With so many reluctant to return to the office, some even to work at all, and so many on strike, is it time to try to penetrate these questions and suggest some answers?

They should mean trust, loyalty, perseverance. You should mean trust, loyalty, perseverance. Each will mean even more to the other for specific work situations but if the foundations of the relationships lack any of these three elements, they will flounder.

There will either be a separation, costly in terms of wasted training, expensive to replace, difficult to retrain when replaced, or there will be a loss of confidence – you in them, they in you. Stability is not a solution to all problems. Instability is a wound that never fully recovers.

It may seem strange to contemplate what bosses and workers mean to each other. One party hires people for financial and other rewards, the other party is hired as employees by the same inducements. One decides what needs to be done, the other does it. One makes more money than the other by risking job and capital. The other makes less money and still risks job loss if the wrong decisions are taken or if circumstances outside the ability to predict or control make life difficult.

This is a description of the old pattern of working. It has less to do with today’s formula, but remains the basic capitalist structure of business.

Learning by example

In my time, I have built and helped build several businesses. My first lessons in what colleagues mean to each other were observations at schools, on farms and in London during Wolrld War II (WWII). Because of my particular circumstances with absent parents (not their fault), I had to watch what other people did and try to interpret it in a way that guided my own lifestyle.

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I saw the success of the freedom allowed to farmhands, often little educated except by the same rigours that I experienced. They were held together by personal ties to each other and to nature, which provided them with their livings.

The military were a different matter. Their principal requirements were collectivism for a cause – winning the war. They wanted and needed charismatic leaders, epitomised by Winston Churchill – a point of rally and a symbol of determination.

My father worked for Churchill on the critical transatlantic convoys bringing supplies to Britain. The powerful German U-Boats decimated these supply lines which were often left vulnerable by the slowness of some of the vessels. A convoy’s speed is that of the slowest. Only the troop-carrying Cunard Queen Liners were unescorted on these perilous journeys. They had been built for fast crossings.

What of discipline, education and communications?

Most of life today is a different kind of war requiring new sorts of leaders. The understanding of discipline has changed fundamentally in the nearly 80 years since WWII ended. The master-slave concept had already been questioned by the 1950s; its redefinition since then has been dramatic.

Education of a wider coterie of people is credited with much of the change and I agree with that. However, education stopped short at equipping people better to handle the technological complexity of living when it should have gone deeply into the political relationships of our lives.

My good fortune to attend the first ever communications course in Britain run by the Institute of Directors in 1960 opened a whole new concept of boss-worker relations to me. Many industrialists such as Paul Chambers, the chairman of ICI, one of Britain’s largest companies, and a raft of politicians such as Oliver Lyttleton (Viscount Chandos), with his innovative MacMillan Memorial Lecture Jungle – or Cloister? – Some Thoughts on the Present Industrial Scene, made those attending the programme think about how relations between boss and worker could be stabilised.

I was the youngest member of the course and nearly got thrown off it for asking Chandos what caused the difference in thinking between his generation and mine. Regarded as outrageously impertinent at the time, I still think it was rather rude of me. I would ask the same question today but with less abrasive words.

Tackle the impossible first

Paul Chambers was a different sort of leader. My takeaway from him was to deal with the impossible before tackling any issue that looked as though it had a solution, however distant.

I had asked him how he dealt with what must have been an overwhelming daily postbag. He said he glanced at everything that got past his beady-eyed PA and sorted it into two piles. Those that looked as though they might have a solution and those that didn’t. The former he put into his “out” tray, relying on others to deal with them. That left him with about five to eight items to which there appeared to be no answer. “They are my job,” he said, “because I am chairman and chief executive.”

When I asked him how he coped with the then-increasing antagonism between his company and Anglovaal of South Africa, he said that he had agreed with their chairman that if a problem appeared insoluble to their subordinates, the two of them would be locked in a room, and deprived of food, water and sex until they found a solution.

I have not myself been forced into such deprivations, but in extreme circumstances the threat has been enough to lighten the atmosphere between the aggrieved parties and precipitate a sensible way to avoid it.

Caring for others by behaving sensibly

Odd that neither the autocratic nor the democratic systems of government have provided education systems that equip people to relate sensibly to each other.

It smacks of political prejudice in favour of politicians – something to be expected, I suppose, given the nature of human passion for control.

For the manager of a business, the lessons of economic development amount more simply to how to get workers productive enough to bring goods and services to customers at competitive prices and with tenable profit margins.

Today’s leaders have slowly, and quite reluctantly, come to realise that they are not dealing with robots.

We cannot live other people’s lives. Every political system that has tried to do so has failed sooner or later.

Equally, we cannot ignore the responsibility we have for supporting our neighbours – not, today, the people next door but anyone who lives on the planet. Employers and workers are close neighbours. They must behave as such or fight a pointless harassment war. What does that mean for how you see your colleagues, as I prefer to call them?

Caring for others is no soft option in life nor is it easy to do properly. It requires discipline to think about them, not you. It demands being effectively tough, not brutally brash. It presupposes a release to independence, not a debilitating lasting dependence.

One of the altar boys in a church where I played the organ for Children’s Mass in the 1960s was a rather slow, gangling youth. The priest – Father Gordon Albion, one of the few whose actions taught me much about the meaning of Christianity – treated him exactly the same way that he treated all his other helpers, kindly but firmly.

But if anyone dealt with the boy in an unkind, offhand or patronising way, Gordon was ruthless in his treatment of the offender.

You do not cosset your colleagues. You treat them fairly.

The writer is founder and chair at Terrific Mentors International