Having personally and voluntarily moved from salaried to freelance status four months ago, the feeling of being free of both the myriad corporate restraints and the absurd expectations that arise out of the inefficient managerialism that dominates organisational life has been an utter delight.
Alongside this sits a fantastic sense of autonomy, in recognition that suddenly, almost overnight, my time is once more genuinely my own…and I can use it as I choose. No longer having to dance to arbitrary (and oftentimes irrational) demands in a creaking hierarchy has made me feel properly human again.
At its crudest instance, this newfound liberty means that I can work when I want and need to, and also indulge my lifelong fascination with quiz and game shows, of which there are a good many in the daytime TV schedules.
Two of those that I have paused to watch just recently in my truly self-managed working day actually set me to thinking about the leadership lessons that they seemed to be offering. I’m going to outline my thoughts in this regard for each format in the hope that these observations might stand up outside of those programmes.
The Boss quiz…
This programme is set up to roughly mirror the dynamics of the workplace. It puts five contestants alongside one another and its opening round – a timed general knowledge quiz – teases out who will be the boss at the start of the show. Interestingly, the successful participant has the opportunity to step away from assuming that responsibility by nominating someone else. This is the first point where its verisimilitude in regard to the workplace is tested.
The boss peels away from the other four and undertakes another general knowledge quiz of a set number of questions, which – if successfully answered – move them up a money ladder; for example, in the first round, it climbs in five increasing stages from £10 to £100, although incorrect answers sees the boss move back a rung.
Once the prize per correct answer is defined by the boss’s performance, the show moves into another time general knowledge quiz wherein, having heard the question, the boss has to allocate each question to be answered to a member of the workforce.
Making empowerment meaningful
A major departure from the actuality of the contemporary workplace is that – at the end of each of those rounds – the four workforce contestants get the chance to launch a leadership challenge. Where the boss is contested by more than one other person, the boss chooses against whom they wish to compete.
In this element of the competition, the boss is up against the individual and to avoid not just demotion but dismissal from the show they compete across three puzzles. If the challenger is unsuccessful, they go home. If no one challenges the boss, they have to nominate two people to go head-to-head, which means that one of those people will be eliminated from the show.
The performance focus
A resonance between the format and the actual experience of organisational life now appears. The boss may have fared badly in their section of the quiz and the workforce might be competing for just a tenner a question in light of that. However, the boss is invited at the end of the round to pass comment on the workforce in general and the individuals therein, which shifts the performance emphasis away from the person at the top onto the people working in the context created for them. Seem familiar?
I cannot think of a corporate setting – even those that pursue what can broadly be described as post-bureaucratic organisation – wherein formal leadership is democratised as something that can be challenged from the shop floor. Politically, we are told that we live in a liberal democracy…but you wouldn’t know that from looking at the ways in which companies are run in our present socio-economic system.
It is very apparent in our companies that leadership as a way of being is fluid and people will step in and out of it. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than when talking to clinical staff about their experiences of management throughout the Covid crisis. But formal leadership status cannot be questioned – and only shareholders really have any ability to challenge those in the upper echelons of their firms.
Hence, to watch The Boss is to beg the question as to why our liberties in a supposedly democratic state are confined to the occasional casting of a ballot rather than an active involvement in the body politic and the corporate context wherein we work. Positional power in the company is incontestable…but why should that be? If I get to choose who runs the country, why don’t I have a say as to who runs my company?
On the programme, the host demands of the workforce whether or not they intend to launch a leadership challenge by openly asking them whether they “dare to defy”. This framing is a sharp reminder of why voice is so constrained in the workplace and why people choose silence. The experience for most (if not all) of us soldiering away in our organisational constraints is that one has to break ranks in order to speak up…and this act is very often considered as defiance, as so many people who have given voice to concerns in company contexts over time have come to find out.
Management contribution
It is also noteworthy that the contestants other than the boss on this programme are often described using diminishing epithets. They are jokingly referred to as the boss’s “minions”, a phrase arising out of hierarchy designed to put people very firmly in their place. And this place is in sharp contrast to the place occupied by the boss.
As noted above, while the boss sets the price in terms of their engagement in a five-question quiz, the money is accumulated by the workforce. This reflects reality: it is the efforts of the employees that determine the success of our companies, even though the corporate leader is invariably in the spotlight and inhabits the fiction that they enjoy an almost exclusive influence on the business.
This reinforces the idea of surplus value that is foregrounded in Karl Marx’s economics theory. This asserts that turnover and crucially profit in the capitalist commercial enterprise arises out of the gap that exists between what is paid in total in terms of the salaries of the workforce and what is charged from the goods or services that those people create in terms of price. As a sidebar here, it is worth noting that the Marxian concept of alienation arises at this juncture because of the way in which the producer is paid off in terms of the wages exchanged for their labour – and are then as a result completely distanced from the outputs of their work.
Keeping a powerful eye on things
Interestingly, on the programme, the “minions” remain at ground level, standing side by side with a lectern ahead of each of them. Meanwhile, the boss has joined the host in the “boss’s office”, a platform that is above and behind the workforce. From this vantage point, the workers are subject to a surreptitious surveillance, potentially constant oversight over their shoulders. Because they cannot see the boss, they are compelled to assume that they are always watching.
This mirrors Michel Foucault’s discussions of the move from sovereign to disciplinary power, where he used Bentham’s panopticon to explain this change not in power itself but in the modalities of power. The model envisaged a circular building with cells all the way around the edge, all of them facing inwards. At the centre sits an observation tower, and the person in there can look into each and every cell…but those in the cells cannot see the watcher.
Eventually, it is argued, the convicts come to assume that they are always being watched (even when they are not), which means that power has changed from something that acts on the body – through corporal or capital punishment, torture or public execution – to something that the individual internalises, resulting in greater docility and constant self-policing. That surveillance manifests through a range of technologies in contemporary society, of which CCTV is the most obvious. But it also encompasses more mundane practices, any situation where the individual assumes that someone has oversight of them of which they are unaware.
The parallels with contemporary and actual organisational practice – in light of the setting and style of this quiz show – are easily made with our actual experiences of corporate life. Helpfully, the programme surfaces aspects of our working lives that might ordinarily remain hidden by our immersion in the familiar and routine.
Deal or No Deal game show…
This format was originally presented by Noel Edmonds. It came to light in terms of his hosting of the show that he had a personal commitment to something he called “cosmic ordering”. Based on the ideas of someone called Bärbel Mohr, the assertion is simply that, if you make a list of things that you want in life, the universe will eventually supply them for you.
The show was a perfect vehicle for this sort of wishful-thinking and flakiness: despite being a simple game of chance – numbered boxes with one of 22 sums of money written down in them, from 1p to £100,000, are allocated to the contestants and no one knows from day to day what sum is in which box until the game is played – the participants, under Edmonds’s stewardship projected all manner of methods onto it.
The game pivots around the person chosen to play their game each day. They bring their numbered box to the table with them…and then engage in a series of rounds in which they invite their fellow participants to reveal the sum hiding in their respective boxes. An artificial binary is imposed on the game, as it is graphically represented in terms of the sums of money through two columns, one of which is coloured blue, indicating all of the low figures, and the other being red, wherein all of the high sums are listed.
It is sheer chance as to what figure is in which box: the only element of the game that requires some consideration is a conversation at the end of each round with someone called the “Banker”. This figure is never seen – and they converse with the contestant via the host, who speaks to the Banker on an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone.
Banker is not an altogether accurate description; this character’s function is actuarial, calculating what chance might exist for the competitor to have a significant sum of cash in their box and then making an offer designed to entice them to sell the box that they’ve brought to the table to the actuarial Banker.
Despite this, the contestants find structure and patterns where none exist: some blithely assert that they intuitively know whether they have a blue or a red number in their box; others track the numbers that appeared in their boxes over previous games, as if knowing that offers any insight into what might be in the box that day; and the contestants often bring systems to the table along with their box, such as choosing to reveal the cash in the numbered boxes on the basis of relatives birthdays, lucky numbers, or suggestions from the rest of the contestants.
The format of the show encourages people to project onto a game of complete chance a logic where one can patently not exist. This, of course, is something that so many gamblers do in seeking to rationalise their involvement in something that is merely about luck. Patterns are sought where none exist, methods are conjured up that are thought to improve the player’s chances. Ultimately, the competitor is selecting boxes at random without any insight as to what might be in them.
Making sense where none exists
This projection of logic onto something that is completely arbitrary is seen a great deal where people are notionally engaging in corporate leadership. This reflects the fact that people in such roles are sold the illusion that the world around them is knowable and certain. This philosophical foundation serves to reduce the world to a simple constellation of problems, each of which is fixable. The idea of fixability is the first of the six myths than John Higgins and I have identified as constraints on the thinking (and hence practice) of managers and leaders.
In the same way that the Deal or No Deal participant derives reassurance from overlaying the complex nature of reality with all manner of self-created systems, the corporate leader does the same in their constant quest for more and more data, a great deal of which has limited connection with what is actually happening in their world. To think that you can engage with and make sense of the world by viewing it through RAG ratings is as foolhardy an assumption as the game player assuming that a list of people’s birthdays will affect a game of chance.
Importantly, of course, what these systems that the players bring to the table do is create a sense of control. In considering our human existence and looking to preserve our sense of agency in the world, it is an intense challenge to each of us as a person to concede that, whilst we influence the social and physical worlds by our presence, we do not control them in any meaningful sense. This is all the more difficult to accept when your position, status, and salary seem to convey the socially generated belief that you are in control. It is this that makes leadership so difficult.
The complexity of seeking unity
The programme seems to generate amongst its players – who stay together in a hotel in order to be part of the programme when it airs every weekday – a collectivity that is unfortunately founded on a falsehood. It intrigues me that everyone seems to buy into the notion that they are engaged in something that is not merely akin to the spin of a roulette wheel.
Their shared experience patently looks to draw them together emotionally, as they seem inordinately fond of one another. This serves perhaps to remind us of the strength that derives from coming together with an expressed intent arising out of a particular circumstance. In the workplace, our lone voice echoes off the boundaries of the corporate silence that we so often inhabit…and appears to go unheard by those who constantly invite us to speak up. But when our voices speak together, that connection amplifies what is said and gives it all the more power.
The arrangement of the game – the banker as the most influential character but occupying a space so far away from the studio where the game is played; the host, acting as the intermediary between the banker and the players; and the contestants who are at the whim of fate – seems to me to mirror the stratification of most workplaces.
In that context, there is: an unseen and negatively experienced upper echelon; the torn middle manager, endlessly shuttling between the demands and expectations of both the team they manage and of the top team in the firm; and the frontline workforce, mindful of the fact that the circumstances around them are not of their own making and consequently seeking out some semblance of creative control through resistance, gossip, actively “soldiering” (to use that grim Taylorist term) in order to adjust the effort bargain, and even perhaps sabotage.
The banker’s distance from what happens in the studio creates a negative sense of mystery and intensifies their power. This represents a useful lesson for any senior leader who wants to be seen positively by those whom they might risibly consider as their followers: visibility demystifies the role that you occupy and grounds you in the business of the business via a practical affiliation with those who work for you.
A reflexive opportunity
Back in 2007, I wrote a piece for a journal that took as its starting point the potential for us all to fictionalise elements of our experiences when seeking to engage with them reflexively. Recognising this means that our reflection needs to consider both the material that we were calling to mind – and the way in which our mind interprets that experience. This usefully illustrates the difference in practice that exists between simple reflection, as a quite superficial activity, and reflexivity, which is multi-layered and constantly questioning.
In light of this, I went on to make the observation that fictional artifacts are things on which we can also usefully reflect, offering as they so often do insight into the human condition to which we might not ordinarily be moved to pay attention.
I am not advocating here that you should block out your calendar so as to catch an episode of either of the shows about which I have spoken here. Instead, it should serve as a reminder that our development as a human being arises from our engagement with all manner of aspects of our lives. And that includes the shows we watch, the films we see, the books we read, and so on.
These materials can be seen to give us permission to engage with the world in a truly critical way; in a manner that engages at multiple levels and from a variety of perspectives; and which show us the world, give us strength to face it, and, in so doing, create the potential for us to actively craft a truly ethical self.
Radical OD 