Meet the New Boss

• A new blueprint for the Scottish economy has highlighted the quality of management as a key challenge

• It hints at tying Holyrood's support for workforce skills to training for bosses in making the best use of them

• Many of the best practices in boosting productivity through better management and leadership comes from foreign investors, who have put down roots in Britain because of frictionless access to customers across Europe.

Do workers get the bosses they deserve? Are bosses up to the jobs they have? Do they need more training to get the best out of their workforce?

Are the right people selected for leadership, or promoted for doing their previous job well? Are they selected perhaps for resembling or imitating the bosses doing the promoting, thus cementing in bad habits and old thinking?

How much space for autonomy and creativity should a boss leave? And how much should she or he depend on metrics of counting output - something that's become much easier through digital records of work done?

And what makes you respect a boss, and motivates you to work harder and smarter? Does it help to nurture an element of friendship or to build in some distance? Should bosses strive to be liked, or feared?

Think about your own experience - what has made for a good or bad boss, and what advice would you give if you were free to be candid?

These are just some of the questions that arise from the new strategic blueprint for the Scottish economy. There are many others.

Vilified

Now, this comes from a strange beast. It is the Enterprise and Skills Strategic Board. It resulted from an attempt by former enterprise minister Keith Brown to consolidate Scotland's four enterprise and skills quangos into one national body.

Quangos are easy to vilify. They look unaccountable. They sometimes duplicate work. But they are resistant to abolition. This consolidation failed to abolish anything. Instead, the process led to the setting up of another quango, an enterprise agency for the south of Scotland, and this over-arching strategic board.

This week, it published a strategic blueprint intended to tie together the work of Scottish Enterprise, its Highlands and Islands cousin, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council for universities and colleges.

Some themes are predictable; more start-ups: more growth by small companies once they've been started up: more exports: better, more widespread information about the support available to firms and workers.

Some themes are of growing importance, such as the need for training, re-skilling and up-skilling people throughout their working lives. Think of it this way: anyone not over the conventional age for education and training is likely still to be in employment well past 2060.

The jobs market and its requirements will change repeatedly and radically before then. Yet again, there's a call for that training to be aligned to the skills employers actually want.

For the 20 year time horizon of this blueprint, it's important also to see the mega-trends to which businesses and economic agencies have to respond, starting with climate change, digital developments, artificial intelligence and automation. And with data going big, the agencies want to work together to harness it for a better understanding of the economy and economic trends.

Wider prosperity

So what have bosses got to do with this? Well, everything. What's the point in doing any of the above if bosses aren't up to the job of marshalling newly-gained skills, or older ones for that matter?

By international standards, Scotland scores highly on the level of its workforce skills. But it does poorly on productivity. That doesn't make much sense, yet it's what we've got used to. It seems there's a failure to harness that high level of skills and use it to innovate, to improve processes and products.

Not everywhere, it should be noted. Scotland's leading firms, and particularly those with an exports reach or foreign ownership, have admirable approaches to innovation.

They are often, you'll note, the kind of firms that were attracted to the UK as a place that would continue to provide frictionless, single market access to the entire European Union market. Not any more.

However, this blueprint notes there is a "long tail of lower performing business with considerable opportunities for productivity growth through adopting enhanced management practices and better utilisation of workforce skills".

It wants to make a new priority of improving the quality of management and leadership in Scottish businesses. The evidence behind this? A "poor understanding of productivity and of the links between wages and productivity", according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

UK management practices are mid-table by international standards, academic comparison has found. It goes on: better management can have a bigger impact on productivity, and thereby wider prosperity, than more research and development, investment in skills or technology gains.

The Strategic Board claims, using such research, that improved management could lift productivity by between 10 and 30%.

People needs

The catch is that its recommendations on the subject are full of the jargon that is so often an obstacle to effective communication from leaders and managers.

But among the more significant ideas are (if I'm translating the jargon correctly) joining up spending on workforce skills with the requirement that businesses learn how to use those skills. It's obvious when you think about it, yet not standard practice.

How often do you see people study for a qualification, then to be kept in the same job? The best way to ensure you make use of a Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA) and that you're rewarded for the effort to study for it is, too often, to move to a new employer.

It seems those quangos will be working with client firms to help them better understand their "people needs", use of skills, and recruitment and retention of talented workers.

The Scottish government's Fair Work agenda, going beyond pay, is trying to influence the ways workers can find "opportunity, fulfilment, security, respect and an effective voice" at work.

Trust the chief

Can better management be taught? Well, of course it can. It is a poor quality business that sees training as only something for the grunts.

At business schools, students with at least some experience of work can bring their own experience of good and bad bosses. Then, they accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

I spent an interesting couple of hours this week with students at the business school in Strathclyde University, where there's a telling international perspective to be had.

One recalled using the same poor management techniques his boss used on him.

"I hated myself for it... a smarter idea would be to limit how much to pass on down the line and how much to absorb, and take on the chin."

An American student observed that a boss needs to see the whole person in the employee, bringing life experience and often some home or family concerns to work. She or he also needs to create space for celebration and reward for success.

Another reflected on a boss, and also a friend, who gave too much latitude to do what those under her thought they should be doing, or wanted to do. There wasn't much direction or feedback. That, responded lecturer Bob van der Meer, is management laziness.

What attributes would they say are most important in a boss? Respect, empathy, understanding, communication, consistency. "And trust," added their lecturer.

Dutch by origin and in Scotland for three decades, he reflects on the lack of language skills in Scotland, saying that points to cultural insularity - a reluctance to learn from outside.

He also points to the value of foreign investors bringing more productive processes into the workforce. Think in terms of shonky British Leyland cars in the 1970s and 1980s, compared with the new techniques introduced to England since then by Toyota, Honda and Nissan.

It turns out the problem with British car production wasn't just the fault of the British worker, as he was caricatured 40 years ago.

It was at least as much about how that worker was and is now managed.