In the first of a series of four edited extracts taken from Managing Conflict, the new book in the Harvard Business School Press and Fifty Lessons' Lessons Learned series, Sir Peter Middleton, the former chairman of Barclays Group, talks about putting business interests above personalities - even when one of the personalities is Margaret Thatcher.

“I have always found that the big things that cause organisations to get into difficulties have more to do with personalities than policies. The sort of difficulties I’m talking about are the ones where senior management falls out and the place gets into disarray - even if the fundamentals of the business are perfectly fine.

“I’ll give you two examples of that. When I was in the Treasury, there was a long-publicised and very well-known dispute between Margaret Thatcher and the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson. As the permanent secretary of the Treasury at the time, it was very difficult to know quite what this dispute was about."

"It’s a bit like having a disease: you know what the symptoms are, but you’re not very sure what the cause is. So, at a superficial level, it was quite obvious what they were arguing about, but in a fundamental sense it wasn’t. It had much more to do with personalities, who was responsible for what, than it was about policies. My concern wasn’t about their individual dispute, but about how we were going to keep the business of running the economy operating efficiently.

“Somewhat to my astonishment, a similar thing happened in Barclays when I was halfway through my spell there.

“The question is: what do you do about it? What you are trying to do is to get the business to take precedence over personalities, and provided there’s agreement on the business model or the government model or whatever it is, I think it’s a job that can be done. But it does require a sort of elder statesman-type person to do it. You basically get people together, tell them to grow up, and that if they don’t work together they have to go, quite difficult if one of them is the Prime Minister and one is the Chancellor, mind you, and that will quite often work.

“If you tell people that they’re acting like children, they stop doing it. If it won’t work, you really do have to act decisively and do something about it, because you cannot work in an organisation that’s at war.

“To sum up, I would say that, first, you must be very aware that personalities are important; they’re more important the bigger the business, and they’re more important the more senior people get. Secondly, personalities can be dealt with, but if they can’t, you have to get rid of one of them.”

LESSON SUMMARY POINTS:

1. Organizations can get into difficulties if personalities are allowed to get in the way of the business interest.

2. The higher you go up the corporate ladder the more important personalities and egos become, increasing the risk of disputes.

3. If personalities are put before business interests you need to tackle the situation head-on by telling the parties involved that they are acting like children and they must behave – or one of them will have to leave the business

4. Conflicts of personalities at a senior level will negatively impact on the company’s reputation with shareholders and inevitably from within the company itself.

This article is by extracted from the latest book in the Lessons Learned series, Managing Conflict; Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved. For more on the series see www.fiftylessons.com

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