What is Professional Management (part 1)?

A manager is responsible for outcomes. The key definition of a manager is that they must achieve these outcomes through other people. The most important activities for a manager is therefore is to plan for the required outcomes and to work with others to achieve this.

Each manager has a domain or area of operation that is distinct from another one. These boundaries divide us by function, eg. sales v finance, each has a different membership, location and purpose

Each department should have a clear understanding of its primary aim. This departmental aim should dovetail into the overriding corporate purpose and contribute to its achievement.  The primary task should be a very clear, easily understood and communicated statement of its aims which contribute to the corporate objective/primary task.  Department aims need to dovetail into the overriding corporate purpose.The “mission statement” describes our aims – what we are doing and how (processes) but also what our intended outcomes are.

For Notting Hill Genesis our corporate aim is “In the community, providing homes for lower income Londoners”. And for the finance team it is something like “Ensuring high standards of financial management and probity, we plan the business and ensure we have sufficient resources to provide more homes for low income Londoners”.

Treasury Team

Why so much emphasis on purpose? Surely if I am a finance manager what I do is more or less the same, wherever I work?

Actually everyone who works for an enterprise needs to understand its intentions so they can see the bigger picture and understand the inter-dependencies – with members of their team, other departments, the board, customers, competitors, shareholders etc. Making sure everyone understands the context of what we do takes considerable effort. I know that some of our teams are relatively isolated and specialist and it always takes more time to help them feel involved, included and listened to. However without it is hard for our staff to understand the meaning of their work – the single most important factor in providing motivation and commitment.

Once it is clear what the department is for, in the context of an organisation that clearly knows what it is there for, the individual manager (and their staff) will be able to take up their role effectively. They will be able to direct their skills and energies to benefit the organisation as a whole.

Clarity around aims contributes to the behaviours required. Both  managers and staff need to relate objectively to other roles, rather than be unduly affected by personal relationships. This is what people usually mean when they talk about the needs of the customer, or the primacy of the bottom line, or the focus on the patient etc. If all of us understand the aims of other departments we can be objective and co-operative when we necessarily interact with other teams.

If this is what a manager does (and I would be pleased to hear your alternative views or challenges) how does one become one?

I believe we must consciously take up the role as manager. This is both a process – the first time we are appointed to take responsibility for others – and a mind-set that needs to consciously approached. Of course some have natural leadership abilities, but we cannot do the job effectively without consciously taking it on.

To take up the role means we need to discover, inside ourselves, a way of operating that enables us to manage our work in relation to the requirements of the organisation, both as a member of the organisation and as a leader.

We take up the role when we identify with the organisation and its culture. We  identify with the objectives and mission of this system  and choose action and personal behaviour which best contributes to achieving the aims. Because circumstances and context change all the time, inside and outside the organisation, the role is never a static pattern of behaviour.

Being in a role means we carry the organisation in our mind and manage our own behaviour in relation to the organisation and its culture, to further its aim and purpose, accepting accountability for ourselves and being open to changing our judgement in the light of experience. This concept goes way beyond what our staff and other managers expect of us, or what our job description entails  – it’s our psychological role. I will come back to this idea in my next post.

 

 

 

 

 

Does representation matter?

Apparently when (propertied) women were first allowed to sit on juries (after 1919 in the UK) the press was somewhat alarmed that their decision-making might not be up to scratch. A 1926 Daily Express  column asked: “Is the woman juror inclined to confuse the issues by the introduction of sympathetic or antipathetic considerations? … Can woman, in short, suddenly divorce herself from temperamental inconsequence and from the compassionate and emotional instincts on which she often acts, and become in a moment a hard, matter-of-fact analytical administrator of the strict letter of the law?” (quoted in A Jury of Her Peers: The Impact of the First Female Jurors on Criminal Convictions , Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson, 2016).

What actually happened, according to the academic research mentioned above, is that more women on juries meant that male offenders were more likely to be convicted for sexual and violent crimes. Female jurors were also  more lenient on women convicted of procuring an illegal abortion, implying that  “female jurors might have viewed the alleged behavior (sic) or its impact on the victim from a different perspective than their male counterparts”.

Of course this is fascinating and proves what many of us already know – that our own experiences, backgrounds and beliefs will affect our decision-making. In a modern work environment this means that our own cultural background, religious beliefs, class, sex and sexuality, will have a clear bearing on how we see the world and the decisions that we make.

A study on the “gender punishment gap” which takes the gender pay gap a step further shows that, when considering the career trajectories of more than 1.2 million men and women working in the US financial advisory industry following misconduct: “Women face more severe punishment at both the firm and industry level for similar missteps. Following an incidence of misconduct, women are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs relative to their male counterparts. The punishment gap is especially prominent in firms with few female managers.” The same findings also show that black and hispanic financial advisors are punished more severely for less serious misconduct that white Americans.

This research correlated the dismissal decisions with the gender make up of the management at the companies investigated.  Where the company had  no female directors the female advisers are much more likely than male advisors to be sacked. On the other hand companies with a balance of male and female at the top, punished male and female misconduct at a similar rate. In other words where fairness was important culturally, then fairer decisions were made. It seems likely that the female leaders were able to appraise the performance of the female staff more realistically, and that managers are more forgiving of failures made by members of their own gender or ethnic group.

Certainly in my experience in diverse workplaces over several decades I have seen people being tougher on staff and customers from different ethnic groups and class backgrounds. I have assumed this springs from misunderstanding, labelling and unconscious bias rather than out-and-out racism. But the labelling of black males as “aggressive”, or a lack of sensitivity to some women’s fear of allowing male staff into their homes, has made me realise that empathy and understanding is something that we need to work on and share throughout our organisations.

Over the years we introduced “racial awareness training”.  I think this was of some value in sensitising our staff groups to things they might automatically assume, but which could have the effect of being exclusive or discriminatory. I once overheard a conversation in the Oxfam shop of a friendly white male worker addressing his headscarf-wearing colleague:

“You ought to come to the pub for our Christmas party. Even if you don’t want a drink you could have a sandwich or a sausage roll.”

I believe that modern research plus my experience at work shows me that genuine diversity at the top is essential for creating organisations that are fair and reasonable all the way down, and in particular in how we treat our residents and other customers. While intellectually most will understand the need for fairness and sensitivity in decision-making, it is very important to have black, female and gay managers in today’s workplaces. It is hard for monocultural leadership teams to fully appreciate and engage with a diverse workforce and customer group. Although I believe strongly that I do not have double standards for black staff (for example being too soft, which is as bad as being too hard) I am reassured by having an increasing number of highly competent black managers who can ensure that we are not unfair in our treatment of black staff. One of the reasons we have used Action teams so extensively is that it ensures that the people making the decisions are representative of those who have to live with them. We make sure we include front line staff, young/old, black/white, male/female etc.

Of course this blog believes that none of us can be completely “objective” in our decision-making. We do the bit that Artificial Intelligence cannot do. We use our human skills to appraise the social and psychological aspects of decision-making and human to human, team to team, and group to group interactions. We are aware that our prior experiences from birth onwards will strongly affect how we see the world. Our prescription of much greater reflection and team insight provide a strong antidote to stereotyping and scapegoating.

To ensure that our organisations are scrupulously fair – in hiring and firing, allocating scarce resources and making judgements – we need balanced and knowledgeable teams. There is a strong case for having leadership teams which broadly represent the client group, or population as a whole. For example those recruiting Magistrates are concerned that older white people with middle class backgrounds are handing out justice to younger, working class and more ethnically diverse groups. They are currently actively seeking to change this and are doing much better than other sections of the legal system. And while it may be obvious in terms of juries, magistrates and judges, the same is also true of our corporate boards, local and national government. We cannot expect good governance on behalf of large groups without significant representation of those whose interests they serve.

What do you think?

Action teams continued

ACTION TEAMS

1. Focus on real issues
2. Sponsored by a Director with authority to decide
3. Facilitation time and senior support is supplied
4. Fast, focused turn-around time
5. Small groups (8-12)
6. Director monitors progress and team dynamics.
7. Director manages interface with related teams
8. Celebrate success and share learning.

Taking a great idea from total quality management we decided to use Action Teams in planning the change processes associated with merger. These are teams of ordinary staff who work together on an issue or problem to resolution. Their findings are shared with the decision makers (eg Executive Board) and are generally accepted as the best way forward. They involve staff fully in analysing problems, finding the best solution bearing in mind the requirments of the project eg, creating the best structure, chosing the right system, delivering the required savings etc.  It is a proven system for planning the future, but they also provide a very important continuation of the containment process.

By empowering front line and the first tier of management these groups have fostered trust within our organisation. They are consultative and are in touch with the views and feelings of their colleagues. By actually empowering them to make decisions we demonstrate that we trust our staff to make the right, balanced decisions. We never find that staff make self-interested proposals. They (like most managers actually) are scrupulously fair and they do their very best to make balanced and sensible judgements. They do not always make proposals that I would have made, and sometimes I will disagree with aspects of what they suggest. But I still implement their proposals because it is not necessary for me to agree with every aspect of how we work. By accepting the recommendations and implementing them we show our staff that they will  not be subjected to a top down, imposed process. We show our teams that they are part of  a genuine consultation process, carried out by those colleagues who are actually doing the work. For example over 80 staff, representing about 1000 people, have been involved in designing our new service delivery model. This has been a difficult and intense task as they are tasked with merging two very different ways of delivering the housing management service. After four months they have come up with a very satifactory approach, taking the best from both existing approaches, but soaring above them with a new committment to digital at the core. It will be much better than we have already, and we have the buy in of over 1000 people as they now have to adapt to the change process. In other words by asking our staff to design the way forward we have contained their merger anxieties and created a great, carefully thought through solution, that has already been challenged and improved by the staff who actually do the job.

The process has not worked well in every department. Not everyone understood how powerful and important this approach can be. In some teams senior managers could not resist trying to control them and this meant that while technically the solutions were sophisticated and good, the failure to follow the model has lead to anxiety. The senior managers did not understand how important the planned process (summarised at the top) itself was, to contain the emotions of their teams.

While senior directors gave guidance at the start on the parameters (eg the size of the budget, customer requirements etc), it seems that some of managers focused too specifically on what you might call the quantitative aspects of the progress. Similtaneously of course integration was actually taking place in each team, as the merger progressed. But inevitably not everyone understood how important the containment of emotion was.

Over many months we have emphasised that this is a merger of equals, especially in terms of staff and their ability to influence the process. Both legacy organisation will have an equal involvement in the teams and decision making. Some teams, initially set up in a balanced way, (eg four colleagues from each legacy organisations) were then opened to all affected. What happened of course is that the teams were now imbalanced – ten from one side and four from the other for example. What do you think this would do? Now instead of people feeling fairness was important we had a very big group and the smaller team felt overwhelmed and threatened. Everyone began to think in terms of “who is going to lose their job?”. This, despite the fact that we have made a very public commitment to avoiding redundancies and have developed a careful process for redeployment in the event of teams being too large. What seemed like a good idea – including every one affected – ended up being disastrous because now the team could not think clearly about the best way forward. Now they were engaged in a fight to the death. The outnumbered ones felt defeated and the larger group made self-serving recommendations. The “us and them” approach so common in most mergers automatically arises and colleagues behaviour begins to become frightened, ungenerous, negative, anxious. Now instead of feeling like a team they see themselves with opposing interests, and start to blame, scapegoat and actually believe they have to “win”. Then the teams (both actually) start to fear a “take over” by the other team. These sentiments, absolutely normal in most merger scenarios, are early warning signs that things are not going well.

In response the leadership has to take every opportunity to re-assure our teams about what the policies actually were, ie that we fully intended to avoid sackings, and where there is a duplication of staff we will make extensive attempts to re-train and redeploy our colleagues, each of whom is valued. All along we have said that we will reward loyalty to our organisation and that we will go out of our way to ensure that those who want to stay with us will be able to. We have made a start by advertising all vacancies internally, and only going to the market when we are unable to find someone who already works for us.  Natural turnover continues at its normal (pre-merger) pace and we feel sure we can shrink staff numbers to the right size over a reasonable period (about three years after the merger).

We also need to clarify that the action team methodology is a tried and tested approach and should be delivered as specified, despite some teams thinking it can be improved by adding a few more people, or managers taking a clear lead.

 

 

The use of Action Teams in a merger or major change process

Why we need Action Teams (containment)

We often hear that mergers are difficult to achieve because of cultural differences – the way we do things in our different organisations obviously differ, and difficulties can arise as a result. Some people assume they know what they mean about something and others have a whole different idea of how to behave.

In a merger what happens to culture?

The two pre-existing cultures are actually destroyed by the process of merger. As this happens, and as new ways of looking at things take hold, many of us can feel very uncomfortable. Instinctively we react quite strongly to the loss of the old way. The loss of the shared reality, on which we relied as individuals and a group, evokes a strong feeling of anxiety and can lead to strong  resistance to change.

The most important thing for managers to do in this situation, as I have described before, is to provide reassurance and emotional containment so that the staff in the organisation can continue to work as normal, and in general find themselves in conscious support of the necessary process of change.

If the process of containment is not supplied by the leadership of the organisation very quickly people become highly anxious, feeling threatened by every change initiative, they hunker down and become paralysed. Then they start to throw around blame, scapegoating, attacking back, and their understanding of what is happening can become quite separate from reality. Even in my organisation where we have worked hard to contain anxiety and keep the focus on the task we have been surprised, and sometimes amused, by hearing back some of the gossip. If you find even normally able people saying they didn’t understanding, or weren’t told, or didn’t get the email it could be that their perception has become less reliable due to the stress that they are carrying. When this happens their ability to work effectively is seriously compromised. Concrete thinking leads to rigidity, a loss of creativity, and polarisation. As a result they cannot work effectively with others on integrating their differences and collaborating on the necessary change process.

Of course all change management is not about how we are feeling. Not at all. There are technical issues to be sorted out – what IT systems we will use, how savings will be made, what our growth strategy might be. All of these have to be planned in and work done to achieve them. But how people are feeling about the organisation, their team, the way the are treated and how trust (or distrust is growing) is of even greater importance. Senior managers need to understand and plan for the emotional aspect of the changes required, all the time providing containment of emotions.

While there will be plenty of delays, failures, difficulties and expense involved on  the technical side it will not seriously affect a merger or any major change programme. However, if there is a failure to contain the emotions of the organisation, the set backs will be very severe. At worse, it could stop all progress and result in considerable loss of revenue. When this happens, and I have seen it in many mergers and change programmes to date, the staff are in a state of panic and anxiety. They spend most of their work time, and much of their time outside work, worrying about the change. They believe all the rumours about being taken over, discriminated against, treated unfairly, ignored, told lies, undermined, undervalued etc. And even if senior managers do not mean to harm or attack their staff the sentiment soon grows and is believed. Even innocent decisions are felt as attacks and the ability to carry on working, delivering services to their customers, is severely undermined.

What is an Action Team?

At Notting Hill Genesis we decided to use Action or Co-creation Teams to begin to create the new teams that will serve the new organisation. Originally a product of Total Quality Management Action Teams are a vehicle which can foster individual, group, and organisational learning, while contributing to the task of the organisation.

These are teams made up of representatives of different parts of the organisation who are empowered to solve cross-functional, and intra-functional problems. This includes the design of new departments, but also issues such as our accommodation strategy, or issues like terms and conditions.

Their success depends on their terms of reference which provide enough senior management input to contain anxiety, but not so much that their scope is limited. They need some overall parameters in which they must work (eg the accommodation action team has to take the convenience of customers and staff into account as well as a desire to save money and use our offices efficiently). Of course the main priority is to empower this group of staff to make decisions on how the whole organisation will go forward. This empowerment is real, not just words. The expectation is that the Board will accept their recommendations in full.

Here are the guidelines we issued to each department and team:

1. Each team will work on problems connected to the strategic direction of the organisation, ie real, big problems not small sub-sets.

2. Make sure one sponsoring senior manager is responsible for the team. He or she must have sufficient delegation to be able to make decisions.

3. Make sure that all managers know why and how these teams will operate and recognise their key importance in the work of the organisation. This means releasing staff and allowing them sufficient time to carry out their work.

4. Impose a time limit. These projects are relatively short term and have a clear finish time. We have found 3 months is about right, although some may take longer. Decisions on offices took about 12 weeks, whereas the design of our key operating model (delivering our key services to our residents) took five months.

5. Do not make a whole industry of this approach. Most people need to be able to get on with business as usual.

6. The sponsor is responsible for measuring and monitoring the progress of each action team in terms of both the task and the team dynamics. Most of our teams have worked effectively on the key task. However there have been cases where teams have been at loggerheads and have been fighting for supremacy. This has required the sponsor to take back control in order to reset the work.

7. There may also be difficulty and stress around processes which affect other parts of the organisation, for example the need for new IT systems or HR policies. In these cases the sponsor needs to oversee the processes which cross over into another part of the organisation.

8. Always celebrate team success and share the learning.

9. Make sure the contribution the team has made to the strategic direction of the organisation is documented and communicated to the whole organisation.

Next week I will describe how we got on; the successes and failures.

 

 

 

What is Projection in the work place?

Two weeks ago I wrote about a failing organisation, and I explained how, as a consultant to that organisation, I felt I was being projected into.  A couple of people asked me to explain what “projection” means in a work context. Although it is a psychoanalytic concept it is a defence mechanism that is not too hard to understand.

From our earliest days feelings and sensations we do not like or want to experience can be dealt with psychically by dissociating ourselves from them. We take these feeling and push them away from our minds and perception and project them outwards – spitting them out. Our earliest and most primitive feelings of frustration, inadequacy or anger are not pleasant to contemplate so we have great difficulty owning them. I am sure you will have had an almost automatic response when something goes wrong to immediately feel someone other than oneself is to blame. I do it all the time!

The unpleasant or unbearable feeling is pushed aggressively away – nothing to do with me, mate – and it lands on someone else who will be blamed. We push these feelings into another person – firstly our mother/parent and then later into our siblings, friends, partners. Our unconscious wishes and ideas are allocated to others.

In a work context perhaps we are not finding our work easy. We try hard but we can’t fix it. Our manager has noticed and is on to us. As we do not want to accept it as our responsibility we are likely to blame our manager who has conceived the work badly, has asked for the impossible, is being unreasonable, has a terrible manner, is stopping me be successful etc.

The time when we are most likely to deploy this defence mechanism is when we are facing anxiety and difficulty at work. Like all the defence mechanisms projection is something that happens in an automatic and involuntary way. It is an unconscious process. That feeling you get when another driver does something stupid is a feeling of projection. At the time, in the heat of the moment, we are not able to fully appraise what actually happened, which is one reason we have a legal and parliamentary system. We are rarely able to see the whole picture – we inevitably respond and have feelings which entirely support this response – from our personal point of view. The feelings that we throw out are likely to be the exact issue we face ourselves. For example a stroppy driver accuses the other driver of being aggressive. A lazy and inattentive manager complains his team is not sufficiently on the ball. Later, when we reflect, we may be able to see what we are projecting on to others which properly belongs inside ourselves.

When we project our feelings on to others it brings a sense of relief and allows us to get on with what we are doing. By shouting at the other driver or blaming our manager or team for our ineptitudes we can calm down, and move on. We get a sense of satisfaction having got rid of our angry feelings about ourself and the feeling dissipates.

As chief executives or senior directors we will always be a site for projections. People who are frustrated with their own efforts will often project into us and see us as responsible for their own inadequacies and incompetencies. Careful reflection is required for us to understand what is going on here. If we reflect on the experience we can often get an insight into how others are really feeling, even if they don’t admit it. At the same time we do not need to accept these projections. We can explain that this is indeed being put on to us and does not arise from our own behaviour.

I feel sure you will be able to recognise this in yourself and see it in others too. There is another aspect that I want to mention.

Let us say you have someone on your team who is just not very good. Beware of them being used to project all the group’s negative feelings onto. It’s interesting how all the phrases to describe this phenomenon come from livestock – giving a dog a bad name, the scape-goat, or becoming the black sheep of the family. What we see is that once the group collude that someone is vulnerable we can turn on them and blame them for every bad thing going. Before long they adopt the personality of the outsider, the baddy, and their behaviour often escalates. If you see this happening in your own team you will need to take action to bring the black sheep/goat/bad dog back into the fold. Make sure you deal specifically and fairly with any issues they may actually have. This can be difficult once a group makes up its mind that the individual “needs to go” (into the wilderness). If a weaker member of staff is being projected into make sure to name it and turn it around.

Groups

The other week I finally launched a book (about fashion, style and making clothes). And, as you do, you thank those who helped you – spouse, family and friends. I also thanked the sewing community – the army of wonderful women who gather around each other in a shared endeavour, boosting each other up as they pursue their craft. And my teachers, coaches and helpers. I made the simple point in my short speech that “all work is team work”. Do you agree?

We are at heart social beings. In a way there is no such thing as an individual despite our (Western) cultural prejudices. In fact, from earliest infancy, we are all part of a group. We come into existence biologically and socially dependent on our mothers, and from the babies point of view the mother is part of their self. There is no such thing a baby without the mother (or carer). The dominant feature of our psychology is a desire and an impulse to form relationships. We are socially orientated just like (most) plants are orientated towards the sun. From the beginning of time, and from the start of life, a relationship grows between two people as they experience and adjust to the other’s nature. Many conversations between mothers, or between parents, focus on trying to understand their baby Jane. She is fussy, good, wakeful, irritable, easy, boisterous, timid, he feeds all the time, he won’t settle, etc. The mother will adapt to her understanding of his behaviour and her own behaviour will change as she tries to make the relationship better or even possible and bearable.

The power of a group – two of us refused to wear a green tie!

I knew a couple who devised such an elaborate method to get their child off to sleep, (involving a baby bouncer, a wig, a flannel and sometimes a car drive at 38 miles an hour) – their strange behaviour perfectly attuned to the needs and peculiarities of their infant son.

Of course this pattern of learning about others, adjusting ourselves to them as they reciprocate, is completely inbred and taken for granted. It is very important at work where relationships are everything. We do this learning/adjusting thing all the time, and it always surprises me how well it works despite the huge complexity involved. As we grow, learn and develop as individuals we will have a pool of internalised knowledge that we can rely on to understand and predict the behaviour of others and we may be better or worse at doing this. We all have our own interpretations but trying to understand the behaviour of ourselves and others is key to better relationships and outcomes in the workplace.

I believe that we all need to consider our behavior in relationships and more importantly in groups and teams at work. What happens to us when we form or are forced to join teams or groups? Have you ever wondered what forces are at play in groups which influence our behaviour? Some groups seem cliquey and we might become cliquey when we join that group. Some are hard working. When I was at University I ended up in a group that did alot of extra work together, out of hours, to understand our subject matter. Some groups are very caring and nurturing where everyone remembers each others’ birthday, checking up on each other and helping out whenever there is a need. This could be because of a dominant personality or an underlying need that comes together, but I would argue that we often go along with the group culture even when we don’t feel entirely comfortable about it.

Why is it so hard to break away from corporate culture and do what we as individuals want to do? When a group takes a view on race, or Brexit, or the importance of the bottom line, we often feel a very strong impulse to comply with the corporate culture. Why can’t we do what we want? There are a few “loners” or people who are willing to be disagreeable, occasionally, but most of us would rather become an uncomfortable version of ourselves than stand alone against the group.

Even if we are the biggest introvert on the planet, even if we are a hermit, human beings are a group-ish. Every thing that we engage in – a work, sports, in the family, even if we are engaged in a solitary task like writing a book or praying on a hill side, it is done either in a group or with a group in mind. My writing coach spoke, in my mind, whenever I was writing. When I speak at an event I respond to the faces, feelings and context of the audience and change what I say or the emotional content as a result. Groups provide us with support, security and safety. But they are also places where we can experience a lot of conflict, unhappiness and fear.

 

More help for managers in a merger

Firstly –  Hello to my new followers. I really appreciate those who have signed up! I know some of you are from the housing world, and that some of you are interested in mergers. So please do comment, or ask questions, or suggest topics I could cover. And do tell others about the blog or articles that you enjoyed.

Last week we held a meeting with middle managers from one of our legacy organisations. We realised they were uncomfortable with certain aspects of the merger, were feeling individual pressure or were wondering if rumours were true. I met with about ten of them, with three other Executive Board members.

There were two main issues – was the recruitment really being done fairly or did it favour one organisation; worries about will my “face fit”? And was this really a merger of equals or would one organisation dominate the other?

In the course of the discussion it became clear that “rumours” were circulating that were frankly bizarre (eg the whole senior team consisted of people from one organisation (it really is 50:50), the leadership was “all white males” (it includes two women and one Asian person), mass redundancies were coming, we will have to change offices and so on.

Staff discussion group

Before I explain how we dealt with the issues, let’s examine why these feelings exist.

Both change and anxiety are real. In a merger we have to adapt to more change than we are used to, and this is uncomfortable. If we are realistic about our own and other people’s anxiety then we will be much more able tolerate it, allowing realistic management of what is happening. What helps greatly in major change situations is the creation of organisational structures, procedures, plans, etc to contain anxiety, offer reassurance, and enable us all to move forward and manage reality. These structures and processes embed the appropriate authority structures that enable everyone to know and understand what they can and can’t do, what is their responsibly and what is someone else’s, and it helps us all feel safe. Once a clear blueprint of how the merger will proceed is published, or working parties are established to create an office strategy, for example, then everyone

• understands how they can contribute or get involved (or be reassured that their peers will do it on everyone’s behalf)
• knows broadly what is happening and how it applies to them
• can think creatively when new situations arise, without reverting to our earlier anxieties
• feel their anxieties are now in perspective
• realises the leadership know what they are doing
• understands that whatever happens, and lots of change is coming, they will be safe.

Although all merger advice is “to communicate” about change I don’t think this is enough.

Instead of a top-down oracle people need to see for themselves, by being involved, or by hearing from colleagues they know and trust, that it is being done properly. Even well-organised communication is still one way, and top down. It will not contain merger anxiety effectively and you will see a rise of gossip, people withdrawing from the emotional life of the organisation, seeing work as nothing more than survival, or for some people becoming a craven supporter of top management, as it is safer.

If managers do not contain change anxiety effectively individuals will be left to their own devices, to do what ever they can with their troubled feelings. For some the real anxiety may turn to neurotic anxiety when imaginary explanations are firmly believed. One colleague who decided they wished to leave at the point of merger honestly thought they had been dismissed and told everyone that.

Managers have to be able to address the real dangers that exist, and also the anxieties that are felt as a result. Increasingly, managers need is to help their staff confront the emotional aspects of change. Our teams are partly in mourning for the loss of close friends or a popular manager, they are saddened by the loss of systems and approaches they liked using, many are scared that any review will automatically lead to redundancies, closure of offices, unbearable change and even personal annihilation. In response managers need to contain their own anxiety, carry out mindful thinking and reflection and reach out, as individuals who are emotionally available, to help their team deal with their feelings.

So how did the meeting go?

I was very glad that, after a few false starts where people felt under pressure to be “positive”,  they started talking very openly about their fears. We let the elephant out into the room, and people were very frank about the stitch ups and secret plans that they believed might be on-going. We acknowledged the feelings were real and frightening. We thanked them for their commitment, their hard work in containing the anxiety of their own staff. We never said “that’s not true; quit belly-aching”, we didn’t roll our eyes or take offense. We weren’t defensive. We listened carefully, helped them analyse what was happening, asked for their suggestions and agreed to support the proposals. These included

• A management committed to always telling the truth so that people can confront the reality, with help if necessary, eg merger will involve significant change for everyone and much of it will not be pleasant, but your leaders do believe it to be necessary to get us to be where we want and need to be
• All data, including financial information, to be precisely accurate and shared (ie one truth not several competing versions of KPIs, budgets, results, etc)
• At the moment trust has not been built between everyone or between the two organisations. We will work on this by always being truthful and as transparent as humanly possible. And, as staff start joining design groups, process workshops and consultation events, they will see they and their peers are empowered to co-create the new organisation together. This itself will build trust.
• A better elaboration of what “merger of equals” means (not everything can or should be 50:50, but all colleagues are equals and absolutely fair processes are baked in)
• Workshops on our recruitment/assimilation processes so everyone is assured that our approaches are scrupulously fair.
• A new, enforced, cascade mechanism for information to be passed down from managers to their staff face to face, as well as via the intranet.

I look forward to your feedback!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leadership needs to be highly visible, present and in constant touch with staff. A Leader represents a commonly shared object for a group that binds them together. If this object is lost or injured (psychologically), the group may behave as if it has lost its head. This is as a result of their projective identification with the leader – literally projecting leadership into the individual.

 

Emotional connectedness enables staff to connect with both the psychic and external realities of the organisation. It allows the possibility of integration and synthesis and therefore lessens the cleavage between life and death instincts, good and bad objects. When external realities are enabled to emerge then they are available for thinking. Openly addressing felt experiences is the enabling link. Of course, it also means that both the creative and destructive aspects of unconscious irrationality will emerge.

 

The central themes all point to the importance of enabling people to operate from the depressive position: to be able to learn from experience, to be vulnerable without feeling persecuted so that one can learn from experience, to be curious about, rather than fearful of, the unknown, to be able to link with others across important differences, and to be realistically connected to the genuine opportunities and challenges they face. From the paranoid-schizoid position it is impossible to handle the emotional and cognitive complexities. While these more primitive defensive approaches enable people to avoid the experience of anxiety and complexity, they disable people from being able to confront situations realistically and competently. They can neither think to be in touch with reality nor are they supported by the organisational system to do so. Everything seems to conspire against their realistic anxiety being acknowledged; rather it is repressed and denied. As a consequence, their feelings of omnipotence are aroused.

 

Stable structures provide containers for experience – people can project aspects of themselves into these structures and then re-integrate their experience in either coherent or fragmented form. But the structures are there to offer containment. Being embedded in structures, authority is conferred from top down and authority relations in organizations serve as mirrors of people’s internal fantasy life in relation to authority figures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of sweetness comes strength

How this blog got it’s subtitle:  Out of (or from) sweetness comes strength.

You may dimly recall a biblical statement: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”: Samson slays a lion and when he passes the corpse he sees bees have built a hive and made the honey flow. It may be memorable because the phrase has been associated with Golden Syrup since Victorian times. The dark green tin features an ornate drawing of a dead lion full of bees. The black and white, racing green and gold gave the tin a majestic feel and it took pride of place on the breakfast table.

I used to eat porridge with a spoonful of this sticky sweet amber liquid pooling in the middle. My auntie also used to spread it on thinly sliced brown bread, smeared with a little bit of salty butter first. But my preference for it was when it was aging in the tin and crystalised. 

The combination of smell, taste, colour, the lion and the bees, the intriguing statement about strength and sweetness appealed to me and I associate the product with positive feelings of satisfaction, family, tradition, contentment and treats. As a young child I felt some kind of affinity with both the lion and the bees. Both dangerous and deadly, but also impressive and beautifully designed. Social animals with an important place in the eco-system.

So when I thought about summing up my lifetimes experience of work in just one sentence I wanted to combine the two elements of both strength and sweetness. One without the other is scary or fickle. It is easy to be frightened by something that is so strong it overwhelms and oppresses us. Equally we recoil from too much sweetness – sugary, pink, silly childishness. Few of us want to be associated with the pink period that little girls go through.

But put the two together and we have something much more realistic, and much more powerful. Meat and sugar. Male and female. Hard and soft. Solid and liquid. Firm but gentle. Cool head, warm heart. Facts and feelings. Tough love. The counterposed elements of strength and sweetness struck me as the most useful metaphor for how to deliver success at work. Soft and strong is not only what you want of your toilet paper!

Strength is not generally contentious. Strong finances, strong business, strong markets, strong performance, market dominance, powerful leaders, security, safety and so on. It was no surprise that Theresa May chose to emphasise the “strong and secure” nature of her government. This phrase emphasises the strong by adding secure. The leader of the opposition instead calls for “solidarity, humanity and compassion” to determine government values. He emphasises the other side – the need to care for others, but down plays strength eg strong finances, secure borders etc.

Let me develop the point a little from a conversation I had with Jack Dromey MP who was a senior trade union leader and now a Labour MP. He said (I paraphrase);

We care about people – the NHS, education, families and children. Of course we do. The public know this and they trust us to look after them. But do they trust us to run the economy well? No. Generally they feel we can be irresponsible, spending money we don’t have and jeopardising our financial standing by raising taxes. The issue for Labour is to show they can be trusted to run the economy well, and for the Conservatives – they have to prove they care.

Now I mention this dichotomy not to make a political point at all. Rather it is to illustrate that while different parties and leaders may emphasise their strength or their caring, many of us (the public) desire a bit of both. A strong economy, personal and national safety, plus sufficient resources dedicated to caring for all of us, especially children, older people and those who are less well off. In a nutshell this is why, in the UK traditionally,  most people gravitate towards the centre ground. Politicians try to do what Dromey suggests and combine strength with an appropriate degree of softness. Take this one from Tony Blair:

We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime.

Here the then shadow Home Secretary was showing his own awareness of the need to show strength (tough on crime) and sweetness (tough on fighting poverty, child abuse etc). It is interesting how he referred to both sides as “tough” ie strong. He could have said “We will be strong in fighting crime, but also compassionate to those who commit crimes”. It doesn’t scan, but it also dangerously suggests that Blair might be “soft” on criminals, an accusation he feared. So his clever wording tries to suggest both compassion and strength without actually saying it. The rhetorical device of “on the one hand, on the other hand” is useful for a politician who is trying to appeal to the centre ground and win enough votes from both sections of society in order to achieve governmental power. In a similar vein David Cameron often spoke passionately about his commitment to “Compassionate Conservatism” which many saw as an Oxymoron. Theresa May’s view that the Conservatives, once “nasty”, should embrace equality and emphasise their caring natures.

Moving to the world of work we must combine sweetness with our strength. Strong finances, structures, processes and disciplines are of central importance, but without compassion towards our teams we will not build the trust and involvement of our staff that we need to be successful. This blog reverses the biblical quote. Rather than sweetness coming from strength (Bill Gates becoming a philanthropist), let us work on building strength through sweetness. Compassionate Management brings commercial reward.

The Bonus

Do you get a bonus?

Throughout my career, I have sat in meetings where management believed that their people could be motivated by the detailed metrics of a bonus systems. The basic idea of course is that the management decide what they want people to achieve and arrange a payment system to elicit greater effort and commitment.

I have also worked in organisations that have Performance Related Pay.

I tend to dislike these systems for the following reasons:

• Most bonus systems are opaque and difficult to understand. And justify. This can be counterproductive and demotivating
• They can incentivise the wrong behaviour, e.g. staff push customers to buy a product that is not suited to them (for example, in financial services)
• To the member of staff who has done the work, the actual award can seem paltry compared to the effort invested
• Unequal salaries and individualised bonuses can cause envy and division within the workforce leading to “lower performers” withdrawing commitment
• Evaluation of achievement can be very subjective and is often influenced by the quality of relationships
• There’s a risk that time is spent by competent and senior people in devising ever-more detailed systems: time which could perhaps be spent on other initiatives
• I believe the basic salary the average employee receives should be the rate for the job and I don’t think it’s fair that they should be paid lower than average. If people are performing poorly, that needs to be dealt with creatively not just by paying them, say, 80% of the market price.

So is there ever a case for a bonus?

Some will say that certain jobs cannot be filled without a bonus. Sales people, for example, are used to getting a car and a bonus as part of their package and won’t come to an organisation that does without. I am not sure about this. If the basic salary and terms are fair, and the organisation sells good stuff without pressure I think the people will come. A good experience at Sofa.com led me to ask if the staff were incentivised. I was told they were paid a good salary and they were motivated by a good product. They felt the price and quality, and superiority of their product, made it “sell itself”.

John Lewis is another company that provides a great customer experience with knowledgeable staff who take the time to help you choose. I met staff who take instruction booklets home at night, or who use their own phones to get you information in the shop. John Lewis seems to encourage long service, and employ “characters” who know all about beds, or fountain pens, or fridges. They get a bonus if the company does well.

At Notting Hill Housing we introduced a bonus system. It is very simple. Each year we set a budget that should deliver a surplus. If we make more we pay a bonus – the same amount to everyone in the company. The most that can be made is £1,000 extra (if we make £8m more than planned). Morally justifiable, the bonus is paid from surpluses, not from rents, and it is paid on top of market median pay which all staff receive regardless of market conditions or the success of the company.

We introduced the bonus to help everyone focus on a key success factor – our profitability. This is what enables us to deliver our mission: affordable homes for low-income households. At NHH we have lots of staff who focus on customers, whose activity is only obliquely linked to profitability. But by giving everyone the same bonus we make sure all benefit from the company’s success, not just those building or selling homes,  for example. It’s one reason why our reception staff are so welcoming!

On reception at Notting Hill

By concentrating on one metric the whole company is focused on that criteria – the overall success of the company, expressed in its surplus. The Board has the right to reduce or cancel a bonus if we do badly on other fronts e.g. if customer satisfaction tanks. But in the last seven years we have been able to pay the bonus every year.

Because all eligible NHH staff benefit from the bonus it is quite an expensive commitment to make – if we give everyone £1,000 this costs about £1m per year. We feel it is justified for the following reasons:

• Some of the value created by staff effort is repaid to them
• It incentivises teams to save or make money, enabling us to meet our objectives
• We are all in it together in terms of objectives and benefits; our system unites teams and individuals
• Lower paid staff receive the same level of bonus as senior staff – up to £1,000 a year. It is much more valuable to lower paid staff – as a percentage, and due to lower tax take – than to senior staff. This helps retain our front-line staff as they effectively earn a little above the median level, which can be as low as the London Living Wage.
• Because the process is transparent and relates to our published accounts, all can be sure that the bonuses are fairly distributed.
• Like our annual staff parties, the bonus helps the staff bond and feel part of a successful and happy team.
• At present we are piloting a performance related pay system with our sales teams, at their request. There are also occasional ‘thank yous’ given to teams or individuals for very special achievements, e.g. £25 vouchers, breakfast, or a drinks party. Very occasionally we give leaders an extra £1,000 for truly exceptional work; these are one-off sums discussed and agreed by the whole Executive.

What is your experience of Bonus Systems, Performance-Related Pay and Rewards Systems?

The blame game

These days, one of the things many businesses experience more of, often in response to a service failure, is a strongly worded attack on social media where the Chief Executive or Chairman is accused of running a shabby ship.

I find such Tweet-attacks quite upsetting, especially when uncritically retweeted by all and sundry who love to pile in when they see a fight happening. The attacks are rarely based on fact: unfair and untrue assumptions are made and scandalous motives are apportioned. The perspective is inevitably one-sided, the accusers are invariably anonymous and the messages are crudely designed to whip up sentiment – all in just 140 characters!

However, this strong desire to blame someone when something goes wrong is ingrained in all of us. When something goes wrong I know that my first annoyed and emotional reaction will always be to blame someone else. If it rains on holiday I tend to blame my husband for booking the wrong destination, or the wrong week, conveniently forgetting I had agreed to a staying in Gloucestershire in June.

Working together to sort things out

When I step on a Stickle Brick, I blame the child for not clearing up rather than myself for forgetting my slippers. In order to feel OK about ourselves, we just project the fault onto others. If the mistake is someone else’s, our anger is turned out and on to them rather than on ourselves. Our own responsibility is invisible to us.

I remember very clearly my first experience in a coroner’s court when an older man had died in a fire in his bed in a sheltered scheme I was responsible for. The resident was a heavy smoker and he smoked in bed. The manager knew it was a risk and, from time to time, she warned him of the dangers. He died in terrible circumstances with a member of staff trying to put out the fire.

The family were, understandably, distraught. They immediately blamed the landlord and the staff members for allowing their relative to smoke. Who gave him a lighter? They suggested that smoking should be banned in sheltered schemes and that their relative should have been prevented from having cigarettes and matches in his possession.

As you can imagine we would never try to restrict an older person from smoking in their own flat. It’s their right to smoke and do whatever they like – we don’t run a prison. We don’t have powers to confiscate their smoking paraphernalia, nor would we wish to restrict people’s choices. In older age, some things pose greater risk, e.g. living alone, smoking, drinking, walking in icy conditions, catching flu, etc. We felt that there was a risk associated with smoking in bed, but that the tenant was free to make his own choice.

In court the coroner listened carefully, took all the evidence into account then said that the old gentleman enjoyed a fag and no one had the right to stop him smoking, even though it raised the risk of harm. He concluded that the death was “a tragic accident”. I thought he got it right. Clearly the death was tragic, but the circumstances were accidental – no one was to blame.

Yet I absolutely understood why the family wanted to blame us. It may have been that they felt some level of guilt themselves, even though they equally couldn’t stop the resident from smoking if he wished, and it’s human nature to ask what could have stopped bad things from happening.

Personally, when blame is being chucked around, I find it easier to deal with if I can understand the very human instincts that leads to the “name, blame, shame” approach. The old saying that notes how “the pot calls the kettle black” is true. If we see someone getting very angry with the management or the police or social services, we need to ask why.

Very often bad things happen because we let them happen. We like to blame politicians, but we need democratic representatives to work for us. All of us in society bear some responsibility both for the things that go well and the things that we don’t like. None of us is uniformly good, nor completely bad and wrong.

To continually blame and undermine “them” is so much easier than doing something about the problem. Those who know me well will understand how, a long time ago, I decided rather than criticising others for not producing enough affordable housing I would do something about it. I find this very much more rewarding than blaming others for not doing enough.