Portrait: Raphaël H. Cohen

“I teach people to be agile, able to identify professional opportunities, analyse them through 11 key questions, sell them and exploit them”

“If you find leadership that is both benevolent and costly (in effort and time), try benevolent demandingness.” This may sound borrowed from Abraham Lincoln or from a management guru’s latest book, but it was in fact put to the public by Raphaël Cohen at the end of 2019 by Eyrolles Editions. He says little about the “great leader”, warning against taking enterprise for a sudden fit of genius. But with his latest publication, he settles the score with the legacy of a management style that is totally outdated: “it is not a matter of being all soft and all nice, but of writing one of the first books in French on benevolent management, and there is a lot still to be said”. Since then, the concept has become public, but often confused with “nice”.

Consistency and coherence

“It is confused with kindheartedness and with good cheer, yet some still think that to engage people one must tighten the screw all the time, force them, ensure that they are controlled”, says the person responsible for management training at the University of Geneva. “One can be severe, strict and speak the truth while being benevolent in one’s actions, but above all in one’s manner of seeing the other person.”

To think that one can simply be kind is not enough. “Being a leader and lovable at the same time is not easy, and coherence of performance and the need for the individual to be benevolent must be backed up by discipline and clear standards. And concretely, where do we start? More than 50 practical cases in the book Le management bienveillant show examples taken from executives’ daily lives. Like ‘Vel’ on L’Incognito, and the Chinese tale [No 38], developing one’s emotional intelligence (No 3) or opening one’s digital camera (No 4). At the same time, benevolence does not seem to be in fashion. But all the same the interest lies in the disillusionment caused by these harmful principles. And some derive merit from it by becoming, like No 48, “the one who can say no and be right”. This is where his latest book begins.

How should one react to the issue of teleworking after two years? A Stanford study published in 2015: does one still need to invent new management concepts in order to motivate people? “Benevolence pushes us to return to the concept, there is no one single recipe for leadership”, replies Raphaël H. Cohen (which is in Hegel’s wake where there is too much...). His latest work asks to take account of economic reality, whereas many books on management idealise things or overstate them. “The levers I have listed and taught”, Raphaël Cohen established in 1975 a first business in 1975 while teaching at conference...

Benevolent leader

RAPHAËL COHEN

Generalised suffering at work is not inevitable, believes the entrepreneur and management professor from Geneva, who is publishing a book offering keys to securing employees’ commitment.

When one opens one’s diary to explain one’s principles of benevolent management, one still starts with a need to save money and preserve jobs, but one can also... “Certainly, but the entrepreneur has to ask himself questions and be able to decide”. This is not the whole concern. “This is one of the first books in French that speaks of benevolent management, and there is still much to be said.”

A carefully chosen vocabulary

When Raphaël Cohen speaks with the journalist from Le Temps, he places a great deal of emphasis and energy on the precise choice of words, but never in an excessive or familiar way. Thus this professor uses a rich, concise vocabulary. If one asks him what his speciality is, his answer is not immediate: “entrepreneur and management professor”. He could have used “management specialist” or “entrepreneurship expert”; he prefers to avoid formulas that are too broad or too ready-made.

His path, however, would have entitled him to use them. Born in Cairo in 1953, he moved with his family to Switzerland in 1957. At 17, he got his first industrial job in a family textile company after his father had bought one in Great Britain, and he says that there he developed “an entrepreneurial fibre”. He then studied at HEC and in 1975 founded his first business while still a student. In 1977 he obtained a degree from INSEAD and a doctorate in economics at the University of Geneva five years later.

By the early 2000s he had already founded or co-founded several companies, notably in innovation and venture capital. In 2000 he created one of the country’s first entrepreneurship courses at the University of Geneva. In 2019 he published Le management bienveillant, then Leaders, comment obtenir le vrai engagement?.

When he speaks about commitment, he refuses simplistic recipes. According to him, one does not obtain employees’ commitment through slogans or empty declarations. It requires consistency, credibility and the alignment between what one says and what one does. The leader must embody what he expects from others.

“I teach people to be agile, to identify professional opportunities, to analyse them through eleven key questions, to sell them and to exploit them.” Still with benevolence.