Archive
midweek musings on thank you notes, and why it is wrong to solicit them
One of the things that have been doing the rounds on various blogs and social media posts for a while now is the lost art of the thank you note. Now I like to write one of these where appropriate, and I do mean write; pen and paper and my own hand, not typed.
But many of these recommendations to write thank you notes are for where you have been interviewed for a job, the suggestion being that you should always write a thank you note after the interview or you won’t get the job. Read more…
when you need to, saying sorry is the only option
Reports down here in North Wiltshire of local footballers apologising for their behaviour got me thinking a bit about saying sorry. It isn’t an easy thing to do in private, let alone in public, but it is something that a leader has to face up to from time to time. And if apologising for something you said or did is hard enough, what about saying sorry for something that you didn’t say or do? Read more…
leadership lessons from Michael Schumacher
Taking a sporting theme for the second week in a row I’m going to refer to the aftermath of Michael Schumacher’s early exit from the Chinese Grand Prix after one of his wheels was not properly attached during the first round of pit stops; “I don’t have any hard feelings. I feel a bit sorry for one of my boys that I guess he feels responsible, but it’s part of the game”.
And this after he lost the chance of his best result since making his comeback and, possibly, a win on the circuit that he won his last race on. No tantrums, no ranting or raving, just a straightforward comment. Read more…
has Gary Neville got it right? more musings on ethics and standards
Continuing my recent theme on morals and ethics I read Gary Neville’s column in the Mail on Sunday sports section yesterday. My loss of interest in the professional game of soccer must have about coincided with his rise to prominence in the game (having checked, he did play in the last professional game that I watched; England v Georgia, 30/4/97, but that was the first game I had watched for about 8 years), and so I can’t comment on his abilities as a player, but his piece for the MoS got me thinking. Read more…
keep calm and carry on? it would be nice if we did
Seeing the lines of cars queuing for petrol got me thinking about how prepared we are for when things go wrong. You can’t foresee everything of course, but experience tends to help you come up with ideas as to how best to cope with things that you’ve not expected. The trick is often not to over react to a problem; why are all of these people queuing for petrol and creating an artificial shortage (and a lot of traffic chaos)? They have panicked on a wave of media hype when there was no real need to and some of the stupidity that has been reported is beyond belief. Read more…
Do your Key Performance Indicators work, or are you locked into the past?
Input specifications used to be the norm; we would be very specific about what we wanted and how it should be made and delivered, or performed in the case of a service. I can well remember deciding to go out and start replacing the fork lift truck (FLT) fleet at a logistics operation that I had just taken over. Having talked to the vehicle buyer they produced a spec that had been used previously; it was half an inch thick, had drawings of all sorts of components that are standard on any FLT and even had a requirement for a specific pantone colour plus three pages alone on the fleet number, font, style and positioning. Read more…
when it comes to change, would you rather be a follower or a leader?
Continuing the theme of change, last week I wrote about how change is all around us all of the time and I described myself as a change junkie. I’ve been challenged on that, so want to explore my motivations a little more.
I am an enthusiast for change; I like new things, the way technology brings us opportunities to live and work differently and the possibilities to make our lives better. Advances in science and medicine take away some of the fears of illness and its consequences; as a child tales of polio, iron lungs and the like were the stuff of nightmares and it is good to know that many of these things have been pretty much eradicated from our lives. Read more…
The times they are a changin’
Change is with us all of the time; before I finish the first draft of these words the sun will almost have set on Wiltshire as another day spins to a close. The world has moved on and tomorrow will bring another day.
We don’t all take kindly to change though, for it brings new things and takes away those that we are familiar and comfortable with. That new day tomorrow could bring all sorts of things; some will excite and delight us, some will challenge or scare us and we never quite k now what is around that next corner.
It is easy to see why we often have a natural resistance to change because most of us like the familiar and comfortable and it is only when we get bored with that that we want to change. Then we get that buzz of something exciting as we plan redecorating the room, moving house, buying a new car or whatever. These are changes that we enjoy.
Other change is less welcome, especially that which is forced upon us, but change will happen whether or not we like it and so we have to learn to deal with it. Life isn’t fair and never will be, no matter how much we try to make it so, because we know from the world around us that it is those that can adapt best to change that survive and thrive; seen a Pterodactyl around lately, or maybe a Dodo?
As the big 60 looms for me there are times when I feel I would be happier back in the 1960’s, but why? When I really think about it what was so attractive about that decade that took me from 8 to 17? It isn’t so much the comforts of not having responsibilities and carefree youth; no, it’s about how exiting those times were for someone of my age, and the reason for all that excitement was that there was so much changing all around me and within me. My fondness for those times comes from memories of all of that excitement and change.
Maybe that is why I became such an enthusiast for change, although I was in my forties before I realised that I was an incurable change junkie. But it was that I had become able to make change happen that cemented the package for gradually I had got into positions at work where I could do things and that was due to people working on me and putting their faith in me.
One of the standard things that we do when developing people is to take them out of their comfort zone. Done well that can be a powerful tool to help bring on the next generation of leaders and we need to have people who can embrace and thrive on change if we are to take business and society forward. I was lucky to find myself with people who helped me, saw that there was some spark, provided the fuel and fanned until the flame burst into life.
One of my projects is a procurement transformation where I am working in a team that includes people the same age of one of my grandchildren. It is a fantastic stimulus to be able to bounce ideas around and spark off each other because, even at my age, there is still so much to learn and do. The baton is passing on to new generations, but that is how it has to be, to quote a line from my own youth, The times they are a changin’. They always will.
Can we ever expect those that we elect to act ethically?
It’s a few years ago now that I made an important decision about the way that I would live my life: I decided that I would try hard not to get angry. It is a wasteful emotion and it drains you, and so, taking the view that you have a choice as to whether or not to get angry, I decided that I would choose not to.
Largely this policy has worked for me, but my resolve does get tested from time to time and this last week has seen one of those trials of my resolve. I had started the week off by emailing in my next column for FM World where I have written about business ethics. I won’t pre-empt that here, but by the end of the week we had seen the seemingly scandalous issue of the Welfare to Work case erupt all over our news media. This has echoes of the National Bullying Helpline case that rattled around the UK from its base here in Swindon a year or so back where, again, a conflict of interest was apparently overlooked.
There are two aspects of these sort of cases that threaten to raise my bile levels; the first is that both of these issues are built on milking the hopes of the vulnerable and I find that utterly despicable; those who perpetrate such scandals are beneath even contempt, but it is a fact of life that these low life individuals get to live the high life at the expense of the rest of us.
The second issue is how on earth are they allowed to get the opportunity and then to exploit it? Surely someone should have seen these things and closed them down, but they patently didn’t and allowed it to carry on until the media blew the lid off for them. (Which is why, although I am appalled at how standards in the media have slipped I am still firmly in favour of the right to freedom of speech).
I am a businessman with a lot of experience in supply chains, so I look at these contracts with that experience shaping the way I see things. I work with the Public Procurement Regulations, from both sides, on a regular basis and, in my view, they are nothing but a Supplier’s Charter. In both of the cases that I have referred to above the regulations should have been applied to the letting of those contracts. The regulations are supposed to help deliver value for the public purse, but consistently fail to do so, and although they may not have been the only poor element of these two contracts, they will have played a part in the nonsense that has emerged.
But how on earth were these contracts allowed to go so far before being exposed? That has to be a leadership issue, because a good leader, even just a competent leader, would have seen things going wrong. I can’t believe that no-one saw the problems, so there has to be a chain of command issue whereby the bad news was being suppressed and, in that case, it is doubtful that we, Hoi Polloi, will ever get to know the truth, for just as there was a conflict of interest at the heart of the contracts, there will be a conflict of interest in allowing the truth to come out: Someone will have to take responsibility.
My anger is just about under control here, but can you see any of those happily pointing fingers at business bonuses taking responsibility for the Welfare to Work scandal? I can’t.
Facilities Managers must become more businesslike
I wrote a while back about the need for us to see more business acumen amongst the specialist disciplines like purchasing and facilities management, so I was delighted to read my fellow FM World columnist (and fellow consultant) Lionel Prodgers’ article last week talking along similar lines.
When I wrote about this last time my own thoughts on this topic had been prompted by a conversation I’d had with Steve Gladwin as we drove between site visits whilst judging in the BIFM awards. The general thrust was that, if we wanted to advance the FM profession into the boardroom, then FM people needed to understand that corporate jungle and its language.
Like many of my age group I came in to FM from other disciplines; I had an IT and purchasing/supply chain background and, although I had spent two and a half years as a buyer managing that end of M&E contracts, it was only later in life, as Operations Director running a large logistics operation, that I moved from FM customer to FM Provider. Even then it was a small part of my empire and it had only come to me because the Accommodation Team, as they were known, had managed to close down my goods inwards function with an ill thought through project. By the end of that month they had been transferred from Personnel to my team and we got on fine thereafter.
It was only when I merged that operation with another business and did away with my own job that I made the move to FM as a full time interest with a portfolio over more than 30 sites to manage. But I didn’t ever see myself as a facilities manager; more as a businessman who ran a facilities management organisation, and I think that this is a crucial difference in approach.
As a younger man I worked for some years in the wholesale trade where it was important to be able to supply the retail clients with things that they could easily sell on and make their profits from. That requirement to think past the next link in the supply chain to the next one beyond stood me in good stead in FM; what did my clients need to help them run their business? Indeed, to understand what their business was, how it was developing, what their objectives were and so on was a foundation of my approach. If I could understand what their issues were then I could help deliver FM solutions that much better and could contribute to the way that their strategies evolved.
As FM became established as a profession through the 1990s it came together with a wealth of talent from all sorts of backgrounds and it was this that, in many ways, enabled it to establish its own identity. Quite rightly we have tried to get to a point where FM is a profession of choice for younger people and BIFM have done sterling work in evolving a professional qualification framework to enable them to qualify through. These things take time to work through, but it is doing what it was intended to do in bringing people on.
This approach is something that I carry through today into helping people studying for their FM qualifications because, whilst they obviously need to understand FM, as they become more senior they need to become more business minded. When I qualified as a buyer I had to study marketing, accounting and law amongst other subjects to pass out, and it is this breadth that we need to develop in our FM people.
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