Money Clinic presents — How to future-proof your career

This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘Money Clinic presents — How to future-proof your career’

Claer Barrett
Hello, it’s Claer. Before we begin, I’d love to hear a bit more about you and what you like about Money Clinic. We’re running a short survey, and anyone who takes part before the 29th of August will be entered into a prize draw for a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless headphones. Spiffing! You can find a link to the survey and the terms and conditions for the prize draw in today’s show notes.

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When it comes to looking after your money, your career and your earnings prospects are very important. So when fellow FT podcast host Isabel Berwick launched a new book, The Future-Proof Career, I was on hand to quiz her at the launch event. You’ll know from our Working It podcast that Isabel is full of good ideas. And this event, recorded live at Daunt Books shop in the City of London, is certainly packed with tips for anyone who’s looking to move on up. So in this episode of Working It that originally aired in May, you’ll hear me ask Isabel about the main takeaways from her book for managers and those who are managed by them, as well as audience questions about challenging tricky workplace cultures, quitting your job and what to do if your manager is a bit of a you-know-what. I’ll be back next week with a brand-new episode of Money Clinic. But for now, consider this a belated invitation to Isabel’s launch party for The Future-Proof Career. Enjoy!

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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Today’s episode is something a little different. I’ve spent the last year writing a book about work. It’s called The Future-Proof Career, and it came out on April the 11th. I had a launch party at Daunt Books in the City of London, where I talked to my dear friend and colleague Claer Barrett, host of the FT’s Money Clinic podcast, about what I learned from writing it. I also answered a few questions from audience members and addressed some of the big work problems that were on their minds. It was a really lovely event and I’m so glad I get to share it with you. So sit back and enjoy.

Claer Barrett
Well, thank you everyone for joining us tonight. It’s so wonderful to see so many of you here in Daunt Books in Cheapside in the City of London for Isabel’s official launch party. Can we have a round of applause right now? (Applause) As Isabel’s colleague at the FT, I think we had a conversation very early on when you first had the chance to do this book and, you know, could you fit it in around work, should you do it? And then lots of other conversations since then about, oh, the difficult fifth chapter and the final chapter and deadlines and dealing with publishers. And I’m just so proud. I’m so proud of you. You’ve done this fantastic book and reading it, I could just hear your voice in my head.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) Is that a good thing?

Claer Barrett
Oh, yes. Definitely. I mean, obviously I’m a fan and a colleague, but if you haven’t met Isabel before, she is, of course, the force behind the FT’s hugely popular Working It podcast and newsletter of the same name. And now, of course, the author of a fantastic book, The Future-Proof Career. So let’s kick off. You are a voracious reader, but this is the first time that you as a book lover have ever written a book. What was the most surprising thing that you think you’ve learned?

Isabel Berwick
I learned that everything goes back to management. You know, you can have the best organisation in the world with lots of mission statements and, you know, great purpose and doing great work. But if you’re in a job in that organisation and your line manager is, you know, someone you don’t get on with, who is actively blocking you, who is micromanaging or is just a bit of a shit manager — sorry, I probably can’t put that on the podcast — you know, that is gonna affect everything. And I think organisations just don’t invest in management training. Eighty per cent of managers in the UK have had no training whatsoever. They’re called accidental managers. And the UK is particularly bad. America is better. Europe tends to be better. I think it’s perhaps because they are more serious cultures and we have this British idea that we can have a go at everything. And we can’t. And management is a very particular skill and you need to learn it.

Claer Barrett
Now we’re sitting in a bookshop in the City of London. Of course, we might not formally train managers, but there are an awful lot of books nevertheless that managers can read, lots of career titles, self-help, self-improvement, very big section in Daunt’s about all of that. How does your book differ from those?

Isabel Berwick
So when I got the book deal, I did have a moment’s pause because for a while at the FT I worked on the books desk and we have a big books cupboard absolutely full of books that probably no one’s ever gonna read. And I thought, does the world need another book about work? And actually, as I was writing it, I realised what I was writing was a book for people who don’t buy books about work and management. It was a book for people who just want to get on with their jobs and have a good time; to find purpose, to be well-paid and perhaps better paid if they can get a pay rise.

Claer Barrett
Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that in a minute.

Isabel Berwick
And you can, you know, it’s a book that can travel with you throughout your career. You probably don’t want to be the CEO, and you probably don’t want to do an MBA. But most, I find, management and career books are really aimed at that very, very committed market of people who really like reading about management and leadership. I mean, I count myself one of them, but I didn’t write the book for those people.

Claer Barrett
OK, well, that’s great, because I think most of us within the room comfortably fall within . . . (Laughter)

Isabel Berwick
Not MBA market.

Claer Barrett
 . . . Within that category. So if you’ve picked up Isabel’s book and have had a flick through it, you’ll see that it’s divided into two sections. I mean, why did you do that? So one is for managers and one is for employees.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. Because I think, you know, we have a very different view of work, whether we’re in a team as a team member or as a manager. And we might be both of those things at the same time. And we might be that at different points in our career. I mean, I’d urge everybody to read the whole book because I think there’s chapters in each section that informs it. But I hadn’t seen a book that actually differentiated between the challenges of being a team member and the challenges of management, which in particular can be things like managing people you don’t get on with.

Claer Barrett
Oh, yes.

Isabel Berwick
Which is not talked about enough, but I’ve just brought it out into the open in this book because I . . . it . . . 

Claer Barrett
Yes. There’s an entire chapter called how to manage people that you don’t like. (Laughter) Come on, we’ve mentioned it now. Give us a few nuggets from how to manage people you don’t like that don’t involve dart boards or anything that HR would be concerned about.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. Well I mean, the first thing to think about — and Gabriella Braun, who’s in the audience here, has been someone who’s really informed my thinking on this — is that, you know, we’re bringing our childhoods, and I apologise to my father, who’s in the audience. (Laughter) We’re bringing our childhood baggage to work whether that’s as a manager or as a team member. And often when we get into a situation with someone, we might be replaying, you know, our mother who pushed us too far or our authoritarian parents, and we react really badly.

Claer Barrett
Or competing with a clever sibling.

Isabel Berwick
Or competing with a clever sibling. And so I think just taking a step back, whether you’re the manager or the team member and saying, you know, why am I reacting like this? Is it me or is it them? I wrote an article for the FT a couple of weeks ago and the book came out and the first point I said about that I’d learnt from writing the book was, you know, look in the mirror before you criticise your boss. I mean, I didn’t just write that for the editor of the FT, although that was a happy byproduct. But I just thought we’re just too quick to criticise our managers. And if you are a manager, it can be a very vulnerable position to be in. And a little bit more humanity all around would be a great thing.

Claer Barrett
Well, I mean as somebody who’s been both a manager and an employee, it can be a bit lonely being a manager. You know, you don’t get invited to stuff anymore. The team will go out without you, probably talk about you.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, I think that’s healthy. And I think, you know, you get paid the big bucks for a reason and maybe there’s a trade-off for that. But I do think that we forget that managers are people. And also we don’t thank people enough. And that’s another point I wanted to make in the book that saying thank you goes a long way.

Claer Barrett
Both for managers . . . 

Isabel Berwick
Both managers and team members. There isn’t enough gratitude in the world. And I don’t mean woo-woo gratitude practice, although I like that stuff too. I mean, you know, just a note to say thank you for supporting me in that meeting. Thank you for that presentation. I just think we move on to the next thing so quickly and I’m really guilty of it myself. I think this book has really taught me just to slow down a little bit.

Claer Barrett
Very, very good point about saying thank you. Another brilliant point that you make is about listening.

Isabel Berwick
So listening, I think, was one of the big things that came out of writing this book for me — the importance of listening, how little we do it. And, I mean, those of you who are familiar with management talk will know that listening has become very fashionable in management circles. Active listening is a massive buzz word, but I’m not sure it actually means that much. And active listening is really hard, particularly in a work environment where you’re in a meeting, on a deadline and you have an agenda to get through. Everyone’s got on their mind what they want to say, they want to make an impact. And sometimes, you know, there’s a mismatch in the conversation. The writer Charles Duhigg came on the podcast recently and talked about this. You know, you might be having a transactional conversation about a work process, but your colleague might be telling you something important about their life. If you’re intuitive, you can listen for that, and it might explain why their performance is off. Or it might explain why the project is late. So I think better listening has so many ramifications, and I think we’re just at the beginning of really understanding why better listening matters at work.

Claer Barrett
So what would you say your top tips are for being a better manager, but also being a better team member? We’ll start with managers because I suspect there’s a fair few of them in the room here tonight.

Isabel Berwick
OK, so being a better manager, I think trust is right at the heart of it. Trust is what’s missing actually in the modern workplace. So if you believe your team are competent — and they should be if you recruited them — you should trust them. And there’s this dreadful statistic that I’ve got in the book and it just stays with me all the time. Microsoft did a massive survey, about 20,000 people, managers and team members, and they asked the managers, you know, do you think your team is working effectively when they’re at home, you know, when they’re working from home? And 85 per cent of them said no. And then they asked the same question to team members: do you think you work effectively from home? And 85 per cent of them said yes. So there’s a massive trust gulf there between the managers and the team members.

So trust I think for managers is number one. If you don’t trust your team, why? Is it because they’re underperforming or is it because you’ve got a problem with trust? Are you a micromanager? That’s a very common management problem, and it stems from insecurity.

And from a team member’s point of view, I would say have a bit of understanding for the pressure that the manager is under from above. So the manager’s squashed in the middle and they have to execute the orders from above while also being pushed from below by their, you know, probably quite arsey team members who are pushing for a promotion or pushing for more work or less work, or, you know, more time off so that you’re assailed from above and below as a manager. So as a team member, I would just say have a bit of thought for, you know, all the other stuff. You know, you have what we might call asymmetrical information about what your manager’s doing. So don’t jump to conclusions.

Claer Barrett
Let’s talk about ambition. You talk about in the opening chapters of the book about how the definition of ambition you think has changed. It’s partly to do with the pandemic. Tell us more.

Isabel Berwick
OK, so I think before the pandemic, ambition was something that we had for our careers, and it was a very work-focused word. I don’t think it’d changed that much since I started work in the very early ‘90s, when people would say to me, you’re very ambitious or you’re a bit of a career woman. Ambition was about, you know, wanting to further yourself in your career. And I think with the pandemic, we moved home. We saw a lot more of our families, our communities. And I think now, people expand that ambition to be essentially, to lead a life that is fulfilling as well as having this kind of very old-fashioned, linear graft going on at work, which I think is massively outdated.

Claer Barrett
But I think also the pandemic and not being physically present in a workplace for five days a week, which, let’s face it, none of us could really have imagined happening before it actually happened, has really rewired people’s assumptions about what you need to do in order to be a successful person.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. I think that’s right. I think now we are back in a kind of hybrid world. Many offices are in three days a week. I do think there is a value in in-office, you know, making an appearance in office. And I think your career might suffer in many organisations if you don’t go in because we are hard-wired to trust the people who are in front of us. People who choose to work remotely where there’s a choice, they might be losing out there. But certainly I think the flexibility that the pandemic has brought us has turbocharged, in particular, women’s ambition. There’s a lot of data already showing that women’s ambition has rocketed since the pandemic, and researchers believe that is due to the flexibility that more people have now.

Claer Barrett
I mean, certainly my experience being on Money Clinic, we talk a lot about how flexible working for women especially, has opened up the prospects of doing a five-day week instead of a four-day one. I’ve written before in the FT about the part-time penalty. You know, you’re effectively doing a full-time job, but you’re only being paid 80 per cent of the wage because all of the devices that we have now mean people are contactable when they’re not there. Hitherto they haven’t been paid. And I’ve encouraged quite a lot of women to actually go back to five days, but say, you know what, I wanna finish two hours early on a Friday because I’m making up those hours for the rest of the week. And I think that employers are much more prepared since the pandemic to strike deals. But the other trend that I’ve noticed is more men saying that they want to go part-time or cut back their hours or work more flexibly, which I think is great because if flexible working becomes a thing for women then it’s not gonna be good for any of us.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And I think the, you know, the key to closing the gender pay gap and gender equity in general is men actually, not women. Now, I’ve been to so many conferences about, you know, women and Women at the Top, Women in Business Summit, and they’re all great, but there aren’t very many men there. And actually, when men are taking extended paternity leave, that’s a huge indicator that your gender pay gap may close because, you know, when all the penalties that have affected women start to affect men, that’s when structural change happens, because men don’t like that.

Claer Barrett
And nowadays, it’s not a barrier to getting another job, because most jobs that are advertised will say, you know, we’re happy to entertain part-time working, flexible working. But for years, once women went down to a part-time position, they were kind of trapped in it. And of course, we know at Money Clinic, if you do want to get a pay rise, the quickest way to short-circuit the whole process is just to get a job working for another company.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, and I think leveraging your pay offer elsewhere has traditionally been a great way to get pay rise. But you have to be prepared to go, don’t you, Claer?

Claer Barrett
You do.

Isabel Berwick
That’s the pitfall that lots of people find. And I’ve heard lots of stories of people crawling back to their employer (laughter) trying to get back in. I’ve heard a couple of people who lasted a week in a new job and then gone back.

Claer Barrett
Yes. Well, I mean, and also money, although in a cost of living crisis, we all need to earn more. Your salary is not the be-all and end-all, but it’s still a highly emotive topic. And anyone going in and asking for a pay rise and being told no, it’s a big diss.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think one of the things that really was clarified for me when I was writing this book is that often in those pay rise negotiations, we’re trapped in a kind of parent-child dynamic, you know, and there is the gratitude thing there, that we’re made to feel we should be grateful for anything they give us, but actually, it should be an adult-to-adult interaction. And it’s fine to ask for a pay rise, you know, be a grown-up. If they say no, that’s not a stain on your character. I think we, you know, we internalise our worth around our pay, and it’s very hard to disentangle that. And I think that’s one of the key things that may be going forward. And I think salary sharing and things like that are much more common in younger generations, sort of removing the stigma around saying how much you earn. You won’t know if you’re massively underpaid compared to the person sitting next to you unless you say or ask them. So it requires some bravery, actually.

Claer Barrett
Mmm. Well, I mean, often because organisations have policies that they explicitly don’t want staff to discuss levels of pay. I wonder why.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) Yes, who benefits there? But I mean, there is an argument for not having total pay transparency. There are companies that put the salaries of everyone who works there on their website, and they don’t particularly perform better. And actually, there’s some research about CEO pay because that’s public. You know, it enables CEOs to get more pay because they say, oh look, Joe, over here at Widget Company X in my sector is being paid $300,000 more than me. So, you know, it does work, total transparency, but only in the very top echelons of business.

Claer Barrett
Now, you mentioned younger people in the workplace. I think just scanning the room, I’m thinking, yes, I think most people here are over the age of 40, so we can have a good old go at Gen Z. Now let’s talk about Gen Z and the profound impact that they are having at work, because, you know, there are some good points that they make that we should be listening to, but nevertheless, it’s causing an awful lot of disruption.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. I think probably when I talk to people off the record in Chatham House meetings where no one’s allowed to say what’s been said, when I talk to business leaders the thing that they are absolutely obsessed with is Gen Z — you know, how the workplace is changing, how they are bringing these new pressures to bear in the workplace. Fear of being cancelled is another massive issue for older managers. I’m delighted by Gen Z and, you know, I have two at home. I think what they’re bringing to the workplace is this bottom-down push on everybody else in the workforce to say, this is how we’re doing things now, and we can take it or leave it.

But actually, if we don’t listen to the things they want, which are often around trust and purpose, you know, they want their employer to align with their views. Now, I think we’re gonna run into trouble because the world is so polarised, you know, and a lot of younger people are quite activist. So I think companies haven’t really thought through how this is gonna work in the workplace. So I think in the next five years, managing Gen Z, managing their expectations around purpose and commitment to the company and aligning with goals is gonna be a huge challenge for CEOs and leaders.

But for everyday people in offices, I think what Gen Z bring is we are all bringing — you know, there’s a very fashionable phrase, bringing your whole self to work, which I find a little bit cringey. But actually, what it means is there are far fewer boundaries around what younger people will talk about at work. And that might be uncomfortable for older people, but it’s not going to change. So we can accept it and say work is a much bigger part of our lives than we’ve previously thought. We can’t wall it off. And I think all the mental health conversations that are going on now . . . 

Claer Barrett
I was gonna say.

Isabel Berwick
So, yeah, one in three people between 18 and 25 has a diagnosed mental health condition. So anxiety, depression, OCD. So if I had one prediction for the future of work, it is that managers will have to become a lot better at mental health management — understanding it, managing it, making accommodations for it, and for boomers and Gen X-ers, you know, that might be uncomfortable because we’ve, you know, put up and shut up for many decades in our careers. But things are not going back in the box. I think we have to have much more open and honest conversations about it.

Claer Barrett
Well, amen to that. I think we can all agree. Now, before we come to your questions, because I’m sure there will be lots in the room. There are a couple of other things that I want to ask you about. Now mental health is obviously a huge issue, something that you tackle on the podcast a lot. But another really big one is AI. Do think like, as journalists, are we gonna be redundant in a few years?

Isabel Berwick
Well, that’s a very good . . . I don’t know, I mean, I like to think . . . 

Claer Barrett
I hope not. (Laughter)

Isabel Berwick
I hope not. I like to think that people will want, you know — and this goes for lots of sectors — a human touch, actually. And I think I like the idea of, I think, Microsoft’s software is Co-pilot, its AI. And I think that’s what I would be aiming for. You know, AI is co-piloting with us.

Claer Barrett
Not pilot.

Isabel Berwick
Not pilot. Co-pilot.

Claer Barrett
Co-pilot. I like that.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, at the other end of the scale for a lot of what used to be called blue-collar jobs, I’ve heard the phrase “machine minding” for the future of that work. So essentially it’s almost going back to Victorian times where people would stand next to a machine and make sure it was working properly. So in the AI-driven world of, say, automated warehouses, you’ll be minding a machine. And it’s not a brilliant future of work, but it could be made better because it will free people up to have more time for, I don’t know, human connection, for learning. You know, if you’re in a kind of not, a desk-less job, as they call it, maybe you can have time for training because there’ll be fewer people in the warehouse because AI is doing some of that work. But there may be more time for learning new skills.

Claer Barrett
They’ll need to have more capabilities for when things . . . 

Isabel Berwick
Exactly. So I don’t . . . I’m not completely pessimistic about that. And I think in what’s fashionably called knowledge work, which is what I think probably most of the people in this room do, AI will obviously take over a lot of the admin tasks. I think there will be many fewer jobs. But everyone I’ve talked to about AI, and it’s quite a lot of people now, emphasises that it’s a human thing and we get carried away with the hype and we have to embed the humanity in our workplaces. And that’s what people value.

Claer Barrett
Well, one interesting question about AI, which has actually amazed me. I went to a conference with a bunch of lawyers. We were talking about how AI will impact the legal profession, because there’s an awful lot of reading through paperwork and checking things and having to look things up. That’s what they do all these long, late hours in City law firms around here, and you see all the Deliveroo drivers going in at 8:00.

And people are saying, well, it raises a really big problem for how we train people because they all grew up doing all of this hideous checking and admin work. But it was how they learned about contract law. It was how they learned about conveyancing, it was how they learned about commercial property leases, because they were having to go through these things line by line. Now, if AI is doing that and you’ve got a machine minder, somebody who’s checking these things, then how does the training process work? It’s gonna have to be completely reimagined from the ground up. Dare I say it may be, a better version of training will come?

Isabel Berwick
I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening. And I think a lot of the big employers in the legal and consulting sectors are thinking a lot about how are they gonna train their graduates or what graduates do we need? Do we need different graduates? And actually, a lot of the things that Deloitte and KPMG, I think, some of the Big Four are doing now is focusing a lot of their efforts on training their grads in meeting skills, collaboration skills. So I think they can probably fill that gap with what used to be called soft skills and are now, I would call them human skills or communication skills.

Claer Barrett
And then their core skills.

Isabel Berwick
Core skills. Yeah.

Claer Barrett
OK. I’m gonna ask one more question before I come to the audience for their questions. Now, I’m sure many of you read Isabel’s Working It newsletter, which comes out every week, and you often answer specific problems that people have sent in. Feel free to share your problems with us if you like tonight, but give us a sort of 360 overview of the most common kinds of problems that people approach you about.

Isabel Berwick
Number one, I hate my manager. My manager is terrible. I don’t get good work. My manager is terrible.

Claer Barrett
Did I say I hate my manager? (Laughter)

Isabel Berwick
Did I say I hate my manager? Number two, my team are terrible. (Laughter) Number three — and this is quite surprising — my office is very noisy. I’ve had quite a few repeat noise problems. I’ve got a noisy colleague, I’m an introvert or I’m on the autism spectrum, I don’t like it. I want to wear headphones, but it’s not allowed in my office.

Claer Barrett
What?

Isabel Berwick
I’ve been at home in the pandemic.

Claer Barrett
I’ve got used to it.

Isabel Berwick
And actually, this is something I’ve noticed in our office at the FT, our newspaper offices used to be very noisy. We were all bashing the phones all the time, and now they’re very quiet.

Claer Barrett
We don’t even have phones.

Isabel Berwick
We don’t even have phones on our desks anymore. So that’s a real . . . 

Claer Barrett
There’s nothing to hit! (Laughter)

Isabel Berwick
No. So someone making a noise in an office is noticeable now. But, you know, the level of chit-chat and people on Zoom meetings, there’s a lot of that going on.

Claer Barrett
Well, noisy offices. I mean, I am a noisy person. When I see something that makes me laugh, I do let out a large whoop often, which kind of echoes around the newsroom. But I’m sure we’re gonna get lots of whoops later on. So who would like to do me the honour of asking Isabel the first question? Oh, we had a hand up straight away.

Isabel Berwick
Oh, wait for the roving mic.

Claer Barrett
Wait for the roving mic.

Audience member 1
I’m pretty loud without a mic, but OK. I have to disclose before I ask this question, I do have an MBA. But the reason I mentioned that is you were talking about what I would call the cult of the amateur in Britain. You were quite dismissive, I think rightly, of books aimed at MBAs and people who have MBAs. And there is that attitude here and it’s through everything I know from my own experience — it’s through parliament, it’s through the military. It’s very much the cult of the amateur. How the hell do we fix this, at least within a job, in a management kind of arena?

Isabel Berwick
It has to come from the top, actually, and it’s difficult to be proactive. You can educate yourself to a certain point, but actually, why would you if that’s not the culture? So corporate culture has to change. And I wonder if it is gonna change generationally here. I hope so, because I think young millennials and Gen Z in particular have a very high expectation of what managers are gonna do for them. So they essentially have to act as coaches and therapists as well as career progressors. And I think that a lot of companies are gonna lose a lot of staff unless they start investing. So, you know, as with gender equality back in the day — and there’s people in the room who will remember that battle — you know, there has to be a business case first and then you can start talking about actually, there’s a moral and societal case for making better management. And there is a productivity case as well. You know, British productivity is terrible and quite a lot of that is actually, you can put it down to poor management.

Claer Barrett
All of those people saying, I hate my manager! (Laughter) I hate my team!

Isabel Berwick
Exactly. It’s like people are petty, and who can blame them?

Claer Barrett
OK, the next question.

Mark Edwards
Hi Isabel. Mark Edwards, hi! I’m just wondering, from all your research, which sort of people, which sectors are just having really fulfilling careers? (Laughter) I mean, who’s actually buzzing and loving life and loving work?

Claer Barrett
And may I add to that the flip side, who are the ones who really hate their managers and their teams?

Isabel Berwick
Well, you know, it doesn’t matter what sector you’re in. If you have a great team and you, dare I say, have friends at work and you are engaged in your work, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing. I mean, I hear from lawyers who love it, and I also get, you know, questions from lawyers who are miserable, overworked, on the verge of burnout. I think the common thread through misery is overload. So workload. So it’s very prevalent in things like financial services, law, consultancy — what the economist Claudia Goldin coined as greedy jobs. You know, they take up not just your work but your life. And I think anyone in those jobs now is probably aware of how greedy they are. In jobs where there’s many more applicants than there are places, I think crappy working conditions can be quite pernicious and you either sink or swim. And the kind of people who are very happy are often, dare I say, self-employed. But I think in a corporate environment there are lots of organisations that make a huge effort and I think you can be happy anywhere, actually, if you have great colleagues, good working environment, I’m gonna say free coffee, which sounds venal, but actually things like that, small things like that make a huge difference.

Claer Barrett
We have another question from the lady at the back.

Audience member 2
Hello. I was wondering, and it’s more of what your take is. And so I think now I’m a better manager because I’ve had some really shit managers and I’ve learned loads about how they’ve managed me and what I’ve really disliked. And I do actively . . . Yeah, and try not to do . . . or always have this thing of like, am I being like that person? And that’s kind of my sense-check. So I wondered what your view is on that idea of past experiences then helping you be a better manager, hopefully.

Isabel Berwick
I can’t see if there’s anyone in this room that I’ve actually managed, but I think age actually in a workplace, I mean, it’s a double-edged thing because it can make you a bit too resistant to change. I try to be much more open. I think a lot of older people do carry with them the scars of the past. There’s a real value, actually, in taking something away from everyone you work for. I thank some of the managers I’ve had in the book because they make such a difference, a really good manager.

Claer Barrett
One hand at the back and then one at the front. We’ll come to you next.

Audience member 3
Hello. I have a similar disclaimer today that I’m one of the aforementioned Big Four consultants that you talked about. I’m really curious about the intergenerational kind of tensions that you talked about earlier, and it’s something that I’m very much on the fence about as someone who’s both like Gen Z and manages other Gen Zs and the incoming Gen Alpha. I’m curious about that kind of perception of the lack of soft skills and whether you think we’re on the precipice of this like, huge skills gap, whether it’s real, whether you think there’s something more that managers and people that manage Gen Z should be doing around it.

Isabel Berwick
I’m not sure there is a skills gap, but I think younger people communicate differently, and I think the crunch in workplaces is going to be where we meet. You know, is it gonna be this is how we’ve always done it, and you’ve got to meet us here, all the people who were born in the ’60s, ’70s? Or is it gonna be we’re gonna find a new way of communicating? I hope that what will happen is we’ll all come to some sort of, you know, cultural understanding within an organisation about how to communicate. I don’t think younger people lack soft skills. I think they have different skills which are very digitally oriented. And I think if you’ve spent a lot of your late teens in your bedroom because of the pandemic, you are gonna be absolutely brilliant at digital communication and collaboration. Is that worse than real life? Potentially, but not necessarily. So you can take hybrid and run with it and really make it work in a way that older workers probably can’t. So I think we have a lot to learn from younger staff.

Claer Barrett
We have time for a couple more questions before we go to do the book signing. Do we have anyone else who would like to ask something?

Audience member 4
Thank you. I suppose I was thinking if an employer or business leader came to you and asked about what are the real pain points they should be addressing in the short term, so much of this will impact medium and long-term, but obviously, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the outside world. What do you think employers should really focus on this year?

Claer Barrett
So some quick wins for employees.

Isabel Berwick
Internally, focus on how your workforce is feeling. You know, anger is massively on the rise in the workplace. I was really shocked by the statistics on this. And that goes back to listening. So I think built-in time for listening, make sure people’s workloads are not too great. It will reduce turnover, which is a huge problem for a lot of people in a lot of sectors. There’s a talent shortage. So if I say make your workforce happy, I don’t mean it in a glib way. I mean, there are quite practical things you can do and things like one-on-ones once a week, listening to what people say, understanding where people are coming from. And that is traditionally not something that leaders have really done.

Claer Barrett
Great answer. OK. And then we have another question.

Audience member 5
Yes, I had a question about bullying from both sides. So I think it’s very easy if you are wanting to be an effective and action-driven boss. It’s quite easy to tip over into bullying behaviour, but it’s also — and I think this comes back to the question that was asked about the intergenerational difference. I’ve seen, as a NED, quite a lot of examples of senior management being bullied in reverse because of cancelling, cancel culture and expectations around senior management behaviour that I would describe as bullying. What were your insights into how, both as a manager and as an employee, you can address bullying? 

Isabel Berwick
I think bullying is the most difficult issue in the workplace and it’s . . . I’m glad we’ve got to it. When you are on the receiving end of bullying, it means, you know, it’s awful. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a manager or a team member. It impacts everything. And I think you have to have a corporate culture where you say everybody has a role to play in preventing bullying, because bullies can only operate when other people do nothing. I mean, that goes for everything in life as well. We know that. But in workplaces, that’s always been ignored because people are reluctant to speak up because it impacts them. What if I lose my job? What if I start getting bullied? So for leaders, that’s particularly difficult. So I would probably suggest that it’s quite an open conversation among a leadership group. Maybe get an external facilitator in and talk about what the signs are of bullying and how can we address it. And also getting things in writing — you know, is my understanding correct? You said X, Y, Z. If you create an audit trail of what’s been said, people will often back off.

Claer Barrett
Playing devil’s advocate, some managers in the room might think, well, I’ve been accused of bullying just by asking someone to do their job or to meet a deadline or to, you know, do a piece of work.

Isabel Berwick
There is a generational piece there because somebody can go on TikTok or Instagram immediately now and 20 years ago, bullying happened in secret. Nobody spoke out and nobody quit. You know, we just did a podcast episode about people quitting on TikTok.

Claer Barrett
Quit-Tok.

Isabel Berwick
Quit-Tok. So I think people are much more willing to go public. And you have to build that in to everything you do. And it does require a certain circumspection. And maybe that’s a shame and maybe it’s not, but it might be that sort of transparency is also protective. (Audience clapping)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks to Claer Barrett and to Daunt Books for hosting us. This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.