People, Product and Profit
Profit is a goal that should be approached obliquely.
My first job out of university was working for a multinational engineering consultancy, one of the leaders in its field. I had a most remarkable boss, John Gregory, who was irrationally supportive and forgiving. For my part I was almost unemployable. Coming from the wrong side of the tracks in Rotherham, Cambridge University had failed to knock off many of my sharp edges — it would take several bosses like John and an exceptionally patient girlfriend come wife to do that.
The attitude of the business and John in particular to profit was interesting. On occasion he would ask “When do you think you could get that finished by?” but he would never demand “I need that finishing today.” Most of the time he was more concerned that I was developing the requisite knowledge and skills. Over time I came to realise that it was part of a management style that put people first. In the words of Tom Westgate, a boss that I encountered much later, “Look after the people, they will look after the product and then the profit will look after itself.”
In a 2018 interview with Inc, Richard Branson said “So, my philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customer second and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and you yourself are happy.” In other words, look after your staff and they will look after the customer (and ultimately the shareholders).
Why does putting your people first work so well? You might think that there is a straightforward answer to this: if you look after your people, equip them to be successful, trust them, and then give them the necessary headroom to perform they will be both capable and motivated.
Whilst this is all true, there is more to it than that.
In the late 1990s a group of Italian scientists discovered that some motor cells in primates and humans are activated by watching an opposite number’s facial expressions and gestures. They named them ‘mirror neurons.’ They cause us to mirror the expressions of the other person at a microscopic level and, in doing so, we feel some of what the other person is feeling.
In his 2011 book Mindsight, Daniel Siegel (p60) describes mirror neurons as the “root of empathy” and explains that “our brains use sensory information to map out the minds of others, just as they use sensory input to create images of the physical world.” The contagion of yawning is the work of the mirroring system and the system also explains why anxiety is contagious and why authenticity is hard to fake — we can often sense in our gut when what someone is thinking is not consistent with what they are saying.
Any leader that puts profit or even the customer first will inevitably engender anxiety in their team. What are this month’s figures going to be, what are the latest statistics for customer satisfaction? While these are legitimate interests, if we put them centre stage and worry over them the anxiety will spread.
The rest of the team may not even know what their managers are anxious about, but they will be anxious and that in turn will use up energy that they could be applying to their job. This is turn compromises both their ability to undertake their everyday tasks and their capacity to take on other challenges.
If the leader is at ease and concerned first and foremost for her people, those people will have the motivation, the energy and the emotional bandwidth to perform.
And that is why profit is a goal best approached obliquely. It is a dependent variable, and people are the dominant factor on which it depends.
