More fool the CEO who speaks his mind. Woe betide the industry boss who says what they actually think. And why the hell did the Marks & Spencer head Stuart Machin open his mouth? Machin has caused a storm by admitting he has problems with fellow business leaders switching off on holiday and not being continuously available.
“I think in leadership, what I don’t like is leaders going away and being completely switched off,” he told the Business Leader Summit at Central Hall in Westminster last week. “I don’t like all of this talk about work/life balance. What I like is to talk about life and what’s important to you as a person. I’m going away this weekend to see a friend for their birthday, just for two and a half days. I’ll keep in touch with work.”
Machin, 55, has been chief executive of M&S since May 2022 and has developed a reputation as something of a hard taskmaster with a tough, hands-on, details-orientated approach. He said all of his top leadership team “had changed” since he was appointed to the top job, bringing in a new food managing director, a new managing director for the fashion business and — perhaps obviously — a new chief “people” officer.
Well, Stuart, I couldn’t agree more with your strategy and I raise my M&S beanie to you. I have spent the past 40 years of my career editing magazines and newspapers, and running large groups of people. I have edited GQ and the Evening Standard, been a senior editor at The Sunday Times and The Observer, and overseen news desks and features departments at many other publications. I’ve worked with some extraordinarily gifted and hard-working people but since Covid I’ve noticed a worryingly popular dynamic in offices: people these days just don’t want to work as hard.
I joined the Evening Standard three years ago and inherited a mostly brilliant team of digital journalists whose job it was to keep our equally brilliant website updated over the weekend, when there was almost no one in the office. But there was one chap who just wouldn’t play ball and whom I could never reach when I needed to. When I eventually tracked him down — he had a knack of never being around when I wanted to speak to him — he said that phone calls on Saturdays and Sundays interrupted time with his family. When I explained that being interrupted by his boss over the weekend was actually part of his job, he looked at me as though I’d just asked if he wouldn’t mind bringing his bed into the office.
What is this nonsense? Whenever one of my bosses calls me at the weekend, or when I’m on holiday, I answer immediately. If it’s urgent enough for them to call me then it’s urgent enough for me to try to help them. I don’t think there’s ever been a day when I’m on holiday when I haven’t taken or made a phone call or had an email correspondence with someone. Why would I switch off? It’s work. One of the most pathetic things I heard this week was civil servants demanding to spend even more time at home (some only spend two days in the office these days) because petrol prices have gone up. Really? Take a bus. Or, even better, walk.
I’ve recently written a big book on the history of the London restaurant (it comes out in October) and one of the chefs I interviewed (now famous) mentioned the Great Storm of 1987, when hurricane-force winds brought the country to a standstill. He was working that day in a restaurant in a Park Lane hotel and had 120 people coming for lunch. He lived in Acton, about six miles away, and public transport had all been closed down. So what did he do? He walked to work. And a bottle of champagne was waiting for him when he arrived two and a half hours later. I can’t imagine many people in his position doing that today.
Am I a workaholic? My wife would certainly think so. In fact when I was offered the editorship of the Evening Standard, I asked her if I should do it. Her response? “Well, you wake up and read the papers every day at 6am so you might as well get paid for it.” So I did.
I like being called a workaholic, although these days it’s very much a pejorative description, almost as though it’s an affliction, a condition you can’t shake. If I tell someone I’m a workaholic, they usually start suggesting ways for me to relax a little more or have some more “downtime”. They think I’m weird, a relic from an age when people went to work for long hours and then came home again. They think my work/life balance is out of whack, that I need to calm down a bit and take my foot off the accelerator.
Well, I have news for them. I like my work/life balance and it doesn’t need any alterations. I have a wife, a dog, two grown-up children and a handful of fabulous friends. And I have an extremely busy work life that I love. I don’t want less work in my life and, if I’m honest, I’d probably like a little more. I always take on more work than I’m meant to handle because I know I can. Because I enjoy it.
So, Stuart Machin, I applaud you. If you can’t get hold of someone at the weekend, tell them to change their work/life balance and start spending all of it at home. And then hire someone who actually wants to do a proper day’s work. Maybe in an actual office.
