Dinosaur leaders seen off by being out of step

ALSO: Microsoft says we're living an infinite workday

You might vaguely remember the headlines last year when Seb James, the CEO of Boots announced that working in the office was proving so ‘fun and inspiring’ that he’d decided to give an inflation busting fun rise to all employees. Boots office employees would be back in the office five days a week by the the end of the summer.

James, friends with both Boris Johnson and David Cameron through his membership of the Bullingdon Club, and whose £3.8m salary clocked up somewhere in the region of 110 times the average wage of his employees was gifting workers 66% more fun.

In an unforeseen turn of events James tenure at Boots came to an end before the year was out. He cancelled the proposed sale of the company and declared he was leaving the firm.

His legacy was to leave unappreciated, his outgoing approval rating on Glassdoor was 66% with several ungrateful reviews mentioning a ‘toxic company culture’.

But there’s some interesting synchronicity with another story from the last two weeks. Earlier this year Mark Read, the boss of advertising giant WPP, gave his employees a New Year surprise by announcing they’d be going back into the office four days a week from the spring.

When the news broke I spoke to managers at the firm who told me that the policy had felt unnecessary and had created chaos with employees. Reports spilled into the media of employees starting a petition against the changes and expressing open rebellion against the policy. Two weeks ago it was announced that Mark Read, like Seb James before him, was leaving his organisation.

The laboured inference that I suppose I’m making is that senior leaders don’t exist in a vacuum. Our power as leaders depends, not just on our position of authority, but on our earned respect inside the organisation.

It’s the reason why announcing RTO policies that seem out of touch with the lived experience of employees contributes to CEOs losing the dressing room.

Both Boots and WPP were already struggling, and reporting challenging business conditions. Both told their organisations they needed to evolve, but it’s hard to take an organisation with you when you appear out of touch from the realities of working there.

This is the same reason why a growing CEO pay gap serves to drive a wedge between workers and their bosses. In one academic study it was found that a bigger CEO pay gap had the impact of reducing how employees perceived the charisma of bosses. This week the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust published CEO paygap stats that say the average FT350 CEO is earning 71 times the pay of their average employee. At WPP Mark Read was on one hand telling the teams that conditions were hard and he needed them back in the office, and on the other was earning £4.5m in 2023. (He didn’t publish his salary for 2024).

We can overthink culture but it often comes down to a sense of whether we feel part of something. If we perceive that we’re all in it together with leaders and colleagues we tend to work harder and strive to achieve more. We take collective pride in what we’re doing with coworkers.

Professor Alex Haslam’s work on this is essential (and there are some dazzling talks by him on YouTube). Haslam says that we often overlook that leaders’ power comes from the respect in which they are held by their teams.

Showing your teams that you don’t understand what they’re going through is a sure way to signal that you’re not the right person to lead them through change.

Going forwards, culture is all we’ve got

Last week Sam Altman published a blog post about the implications of ubiquitous AI. It’s worth checking out (although as ever, the main rule applies that Ryan Broderick’s take is the one worth reading). Altman describes a world of plenty:

In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else.

But he critically settles on a pivotal point, that in a world where yes (in Microsoft’s words') ‘intelligence is on tap’ the discriminating point of difference is what human’s layer on top:

We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world. It will be extremely personalised and easy for everyone to use; we will be limited by good ideas. For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun.

Yes, great news for ‘the idea guys’. But for most firms the defining point of difference isn’t going to be their tech, it’s the culture (and ideas) they build around it. In a world of abundance the human layer is the only advantage we’ve got left.

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Wishing GMB well with their new slogan.

• Microsoft says we’re living an ‘infinite workday’ with no start or finish. The average workers receives 117 emails and 153 messages every day leaving only 2 minutes on average between interruptions. It means that 29% of workers find themselves doing emails in the evenings, and a fifth dive in at weekends

• The CEO of BT said AI will allow them to strip out more than 40,000 jobs by 2030

• Amazon boss Andy Jassy says that AI means that the firm ‘will need fewer people doing the jobs being done today’

• City firms have turned the screw on homeworking, reflecting the 15.1% of UK firms who have increased the number of mandatory days in the office

• This AI & work summary post by Ethan Mollick sat in my inbox for over a week (I’m an inbox zero guy) before I went through it. It goes line-by-line through the research into AI at work: it halves the time spent on a lot of tasks, it triples productivity, it’s transforming analysis. But these gains are not being captured by organisations yet. Mollick advocates for organisations creating The Lab, a collective learning endeavour to tap into how AI is developing. I think this whole post is worth teams reading together

• Similarly I enjoyed seeing how Neil Perkin uses ChatGPT to help with his project work - I use it in a very similar way but it’s fascinating to compare notes. More of this is needed

• Professional services giant PwC released an AI jobs report that said that workers with AI experience will command 56% wage premium over colleagues in the same job without it and that AI is driving wage growth in exposed industries

• A university worker was fired after filing a timesheet for 5 hours, but her computer login suggested she’d worked for 11 minutes. Sounds like she’s suited to a career in consulting