On transferable skills

Sir Keir Starmer's troubles remind us that ability is not as portable from job to job as you think.

“We have too many career politicians. What we need are people with experience of life before politics, and especially experience of running things.” Such has been a cliched sentiment for years. But there’s a problem with it. Sir Keir Starmer is just what these people wanted; he didn’t become an MP until aged 52 having run the Crown Prosecution Service beforehand. And yet he is just as hapless as his five predecessors, being unable to do the core prime ministerial functions of setting out a strategy and resolving conflict between departments. As Politico recently reported:

Starmer, they say, has no ability to manage a team; an aversion to conflict; no guiding mission for power; no energy to drive change; little interest in people; and no interest in political strategy.

And now, we might add, no ability to command the loyalty of all Labour MPs.

There’s an important and overlooked lesson here: success in one job doesn’t ensure success in another, so it is vert difficult to identify the best person for a job.

For example, Boris Groysberg has shown that when divisional managers at General Electric bcome CEOs of other companies, their performance varies enormously even though all had similarly impressive CVs before moving. He’s also shown that the performance of “star” equity analysts often drops markedly when they move firms. And Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano have shown that the performance of heart surgeons varies according to which hospital they do operations in. “Surgeon performance is not fully portable across hospitals” they say:

When a highly skilled worker must interact with a complex array of other assets—human and physical—within a given firm, the performance of that worker may not be easily transferred across organizational settings.

This echoes Robert Protherough and John Pick:

Rightly we honour the memory of managers such as Jesse Boot, Dr Bernardo, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Cook, the Joseph Rowntrees or W.H.Smith…[But] the notion that they had in common a single talent which can be identified as “managerial skill”, capable of ready transference between their different callings, is pure fantasy. That Dr Bernardo could equally well have run a chain of newsagents, or that Thomas Cook could just as readily have run a chocolate factory, is manifestly absurd. Yet the modern world believes as fervently in the transferability of management as it believes that management skills are separate and identifiable realities. (Managing Britannia, p 13)

All this of course confirms what every football fan knows. From Brian Clough at Leeds to Arne Slot at Liverpool, via almost every post-Ferguson boss at Man Utd and every manager bar Mauricio Pochettino at Sp*rs, countless managers arrive with stellar reputations and leave as failures.

And not just in football. Lots of men (it’s usually men) have been brilliant in one sphere only to show themselves as fools when they move out of it: James Watson, William Shockley, Bobby Fischer, Richard Dawkins...

Success, then, is often not transferable.

Why? One reason is that successful people can get high on their supply, mistaking luck for skill and becoming overconfident.

There’s another reason, though. It’s that what determines success or failure isn’t merely individual ability but rather the match between the individual and the job requirement. This is what Groysberg found. If a manager good at controlling costs took over a mature business needing to protect its margins, he did well. But if he took over a firm needing to grow, he didn’t. The same thing’s true of football managers. One good at organizing a defence and playing effective but dour football won’t last long at a team demanding exciting football: think of Mourinho at Sp*rs or Man Utd or Moyes at West Ham.

The same’s true in politics. Theresa May’s lack of interpersonal skills was a handicap in negotiating Brexit, but one can imagine that her dour diligence would have served OK during Covid; at least she wouldn’t have been partying.

Which brings us to the problem with Starmer. Sure, being head of the CPS is a high-profile leadership role. But it differs from being PM in some important respects. For example, the CPS has a clearly defined role but what the role of government should be is vaguer. The PM must therefore define it, must set out a clear vision and strategy. Also, MPs are not like CPS lawyers. For one thing they are not Starmer’s employees; their future instead depends upon the voters or potential private sector employees. This makes them less deferential (and more likely to talk to the media!) A PM therefore needs skills of persuasion and the ability to command personal loyalty; merely being the boss isn’t enough. And the CPS, being a monopoly, need not worry about competitors, whereas a party leader most definitely must.

In these respects, being a good DPP (assuming, arguendo, that this is what Starmer was) does not equip one to be a good PM. Starmer has been unable to make the transition.

To some extent, this is forgivable. We are all prisoners of our professional background (as well as our class, formative years etc). Starmer’s culpability lies in allowing his ambition to over-ride both his self-knowledge and (what should have been) his knowledge of management history, or even of the saying that “round holes need round pegs.”

In this, however, he’s not alone. Our individualist culture over-emphasizes the importance of personal qualities and under-emphasizes that of organizational capital and of the need for a good match between person and role. This is reinforced by neoclassical economics’ talk of human capital and marginal product.

So, what’s the solution to this?

In part, we need unsentimental precision. We must ask: what exact qualities do we want in a PM? And: who possesses these? In asking these we must ignore vibes and hype. We must also pay little heed to policy platforms, as these can change; policy is a product of incentives, not merely individuals’ dispositions.

There are, however, tight limits on how much we can achieve even with this approach simply because we can never have perfect information about individuals and even less about the future; the things we might want from a PM today might not be those we want in a few years’ time if only because there’s a big difference between governing and campaigning. Everybody taking a view on who the next Labour leader should be must be humble in their judgment, and must recognise that their circle of competence in this matter is small.

In fact the private sector doesn’t get it right, as anyone who has worked in it knows: there’s a reason why the Peter and Dilbert principles are so well known. Hirers often look not for the best employee but for those whose skills they can easily assess, causing them to prefer proven mediocrities to potentially but unproven better ones. And often it is more important to avoid toxic employees rather than hire superstars.

Which suggests we need something else - resilience. If you can’t get a decision right, at least ensure that your inevitable mistakes don’t do much damage.

In one sense, we have such resilience in politics. However bad the PM is, the NHS treats people, taxes get collected and benefit cheques go out. The basic functions of the state continue, albeit not as well as they might.

Support for the Labour party, however, is not so resilient. Which matters as a weak Labour party increases the strength of Reform even if few voters switch directly between the two parties.

One way to improve resilience would be to have a more collective leadership - not necessarily formal co-leaders as the Greens used to have, but a system in which the leader is only first among equals; in which power is devolved from the centre; and in which strategy is decided by something more robust that the private whims of a few shadowy individuals.

Of course, such a system is precluded by our political culture. The media wants a simple narrative of politics as a conflict of individuals - anything to stop it facing the facts of complex social systems. And a mindless managerialist ideology leads politicians to over-invest in the dream of “good leadership”: centrists are as unrealistically utopian as any teenage lefty.

So yes, perhaps we get the leaders we deserve.