizational structure, to force them to act in accordance with the job descriptions but not their personal nature. This method can also be effective, but only when it comes to junior staff, especially in a large company. You would not delve into the family difficulties or personal life of each cashier, if you own a network of supermarkets. You would instead require them to strictly comply with the company rules and regulations. But it is vital for you to understand, on an interpersonal level, your top managers. You must clearly see their strengths and weaknesses, understand their inner psychological motivations, and set them tasks that do not contradict their attitudes. Once again, not for the sake of humanity, but for practical effectiveness. If your subordinate is an introvert, do not set them a task that requires a bright leadership behavior, they could not cope with it. And it is useless to offer people who would rather socialize and spend their time with idle chatter the opportunity to head the project office as it requires consistency and perseverance. This task is guaranteed to fail.

We’ll be talking about this a lot throughout the book, but if you’re a businessman or a top manager, you’ll have to spend more mental energy understanding the personalities of your subordinates than any other issue. After all, business is made by people, and if you are surrounded by the wrong type of people, in terms of your personality and your ideas, no matter how powerful your strategic vision is, it will be difficult to succeed. You need to know the internal motives of subordinates. What motivates them? The position? Their bonus? Their status? Personal praise? You should know what they do well and what they don’t do well, and if possible, entrust them with only the first one, and not the second one. You need to understand what’s keeping them in your company, apart from natural inertia. Because if they’re really quality managers, you probably don’t want to lose them.

Examine your employees, closely observe them, and organize their tasks according to their personal characteristics. The task assigned to a staff member with the appropriate talent will be accomplished both faster and more efficiently.

Chapter 4. Everyone Around Here Is the Same, Except for Me

If you have managerial experience, you have already faced a situation where your instructions have been interpreted in a bizarre way that you would never have thought of. I, too, have been in a few such situations, especially at the beginning of my career as a director. I was left grabbing my head, seeing the consequences of actions taken by my direct subordinates who misinterpreted my words in the instructions given to them by e-mail or orally.

“How could I have been so misunderstood?!” I was distraught. At the time, I thought I was surrounded by mentally incompetent people. Although, in fact, I had no one else to blame but myself.

Once I watched (thankfully from the outside) as a supervisor berated a subordinate, and not just a subordinate, but his closest ally and deputy named Vadim. The business was a chain of restaurants, and they were preparing a new café, which was due to open a week later after the completion of renovations. The work was led by Vadim.

“Vadim,” said the supervisor, “I don’t understand. Is this what you think quality is?” The entrepreneur was indignant, digging up an extractor grille with his fingernail, which he didn’t think was level enough. “And what about this, is this good quality?” He was pointing to a paper towel container. From my personal point of view, the container was like an ordinary container. “Vadim, we’ve said a hundred times that we should maintain good quality in our company. Is that good quality?” He was pointing to what I thought was a pretty decently painted wall. Vadim’s confused rather than guilty face showed that he clearly had a different understanding of the terms “good quality.” Their dialogue has clearly upset both of them.

At the dawn of my career, I was also such a leader – on the move, in the corridor between projects, typing a short note or a text message, making orders, and then angry that my orders were executed incorrectly. I once, sensing the high seasonal demand for Czech cornices, instructed my purchasing department to double the usual rate of purchase. They did that honestly. But the cornice wasn’t sold without a special bottom bar. For those who assembled and sold the units, the word” cornices” meant a set of” cornices + bottom bar”. But the purchasing department worked with individual items, and for them the “cornices” meant just cornice. And the bottom bar is the bottom bar – a separate piece. And that’s why they didn’t double the volume of purchases, and we failed the season.

I was also very frustrated if the employees who were in difficult, unforeseen situations did not do what I would have done myself, if I had been in their shoes. The way I would have chosen to solve the problem seemed to me quite natural and the only one possible, but for some reason people acted differently. It was only after many conversations with people in an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what was happening, of exactly what motivated them to make certain decisions, that I gradually realized that each person has their own system of values and references in their head which is different from mine.

It is common for a person to be convinced that all the people around them are the same as they are, but not as perfect. It seems to them, especially because of inexperience, that the people around them have the same “play” in their heads as they do. And that is why he or she expects others to behave according to their roles in the play, which, however, is written exclusively in their own head, and played in a completely separate theater. This is how a marriage usually breaks up – we “write” a role for our spouse, but they have their own plays, within which they have their own roles, and they have the starring role. Worse yet, they have written roles for us too, and our life companions want us to play them in strict accordance with their scenario, not in the way we want to play them. If the conflict between these roles becomes protracted, relationships either end or become only artificially maintained. In a similar scenario, there are conflicts between parents and children as parents write an imaginary role for children that they refuse to play.

An experienced and wise leader understands that each of his subordinates has their own drama playing in his head, with their own heroes and villains, princesses and dragons, princes and beggars. And if the manager wants to join this drama as one of the main actors, they will have to make some efforts to try and convey to the subordinate their thoughts, ideas, expectations and demands in an understandable language.

This is where the managers often interrupt me with indignant questions “Why are we the ones who have to adjust to the subordinates? They’re the ones who have to adjust to us since we’re paying them money, right? Did Steve Jobs adjust to his subordinates?”

Let’s look at this from a hypothetical point of view. You are a manager, your task is to guide the project, develop the business or launch a successful startup. You won’t do it alone, you’ll be surrounded by people who will do this project with you. However, let’s say that you are hesitant to try to build dialogues with them in a mutually-shared language, and you demand instead that they totally adapt to you. In practice, this means that by the expression in your eyes, by your short emails (and we do not like to write long messages, it is too time consuming, and therefore we reduce the text as much as possible, always to the detriment of the content and intent), and by the fragments of your phrases they are supposed to be able to perfectly recreate the picture in your head, and then translate it into reality.

The problem is that most of them are not so much unwilling as unable to do so, and their efforts to achieve your vision could turn into a nightmare. They’ll try to guess your expectations, and they’ll often be wrong about what’s causing your anger. Your anger will make them nervous, the number of guessing errors will only increase, and everything will loop in a vicious cycle.

I know what I’m talking about. I had the opportunity to work for an entrepreneur who sincerely believed that he was the only one who knew how to do business properly, but he refused to share his understanding with the team. He was sincerely convinced that his subordinates completely understood what he was looking for, and didn’t elaborate on his vision when asked to provide details. He literally would not even answer their emails. However, if the subordinates did not guess what he wanted correctly (which was usually the case), he was very good at turning their lives into a nightmare. Almost nobody worked for him for a very long time.

If you need to complete a project, develop or create a business, but you refuse to share your vision with your subordinates, you will not succeed. The same thing will happen if you share it with them, but only in a language that no one but you understands. If your pride prevents you from learning to communicate in a way that employees can understand, you are unlikely to achieve anything. Leadership is not only a status, regalia, personal secretary and high income. It is hard work, 90% of which is spent on building a dialogue with your team. If you fail at a project, fail to create or develop a business, no one will accept an explanation that your employees have refused to learn your language.

To better illustrate the problem, I will give a brief excerpt from a book on Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory. In particular, it describes the mechanism of information transfer from person to person, which I will present here in a much-simplified form.

When you think about an idea, it’s not a word in any particular language. It is a set of electronic impulses in your brain that you visualize at best as images, but not as words. It is only when you need to share your thoughts with someone that you begin to use language. Language is not an instrument of thinking, but a way of communicating. Language is nothing but a code, a way to encode a complex and multifaceted idea with words. Verbally, using words, we are only transmitting a small amount of information. Therefore, face-to-face meetings or video meetings on Skype are better than a telephone conversation or correspondence. We need to see the other person. Our communication system was invented by nature long before the invention of the phone or WhatsApp. The bad news, however, is that when we encode information from brain to word, we lose a huge layer of information. Any language system in the world is poorer than our thoughts. We feel it acutely in moments when we perceive our own inability to express in words what is happening in our souls. But even when we talk about such prosaic things as a budget or a week’s plan of events, we could stumble over the inefficiencies of our language.

So, when we put the idea into written words, we lose 50%, if not more, of the important information along the way. If we speak in person, we have the chance to compensate for the loss by adding mimics and gestures to our message, which often arise involuntarily. But if we just have a written dialogue, then we fail to fully convey all the information due to the extra effort of writing. As a result, if the person we’re communicating with understands even 30% of our information in writing, it can be considered a great success.

But that’s not the whole problem. When information reaches the ears or eyes of someone you talk to, the reverse mechanism – decoding – starts. The conversation partner translates the information received in the form of code(s) back to electronic impulses in their brain.

The problem is that as long as we use the same language, we believe that our words are decoded according to the same principles that they were encoded. But that’s not true. Each person has their own individual coding and decoding system. This system was formed in childhood, under the influence of environment, education, read (or unread) books, schools, etc. And it is not compatible with other peoples’ systems, especially those that have grown up in another environment.

As proof, I suggest you remember your arguments with the opposite sex. Did you ever get the feeling that your dialogue sometimes resembles a conversation between a Japanese and an Irishman, even though you both speak the same language? That your words are being misinterpreted and that you are unable to communicate to the other side a message that you personally think is so simple? And in disputes with someone of the same-sex, the situation is not much better. We use an extremely imperfect tool called language to communicate with others. How did we humans manage to negotiate and develop as a species?

Once during corporate training I asked top managers of a company to continue writing on a piece of paper the rest of the phrase: “A successful company is…". And the team was lively, active, and young. Then I collected the sheets of paper and wrote out the answers on a flipchart, trying to find intersections and common ideas. All employees agreed that a successful company should be financially healthy, but otherwise they totally disagreed. As a result, the motley and heterogeneous picture was an unpleasant surprise to the owner. Unfortunately, the opinions of individual employees did not add up to the overall picture in the owner’s head, but more often than not contradicted it. The owner was convinced that his subordinates’ heads somehow magically, by themselves, should have formed a picture that was completely identical to his own. But that did not happen.

The Whole World Seems to Be Made of Nails to a Person with a Hammer

During my management career, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Communication with subordinates is the task of a manager. If your subordinates don’t understand you, it’s your problem, not theirs. As someone wise once said, “The truth is not in the mouth of the speaker, the truth is in the ears of the listener.”

2. Your task (not that of your subordinates) is to convey information to them in such a way that it is understood and understood by them as fully and specifically as possible. And when talking to different subordinates, you should use different metaphors, definitions, vocabulary and terminology. It is necessary to set a task for a construction foreman and the head of a programmers’ working group in different ways.

3. Remember that other people’s heads aren’t acting in the same play as yours. These people see the world differently, they have different values, priorities and interests. They may interpret abstract concepts such as “quality”, “values”, “fairness” or “customer focus” differently. The more you use such vague notions in your dialogues with them, without specifying what you are expecting from them, the greater the chance they will misunderstand what you want, even if they nod at you vigorously.

4. Time spent explaining your position to an employee always pays off. It’s better to spend two hours explaining what you want from him or her and from the company as a whole, than to deal with the consequences of his or her misunderstanding. That’s why I’ve always loved to go on business trips with my staff. You have plenty of time to talk on the road and you have a chance to better synchronize their vision with yours.

5. If possible, never only use written means of communication, i.e. messages and letters, to discuss important things. Find a way to communicate in person. Use the written form then as a a confirmation and reinforcement of the discussion.

6. If you are faced with a subordinate’s misunderstanding, pause before you get angry with them. Remember it’s your own fault. Think about what went wrong and how you can avoid similar problems in the future.

7. If a subordinate truly does not understand you, and all your attempts to establish a dialogue with them are in vain, it is better to let them go. Your processing systems are too different, and the cost to build a working dialogue is too great. Firing them is actually better for both of you.

Chapter 5. Human Management Is a Profession

In order to learn how to fix electrical appliances, a person needs at least one year of special education. It would be nice to have a basic technical education, at least a secondary one.

Doctors are allowed to perform operations only after years of practice as assistants. In the United States, a psychoanalyst is not eligible for private practice until he or she has worked in the profession for at least ten years. If you start operating on or treating the human psyche without proper authorization, you will be punished in strict accordance with the law. Driving a modern car with an automatic transmission, especially in a country with quiet, law-abiding traffic and without snowfalls, can be learned by a youngster. But in order to drive without breaking the law, you need to be trained and pass an exam.

But there are two things in the world that for some reason can be done legally without any training and experience: giving birth to children and managing others. The birth of children is outside the framework of this book, but we are very interested in the management of people. Of course, few people hire other people who have no experience in high-ranking positions, but legally it is quite acceptable. There is no law in the world that would prohibit you from taking charge of a company, even if you were only in charge of yourself before, and not too successfully. Especially if they are the owner of this company.

For some reason, it is believed that the art of managing people is learned by itself, that if a person sat for many years in a comfortable leather armchair in a separate office, it made them a wise and experienced leader. Alas, the manager is a profession that needs to be mastered separately and purposefully. That is true for the owner of the business, too.

However, the entire education system in most countries is aimed at producing specialists rather than managers. At schools and universities, we are given awards for individual achievements, not for our abilities to work well in team efforts. An egocentric or introverted person may receive a gold award at the school, but if they make a career to become a boss their future subordinates could indeed be unlucky.

Business schools, as much as they can, try to fix this by focusing on group work and case study. But how much, objectively speaking, can such group work teach you? Owners and directors of different companies sit around the same table and decide cases together, but tomorrow they will return to their offices, where they will be alone with their subordinates, in real life. I have two degrees in business, but it was my own experience – reading books on psychology and natural observation – that gave me more insight into people management than those schools, although a formal education was extremely useful.

If a person who had previously worked happily as an ordinary subordinate is suddenly promoted to a senior management position, even if he or she leads only one subordinate, their life changes suddenly, and will never be the same again. And, except for the larger paycheck, it might change for the worse.

Previously they were only responsible for the results of their own work, and the burden of bigger decision-making rested on their boss’ shoulders. Now the results of the project depend to a great degree on the work of their subordinates. Do they possess the skills to motivate their subordinates? Should they force their subordinates to do it? They may not listen. Scream at their subordinates? They’ll quit. Threaten to get them fired? That could be worse for everyone.

Perhaps the recently promoted worker had naively believed that the boss was the one who, after a good night’s sleep, gave instructions to their subordinates and merely shouted at them from time to time so as not to relax them. In reality, it is the subordinates who come to the office cheerful and having slept well, and greet their wrinkled and gloomy boss who, after a sleepless night, sits drinking coffee in their office. They didn’t sleep well because although the subordinates may work on the project, they would in fact be responsible for its results. As a subordinate, he or she only supervised the work of their own hands and head. But now they have to command other people’s hands and heads, while having no education in how to do so.

When I myself had just started climbing the career ladder, it seemed to me that the CEO was the freest man in the company. But when, ten years later, I finally sat down in the director’s chair, I felt like I had been a victim of an illusion for many years. It turned out that not only does a supervisor depend on their subordinates, but the subordinates depend greatly on their supervisor. And the more subordinates there are, the less chance the director has of influencing each of them personally. In a large company, a director does not have a chance to meet each of his or her subordinates face to face, but any one of these subordinates could suddenly turn the life of the director upside down if he or she sticks their hand into a machine, sells confidential data to competitors, or simply fails to implement a sales plan.

Contrary to stereotypes, a manager depends more on subordinates than on upper management. Entrepreneurs, strictly speaking, have no supervisors at all, but they are also acutely dependent on their employees, especially when their companies have a management hierarchy, and they cease to control each employee personally. Achieving maximum efficiency, dedication, loyalty and honesty from subordinates is extremely difficult, because many subordinates do not think it is fair that you sit in the office and earn more than they do. They don’t think it’s because you worked harder and risked more than they did. They think you’re just lucky and they’re not.

Most managers lack only one thing to successfully manage people: the ability to look at subordinates not as functioning machines, but as a community of people different from themselves. Many entrepreneurs are egocentrics and visionaries, which is very useful for a successful business. Therefore, it is difficult for them to think about some things other than themselves and their ideas. However, they will have to try to make themselves understood at least by their immediate subordinates. To start, you can answer a few simple questions about each of your direct subordinates:

1. Who is he or she? What kind of person are they? What are their main character traits? What is their life situation? How does this get in the way or help the job?

2. What are his or her strengths and weaknesses? What prevents them from being successful and what helps them to achieve success?

3. What kind of tasks does he or she cope with successfully and what kind of problems are they unable to cope with, or only cope with great difficulty?

4. What kind of behavioral strategy do I have to adopt in relation to him or her? Does the employee fit in with their position? Should I send them for extra training? Which tasks should they be assigned and which should they not be assigned? Are they ready to work in a team, and if they are not ready, how much of a hindrance is it to the overall work?

The ability to understand people is the primary skill of any manager. And the path to excellence in this area begins with regular exercises to observe staff members and try to get beyond their words and into their motivations, fears and expectations. People rarely say what they think. More often they say what they think they should say, or what they think you want to hear. Jeremy P. Shapiro, a human resources theorist, said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.” He was referring to human resource metrics, but it’s also true for people. You can only control something (or someone) if you understand how it (or they) works.

People rarely say what they think. More often they say what they think they should say.

In the book “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy, one of the world’s most acclaimed CEOs, the author says a manager should spend up to 70–80% of their time talking to their subordinates. If they joined this company recently, it should be up to 90%. And not just during formal meetings; chatting over coffee or during lunch can be equally valuable.

The importance of communication cannot be overestimated. You do two important things in the course of communication. First, you communicate your expectations, goals, objectives, requirements and guidelines to your subordinates, and this is very important for them because it reduces their anxiety and increases their productivity. We will talk about this later. Second, you listen, and therefore you understand them better. Only in the course of a quiet conversation can a subordinate relax and begin to speak out loud about his or her difficulties, problems, ideas and views. Like a marriage, business is the union of people working together for the sake of common professional interests and requires daily work to synchronize goals, expectations, ideas and points of view. And there is no better way to do that than talking. Leave emails and messages in messengers to discuss simple technical tasks. If you’re the boss, your main tools are ears and language. And ears are the most important.

Read books and articles on psychology

I once read the idea that a manager does not need to read business books at all, he or she needs to read fiction instead. The idea is probably too radical, although there is some common sense in it. In business literature and business periodicals you won’t find many answers to the question of how to understand subordinates and to distinguish, by the use of their words, beneath the layers of their masks, their true motives and aspirations. The best way to do that is through psychological literature. I am referring to serious works, not just books on personal growth.

A good leader must have a strong personality. But this alone is not enough. Contrary to the stereotype that employees must understand the motivations of their supervisor, the supervisor, in fact, must constantly learn to understand the hidden motives of subordinates (and people always hide them, even if they are very noble motives), and be able to talk to them in the same language. If it is boring to read psychological literature, read fiction, but not just as entertainment. Analyze the motives of the heroes and try to understand them. Think how you would build a relationship with them when you meet them in real life.

A man burdened with his own mental health problems, who has not found himself, who is captive to his own fears and doubts, will not be able to be a good leader. A good leader thinks more about others than about himself, but a person who is crushed by inner fear or phobias, has all of their thoughts directed inward. So, if you have a lot of unresolved internal problems, try to solve them. The path to a solution is often complex and always unique to the individual, but I have seen that many managers are well helped by passing a career skills analysis at an assessment center, which can be done in any city, and at least a few conversations with a professional coach. You will better evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, which is very important for a leader. A leader must understand who they are, and not fight with their shortcomings, but develop their virtues. If you have a weakness, find yourself an assistant for whom it will be a strength. For example, if you don’t like to deal with numbers, find yourself an assistant for whom numbers will cause pure delight, and trust their calculations. Don’t forget to think about your strengths, not only in terms of how they can be developed for the sake of your own growth, but also for the sake of increasing the efficiency of your work with your team.

Raising children is an excellent management school. Therefore, in particular, I never tried to take childless staff to top management positions. Children are subordinates who cannot be fired and cannot be punished too severely. In many cases, however, you want them to do what you expect them to do – what you think is right. At the same time, limited leverage over these “subordinates” significantly complicates the management task. We will talk about the similarity of managing people and raising children in a separate chapter, but we will only point out that you can learn a lot from your parental experience. Note which techniques work and which do not. Also, hire experienced parents for senior positions.

The higher you get, the more important your management skills are

The higher an individual ascends the career ladder, the less his or her professional skills play a role, and the more important their managerial skills are. You can be an average financier, but a great financial director. You don’t have to memorize all the diameters of the nuts used in the shop floor, but you can be an effective production director. It’s not a benefit if you’re the only one who knows how to do the work of your department. Your department will work as fast as you can to think about all the problems and make all the decisions, that is, at a slow speed. What you are able to accomplish is limited by the 24 hours that are in a day. Wouldn’t it be better to hire subordinates who are superior to you in some way? Then they’ll do some of the work themselves, and often better than you would. The result is the main goal.

Steve Jobs said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do!”

The “Head-and-Hands” System

Unfortunately, not many people think that way. Many of the people who formally occupy managerial positions are, in fact, highly paid professionals. They don’t have basic human management skills. In reality, their departments are theatres starring one actor, led by fiery professionals, surrounded by sluggish, inactive and faithful vassals with medium abilities, blindly devoted to leadership. Such “directors” build a system of “head-and-hands”, in which they assign themselves the role of a thinking center, and subordinates are nothing but executive adjutants.

To see if you have this type of manager in your company, walk around the office after 6:00 p.m. If you see bosses sitting down, finally, to work, when their subordinates long ago went home, then you know it’s this type of manager, that is, an inefficient manager. If you do this yourself, you are an inefficient manager, unfortunately.

I have been thinking a lot about why leaders, instead of providing themselves with a comfortable existence and making their subordinates work (which is their true job function), work hard on their own, destroying their own health, family harmony and self-esteem. And why did I myself do that some time ago? I came to the following conclusions:

1. The system of upbringing and then school and university education are too focused on individual, not team, results. “I don’t care what grades the other kids get, it’s important to me that you get an A again!” And it’s firmly embedded in us. Many leaders still try to please their symbolic “fathers” (their bosses), and diligently “fill in the form”, counting on an award and individual praise. They try to work harder so that the leadership will appreciate their diligence. However, an effective leader is not the one who works the hardest, but the one who achieves the best results.

2. The KPI (Key Performance Indicators) system in many companies is also structured in such a way as to encourage personal achievements rather than those of departments or services.

3. Managing other people is hard. These are scary, incomprehensible, unpredictable creatures, with their own secret thoughts, motives and desires. It is tempting to avoid the challenge of mastering the art of this difficult science by trying to do everything by ourselves, not realizing that we’re doing irreparable damage to our company in this way. We often don’t even think that in the end our entire department, or more broadly our entire company, is working at the top speed of our individual ability to process information and make decisions, but not faster. And that if other people had been involved in this process, the final result would have been better, and would have come sooner.

4. Such leaders are deeply proud of their hard work, boosting their own self-esteem with their late night vigils in the office. They feel that their value in the eyes of others grows in proportion to the hours spent at work. In one of our consulting projects, a CFO, at every opportunity, as if by chance, emphasized how much she worked. “I was working on this document until 1:00 a.m.” At the same time, she had a whole brood of cheerful employees, leading a busy life during working hours, dedicated to the discussion of gossip and Instagram feeds.

5. If the leaders are not sure of themselves, they have the syndrome of “liar’s manager” (I refer those interested to the book “The Leader on the Couch. Clinical Approach to Changing people and Organizations” by Manfred Kets de Vries). They feel they don’t really deserve their position and their salary. It’s common for educated people in general, and we try to hire such people in leadership positions. As a consequence, subconsciously, these leaders recruit their subordinates knowingly weaker than themselves, so as not to create competition for themselves.

Did you recognize yourself in one of these descriptions? If so, it’s time to rethink your priorities. If you do the work of your subordinates, you risk your career, success and, first of all, your reputation. As one of my very first managers taught me, if you fail because you didn’t task your subordinates enough and get fired, your subordinates won’t compensate you for your material losses as a sign of gratitude for taking care of them. If you fail in your business or career because you have worked too hard on your own and provided too few challenges for your employees, your employees will not appreciate it, they will shrug their shoulders and forget about you faster than you do about them.

But that’s not enough. If you want to be an effective leader, it’s important that you don’t just become one. It is necessary that all managers, both under your direct and indirect supervision, are also effective leaders, otherwise your entire business will resemble a large heavy barge, which is pulled by two or three enthusiasts.

If you see that your subordinate walks with bags under his or her eyes, exhausted and overburdened, unable to meet deadlines and trying to hide their eyes that are twitching from the stress, do not be in a hurry to show compassion. That’s exactly what they expect you to do. They are already prepared a space on their shelf for the award they’re certain you’re going to give them. And with compassion, they expect you to absolve them of all their sins, like how the project is behind schedule despite how hard they’ve worked! But a truly professional and responsible manager does not plan to die at work. He or she adequately evaluates the qualifications and motivation of their subordinates, motivates the weak, dismisses the lazy, distributes the work according to the situation, and organizes and inspires. And if there are not enough resources (it happens, but less often than it seems), they look for a way to solve the problem differently: for example, to transfer a part of the work to outsourcing, or discusses the allocation of additional funds or people with management. They realize that life in the heroic mode can last a couple of weeks, after which the productivity of the employees could be zero. Their goal ­is to solve the tasks that have been set, keeping the employees in a mission-capable mode.

How to make managers recruit full, active, self-motivated subordinates and then develop them? I don’t know a better way to proceed than the next sequence of actions:

1. Global staff assessment by HR department and, possibly, external specialists. You may know your subordinates well, but you probably don’t know the subordinates working for them further down the employee chain.

2. Based on the assessment, department heads, together with HR, should draw up plans for change. Someone may need to be let go. Sometimes it’s the leader himself. Someone, including, of course, the manager himself, needs to extend his learning and development. Move someone to a different position, entrust them with a task they would be able and happy to perform. It’s all very expensive, the entrepreneurs will exclaim. Yeah, it’s not cheap. But it’s a necessary expense to increase the efficiency of your work.

3. The result of the development program is obligatory certification to ensure that the employee has really learned something. And if the results of certification in the department are terrible, do not hurry to dismiss employees, start with the head. If he didn’t pay enough attention to the development of his subordinates, why do you need him?

I once read about a very important rule that I had the opportunity to experience myself during my management career: class A managers hire class A subordinates; class B managers hire class C subordinates. If you go into a department and see the employees there that are energetic, cheerful, lively and happy, then the head of this department is in their proper place. But if you see sluggish, inactive subordinates in the department, always ready to explain why the tasks they face are impossible, gently escort the head of this department out the door and wish them all the best.

Human management skills can be developed and learned. There are various courses and training for this purpose, including mine. But the main thing in this training (as, by the way, in any other) is to take on the role of a student. If you or your subordinate believes that you have nothing to learn, that you are practically a teacher, even Marshall Goldsmith himself will not teach you anything. But if you think you always have something to learn, you will find useful information in any educational course.

Chapter 6. A Shareholder Is Also A Profession

Any sensible business owner understands that to have a successful business it is important that the company employ a professional staff, from the CEO to the loader driver. But not all owners think that they, too, should be professionals, and not necessarily in finance, marketing or production. They must be professionals in business management from the position of creator and owner (or co-owner).

Many owners in Eastern European countries have set up a business without knowing or learning anything about it, with pure enthusiasm, energy and will. Some of them have succeeded and made a mistake in concluding that education is useless. Of course, their vast experience has made them wiser and smarter. But the growth of professional competency in business management from the standpoint of the owner requires conscious intellectual efforts and purposeful actions, not just life experience. Ownership is a profession that requires a separate book or course like mine. Let me summarize the main points in this chapter in a concise manner.

To begin with, the entrepreneur should determine what role they want to play in the business. An entrepreneur can be a CEO of the company, an inspirer of ideas, an integrator or a silent investor. The CEO de facto manages all processes, from budgeting to strategy. The inspirer of the idea is more focused on marketing, they are in a constant search for new ideas for development, transferring daily management to operational managers. The integrator passes on the strategic and operational management responsibilities to managers, leaving only the task of maintaining the right spirit in the team, ensuring continuity, following the mission and established values, and preserving the corporate spirit, he or she can serve as a living symbol for employees. Finally, the silent investor fully transfers management to the board of directors, leaving mainly the control functions to himself.

The worst role possible is the role of a leader who suffers the so-called seagull syndrome. The leader of such a company pretends to depart from operational management, and even hires managers with administrative skills who can bring order to the chaos they created. But in fact, he or she, like a stubborn seagull, bursts into the office from time to time without warning, and, flying through the corridors and offices, stuns employees with their sarcastic comments in a style like, “no one here wants to work, everyone in the offices just sits on their ass! I would never let it be like that.” Then just as suddenly they disappear, leaving behind despondency and demotivation but not making the company any more effective.

Let’s get back to the roles. The owner must determine what role they need to play in the life of the company. Similarly, the owner must be very clear and unambiguous about what roles he or she will not play. And the list of such roles should also be published and internally accepted. Internal acceptance is the most difficult part in this case. After all, when we consciously give up any role, we must accept the idea that, since this role is important to the company, it must be played by someone else. And that someone else should have everything they need to do it.

Both list of roles to be accepted and list of roles to be rejected must be written. Keeping it in one’s head doesn’t count. Only a written list, printed out, will be useful. The best way to write a list is by hand, not by typing. Scientists have proven that handwritten text is about 10 times more memorable than typed on a keyboard.

Create a grid, and in each cell corresponding to the role you want to play, and the one you plan to reject, write down exactly which personal qualities will allow you to perform some of the intended roles, and which personal qualities make you reject others. How can you be sure that you will be able to deal effectively with, for example, strategic development? Why don’t you see yourself as the CEO? I would recommend that you discuss this list with your mentor. And if you don’t have one, I recommend you find one.

After the list of roles has been drawn up, we need to:

1. Draw up a list of job responsibilities based on what you plan to perform and what you plan to reject;

2. Think about whether you have all the skills you need to perform the functions you have assigned yourself. If you do not have enough competency in the skills you need, make a personal plan to get them;

3. Think about what information you need to do your job and which employees you will involve. Will these employees do anything else in the company, or will you use them for a full workday?

4. Who will perform the functions that you have marked as “not your own”? Are there appropriate people in the company? Do they have relevant competencies, abilities, knowledge, personal skills? If not, how, where and when to get these people?

5. What can you do so that you draw a clear path to passing the responsibilities you want to pass to others and leave everything you want for yourself? Should you issue an order? How would this be best done in your company environment?

6. How to build a mechanism of remote control, without constant intervention, over processes and results that you do not plan to deal with personally? After all, the company is still yours, and even if you let go of the reins of power, the reins of control should still be there. How to better build control? How often to get reports, and from whom? Remember that to make subordinates report to you personally every day is not “to let go of the reins of power”. Do not lie to yourself. Make sure you receive your reports regularly, but not more than once a month, for example. Otherwise employees will never believe that you really don’t want to deal with these issues. And if they don’t, they’ll never start doing it themselves.

7. Make a habit of not interfering with the situation, even if the first report already differs from the expected one, otherwise you will spend the rest of your life personally dealing with these issues. Give people a chance to fix the problem. And if they don’t fix it, don’t fix it for them, just take care of the people. Why can’t they succeed by themselves? What are they missing? Is it possible that they might have to be replaced?

8. Marshall Goldsmith claims to have an employee who calls him every night and to whom he has to report whether he did what he was supposed to do during the workday and whether he did what he chose not to do. It increases his self-discipline during the day. Let your mentor ask you from time to time (preferably from a checklist) if you have violated the boundaries of personal responsibility and authority that you were supposed to have given up?

9. Be prepared to violate these boundaries in the event of a real crisis, internal or external, but only until the crisis has passed. And work not only on dealing with the consequences of the crisis, but also on how to make the system work again independent of you when the crisis is over.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a living person, too. This means that not only will you be happier and more relaxed, but you will also be much more effective if you do what you do well and what you really love. If your business is successful and does not experience a great lack of funds, then for all the other tasks you can always hire brilliant professionals who will perform them better than you, which will be better for you, and for them, and for the business. Don’t forget about the control, but do not allocate more time for it than necessary.

Chapter 7. Employees as Fellow Travelers

The main reason for the breakdown of most marriages is the different expectations each spouse has when they enter into the marriage. The decision to marry (or to live together) is often made at the euphoric stage of a relationship, when we are overwhelmed by feelings and all small differences of opinion seem easily surmountable. The reality, however, is that we bring different attitudes and expectations into marriage, and in the long run it is the difference in expectations that destroys the most beautiful, easy and promising relationship.

Marriages between young people break up more often than those of older adults. The secret is that older people are more comfortable with their own expectations and are more willing to be flexible. They simply understand intuitively or consciously that their own expectations are better communicated aloud as early as possible. If you’re not happy with something, you don’t have to create a huge fight, or, conversely, tolerate it in silence until there’s an explosion. It is better to sit down and talk about the difference in expectations, and try to find a compromise, if possible without fights and hysteria. If both sides have the wisdom to discuss their expectations calmly, they spend less time cursing and more time having fun.

Alliances between supervisors and subordinates are also a sort of marriage. We may not share a household or sleep in the same bed with our subordinates, but in reality, we spend more time with them than with our spouses and children. A supervisor and a subordinate should therefore talk to each other as often as possible and discuss their expectations in an open and sincere manner to strengthen their working relationship.

Offense has no room in business

During my career as CEO, I have resigned several times on my own initiative. In at least two cases, I made this decision because I realized that the relationship between me and the shareholders became far too complicated. We are all human beings, and no matter how professional we are at work, there is mutual understanding, shared values, a relative unity of approach and strategy at least. When it seemed to me that such an understanding was disappearing, I always thought it was best to leave, so as not to continue a painful and counterproductive relationship. At the same time, considering the fact that I have always tried to leave in a professional manner, it seemed to me that I was also taking a burden off of my employers. I expected them to thank me deep down for not having to prepare for a difficult conversation with me, explain their decision, etc. What do I usually read in their eyes, hear in their words and voice instead? Nothing but offence.

What’s an offence? It’s a disappointment. You were expecting a new bike under the Christmas tree only to find a boring book there. Everybody’s been invited to the school party except for you. Your own mother supports your spouse in a family dispute. Kids dream of going to Grandma’s for the weekend, not staying with us. The offence is always very personal. The offence tends to swell and grow in our souls, devouring us from the inside.

It’s an offence to the souls of entrepreneurs and managers at other levels when their subordinates suddenly quit – and after all we’ve done for them! And in return they’ve failed to meet our expectations, conspired against us, formed alliances or behaved in a way that seems unfair to us. If you look at it with the cold detachment of an outside observer, it looks ridiculous. Adults spend a lot of time formalizing their relationships – writing job descriptions, drawing organizational structures, formalizing plans, inventing KPIs – and all this still fails to prevent us from sulking at each other like small children.

If you are a leader, and especially if you are an entrepreneur and you feel now or have recently felt offended by subordinates, you urgently need to change your inner attitude. You have come to this “marriage” with wrong expectations, and if you do not change them immediately, you will not ever see any success or satisfaction from work.

All employees are fellow travelers

Imagine a train. Would it occur to the conductors to resent some of the passengers for not driving with them to the final station? Will they be upset that almost none of them are interested in the conductors’ names and life goals? Will the conductors be saddened by the fact that all of the passengers used them for their own purposes, and once the passengers arrive at their station they immediately leave, forgetting about the conductors forever? They haven’t spent much time together, have they? They were completing a project together: going from Point A to Point B. They depended on each other: the passengers relied entirely on the conductors’ experience and knowledge, and the conductors hoped that the passengers would all buy tickets and not break the seats or doors. And then suddenly, at the end of the project, the passengers went out at their station, and didn’t even take the conductors’ phone numbers to congratulate them on Railroad Worker’s Day.

Many years ago, I was the head of a plant in the Moscow region. I was young, most of my employees were older than me. I thought I had a good relationship with them, based on mutual respect, and I created comfortable working conditions for them whenever possible. But then my shareholders bought the premises a hundred kilometers away from the previous one and announced the relocation of the plant. It was obvious that the old employees would have to be fired as it was unthinkable to commute 3–4 hours to the plant and back. The moment came when it became clear that most of them would leave the company within a month or two. I was displeased by the changed attitude of my employees towards me, even my direct subordinates, with whom I thought we were connected not only by professional ties, but also by personal sympathy. There was no trace of yesterday’s warmth, they bargained coldly and harshly for the financial conditions of termination of their employment, clearly understanding that the force was on their side. Many of them left before the move, which put me in a very difficult position, because I counted on their help in moving, for some reasonable compensation in return for my investment in them. But none of them thought about my difficulties, and had no sympathy. They tried to solve their own problems, not mine. Almost nobody wished me luck in the new place and said goodbye to me, saying, “It was great working together!” Moreover, many of them openly accused me, as a representative of the company, of having made it very difficult for them to live their lives, depriving them of a comfortable and well-paid job near their homes.

My feelings at that moment can only be attributed to my inexperience, both in life and in the professional world. Why did I actually think these people would put the problems of the company they were just working for ahead of their own? Why should they make concessions in a situation where they are de facto fired, with unclear job prospects? Why should they be sympathetic to me, because I, unlike them, kept my job? That’s what any employee in any company would do if it happened to them. In fact, the employees of the company are your temporary companions. These are the fellow travelers on the train, and somewhere in the future there is a station where they will get off. Maybe it’s not going to be a long journey, maybe you’ll find exciting tasks and great teamwork along the way. But sooner or later, you’ll have their resignations on your desk. And it’s possible that you yourself may insist on their resignation.

Some entrepreneurs who build open, trustworthy, even friendly relationships in their companies may disagree with me at this point. But in general, the only difference is whether you let your employees into your “Captain’s Bridge”, into your driver’s cabin, whether you let them drive, or whether they sit in the car in silence. The train is still yours, and the staff are the passengers who will get off sooner or later. You can spend wonderful years together, fighting against failures and achieving great heights of success, but most of them are still with you only for a while.

And don’t be deceived: their first concern is to solve their personal problems, not yours, at least as long as they remain hired employees. Yes, your strategic interests may coincide for a while and sometimes for a long time, but they will always be fundamentally different. If you are a shareholder, you will care about the value of the company and their own value in the labor market. In management theory, this is called an “agency problem” and no effective way to overcome it has been invented yet. At some point, your interests will cease to coincide, and you will part. I’ve had to lose a lot of employees, and I’ve put a lot of effort into the relationship with them. Most of the time, they left at a bad time. And in general, if an employee is valuable and important to the company, there isn’t really a “good time” for them to leave. At first, I was very upset until I realized that investing my energy in people without preparing “Plan B” in advance was nobody’s mistake but my own personal managerial mistake.

Losing an employee does not necessarily mean a conflict. Today, the employee is enthusiastic about his or her work, and tomorrow he or she remarries and moves to a new location. Emigrating abroad. Leaving to look for his or her way of life on Goa beach. Becoming pious. Tired and burned out. Many parents change their life priorities dramatically after the birth of their first child – from now on, children play a major role in their lives, and who will blame them for that?

Does this mean that we should not invest in building a climate of compassion in our relationships with our employees? No, we still should. Companies of the future will be less and less like military barracks, and instead be teams of people who trust each other more or less. The trend is obvious – the entrepreneur, the director, must be more and more an integrator and less a boss.

But no matter how cynical it may seem at first glance, you must always keep in mind that such a carefully built relationship can end at any time, and be ready for it. If any of your company’s teams have a bright leader who is achieving results – encourage him or her in every way, help them, talk to them, support them. But, at the same time, be careful to ensure that you grow their potential replacement, the future leaders, even if they are not yet experienced. Build the system in such a way that each employee feels like a significant person, but reduce the importance of each individual in the company’s overall dependence.