Bizcuits | When the cat’s away

Leanda Lee

A new sign of the summer holidays arriving are those emails from BNU promoting their foreign banknote online ordering system. In my rare moments of need for currency at this time of year, I used to take pot-luck at the branches, which had been a successful strategy in the past, but then luck dwindled as the travelling population and demand increased. In more recent years the main branch could drum up a spare Pound or Euro or two upon request over the counter but then an unusually helpful teller somewhere suggested pre-ordering, but, as these things go, it would take up to 5 working days. Now we have the on-line system. Macau, we have progressed.
What these promotions and maturing processes signal is the increased seasonality of demand for such services: The summer exodus is underway.
Since my summer downtime is in a different hemisphere, I’ve tended to keep working during July and August while bidding a bon voyage to a major proportion of my peers and colleagues.  It can be a fabulously productive period for professionals left behind. The interruptions are fewer, meetings all but disappear from the calendar, those reports can be written and projects put underway or finalised. It’s an introvert’s paradise; the thinking person’s equivalent to savouring delights of the slow food movement – at a table for one.
Frustrations start when inflexible bureaucratic organisational systems and decision making protocol get in the way of initiative, and there is no-one around to sign the cheque or MOU or give the final approval to move forward on that project you have been working on.  When we are told “You’ll have to wait until Prof./Dr/Mr/Madam S returns next month”, when managers disappear and leave a void, afraid to empower others and distrustful of delegation, productivity grinds to a halt. The void that is left amplifies the void that was always there – a void of leadership, trust, empowerment and encouragement of proactivity, group cohesion and self-directedness. There is little excuse for this in a professional environment. Professional people can generally be trusted and left to their own devices for a while to get on with their jobs as long as their roles are clearly defined and authority levels appropriately designated to enable rather than restrict work, even without temporary ones being established.
A sign of a sure-footed leader and leadership team is one does not have to be there. The business of the business will be done regardless. Such a leader selects, develops and manages the team for these moments. Indeed, leaders and key players will obligingly disappear every now and again to give the team a chance to demonstrate what they are made of.
I know little about football but I do know that offering Portugal’s Euro 2016 win as an exemplar of anything in a place like Macau risks being shouted down from all points of the compass for ignorance and wacky opinion. However, I am partial to analogies so I’ll risk it. Portugal’s captain, Cristiano Ronaldo, forced off with a knee injury in the first half, by denying Portugal their larger than life key player, gave the team the opportunity to show their grit and gravitas, and be acknowledged and analysed for their strengths as a side of skilled individual professionals rather than as a one-man-team with sidekicks (pardon the pun). The transitory void, ironically, likely enabled such a stunning performance.
And that’s how it should be; that’s what managers and leaders are there to achieve – the creation of a team that’s better able to perform without them and their key personnel than with them, at least for a while.
Bon voyage.