This was the subject of a talk given by Jean Dominique Senard (Chairman of Renault Group) at the Essentiels des Bernardins on Wednesday 12 June.
While the overall situation has improved considerably since Chaplin’s famous film “Modern Times”, in which he was crushed between two cogs, the subject remains topical.
The breakthrough of AI is making the issue even more acute, at a time when various barometers are pointing to record disengagement from the company and when psychosocial risks are becoming a major cause of sick leave. What can we do when 25% of people today consider work to be important, compared with 70% 30 years ago?
Be the Master of Variables or become The Variable?
For Jean Dominique Senard, the solution lies in three words:
· Listening
· Respect
· Recognition
Behind the avowed demands – retirement, salary, employment, etc. – it is these three words that he finds at the root of the demands.
That’s certainly true. But I’m pointing out a difficulty in implementation and I’m taking just one of these words: Recognition. In my role as Manager, I have sometimes found that what I thought was a good marker of my recognition and that of the company was not for the individual.
These notions are very relative, and in a rich, luxurious world, the race for more and more limits the impact of the best intentions.
Another of Jean Dominique’s strong points: Responsibility
Not self-management. For him, it doesn’t work, and the experiments at Michelin were flops.
Empowerment must take place within a clear framework, with the ambition of developing talent to solve problems. Instead of operating on the basis of – Command in the morning, Supervision at midday and Control in the evening!
This requires very strong conviction on the part of the management team and a major effort to train people to take on this responsibility.
In this speech, delivered with talent, sincerity and charisma, I nevertheless see a flaw: the length of the speech.
8 years to change Michelin’s philosophy is too long in today’s fast-paced environment, where leaders, governments and budgets change overnight.
I’ve met a lot of big bosses who discovered the importance of culture late in life, and who never wanted to tackle the subject head on, using rigorous methods, as the article below illustrates.
I have seen at the APHP, the Prison Service, Orange, La Poste, Schneider Electric, etc. that with the commitment of the manager and his or her team, with a rigorous approach involving teams at all levels, and a reasonable economic investment, the results can be very visible within 18 months. Conversely, if the rhetoric remains incantatory “all we have to do is make people responsible” there is no reason to obtain a convincing result
To conclude on Jean Dominique Senard’s personality, I was struck by his humility and his thirst for learning.
He only wanted to comment on subjects that he had been able to get close enough to. So when he expresses alarm about the dilapidated state of the public hospital system, he does so with full knowledge of the facts, as administrator of the main hospital in Avignon.
One of the challenges facing our companies is to develop leaders who are skilful, diplomatic, convinced and concerned about the well-being of their teams and their impact on society as a whole. It seems that companies are more capable of doing this than today’s politicians?
Laurent
