Interview: Caring and Engagement

The health crisis and, more generally, companies’ digital transformation and the widespread adoption of remote working have had a major impact on our working environments and methods. At a time when working on site is becoming the exception rather than the norm, and when companies’ resilience is measured by the agility of their organisational processes, leaders must revisit their management practices in order to maintain their teams’ commitment.

Digitalisation, but also distancing and the place of Generations Y and Z in the world of work, have brought about a change in mindsets. Employees’ relationship with the company, with their manager and with their role is no longer the same. However, leaders’ responsibilities remain unchanged: they must still achieve their objectives, ensure business continuity and support the company’s performance and development.

So how can managers reconcile productivity imperatives with their employees’ professional fulfilment? How can they create conditions that foster commitment and loyalty? The answer may lie in these three words: fair and benevolent management. Raphaël H Cohen, Academic Director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership specialisation on the Executive MBA at the University of Geneva (Unige) and a pioneer of the concept of fair and benevolent leadership in business, explains.

Sherpany: For some people, benevolence in business is synonymous with a host of clichés. Could you give us a definition of benevolent management?

Raphaël H Cohen: Benevolent management is not “care bear” management. It is management that seeks to take the other person’s interests into account. It is inclusive management, which accepts the idea that I must also look after the interests of my employees, and not only my own as a leader. I no longer speak merely of benevolent management, but of fair and benevolent management, or fair-benevolent management. Benevolence does not automatically include fairness, and if there is one thing that causes frustration and ill-being, it is problems of fairness such as favouritism, lack of consideration or pettiness. That is why one must be both benevolent and fair.

Sherpany: How can a leader spark, cultivate and strengthen employee commitment?

Raphaël H Cohen: Put simply, there are four parameters to commitment. The work being done must be meaningful, the company must be sustainable or have a future, employees must be treated fairly and they must operate in a benevolent environment.

These four major parameters come with a multitude of sub-parameters.

Among the tools recommended for securing commitment is the creation of a committed team charter. The idea is to bring all employees together to agree on the rules of the game. It contains six components, one of which concerns expected behaviours. Among these behaviours, one section is devoted to the management of meetings.

“For meetings to be effective, the rules of the game must be defined.”

For example, is it acceptable for participants to deal with their emails during a meeting? Is it acceptable to arrive late? Is it acceptable to monopolise speaking time? Employees sometimes have divergent expectations of meetings. If some people consistently take up all the time and speak every time, the team may, for example, agree on a rule stating that on a given topic, each employee may speak only once and only for a certain percentage of the time allocated to discussion of that item.

This charter is co-created by the whole team and must never be imposed by the manager. That is precisely why, among the various sections of this charter, one is devoted to compliance with the rules. It is important to decide who will be responsible for ensuring that they are respected. Here again, it is the team that will choose the compliance mechanism, quite simply because when decisions are jointly made and jointly built, they must be applied. Of course, this charter is not limited to meeting management. It goes much further by addressing solidarity and respect, in order to enable the team to perform better as a whole.

Sherpany: In terms of commitment, why is being a benevolent manager more effective than other approaches?

Raphaël H Cohen: Committed employees perform better. Studies show that employee commitment increases a company’s productivity and profits by up to 35%, which is colossal.

If, as a leader, your performance seems satisfactory even though it was achieved by people who are not very committed, it is logical to assume that this performance would be even higher if they were. And to achieve that, you need to know how to put benevolence and fairness into practice, and measure their effects on the commitment score obtained.

It has been amply demonstrated that a bonus, a pay rise or any other form of remuneration never has an impact lasting more than three months on employees’ level of commitment and motivation. Money is, in reality, the worst lever. I teach management in hospitals where there are no financial incentives at all. And yet you find people there who are very, very committed. The supposed correlation between a financial carrot and commitment is a myth. Indeed, among the 54 commitment levers I have identified, money does not feature. What employees expect is fairness everywhere, including in remuneration mechanisms.

Moreover, managers’ opinions about what contributes to commitment have no effect on reality: it is a mental construct. A leader may very well think that paying a bonus will contribute to their teams’ commitment, but that bonus will have no impact if the employees themselves feel that it does nothing to motivate them. By contrast, the commitment generated by the manager accounts for 70% of overall commitment.

Sherpany: How can leaders implement benevolent management? What are the prerequisites?

Raphaël H Cohen: Drawing on the levers of commitment is something very personal that depends on the manager’s values. A person who would be prepared to sell their father and mother for money could never become benevolent, because their values are intrinsically incompatible with it. You need to have basic values that point in that direction. Accepting benevolence also means accepting that, to some extent, you must give up things you like.

Among the 54 commitment levers I have identified, 18 contribute to benevolence. Of course, no one can activate all 54 levers. First, because that would be far too many, but also because it depends on individual personalities. It is up to each manager to identify the ones that suit them and to measure their impact on their teams. There is no miracle recipe.

Sherpany: Is there an effective way of measuring the commitment that leaders generate among their teams?

Raphaël H Cohen: It is difficult to measure benevolence and fairness without using tools. As a leader, I may be convinced that I am benevolent. But in the end, it is you, as an employee, who perceives my benevolence — or not. I may be convinced that I am trustworthy. But again, it is you who will be able to tell me whether I am or not.

We have developed a platform called EazyMirror.com. It allows users to create surveys free of charge to find out how employees perceive their manager, or even each other. A questionnaire is sent to a predefined list of people. The software then consolidates the responses anonymously to ensure employees’ psychological safety, and passes them on to the person who has been evaluated. That person is the only one who can access the results. In this way, it is possible to measure the level of commitment generated by the manager, or the way their colleagues perceive them.

This measurement can change the way organisations’ functioning is viewed. At present, the types of evaluations carried out periodically contain a whole series of parameters. Some of these parameters are ultimately used to determine whether or not the manager generates commitment. But what is being measured is the means, not the result. If, for example, you believe that being participative and inclusive is a good way of obtaining commitment, that assumption will not always be borne out in practice. One must not confuse the end with the means.

By measuring commitment as the end goal, responsibility for improving the commitment score falls to the manager. The company is no longer prescriptive: it is up to the manager to find the way to improve their employees’ commitment according to their personality and style.

For the manager, there is nothing more rewarding than a good commitment score. For employees, it reflects their fulfilment while ensuring optimal performance for the employer. Remote working with committed teams thus becomes entirely natural.

Raphaël H Cohen

Serial entrepreneur, business angel, professor and author of numerous books, including Les leviers de l’engagement (Eyrolles), Raphaël H Cohen is recognised as one of the world’s leading experts in entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, team commitment and corporate governance.

Since 2001, he has been Academic Director of the “Entrepreneurial Leadership” specialisation on the Executive MBA at the University of Geneva.