CHAIRMAN OF THE BORED

Boredom is a management failure.  

While not everything is exciting or interesting, neither should it be always unexciting and uninteresting. Boredom is not the default state of being at work. 

Boredom is a failure to pay attention to the details.  

When was the last time you heard your inner voice say, “this is boring”. Revisit that moment in your mind. What was that boring thing? What if you’d tapped into your curiosity and focused on something about it that appealed to you? Is it possible you might have found something interesting about it?

I recently had an amazing holiday in Morocco. Our tour guide, Abdou, had a wonderful sense of humor and we got on well. Everything around us was interesting and completely absorbing... Except for one moment during the tour when the group went on a guided walk through an oasis. The conversation got on to how date trees reproduce. It is not an understatement to say that this conversation left me and Abdou rather bored. “Mike” he would say to me, “What are we doing here? Why are we here Mike?” It sounded like a meaning of life question, combined with ‘why is this what we’re talking about right now?’ It was a good line that made a mundane moment more memorable. 

Now if I had stopped for a moment to open my mind (and not allowed myself to get distracted by Abdou), I might have found the conversation interesting. When you’re a tourist, you’re surrounded by sights and sounds that are brand new, and you sort of expect everything to be exciting. I’m sure there’s something interesting about how date trees determine each others’ gender, but I was gone by that point.

What’s this got to do with leadership?

First, there aren’t many bored people in high performance cultures. It’s not that the work itself is interesting, it’s that they have intrinsic motivation (as per Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’). They come to work each day to prove and improve themselves. How many people is that true for in your team? 

Second, if boredom is endemic in your workplace, you’ve got a toxic culture. People are not thinking about their work, they are repeating what they already knew. They’re thinking “what are we doing here? Why are we here?” There are no new challenges and they have stopped growing. 

Third, it’s a leader’s job to ensure a person has a growth path in front of them. To some extent this can happen of its own accord in small businesses which are inherently changing quickly, but you need to make it happen deliberately if you want to keep and grow your people. To take it back to my holiday story, they need a tour guide who can inspire them to see what’s interesting about the date trees, not make them wish they were sitting by the pool in the kasbah. 

At one level it’s easy to see and say that if you grow your people, you’ll grow the business. In tough time like these, the market isn’t giving you anything, so you must invest in your people. Sure, that means training, but more so it’s investing in them to invest in themselves to develop their abilities.  

What does that look like? Make everyone responsible for finding and executing an opportunity. Whether that’s a process improvement, a better customer experience, or deleting a pointless meeting – it doesn’t matter. Set clear expectations, see what they come up with. While you don’t always know what you’re going to get, you’re giving your people a new challenge, and a potential growth path. 

We talk in our Active Manager Program about how to develop talent. In a nutshell, identify where people are on the experience curve – starter, intermediate, experienced. For the first two it’s easy to set a path to the next stage, but what do you do with the person who’s mastered their role? Find a way to send them back to beginner. Don’t take their role away, just find new things that put them at the bottom of the learning curve. 

But, as a mentor of mine used to say, what if they don’t? We talk to a lot of people who are blessed and cursed by a layer of management that have vast experience and no interest in learning. Every circumstance is different. Sometimes you just wait until they retire if they’re close. Other times you just bite the bullet: if they’re impeding others’ growth or imposing an opportunity cost there’s a hard conversation to have.  

To come back to the point: when you look at your own people, how bored are they? What do your engagement surveys tell you about their excitement levels? How’s the energy? Do they have a sense of an interesting growth path ahead of them or just more of the same? 

Are they coming to work every day to prove and improve themselves?  

Are you?