‘I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.’ Friedrich Nietzsche
Apple recently hit the news not for a latest product release but this time over an disagreement with employees over their being in their words, ‘forced back into work’.
Like many other businesses Apple is looking at its work model in a post Covid-pandemic world where working from home (WFH) over the last two years became the norm for many people and who do not want to see this to change.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, recently wrote to all ‘staffers’ that they would immediately need to start working from the office one day a week and gradually ramp this up to three days a week by mid-May. This created a furore with a group, Apple Together, who represent some 200 employees and wrote an open letter addressed to ‘the executive’.
The bottom line as far as the Apple Together group sees it was that the decision to bring employees back to the office is not being motivated by a 'need to commune in person' (an interesting phrase in itself) as Cook wrote in his letter to ‘staffers’, but by what the group sees as the company's 'fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy [and] fear of losing control.'
The latter two points, ‘the fear of worker autonomy’ and the ‘fear of losing control’, must have come as a shock to Tim Cook with the bombshell from this furore being the loss of a Director, Ian Goodfellow, an expert in Machine Learning and its team leader, who openly quit in protest at Cook’s policy.
If this policy had been brought in by Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs, there would probably be no surprise given his autocratic leadership style. Cook, however, appears overs the years to have been quite different in his leadership of the business, working through a far more consensual or democratic style so the question must be, what has changed?
Orders ‘to return to work’ in the now post Covid environment have also been given by CEOs of other organisations such as Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank as well as many others so Cook is not alone.
The problem here is that these leaders appear to have quickly resorted to old habits and thinking, failing to consider how work might be effected in the future as well as neglecting to learn from the experience of the last two years.
The old model of work that Cook and other leaders seem to want to perpetuate is one that was created some 200 years ago. It has undergone little change in that time being based in ‘managing’ employees by attendance totally ignoring the learning of the last two years where a different model, one built in reciprocity of trust, with the measurement not being attendance but performance.
The ‘T’ word of trust has been a perennial issue for organisations and their leaders over the last couple of centuries, for trust is fraught with complexity and paradox.
Trust is something that we all aware of, for knowing whether to trust a particular person or situation has always been at the core of human relationship needs but more significantly underlies our basic survival needs, for misplaced trust can lead to ‘loss’; a job, for instance, or at its extreme possibly even death.
The paradox of trust is that the more we consciously seek it, the more likely we are to hinder our ability to create it. This has implications with research around business organisations pointing out that when it comes to trust many leaders: ‘Try too earnestly to foster it, and their efforts can backfire, instilling suspicion among employees’.[1]
As many leaders have discovered; trust is fragile and precious and built upon both actions and words that align over time but more significantly it can be destroyed in an instance.
It may be too late for Cook and other leaders who are now looking to back-peddle for they have failed to understand the ‘T’ word and how it works. For other leaders there is no better sound advice than that of the literary great, Anton Chekhov: ‘You must trust and believe in people, or life becomes impossible.’
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[1] Harvard Management Update (2000) ‘Trust: How to Build It, Earn it, and Re-establish It When It’s Broken’ Harvard Business Publishing
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