Managing for success: Machiavelli and my foray into management

It's nice to be nice, but it's not going to get your teams very far

Machiavelli gets a bad rap.

His name is a byword for scheming and realpolitik and brutal behaviour. But I read “The Prince” last week, and actually I found it fascinating.

And it put me in mind of a critical mistake I made in a previous role, that taught me an enormous amount.

And put simply, here it is: if you’re a manager, wanting to be nice isn’t going to work.

I worked for the same company for a long time - 17 years all up, including the company who ended up acquiring us. I moved round the world with them and they grew my career from “know literally nothing” to “deep experience across two continents”. I’m very, very grateful to them. I won’t name them - because this is “names have been changed” - but a quick glance at my LinkedIn profile will tell you who they are.

In the mid 2000’s I was working in their Sydney office. I’d moved there absolutely cold as employee 4 and managed to build a very successful desk; I’d landed the biggest customer that business ever had (and one of the biggest companies in the world, to boot) - and they’d made me the team leader. Out of the blue, they offered to relocate me and my family (including a very young baby - it was a vulnerable moment!) back to the UK into a senior management role - Head of the Permanent Division.

I’d been champing at the bit for something a bit more career-y and it seemed like the opportunity. We went for it.

But here’s the thing. I was a “manager” in Sydney, in the sense that I had a team of other consultants, and a direct team of resourcers who worked on my accounts. But neither of those needed any serious management. My little accounts team all worked together like clockwork, and as for the other consultants - we’d hired in our own image. They were all self sufficient sales people who wanted to be left alone to build client relationships and run their own desk. And they were perfectly capable of it.

So when I arrived in the UK, with my sales background and my team leading experience, I was in for a shock.

The team was 5 times the size of the one I had had in Sydney. And it was much, much more varied. It had hugely successful people who were effectively running their own businesses and knew it - they were happy to chuck their weight around. It had underperformers. It had very junior people who needed their hands holding. It had troublemakers, it had people who were discontent. It had people who were going to sit tight and resist change at all costs.

It needed a strong manager with a clear focus.

It wasn’t me.

It wasn’t a disaster - we weathered the 2007/2008 recession with minimal damage. I picked up a couple of the more inexperienced people and helped them develop - one or two went on to real success and I’m proud of that. I got some good traction with some of the sales people, and I actually ended up effectively being promoted.

But here’s the killer mistake I made: I tried to be nice and get people on side. And I wasn’t nearly tough enough at the outset.

Which is where Machiavelli comes in.

Machiavelli spends a whole chapter thinking about cruelty vs compassion - and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared than loved.

He doesn’t say what you think. He says a prince should want to cultivate a reputation for compassion - that it is better to be loved.

But his definition of compassion is interesting.

“By making an example of one or two he will prove more compassionate than those, who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine”.

Now, I’m glad to report that, as far as I know, no team of mine has ever fallen prey to murder and rapine. But without a shadow of a doubt, I fell into the trap of being too compassionate.

I allowed underperformers to go on too long - which both infuriated the high achievers and damaged the motivation of the mid-performers who realised there wasn’t much to be feared from failure.

I was too slow to confront a couple of toxic team members, thinking I could win them over and get them on board, and failing to realise that they weren’t angry at anything in particular, they just enjoyed making trouble. And with the licence to do so, they went round poisoning everything.

I allowed the top performers too much power and made them think they could run the show - which of course they did, but entirely to their own benefit.

And once I realised that I had done all that, the task of undoing all that was far harder than it would have been at the start. We lost a couple of top performers who we might have kept. The underperformers were outraged that I started to clamp down. The toxic people thought themselves victims.

But by that point I had no options but to try to rein it in. I didn’t realise it but I was following Machiavelli’s advice: “the prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal”.

And - guess what - Machiavelli was right. Although the underperformers hated being managed and hated even more that people started to have to leave, the top performers took me to one side to congratulate me on taking it on. And the mid performers - surprise! - suddenly picked up, because they didn’t fancy getting dragged into any of that.

I stood up to a couple of top performers and lost one who resigned in outrage - but a couple of others who didn’t actually want to leave decided not to call my bluff.

It wasn’t perfect. I’m not going to pretend to you that I became a fantastic leader of people. I stuck it for a few years and then bailed out to set up my own business because frankly, having wanted a senior management job for years, I absolutely hated it. But that’s a story for another day - sometimes you have to learn lessons the hard way.

And that knowledge has not been wasted. Because I see these patterns repeated in company after company.

Why does that company have sky high turnover? Perhaps because they have no real performance management and people are frustrated and unable to get things done. Or perhaps the company has gone too far the other way: Machiavelli has advice for that business too; “behaviour must be tempered by humanity and prudence so that over-confidence does not make him rash or excessive distrust make him unbearable”.

Companies can hire the best people in the market, but if they can’t hold on to them, they’re wasting their money. And if the business is set up in a way that stymies people’s efforts, that infuriates them, that protects agents of chaos and annoys well meaning hard workers - it doesn’t matter who you hire.

Fix the culture, and then start hiring.

That’s the lesson I learnt, and I learnt it hard. If only I’d read Machiavelli sooner.