Behaviour

As we enter December, expecting employees to be interested in doing things differently is unreasonable. Naturally, they want the business of the year to end well. But most are on a fixed track, focusing on their performance metrics and hoping for the best. Leaders are in limbo between 2025 business plan approval and deciding what to say about the future at the year-end party. Expect to hear ‘Agility’ more often in discussions.

This is the time of year when companies are finishing their budget processes. Leaders and senior managers have signed up to ambitious targets for 2025, and many will quietly be wondering how they will deliver on them. Mid-junior managers and staff will almost certainly have no idea what is coming down the pipeline: they’re hanging on for the year-end party! Humans tend to repeat the approaches we know.

The modern workplace is dominated by a managerialist approach prioritising efficiency, control, and standardisation over genuine leadership. While you may think it has value, the trend creates significant barriers to success in our increasingly chaotic world. You only have to look at global politics, national institutions, and the business world to see the impact of a paucity of leadership at every level.

Have you ever contacted a Customer Service department as a customer of one of the many companies that claim to provide a service? If you have, I’m willing to bet that one of the first messages you received was, “We apologise as we are very busy at the moment?”. “Busy doing what?” But your work is the customer, and your daily duty is only to sort out the problems your company has caused, so you must be able to do that.

Managers often know when things aren’t going well with their team members. They may encounter expressions of defeat or hopelessness, like "What’s the point?" More often, it’s evident not in what staff say but in what they do. In many well-established cultures that seem okay from the top down, we often encounter a psychological condition known as Learned Helplessness in the middle ranks.

When brand values are being set out, so many cliché words tend to be used. Trust, Innovation, Professionalism and Integrity are probably the most frequent ones. But if an organisation isn’t trustworthy, innovative, professional and has integrity, customers and employees should avoid it anyway. Another word which is being increasingly overused is Empathy: ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’.