This has been a typical summer for my family. None of us are at work or school. Each year my brother escapes the Swiss winter for a few weeks and spends most of the summer with us. He’s sometimes accompanied by his wife or one of his daughters.
The days are spent at either Newport or Mona Vale beaches – as they’re close to my home and well, they’re not Bondi or Manly (ie, overrun by tourists and in the case of Bondi encased in so much concrete as to make it the least attractive beach in Sydney – except for that one camera shot from the Icebergs at sunset).
Our days at the beach are interrupted by lunch – at the Newport (thanks to Justin Hemmes for having the courage to invest north of the harbour) looking over Pittwater… or a burger palace nearby – then it’s more beach followed by cricket and tennis (watching and sometimes even playing).
This year, leading up to the Australian Open, our media had been in a frenzy over a 19 year old “rising star”, Alex De Minaur. There was just one problem with the coverage of this young gun – he wasn’t one. Sure he had a lot of fight and the right attitude and is the right cultural fit for our Davis Cup squad. But when it comes to playing top 20 or top 10 players, he just can’t get the job done. Predictably, he didn’t make it to the 2nd week.
Every story needs a villain. Enter, Nick Kyrios and Bernard Tomic. The bad boys of sport. They have received worse press than murderers, drug dealers and paedophiles. Their crime, according to our Davis Cup captain, they don’t fit the cultural standard dictated by him and former legend of the game Tony Roche. They are not a good cultural fit.
Actually they just don’t care as much as Hewitt and Roche did. They may have other priorities.
So until they get their act together and fall into line they will not be selected to play Davis Cup.
There’s just one problem with this scenario. De Minaur’s run in the Australian Open ended when he came up against former world No.1, Rafa Nadal. You would be right in saying he’s an up and comer. No one expected young Alex to win…blah, blah, blah. Of course, he didn’t win. He had his backside handed to him in a straight sets loss.
This story should’ve ended there except that’s precisely what Kyrios did when he was 19. He beat Nadal at Wimbledon.
No one was talking about cultural fit then. They were slapping each other on their collective backs and saying things like what a player that up-and-comer Kyrios is. Pass the strawberries and cream.
In fact, of the current crop of Australian players, Kyrios has 75% of the wins against top 10 players.
Indeed, even Hewitt (our Davis Cup captain) had won two slams by the time he was 20 and was world No. 1 shortly thereafter…and if you’re old enough to recall he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea either. But he had talent and could get the job done.
I’m not saying Kyrios (or for that matter, Hewitt) is my favourite human being. I’m simply saying what many others – who would know – have said. He’s one of the best talents to emerge in tennis in a decade.
So, you may ask, why am I rabbiting on about tennis prima donnas? Well, as I was reading all the news articles I saw a metaphor start to develop about culture and the workplace in general. In particular banks.
In the past few months I’ve seen a lot of press about brilliant jerks ruining a work place because they’re not the right cultural fit. These articles, for me at least, were juxtaposed against banking morons giving evidence at the recent Royal Commission into Misconduct in that sector. These weren’t just any morons. These were hand-picked senior management. Supposedly the cream of the crop.
Which left me wondering what has happened to all the brilliant bankers?
The argument for not employing brilliant jerks goes along the lines of find the person with the right attitude and we can teach them all the other stuff like skills etc. Kinda like build it and the talent will emerge.
Ahem!
Kyrios’ current lousy form not withstanding…let’s go back to the Kyrios/De Minaur example. One’s a gun and one’s just not. In today’s workplace people are really saying they would prefer to hire a De Minaur because he’s more like them and won’t upset the apple cart. He’d be a better cultural fit.
Here the problem with that attitude. Brilliant jerks are brutally honest but that’s not why you hire or retain them.
No, you rely on them to probably make up a significant percentage of your annual budget. Until they fail one year and you get rid of them. Which is what we’re doing with Kyrios.
Our work places have become so culturally sterile that it is a sackable offence now to correct someone’s grammar or to highlight errors in a junior member of staff as part of their training – apparently that’s now tantamount to bullying. That’s not something I’ve made up. They’re things senior bankers are telling me right now.
How many times have you contacted a bank or other lender and they just can’t help you? We contact banks daily. A few years ago we started to compile a database of bankers who were capable and more importantly those who were not.
It is incredible to see so many of those on the latter list who’ve been promoted. Why? They’re the right cultural fit. I’m not talking about minor promotions here. I’m talking a junior relationship manager being promoted to General Manager in the space of two-three years. This jump used to take an entire career.
We are doing these people, the banks’ customers and shareholders a great disservice.
Years ago I worked at an investment bank with a boss who many were afraid of. He was a little like Kyrios – Extremely obnoxious, brutally honest and not very nice. He was also the best banker I’ve ever come across (either in Australia or globally). Sometimes – because of this guy’s impossibly high bar – employees who’d been there a few weeks or months would simply stop showing up being convinced that they would not make it past their probation period.
I stuck it out and my learning curve was so steep that in five years I learned more about banking than in the rest of my 34 year banking career.
There were people working there then who would move on to be CEO’s of major Australian companies, Heads of Bureaucracies at state and federal levels, owners of highly successful advisory businesses and a future premier of NSW.
The thing is, that boss would struggle to find employment now.
Could he have been nicer? Of course. But he cut through so much jargon and BS and gave it to me straight without sugar coating it. He told me when I had done something wrong – boy did he tell me. All year I worried that I would lose my job.
But each year at each appraisal he would throw me a cheque which was larger than any I had received previously – he would do it nonchalantly too and say “here’s this years bonus. Send in the next guy on your way out.” His appraisals were simple. In my first year he told me he was surprised I knew anything about banking at all. I was good at the vanilla stuff and I needed to learn more about structured transactions. That was it.
At the time I wanted bad, violent things to happen to him but I look back at those five years and am forever grateful to him for shaping me into a much better banker than I otherwise would’ve become.
He’s a bit like our tennis stars. We promote the nice bloke with the right attitude but little talent and pillory the real talented player because he’d prefer to be anywhere but on a tennis court.
Have we ever thought to ask ourselves why?
Perhaps Kyrios’ mental health problems stem from earning tens of millions of dollars for hitting a ball – before he was out of his teens mind you – then wondering why people wanted him to work hard as he was already being rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.
His part of a generation who was raised to believe they could be anything they wanted to be and that there were no losers (everyone got a prize). Life just isn’t like that…apparently (except for him it seems as though it is).
If we make it too easy for people they will come to expect achievement without effort – regardless of the workplace. Make it too hard and you will lose a lot of talent. The answer is not to hire talentless people. It’s to hire talented people and manage them according to the correct/appropriate culture.
That’s what management is paid a lot of money to do.
By all means fill your workplaces with culturally simpatico co-workers. Just don’t expect them to be any good if the underlying talent isn’t apparent.
How do you find that talent?
You’ll never know if we keep hiring the way we’ve been in the last decade in banks. It’s the subtle art of management. Knowing when someone’s bunging it on and when someone knows what they’re talking about. To be able to do that – as a manager – you would have to have knowledge of the subject matter not be a manager simply because you’re the right cultural fit.