In a business environment that operates at
full throttle, it can be easy to overlook
long-term strategies in favor of short-term objectives. This pursuit of doggedly chasing
quarterly numbers often involves a reduced
headcount where fewer employees are given
larger workloads. As a result, employees can
become resentful, believing they are nothing
more than a cog in a machine.
The concept of slow leadership, says
Andre van Niekerk, dean of the School of
Business at Woodbury University, strives to
bring humanity back into the workplace.
“Slow leadership is about returning work to
its role as a forum for expressing yourself
and finding pleasure as well as a financial
reward in your employment,” he explains.
Smart Business spoke with van Niekerk
about slow leadership.
What is slow leadership?
Slow leadership is a movement to remind
the world that work has purposes and
meaning in our lives beyond the purely
economic and financial ones; and that time
and space must be allowed in the working
week for people to express their creativity,
the pleasure they take in using their abilities to the full, their desire to learn, and
their needs for social interaction.
What factors in the contemporary workplace
have led to the advent of slow leadership?
Too many people today are facing work
pressures that go far beyond a level that still
lets them retain enough time and energy for
enjoying the nonwork aspects of their lives.
A rigid insistence on achieving their employer’s continually escalating financial objectives first — often at the expense of nearly
everything else — robs work of much of its
meaning. Employees are reduced to economic functionaries: ‘human resources’ to
be optimized and exploited as ruthlessly
and obsessively in pursuit of greater profits
as any inanimate corporate resource.
How can the principles of slow leadership
develop a company’s long-term foundation?
Conventional leadership — what I term
‘hamburger management’ because it relies on a very limited menu, high speed, and the
cheapest possible ingredients — looks
only to short-term objectives. Indeed,
research has shown that the vast majority
of managers today are willing to compromise the long-term strategies and needs of
their business in order to fulfill quarterly
quotas. As a result, businesses are mortgaging their futures to meet unreasonable
demands for short-term results.
Slow leadership offers ways to retain high
levels of productivity without putting the
short-term cart before the long-term horse.
People can’t exist on hamburgers alone.
They don’t provide a balanced, healthy diet,
let alone one that is a basis for a fully enjoyable life.
How does slow leadership benefit employees?
Work is an important source of satisfaction in learning, exercising your skills,
earning the regard of your colleagues and
developing a balanced sense of self-esteem. All of this is undermined when
people find themselves driven to cut corners and rely on quick fixes, because the
organization has reduced headcounts so
much that there is no time to do any better.
People want to produce quality work. But
if they are driven to focus on meeting numerical targets by any means possible, they will
lose pride in what they do and a sense that
anyone cares about their lives. The result is
alienation, frustration and lack of interest in
anything other than the pay check.
What are the first steps that management
should take when implementing slow leadership?
Stop basing decisions on often spurious
numerical summaries of organizational
activity. Look to the long-term need to
increase value and provide a stable basis for
genuine growth. Then make it clear to
everyone that creativity, insight and fresh
thinking are to be the basis for future
increases in productivity, not driving everyone to do more and more in less and less
time with current methods.
The deep well of creative ideas in any work
force is usually ignored. If you encourage
people to help you grow the business and
treat them as civilized human beings, they
will surprise you with what they can offer.
Once a change has been made, how can a
business owner determine its effectiveness?
Slow leadership is about finding ways to
be successful and still retain a civilized
workplace. What you should see are more
effective and productive people, a higher
quality of output and service, a happier team
of employees and much lower turnover.
Cutting jobs and forcing those who remain
to work longer hours only provides a short-term boost to profitability. Taken too far, it
begins to eat into the firm’s capacity for
long-term survival.
Slow leadership takes the view that the
only sustainable basis for building higher
productivity is the creative thinking of
everyone involved. And that needs time
and space to operate — the very things that
thoughtless, ‘hamburger managers’ keep
removing in a frantic search for greater and
greater short-term profits.
ANDRE VAN NIEKERK is dean of the School of Business at
Woodbury University. Reach him at (818) 252-5284 or
[email protected].