The Leadership Crisis Fallout

The DDI report called “2023 Global Leadership Forecast” revealed the results of a survey of 1,827 human resource professionals and 13,695 leaders from 1,556 organisations around the world. The research spanned 50 countries and 24 major industry sectors.

The crisis

Only 40% of leaders report that their organisation has high-quality leaders.

This represents a significant drop from two years ago, and measures closer to levels during the wake of the economic crisis in the early 2010s. 

I will be exploring the DDI report in more detail in future newsletters.

If you need further damming evidence that there is a leadership crisis, then look no further than the study by Top10vpn. Since June 2020 Top10vpn has been monitoring the demand for employee surveillance software.

I reported on this study back in April and July 2021 when writing for Remote Report.

Top10vpn updated their study in February 2023 with figures for October through December 2022.

 As the graph from Top10vpn shows, there has been sustained demand for employee surveillance following the initial spike in demand in March 2020. Many of us thought that spike was a knee-jerk reaction to sending employees to work from home was far from it. The demand continued to increase even as employees returned to the office.

Top10vpn analysis:

“While demand for the software did start to weaken in the final quarter of 2022 to its lowest point since before March 2020, it remained 35% higher than in 2019. It should also be noted that demand fell to similar levels in December 2020 only to rebound strongly over the course of the following year.

The difference this time however is that between August and December 2022 the size of the average increase in demand compared to 2019 actually declined month-to-month for four consecutive months for the first time since we began monitoring it in early 2020.

It will certainly be interesting to see if this trend continues into 2023. However, even when demand for the software eventually flattens out, as it naturally must, the damage to employee privacy will already have been done.”

The most important point in that commentary comes right at the end. The damage has already been done.

The damage

What is the damage that has been done?

Lack of confidence in leadership capability

This behaviour clearly shows that we have a leadership crisis. We have a mass of so-called “leaders” asking the question, “How do I know if my employees are working or not?”

The fact is that when these employees were in the line of sight, sitting at a desk for 8 hours in the office, leaders still did not know if they were working!

This behaviour means that leaders believe that performance is measured by the hours spent at a computer.

It means leaders are prepared to spend a considerable amount of their time monitoring employee activity with methods including keystroke logging, wiretapping, GPS tracking, and internet monitoring including web surfing, email, instant messaging and interaction on social networking sites.

What is termed “productivity paranoia” leads to time spent watching employee activity rather than leading teams. This is time that should be spent on inspiring, motivating, providing direction, coaching, guiding and supporting.

Killing trust and productivity

Employee monitoring screams, “I do not trust you.” That damage can take eons to repair. As the saying goes, “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair.”

Research by the Behavioral Scientist suggests that when companies monitor an employee’s every move, they signal distrust, which can lead to employee disengagement. Disengaged employees are less productive.

Not only are employees less productive because they are disengaged. They are also less productive because they are fighting back. The employee versus boss covert confrontation is in full swing. As employers introduce new methods of surveillance, employees respond with innovative ways of thwarting the “bossware”.

When employers started to monitor keyboard strokes, the random keyboard input device was invented. When employers started to monitor what was happening on an employee screen, a tool was invented that cycled through a prepared list of web pages at regular intervals.

When an employer found a way to block the use of mouse jigglers, an employee tied his mouse to his desk fan which moved the mouse back and forth. Block that one boss!

In a May 2022 article, I listed some of the covert devices, applications, and employee practices being used to simulate activity, so the boss thinks you are always on!

The fear a leader has that an employee is not working is transferred onto the employee. This is why employees find ways to try and alleviate the cause of that fear. Fear paralyses both the leader and the employee.

Wrong measurement

Leaders are clearly not capable of measuring the right things. Employee performance is not measured by hours at a desk. Employee performance is measured by outcomes and the value delivered.

Many of our employees are knowledge workers. They are not making widgets, allowing performance to be measured by how many widgets are produced in an hour. Productivity can’t be measured by the increase in widgets produced each hour over a given period.

Knowledge workers think for a living. Their outputs are often intangible and difficult to define. Knowledge workers explore and generate ideas and concepts. They create, distribute and apply knowledge.

Leaders must measure outcomes and value, not hours at the desk.

Take the example of an employee being asked to write a proposal paper. The process of producing a proposal paper is not reliably measurable in quantitative terms. You do not know that a proposal paper written in 10 weeks is better than one written in five weeks.

The value of the proposal paper is not in its production but in its usefulness. You must measure the outcome of its use.

Autonomy and flexibility

By monitoring employees, their autonomy and flexibility to work how they want, where they want and when they want. Monitoring means that leaders set expectations regarding where employees should be working, when they should be working, and what they expect them to be doing at that time 

This stifles creativity, innovation, and experimentation. Employees become robots, they stop thinking for themselves, and do only what is expected of them.

Resentment

When you monitor an employee, you make them feel like they are being spied on. This creates stress, anxiety and resentment. These all have adverse effects on employees' mental health and well-being. It has a negative impact on morale and can make employees feel undervalued and create a toxic culture that decreases retention and impacts recruitment efforts.

The fix

How do we fix the damage?

Whilst there may be valid reasons for employee monitoring including security, and employee well-being, the monitoring of employees for productivity purposes must stop.

We must enable leaders to be effective leaders in the world of remote work. They need to get rid of the productivity paranoia and measure performance on outcomes and value delivered.

Leaders must hold employees accountable for delivering on agreed goals and outcomes. They must provide direction but not direct.

We must remove micromanagement and enable employee autonomy and flexibility.

We need to start the long journey of reinstating trust between employees and employers
We must start treating employees as adults.

The fix is simple. We need better leaders.