TOP 1000/OPINION:SOMETHING ELSE to worry about – when business is bad, your best people get twitchy. They struggle. They start looking round for something better to do.
“Clever, creative people want to go to work and have fun,” says Professor Gareth Jones, a fellow of
the centre for management development at London Business School (LBS). “They don’t like
gloomy workplaces.”
We have heard enough for one lifetime about the “war for talent”, but this doesn’t mean leaders can
ignore who is on their team. Last month, I went to a seminar hosted by the Corporate Research Forum which, thankfully, injected new life into that increasingly tired debate over talent, knowledge workers and the rest of it. It is time to reframe this debate.
What we should be thinking about, you see, are clever people. Clever is a slippery word. It is never
a good idea to be thought “too clever by half”. Many people are told at some stage in their lives that “you are not as clever as you think you are”. But clever people are important.
They create “disproportionate value”, in the words of Jones and his colleague, Rob Goffee, professor of organisational behaviour at LBS. The Jones/Goffee double act had its first big hit over 10 years ago, with the publication of The Character of a Corporation, an insightful analysis of
corporate culture. They followed up a few years later with the provocatively titled Why Should Anyone be Led by You?, an original (and subversive) book on leadership.
Later this year, they will publish Clever – Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People, and last month’s seminar, run by the authors, offered a sample of some of the ideas explored
at greater length in the book. Who are these clever people?
They work in research and development (R&D) for pharmaceutical businesses, they
develop new computer games for software companies, they are partners (or rising stars) in
professional service firms, they are mechanics and designers in Formula One. But clever people are not all earning huge money in the private sector.
Some are also working in intensive care in children’s hospitals or curating exhibitions in museums.
What are they like and why are clever people difficult to lead and manage? Having researched the
subject, Jones and Goffee have come up with a 10-point checklist for managers:
1. Cleverness is central to their identity. They take negative feedback badly.
2. Their skills are not easily replicated. Not many people can do what they do.
3. They know their worth.
4. They ask difficult questions.
5. They are organisationally savvy. Their projects will get funded.
6. They are not impressed by corporate hierarchy. Job titles don’t mean much to them; status does.
7. They expect instant access to the chief executive. If they don’t get it they may lose interest, slipping rapidly from obsession with their work to indifference.
8. They are well connected both inside and outside the organisation.
9. They have a low boredom threshold.
10. They won’t thank you. They do not feel they need to be led. But there is also good (and slightly less daunting) news for business leaders. Clever people need organisations.
Their work usually involves complex tasks that are performed in a team setting. They want “a high degree of organisational protection”, Goffee and Jones say. And they are more effective when
they are well led. Who is good at leading clever people? Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of global marketing services group WPP, gets the professorial thumbs up.
He has a lot of powerful creatives to deal with. In conversation with the authors, he downplays the big impact he makes on colleagues: “I’m a boring little micro-managing, number-crunching accountant.”
Too modest. In reality, Sorrell constantly reminds his people that he is running a creative business. WPP’s boss enforces commercial discipline, offering the tough love of a benevolent guardian. He also uses reverse psychology: “If you want them to turn left, tell them to turn right.”
Do we risk over-estimating the importance of cleverness at work? Famously, the clever people at Enron were “the smartest guys in the room”. Fred Hilmer, now vice chancellor of the university of New South Wales in Australia, but previously a McKinsey partner, business school dean and chief executive of the Fairfax media group, says that while you need some clever people, organisations with lots of them can go wrong fast.
The global banking crisis would seem to bear this out. Still, you need to hold on to your cleverest people, especially at a time like this. Try to create the right amount (neither too much nor too little) of sociability and solidarity within your organisation.
Where do clever people flourish? "In complicated value chains, where there is plenty of 'unarticulated reciprocity'," Goffee explains. Build a culture that is hard to copy and will give you a significant competitive advantage. (FT Service)
