On ‘Multi-multitasking’ and Corporate Governance

The reality of work today is that, unfortunately, companies must reduce their costs, and this will probably go on until 2014 or so when we have fully come out of recession and have also paid off debt. The money supply will be restricted, and we will have private and public sector organisations fundamentally not hiring people on a full-time basis. They will be asking a lot of their full-time employees with distinct skills and experience to undertake more activities, and fundamentally offering projects to those with distinct skills, and then as soon as a project is over, the transactional relationship between the project employee and employing organisation will be over. So whoever you are, full-time employee (and there’s going to be fewer and fewer of those as time goes on), or project provider, what we will have is a situation of constantly watching the costs to make sure that they don’t go up, according to the budget set, which means that many people will be doing a lot more more for less.

Stefan Stern wrote an article in the FT a while back that basically says there’s a way of getting around this. My experience is that it’s really difficult, because it’s tough to create an environment where people are motivated and feel they are making a contribution when in fact their lives are constantly disrupted. If we forget the term ‘multi-multitasking’, and introduce the term ‘authentic leadership’, we’re probably in a more accurate description of what’s happening today.

If you look at the situation we have today, first of all, the amount of money we made from productive capital (i.e. goods that we produce and sell) really slowed down in the 1980s. Since then we’ve had financial capital–in a sense we’re making money out of money. The way we do that is to take the existing structure of the organisation and constantly prune it down. That’s why we have many CEOs who actually come from a financial background. You need financial skills to become a leader today. That was not the case twenty years ago, when the finance director or the accountant was called a bean-counter–that was a term of abuse a long time ago. What we also have is making money out of parcelling up and selling the corporation in such a way that it looks more attractive when the bits are pulled apart, and then put together by somebody else who will then sell them on. What that does is create a very short-term attitude and perspective.

So we have a number of tensions: how to make money quickly, and how to make more money by looking after costs rather than looking after sales and the customer. We then have the tensions between governance and the stewardship of the board: the board really looks after the moral health of organisation, while the executive team drives the business and the leadership in terms of profit, sales and future strategy, and the general management below the executive team tries to keep the whole place together. But the executive team is caught between the board telling them to do one thing, and the general management who dislike being told what to do.

So we have a situation there where the best leader with the best intent, wanting to do the very best for his or her organisation, comes over as insincere. In fact these leaders are facing too many pressures in too short a timeframe. So they may intend authenticity, but at best they come out as inconsistent, and at worst they come out as highly political and not to be trusted. So strangely enough, many of our top executives are being seen as politicians and are the sort of person people want to listen to and take notice of. That situation doesn’t help.

Equally, asking people to be very good at multi-multitasking doesn’t help because they can keep it up for a while, but what they need to have is a culture which is supportive and helpful, so that they can continue working at an ever-increasing rapid pace but still be motivated. The multi-multitasking article by Stefan Stern masked an overwhelming need to examine what authentic leadership means today. It’s an issue that’s difficult to talk about because people have to become very personal. It’s an issue that many people find difficult to understand because while they face pressures in their role, they don’t quite comprehend the range of pressures that their boss has to face in trying to manage the organisation and manage the team. So, multi-multitasking can be conducted in positive, supportive cultures which are led by highly authentic leaders, and those leaders have learned how to cope with continuous diversity and pressure and changing agendas but in such a way that their personality and charm comes over and is authentic in front of internal stakeholders (employees) and external stakeholders.