The Perfect Boss: Dr. Axel Zein at TEDxStuttgart

Transcriber: ... ... Reviewer: Valentina Franzoni Good evening. The

perfect

manager. Now Benjamin Franklin said, "Two things in life are certain: death and taxes." Now I dare to add a third thing, a bad

boss

. As humans, we are becoming healthier, living longer lives, and will end up spending 40 or 50 years of our lives at work. Now it is almost certain that during this time we will encounter a bad

boss

. In that sense, an American institute conducted a study and discovered that 60% of American workers were not committed to their work. Now they ask the main reason: why? And it was very surprising because the main reason was not low salary, the main reason was not insufficient vacation, the main reason was not a bad workplace, the main reason why these people were not committed to their work was because a bad boss .

Why do we have so many employees dissatisfied with their bosses? Well, I think there are two reasons for that. First of all, the day you become a manager, your job changes completely. When you are an employee, your performance is defined by your own work. And it doesn't really matter what you do, if you're an engineer, you work in the shop or you're a cleaner. You are in a universe focused on a person's need. Yourself. Well, the day you become a manager you realize that your performance is defined by the work done by others: your team. Then suddenly it's not about what you're doing, it's about what they're doing.

It's not about your performance, it's about their performance. And it's not about what you need, but what they need. Look, if you're an engineer, your job is to design products. If you are a cleaner, you will be measured by the cleanliness you leave behind. But if you are an engineering manager or a cleaning staff manager, you don't have to design or clean, what you have to do is put together the right team, you have to create a high-performance culture. You have to make them more productive and you have to create an environment in which people like to work and like to give their best.

First of all, being a manager is a totally different job. Now someone is made manager and someone else doesn't make it. He doesn't realize that it's mainly about making others grow. That person will find it difficult to become a good manager. Now, the second reason I think people are dissatisfied with their bosses is because we are simply not educated to become managers. Let me explain some of the concepts we are learning in college and school. Well, first of all we learn a hierarchical model: "I am the teacher, I give the grades and you will have to do your homework." "But why?" "Because I said." See if this is how you treat adults in a business environment, you won't get their peak performance, you can't motivate a team to deliver peak performance with just your authority or your title.

Look, people will follow you through thick and thin, if you inspire them, if you do something great. If you convince them or if you care about them. But they won't do it just because you're the CEO. They will work for you but they will not give it their all. Isn't it a shame? Another thing we learn in school is that we learn to look at problems from all possible angles and then develop the best solution. Often a very theoretical one. In business, on the other hand, success is primarily defined by rapid implementation and not the best solution.

In fact, we rarely even have time to look for the best solution. There is a huge misconception about risk-taking and mistakes in schools and universities today. You see, if you make a mistake you will be punished. You get a low grade, for example. Now, as a result, we are educated not to try anything new. We are not taking risks because we could fail. But failure, ladies and gentlemen, is necessary for success and necessary for personal development. Take Steve Jobs for example, he was fired as CEO of Apple. As CEO of the company he founded. What a personal failure!

However, he himself said years later: "It was the best thing that could have happened to me. Because I entered the most creative period of my life." And the positive results of that period, all those wonderful devices that Apple created, remain with us as we speak. Michael Jordan, the basketball icon, said: "I can forgive failure. Everyone fails at something. What I can't forgive is not trying." But we are not educated to try. What we learn in school is that we learn to serve ourselves. It's about improving our individual qualifications, maximizing our chances of getting a good job.

It's about me, about me and about me. On the contrary, leadership, ladies and gentlemen, is about serving others. You see, we are not educated to become managers. If you want to be an engineer, you go to school, you learn math and physics, you go to university, you get a degree in engineering, and you are

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ly prepared to start your job as an engineer. If you want to become a manager, you can do the same, but the day you start working you will realize that you are not prepared at all. There were no classes on leadership. No one taught you how to create a high-performance culture.

And by the way, what is that? No one taught you how to choose the best person for the job. Remember, you have to build the team. How to choose the right candidate? And no one told you how to get rid of, how to fire the wrong people from your team. How to say goodbye with decency. How can you give direct feedback without tearing down the other person, actually helping them? You realize that the day you become a manager, you are destined to fail. So it's not surprising. 60% of American workers are dissatisfied with their bosses. Now, what happens when you start working and you're not really prepared for it?

Let's say we make you director of a camel hear, and the camel director will be in charge of the job of traveling with the camels through the desert. Now there are two possible reactions in a human being: one is: "Wow, that's cool!" And the other is fear. Now, fear in a manager is a recipe for disaster. Because instead of seeing opportunities, you see threats. And you want to protect everything you have. Your ego tells you, protect everything you have achieved. So you start kissing, kicking, you don't encourage others to grow, you remove every person who could be a potential threat from your path.

Isn't that wonderful? It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare for your business, because you'll ruin it in the long run, and it's an emotional nightmare for the people involved. But the fear of a manager, ladies and gentlemen, comes mainly from the fact that that person is not prepared for the position. That's why he's afraid. Now what do I advise you to do? I advise you to learn as much as possible, learn as quickly as possible before becoming a manager. Watch sports, watch team sports. This is a soccer team. Now, for American friends, when I watch football what I want to say is football.

Extremely popular in Europe. These are the players on the field, right? They are the ones who work. There is a team manager, there is a clear objective to win the game and there is a clear strategy on how to win the game. It's the same in business. Now every professional sports team has a high-performance culture. What the heck is a culture in business? It's not taking your team to the opera. Culture in business is the way people in your organization behave. If your culture is built on innovation, chances are that people in your organization will welcome new ideas.

Whatever the reason they do that. So, here are the parallels with business. Everyone on a sports team knows that the important thing is to win the game. The president knows it and the cleaner knows it. Now I encourage you in your business to go to the accounting team and ask an accountant if they know it's about beating competitors, if they know who the competitors are, and if that accountant knows that their work counts. That he is actually competing against the accountant in the competing organization. Or maybe his accountant thinks, "We're not competing, sales is competing, that's where they are." But that's wrong.

Because everyone in a company is important and everyone competes, whether you know it or not. Now, speaking of individual performance, what I love about sports is that individual performance is very visible. Anyone can see who the best players are and anyone can see who doesn't deliver. What happens in business, we tend to put this veil over the question of performance. We act as if everyone offers the same performance. It's funny because the people on a team know exactly who are the top performers and who are the low performers. So when we pay everyone the same, what we're really doing is encouraging poor performance.

It's not a high-performance culture, it's a low-performance culture. Now imagine, this guy in a red shirt, Cristiano Ronaldo, the best soccer player in the world, imagine him with the same salary as anyone else on his team who mostly sits on the bench. In sports it is not possible. Because anyone can see how good this guy is. What I love about sports is their obsession with training. You see, when they're not competing, they're training. Three, four and sometimes six times a week. When was the last time you improved your trading skills? And how often do you do it?

Is it once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year, once every five years? Ladies and gentlemen, in a business environment driven by change and uncertainty, training has to be a continuous activity and managers must enforce it. Look, every sports team has a captain, the captain is the leader on the field. And the way they choose their captains is by choosing the best leader. Rarely is the captain the best player. This is Puyol, from the Barcelona Football Club. He's not the best player there. There are brighter stars like Lionel Messi and Iniesta and you name them.

But he is the best leader. Now, at Buniness, what happens is that we take the best consultant and make him head of the consulting team, instead of choosing the best leader. Often in business, the promotion falls to the boss's friend, or the one who kisses the boss's ass, causing frustration and stagnation in the rest of the company. This is a concept that we have to put into practice. If we make individual performance highly visible, this would not happen. In sports, if the team manager names someone captain and that person doesn't deliver, the media will kill them both.

Because? Because the performance is very visible. And suddenly things fall into place. Something interesting they do in sports is when they win. Wow, they celebrate like there's no tomorrow. And this is something we should do in business. You know, there should be room for joy. When a team offers maximum performance, you have to reward it with money, embrace its soul, celebrate with a team not only because it deserves it, celebrate because it makes them stronger. So what I'm saying is take these five concepts from sports and put them into practice. The culture of high performance. Extremely visible individual performance.

The obsession with training. The way they choose their real leaders and not the fake ones. And the way they celebrate. Now someone might say, "Hm, the perfect boss, come on, that doesn't exist, because after all no one is perfect." And you are right. Nobody is perfect. But when it comes to setting goals, I'd rather try to be a perfect boss than strive to be mediocre. And speaking of excellent coaches, this, ladies and gentlemen, is Pep Guardiola. He is former technical director of the Barcelona Football Club. During the four years he was there as team manager, his club participated in sixteen competitions of which he won fourteen.

They won the competition, not the game. A stellar performance. Now what I found very fascinating is what Mr. Guardiola told his team the first time he met them. He said: "I don't expect you to win titles. I expect you to give it your all. And when you've given everything you've got and we lose, I'll defend you. But if you don't give it all you've got, then you're on the wrong team." What a nice thing to say. Because ladies and gentlemen, for imperfect human beings like us, giving everything we have is the highest level of perfection we can achieve.

When we have given everything we have, we are as perfect as we can be. So, being a perfect manager, at home, at work, in whatever you do, in whatever we do, is only in ourselves. The perfect manager, the perfect boss, is within you. Thank you. (Applause)