Thursday, December 18, 2014

Manage your people like Alan Titchmarsh

Over the last couple of years, I have taken up gardening. It sounds boring but there are so many aspects to it that I've realised that even people who have been doing it for decades still have things to learn.

One of the first things I've learned is the concept of “right plant, right place”. Each plant has its preferences; for moisture – does it like to sit in damp, clay soil, or does it prefer well-drained soil? Similarly many plants have a requirement for acid or alkaline soil. If you put a shade-loving plant into full sun, it’ll probably wither and quite quickly look rather sick. It won’t be having a good time, and neither will you get the best out of it.

In short, if you put a plant in conditions that it likes, and make sure it has the essentials, it can’t help but grow.

When I reflect on this, it occurs to me that this is a fairly good metaphor for leadership and management. What do I mean? Well, think about it a little. If you put a shy person into a position that requires, say, presentations to customers, then it’s not likely that you’ll get the best out of them. Put an active person who thrives on pressure and adrenaline into a routine job that rarely changes, and pretty soon that person will look just as out of place as an alpine plant in full shade.

You could argue that it’s easy for gardeners. All they have to do is look up the plant in a book and put it in the conditions that suit it, or maybe vice versa. Perhaps you want to know what’ll thrive in your shady, damp garden – so you look for plants from woodland environments. Dealing with people isn’t quite so straightforward. That’s where the skill as a leader comes in. You need to know your people well enough to know if they want well-drained soil, or cold wet clay, and whether they are happy to bathe in full sun, or better given some cover.

The metaphor extends beyond just putting the right people in the right place, though. So you've chosen your plants, and rooted them firmly in the correct soil. What then?

Well, obviously, you need to water them – but it’s not as simple as that. When they’re first planted, most plants need a really good soak to get them started off, but if they’re planted directly in the border they can usually be left alone unless it’s really dry.

The other thing that needs to be done is to keep the plants fertilised, and that doesn’t just mean dumping “manure” on them. You know what I mean. The fertiliser has to be selected for the plant too. If you’re trying to encourage lots of leafy growth, you need a fertiliser high in nitrogen. Fruit plants and vegetables need more potassium and phosphates.

If you want your plants to take a particular direction, then it may be that you need to point them in the right direction with a trellis or other such support. Whatever you do with them, the plant knows how to grow. It won’t grow any quicker or more lusciously whether you dig up the roots to appraise them, measure their growth daily, or put them into league tables along with the other plants. Neither will they respond to being shouted at or threatened with disciplinary action. If the conditions are right, the plant will grow.

Stephen Covey, in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, referred to the “Law of the Farm”. There is a natural order to things. You can’t sow seeds and then somehow farm “smarter, not harder” to make them come up the next day. You can’t get more carrots from fewer seeds.

Yet when it comes to looking after our people, what do we commonly see? People put into positions that they are plainly unsuited to. Employees that are insufficiently fertilised, or given the wrong sort of fertiliser. Some are even not watered when they need it. There will even be some people who are allowed to grow plenty, but in the wrong direction, or – even worse – left to dangle without any support whatsoever.


Yet despite this neglect in the most obvious ways, we see plenty of examples where people have their roots dug up to see how fast they are growing, or having their growth unfairly compared to a totally different type of plant. Would you even consider punishing a slow growing foxglove? Or insist that bluebells flower all year long?

Friday, July 11, 2014

Why Democracy is broken in the UK


Today, July 10th, sees a public sector strike across the country in protest about, well, everything really. It is accompanied by the usual objections about union turnout. What seems to be new this time around, reeking of desperation, are the objections about the timing of mandates.

Francis Maude appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning complaining that the NUT last went to ballot its members two years ago on strike action. Funny that, because I seem to recall the last General Election being two years before that. Is Maude seriously suggesting that before each Bill is put before Parliament, that we need to have a General Election? The answer is obvious, of course he isn’t. The rhetoric employed by every Government since 1979 seems to be that unions must not take decisions that are unpopular with Government, and that Government will change the law about this if necessary.

The biggest and most ridiculous of all of the usual complaints about strikes, as well as being the most frequently employed, is that of turnout. It would appear to be a basic plank of democracy that when a vote is called for, the opportunity to vote is given to all qualified & relevant persons. Those that feel strongly either way will vote, those that don’t may choose not to. The motion is carried by the side with the largest majority. It’s a concept which is simple enough, and fair, and that’s why people have fought for it over the centuries. Why should any other model be applied to trade unions? The fact of the matter is, as Dave Prentis of Unison said on Today this morning too, Unions got a 70% response until the Thatcher government made strike ballots by post a compulsory mechanism. The Tory way with Unions is to tie both their arms behind their backs, challenge them to a fight, and then complain when the Union starts to kick them.

There has been lots of talk about thresholds for strike vote turnout recently. Boris Johnson has weighed in repeatedly (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10074549/Boris-Johnson-Coalition-has-failed-to-bring-in-anti-strike-laws.html) despite his last election victory being based on a 38% turnout. The hypocrisy from the Tories goes even deeper though. In 2012 the “flagship” policy of Police and Crime Commissioners fell flat with voters as “fewer than 15% of voters turned out in the 41 English and Welsh police areas electing a PCC, a peacetime low.” http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20374139

Surely even the Tories would have to concede that the election of a Police and Crime Commissioner is more significant to the daily business of everyday people, than a single day of strike action by public sector workers?

Even if we ignore the hypocrisy firmly embedded in the Tory argument, if we try to contemplate what would happen if the strike thresholds were introduced, what would that look like? If the threshold was not met, what would happen? Would the vote have to be run again? Would the vote be banned from being run again for a specified time period? Neither seems very attractive.

The other central plank of democracy is that what is good for one is good for all, in that the voting model is common across all systems, whoever they shall benefit. On that basis, let’s imagine what would happen if no politician could be elected without at least a 50% turnout. Every seat in Parliament. Every local Council seat. Suppose in next year’s General Election, half of the seats had a 51% turnout on average, and the other half had a 49% turnout on average. What would Parliament look like then? Presumably the votes would have to be re-run for all seats, so that the votes for the remaining seats weren’t influenced by the outcomes of the first half. Imagine the complaints from elected MPs! Supposing that Parliament was allowed to continue while elections were rescheduled, who would be the Prime Minister while we waited for the other 300+ seats to be decided? This is rather patently a shambles waiting to happen, and equally obviously is why it would never be implemented.

Often, when we see issues being debated in the Commons on TV, the number of members on each side is in single figures. What is the turnout, on average, for legislation in Parliament, and how can we have confidence in these votes when so few members are present to debate the Bill they are voting on?

The big issue, which no politician dare express or verbalise, is that politicians want us to realise that THEY are in charge, and it’s one rule for them and another for the rest of us. They want us to be governed by rules which they would abhor for themselves. Occasionally, this trait is expressed more clearly than others, and Theresa May seems to be the person most likely to leak it. The appointment of Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to head up the inquiry on child abuse within Westminster is a clear example. It must have been harder to find someone so obviously connected to this issue, than it was to find someone with no perceivable link. It was the same when Tom Winsor was appointed the Chief Inspector of HMIC. Winsor had no credible skills or background that made him suitable for the role of Chief Inspector, other than the fact that he had recently written a report – ghost written by Government – that decimated police pay and conditions and infuriated serving officers. The appointment of Winsor was solely to show the police who was in charge. The Butler-Sloss appointment, like Winsor, is a clear two-fingered gesture to the public, and it says “We are in charge. We can do what we like, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Monday, February 3, 2014

Empty Threats

A few evenings ago, I watched "Made In Dagenham" for the first time. If you've never seen it, the film is a fictional account of a true event; the struggle of female machinists at Ford's Dagenham plant for equal pay. From a distance of more than 45 years, it seems incredible that anyone would think that it was ever acceptable for women to earn half the wages of men doing similarly skilled jobs.

However what caught my attention was the rhetoric employed by one of the characters, Robert Tooley (played by Richard Schiff). I am, of course, aware that this is fiction and that the dialogue has been dramatised. I can well imagine though that similar sentiments were expressed by the real protagonists representing Ford.

Tooley is a Ford executive who is flown over from Detroit to break the Dagenham strike. He realises quickly that he needs to undermine the support the women are receiving from the (mainly male) union. Tooley tells Monty Taylor, one of the union stewards, that if Ford pulls out of the UK, then there will be no members paying union subscriptions and he'll be out of a job. Tooley also flatly states that businesses can't afford to pay men and women equally, and that they will go bankrupt if forced to. Taylor takes immediate steps to marginalise the female strikers.

Eventually, with the plant at a standstill, the Employment Secretary Barbara Castle meets with Tooley. With a voice laden with impending doom, Tooley tells Castle that if the female strikers get their way, Ford will no longer be able to produce cars at a profit. Tooley issues an explicit threat that Ford will make their cars elsewhere.

History records that Castle helped resolve the strike, bringing the women's pay to 92% of the men's rate almost immediately, and that this dispute paved the way for the Equal Pay Act of 1970. The Act came into effect in 1975.

Contrary to the expectations of the prophets of doom, the sun rose the next morning, and fell beneath the western sky the following evening. Ford carried on making cars, in the UK, and at a profit. With the passage of the 1970 Act, businesses up and down the country continued to function despite paying women equal pay for equal work.

I suspect that two things worked in the favour of the machinists. The first was that there was a Labour government, which until the 1990s was proud of its working class roots and would stand up for the rights of the ordinary worker. Secondly, Barbara Castle was an extraordinary woman with extraordinary conviction. A lesser person, male or female, might not have dared arrange such a radical solution to the strike. I have no doubt that a Conservative government would not have produced such a favourable outcome.

Why is this relevant today? Earlier I drew your attention to the rhetoric. We can see now with hindsight that this was not an objective business case talking, but instead it was greed taking priority over principle and using threats to bolster its case. It is doubtful whether Ford really would have pulled out of the UK. I suspect that when it came down to it, the logistics didn't stack up. Ford knew that they had a lucrative customer base in the UK, and that whilst it would have been possible to supply the UK market with cars from overseas, it wouldn't have been practical with the required volume.

The point I am making here - albeit perhaps not too clearly - is that we are hearing similar threats made by various parties with vested interests. Banks claim that their best employees will leave if their bonuses are capped or stopped, and other similarly impartial commentators have voiced the opinion that Labour's proposed reinstatement of the 50p tax band is anti-business and will cause businesses to leave the UK. These are the same people who claimed that the introduction of the minimum wage in 1997 would cause a recession. It didn't.

Maybe we should just take their threats, like Tooley's, with a pinch of salt. Greed should never come before principle. It won't happen today though. I couldn't honestly say whether with the current Government it is caused by greed or cowardice. Maybe both. Neither serves the interests of the country.