Business bookshelf: Why work doesn’t work

What’s wrong with work? The question is worth posing. In large organizations bedeviled by factionalism, favoritism, backbiting politics, a lack of direction and time-consuming meetings, it is a wonder that any work ever gets done.

In Blaire Palmer’s analysis, the broken workplace is defined by a combination of what she calls “frustrations” that can be assembled under five thematic headings: mis-leadership, unfairness, blurred vision, silo mentalities and, yes, those tiresome meetings.

In her book, “What’s Wrong with Work?: The Five Frustrations of Work and How to Fix Them for Good,” Palmer writes that, on average, employees waste the equivalent of one day a week in unproductive meetings.

The law of averages suggests that some must waste even more time than this because thousands of self-employed people get by with few, if any, meetings.

Palmer, a professional coach, seems to run her own meetings with an iron fist, establishing firm ground rules and protocols to ensure an efficient passage of business. But, as a former producer at the BBC, she must have seen the best and the worst of meetings and experienced many of the frustrations encountered in the book, published by Wiley.

She worries that competition between neighboring branches of the same bank, say, can have a detrimental effect on the broader company. Her solution is more cross-team working.

How is that achieved? Well, partly through meetings — the efficient sort, we should stress; partly, also, through establishing shared priorities, which she calls “thematic goals,” an idea attributed to Patrick Lencioni, a former management consultant who has written about dysfunctional teams.

A third approach is for those in one team to target those in another who have some clout in the organization. Haven’t canny employees always sought out the people who can get things done? Does it really need a group of people to draw up an “influence plan” suggested here?

On the other hand, that is not a bad idea. I would love to see the management-reporting chart of a large company overlaid with a blueprint of the movers and shakers.

Most of the learning Palmer outlines in the book has been gathered in her work as a coach, dealing with the problems of managers whose skills she believes are underrated in comparison with the visionary flair of leadership.

She admits to being on something of a mission to reclaim “management” as a legitimate title. “Leadership isn’t better,” she says, “it is just different.

“At all times you are being asked to flex between different management and leadership styles, adapting to the circumstances you find yourself in, the people you are working with and the particular problem you are trying to resolve.”

She is right to defend the practical designs of management. Too often today managers are neglecting their duties in pursuit of what books on leadership would ask them to believe is a higher calling. But most of this literature is barely disguised sophistry.

To divorce leadership from management is a mistake, and the sooner some so-called leaders roll up their sleeves and understand the work in the trenches, the better their companies will function.

Sadly, Palmer appears to have courted the theorists a little too assiduously, allowing an otherwise instructive book to stray from the concrete occasionally into the fanciful realm of vision, values and mission.

This may seem unfair. Values are important but, as she writes herself, it is easy to stress your honesty and integrity as a business without demonstrating exactly what that means in practice.

Ultimately — and this is not meant as a criticism — the book is a depressing read because it lays bare the failings of modern mass employment and the big company workplace. Large private- and public-sector employers have become soulless places where talent is wasted and initiative discouraged.

This book succeeds in gathering together many of the ailments afflicting large workplaces, and its responses are sound enough to warrant some study.

But it neglects to acknowledge the thousands of places that do work today — the start-ups and mid-size businesses that maintain a sense of scale and reach across the entire organization. Meetings in these businesses are brisk and, yes, workmanlike.

Richard Donkin is a columnist for the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.