The end of the year is approaching and you are saturated with contradictory injunctions and speeches from coaches or “inspiring” personalities who are often disconnected from the reality on the ground. Yours. The one experienced by millions of managers in France and elsewhere, these everyday heroes who navigate as best they can in the troubled waters of open space and its share of constraints, obstacles, nonsense but also – very fortunately – small victories that rekindle this desire to fight for your team and for your company.
Throughout 2024, L’Express interviewed management specialists who rely on serious work and with real expertise to seek to understand what sometimes works or malfunctions in the professional world. A way to sort out good and bad practices. If you have not had the opportunity to discover them, L’Express offers you a selection of management readings – surveys, interviews, analyzes – which have aroused keen interest among our readers. With the desire to make the right diagnosis and restore meaning to our work. To approach 2025 in the best possible way. Excerpts.
These absurd practices to be banned
Last October, on the occasion of the release of his new essay The Dangerous Virtue (Editions de l’Observatoire), our columnist Julia de Funès spoke at length in an interview about these absurd practices which ruin the lives of employees and which end up discouraging the most motivated. Often in the name, according to her, of a form of self-righteousness which leads managers and human resources managers to often do more harm than good. The philosopher calls for managerial courage: “Dare to say stop to absurd practices. This does not mean that organizations must live without procedures. But we must, in all circumstances, put common sense first and processes second. This requires lucidity and courage, because the manager may fear losing his position. But I believe that when you take on responsibilities in management, you have enough courage to withstand possible setbacks. otherwise it’s not worth being a manager.”
When the public sector scares away candidates
The average number of applicants per open job, all public functions combined, fell from 16 in 1997 to 6 in 2022. Shortage of candidates, significant turnover, lower requirements for recruiting… According to a recent study by EM Normandie, the sector public struggles to attract talents and vocations. For the researcher Jean Pralong who carried out this study, it is also high time that it models its practices on those of the private sector, in particular by abandoning competitive examinations, “which are not at all candidate-oriented, where today companies go out of their way to ensure that recruitment is an engaging experience, one that inspires desire and is a taste of what will happen next.” “Contractual agents are seen as a kind of cheap civil servant. This is no longer the way to think,” he warns.
The excesses of empathy
In a professional world where relationships between colleagues are sometimes harsh and processes are often dehumanizing, a little empathy can, at first glance, hardly do any harm. We can no longer count the number of LinkedIn posts from coaches and other speakers who extol its virtues and who encourage us to “develop” it. Like any technical skill. However, Jean Decety, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and specialist in empathy, believes that all these speeches are “largely bullshit delivered by coaches who often do not have solid training in scientific psychology or neuroscience.” . “It’s so easy to sell emotion, everyone knows what it means or thinks they know,” he laments. Especially since according to this eminent professor, empathy involves numerous cognitive biases…
Be wary of over-invested and malleable employees
We recognize them by their tendency to overinvest and constantly seek some form of recognition. However, the “good student syndrome”, which is a syndrome in name only, can do damage. Seeking recognition at all costs can harm your career, says Tessa West, professor of social psychology at New York University: “When their superiors ask them for a service, these employees often wrongly believe that this will allow them to access these positions of power themselves.” Not only do these “model” employees harm themselves, but they can also harm the collective. We explain to you why line managers have every interest in being wary of these employees who never stand up to them.
Detect the true potential of a candidate
During job interviews, many people place perfectionists in the category of “false” faults. For Adam Grant, professor of management at the Wharton School, one of the most prestigious American business schools, this is, however, a real flaw. Not to be underestimated. In an interview given to L’Express, the author of Hidden potential. How to accomplish great things (Alisio, 2024), lists the main problems linked to perfectionists: “first, you ruminate and feel guilty too much, which can lead to burnout and a lack of self-confidence. Second, you do not take not enough risk, which limits your work and creativity. Ultimately, you focus on the wrong things, do the little things right, and get the big things wrong. Adam Grant invites us to make a 180-degree turn on the way we evaluate candidates in interviews and to look beyond the first lines of the CV and the immediately identifiable abilities of the applicants.
What the Notre-Dame construction site can teach us
In this column – one of the contents popular with our subscribers at the end of the year – Julia de Funès analyzes what made possible the incredible success of the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris. A feat which offers us a real lesson in management, “a thousand miles from the easy seductions of ambient demagoguery”, points out the philosopher. The restoration of Notre-Dame, she emphasizes, “celebrates collective commitment in its most united form. Here, there is no need for sanitized seminars, team building, where we play Lego, where we erect frescoes, where we solve puzzlesescape games to simulate artificial osmosis”. To meditate…
The bullshit of personality tests
MBTI, Disc, enneagram… Personality tests are to the workplace what horoscopes are to the waiting rooms of medical offices. In a survey which risks dampening the atmosphere in management training, Thomas Mahler, deputy director at L’Express, looked into the reliability of these tests which aim to know oneself better, but also to better understand relationships with colleagues. “What makes these tests successful – putting people into boxes – is precisely their main methodological weakness,” he explains. Only the much more recent Big Five model is of interest according to scientific psychologists. There is no doubt that after reading this survey, you will have a different look at colors and acronyms of all kinds.
How slackers slip through the cracks
In the open space, everyone knows at least one slacker. How does this predator behave who doesn’t do much except steal others’ ideas for his own benefit and rely on the work of his colleagues to organize his meritless rise? Our columnist Claire Padych draws up a sketch of these boasters and manipulators who have built a system that they master without sharing. Like “the ‘discreet’ one, who knows how to be forgotten: he works his hours and never deviates from the rules. However, the manager must follow up with him to understand what he does, sometimes discovering that he has a ‘double life’ devoted to parallel activities in which he excels.
Stop digital and… bureaucratic distractions
Just because you send 15,000 emails a day and have a series of meetings doesn’t make you productive. In an interview with L’Express, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport criticizes the “pseudo-productivity” in vogue in companies, based on visible activity rather than quality. He gives his advice to protect his time against messaging and administrative constraints. “Among knowledge workers,” notes Cal Newport, “everything you actively do generates administrative burdens, including meetings and emails. This is what I call “overload tax.” The more you work on a large number of things, the more you have to pay for these indirect costs. Ultimately, if your workload becomes large enough, you spend most of your time on these side administrative tasks, and you have little time left to actually accomplish. the background work so well that you are sometimes forced to devote yourself to your “real” work outside of office hours, i.e. in the evenings, early in the morning or during the weekend. An essential read to get 2025 off to a good start.
The secrets of conventional termination
As in personal life, professional life can have ups and downs. Despite the permanent contract (CDI) which suggests that the parties are linked forever, an employee can resign if he has had enough while the employer can fire him. However, there is a third method of separation which has just celebrated its 16th anniversary: the conventional separation. Since it was introduced by a law in 2008, conventional termination has enjoyed growing success. Over the last ten years alone, we have gone from around 300,000 signatures per year to more than 500,000. And executives are largely concerned. A popular device but which can have some “trap” points. L’Express reviews them.
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