A happy ship, from captain to cabin boy

I’ve worked in the public sector and the private sector. I’ve taught at an ancient university and drafted blogs for clients who work in technology. I’ve drafted laws, helped table amendments to them and advised on their implementation. And I’ve worked with one colleague who started her job when Harold Wilson was PM, and others who were still shaking the confetti of graduation out of their hair.

All I’m saying by this is that I’ve got a reasonable spread of experience in workplaces, in terms of the jobs themselves, the atmosphere and the colleagues. My bosses have been alpha males and Superwomen, and they’ve been absent-minded academics and scatty but well-meaning bluestockings. All of them have taught me something about how to create a happy team, and the importance of that.

It’s not revolutionary to say that happy people work harder and better. They commit more wholly, and they pay much less attention to the clock. Most importantly of all, they give their best rather than just waiting until the task is somehow completed, to whatever standard. Being part of a tight-knit, committed team is as much of a rush as any drug I’ve ever experienced: the fizz of ideas, the closeness of collaboration, the sense of common purpose which almost becomes a matter of completing each other’s thoughts and sentences.

Late-night sittings of the House of Commons are virtually unknown now, and they certainly upset your work-life balance, but, by God, they could be fun. Being a division clerk when you genuinely couldn’t tell what the result of a vote would be; having to half-guess, half-anticipate the schedules of both Houses; even, as a junior clerk, knowing that you, a young graduate of a few years’ standing, were deciding when each House would sit to interact and do their business. It’s an incredible experience.

It’s also been my experience that the best teams become friends. Some people prefer to keep their professional and personal lives strictly separate, and that’s a choice I have to respect, but I’ve always thought that the people with whom you spend perhaps ten hours or more a day, five days a week, are people you might as well befriend. You’re united in common purpose, and it’s better for everyone if there is a mutually supportive atmosphere.

Giving advice is what I do: to my students, to Members of Parliament, to clients. So I want to take this opportunity to give a little bit of advice to managers, team members, bosses and anyone who wants to participate in the structured madness that we call work. I offer no special authority, only a pledge that this is drawn from my actual experience over nearly 20 years. What you are about to see is based on a true story…

1. Don’t fear hierarchy, but don’t fetishise it. Human beings exist in social structures, and, ultimately, we haven’t found a way to make a truly egalitarian model work. So there has to be a boss, a leader, a director, a coordinator. There are as many different styles of leadership as there are people, but the important common factor is balancing people’s freedom to contribute and express themselves against the exercise of ultimate authority. They say that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, and that contains an important truth: someone will carry the can. There is no dishonour in a leader reminding his or her team gently of that fact from time to time. Of course, the best won’t have to.

2. Never say “Take it from me…” If you rely on the fact rather than the nature of your experience to wield authority, you’ve already failed. Having been there before is enormously valuable, but it needs to be couched in a positive way. “I remember something a bit like this before…” or “What we did last time was…” are fine. It’s also worth remembering that experience is not a trump card. A friend in the Commons, a brilliant but eccentric lawyer, once told a group of young colleagues I was mentoring that “Precedent is the enemy of original thought”. He went on to say that, if he had his way, he’d burn all the files in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, the government’s legal draughtsmen, because doing so would force Parly Counsel to draft bills based on first principles, not on the lazy foundation of “how we did it last time”. He was trying to provoke, of course, but I still run my thoughts under his slide rule from time to time.

3. A “comfort zone” is called that for a reason. It’s a place in which people operate successfully and happily; but it’s true that it’s also a place to which people will retreat when they feel under stress. Again, the successful leader looks for balance: team members will only grow and stretch themselves to find new skills if they venture beyond their comfort zone, but there is no virtue for a manager simply in making employees uncomfortable. Too many people think it is a sign of leadership virility and dominance that people are made to carry out tasks they hate and may not excel at. It’s great to employ all-rounders but they’re rare. If someone on your team is consistently unhappy and ill at ease, maybe they’re in the wrong job? You can always hammer a square peg into a round hole through brute force, but it doesn’t make it a good idea and it’s damaging for the peg and the hole around it.

4. The human brain is a complex and mysterious thing. If it weren’t, psychology wouldn’t be HARD. People can react in illogical and unpredictable ways. There is ample evidence, for example, that relatively inexpensive ‘perks’ in the workplace—a couple of rounds of drinks on a Friday afternoon, the odd ‘duvet day’, meaningful praise—can often go much further in making a worker happy and content than the cold reality of a bonus or a pay rise. Recent discussion of moving to a four-day week revealed not only the hidden potential still in the workforce in terms of efficiency, but also that quality of life is now much more important to people, and that increasingly progression at work is not simply a reductive chase after a larger number on the payslip. So, as with everything, work with the grain of your team. What one thing would make a person’s working week noticeably better? Would it be knocking off at lunchtime one a Friday? Would it a late start to avoid the rush hour? Would it be one day a week working from home? Talk to people. Find out what makes them tick. If you don’t already know, now’s the time.

There’s no secret to making a happy workplace and leading it well. If there were, the business sections of bookshops would have one, definitive volume on them, which everyone would read at university and dismiss the matter from their mind thereafter. There are countless variables and interactions, and only judgement, experience and character can guide you through them. All I suggest above are some examples I’ve encountered in a spectrum of workplaces over 20 years. I’ll probably have a totally different set in another 20 years (if I’m spared). And no doubt I’ll download them directly from my cerebral cortex into a storage cloud with which others can interface. See you then.