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what will people remember you for?
“At least you sorted the drains out”. Will that be my epitaph?
The comment came during a chance meeting with someone who worked for me twenty odd years ago, but whom I’ve not seen for five or six years. It refers to an incident at a site that I had taken over running the operations at and where there had been a perennial problem with flooding. I had been standing in the car park in the aftermath of the first big summer storm following a project to fix the problems admiring the gently steaming tarmac when my boss squared walked quietly up behind me and said, “There may be doubts as to whether or not Mussolini made the trains run on time, but at least you’ll be able to claim that you made the drains work as your legacy to mankind”.
To set out to leave some form of legacy by which you will be remembered may not be a bad thing, but it does require elements of conceit and vanity (both of which I plead guilty of from time to time). The danger comes when those vices get in the way of what you are trying to deliver and the end result becomes more about you than those who might otherwise benefit, and I’ve seen that blight often enough to be wary of it in anything that I set out to achieve these days.
As a young man I can remember being told of the bucket of water test. You plunge in both hands and swirl for all you are worth, but so quickly after you take your hands out do those waters become still again leaving no trace of your efforts. Along the same lines I am minded of an old Scots lament:
“Mony’s the ane for him makes mane, But nane sall ken whar he is gane.
Ower his white bones, when they are bare, The wind sall blaw for evermair”.
Very few people do something that leaves a long term mark, and often those that do are those who had the fortune to have circumstances collide with need rather than any plans for greatness coming to fruition. Cometh the hour, cometh the man sort of thing.
Maybe it is more the little things that you do that will make a difference. I sorted the drains by getting a CCTV survey done rather that spending a 5 figure sum every year on jet blasting as my predecessors had done. That meant that I could invest money in the two or three areas where there was a major problem and get them fixed properly. It worked and a significant irritant for the 1300 or so people who worked on the site went away.
That is classic facilities management stuff; making life better for the workers helps productivity and better productivity means more profitable business, more satisfied customers and all of those fine things. Facilities management people fix stuff. As Dara O’Briain said when he provided the entertainment at the BIFM Awards dinner a few years ago, we are like the fairies at the bottom of the garden, doing things un-noticed.
So we have a lesson in humility maybe? It isn’t about the individual so much as the part that the individual plays in their environment and the contribution that they make.
But the other lesson here is a leadership one. Recognition is a powerful reward: I got a nice glow from someone remembering and saying so. Why not thank someone today, and maybe your legacy will be to be remembered as a nice person. I’d settle for that.
could you manage a little consideration and tolerance in the season of goodwill?
People seem to see things in such black and white terms these days. You love it or you hate it, or something is right or wrong with nothing in between. But is that really true? No of course it isn’t, but why can’t people be bothered to come to a considered decision.
What started me off on this topic was the Vince Cable affair of last week where yet another scam interview had elicited some ill judged remarks and Mr Cable was being pilloried. Now I don’t know the guy, and haven’t really paid too much attention to what he’s been up to since being thrust into office, but I do appreciate what the Government is trying to do in terms of getting us out of the hole the other mob had dug us into and my impressions of Mr C were that he wasn’t doing too badly in playing his part. But does what he said suddenly turn him into such a villain? I don’t think so, especially when compared with some of the conduct we have seen from public figures over the last 15 years or so.
As people we are not necessarily all good or all bad. Doing one good thing or making one mistake doesn’t necessarily move us far in one direction or the other either. There are degrees in all of these things that we ought to allow for.
Love and hate are very powerful emotions and are polar extremities with a wide spectrum in between, so why do people want to only be at one or other end of that range? I doubt that they really are, it’s just another example of poor use of language, exaggerating for effect rather than anything else. Personally I made a conscious effort to avoid hate a long time ago. It seemed like such a waste to me to hate something; to be generating the necessary degree of rage that would go with hate consumes so much energy that can be put to more positive things. I try not to even use the word in every day speech.
It is perfectly possible to neither like nor dislike something, or to just like or dislike something a little. You can like something some of the time, but not all of the time. There is no reason to even be consistent, let alone extreme, about these things. In the same way, right and wrong are not always absolutes. Context plays a big part in understanding these things and that is where consideration and judgement come in.
Perhaps this is all just semantics and maybe the words don’t really matter, but I think that they do. If folks were to apply consideration and judgement a little more (are you listening Vince?) they could be a little more rational perhaps? One of my great sadness’s about modern Britain is in how selfish and inconsiderate people have become, so any move to improve that would have my support.
I wrote recently about the pendulum effect whereby allowing things to go to one extreme causes the inevitable backswing to the opposite end of the arc, and suggested that a bit more time in the tolerant middle ground would be beneficial in maintaining a more balanced and stable society.
Things aren’t always black or white, and things can, sometimes, be partly right or partly wrong. In the season of peace and goodwill my message is let’s all try to weigh things a little, be a bit more tolerant of others and to see things in a few shades of grey, or even a little colour.
A #facilitiesmanagement Christmas Tale
‘Twas Christmas Eve at the office. As the sky began to lighten that morning, Bob the Facilities Manager sat in reception waiting for the receptionist to arrive and take over the desk. On the CCTV monitors he saw the black Audi A6 of the CEO glide up to the gate. His hand went to the control panel to press the gate open button for her – she never used her identity badge – but then he froze. From the driver’s window a pale hand emerged and wafted a small white rectangle at the sensor. The gate rose and the Audi entered the car park. Mesmerised, he followed the car on the cameras until it parked. Sure enough it was the right person driving. The angle she parked at would have been enough to show that, but the lady herself emerged and headed for the door.
Normally he would have made himself scarce at this point to avoid having any contact with her as she passed through reception. Not that she ever acknowledged him, but there was often something that had pricked her bile and some order would be barked out as she swept through. Today though he sat rooted as she emerged from the revolving door and flashed him as wide smile. “Good morning Bob. I seem to have parked across two spaces. Do you think you could get it straightened up for me?” she enquired, dangling her car keys at him.
After Joan had arrived to take over reception Bob went through to make them both a drink. As he waited for the kettle to boil he wondered at the CEO’s behaviour. A voice interrupted his reveries and he turned to face the HR Director. “Ah, Bob. I’ve got six new people starting and you need to get things set up for them”. “OK, when are they starting” Bob enquired, thinking that, at least, it can’t be today. “Not ‘til early Feb, but I thought that you might have a look up on the third floor and see where we may be able to fit them in. I’ve got the names and photos we took at their interviews so I’ll email those to you so that you can sort out ID cards and things” came the response. “Er, thanks” said Bob. He’d been expecting something as his team had seen all the candidates come in for their interviews, but six weeks notice to sort out things out? Unheard of; he didn’t usually get six days.
He took the teas back to reception. As he handed over her mug Joan passed him a post it note. “Old tight wad is on her way down” she told him. Tight wad was their name for the Finance Director. He stifled the retort he was about to make as a diminutive figure in an immaculate trouser suit emerged from the lift and came their way, offering Good Mornings” to them both. She held out the buff file she carried “Your 2011/12 budgets are all approved, so you can get cracking on your programme any time you like. The directors have also agreed to give up their designated car park spaces and to go open plan. It’s all there for you to start work on in January”. They sat open mouthed watching her go.
Mrs Bob came home to find her husband fast asleep in his armchair. A piece of paper had fallen from his hand; it was the list of jobs she’d left him to do. As she looked at him he seemed to be smiling. At least someone’s having sweet dreams she thought.
avoiding the swings and the roundabouts and getting things done
I was discussing here the other week how business goes round in circles; the pendulum swings from one way of working to another and back again, and I argued that we needed to be less reactive. It’s a question of balance.
Conversations arising from that blog suggested that I was against radical change, but I’m not when it is necessary. If you have to swerve to avoid someone then it makes sense to do so rather that endure a painful collision. However, I would ask the question, why did you not see them coming earlier?
This is getting to the heart of running any operation, and those of us in #facilitiesmanagement know the issue only too well. We are often having to fire fight, and most of us in the business will have seen times when we were so busy quelling the flames that we didn’t have time to stop them starting.
One of the things that I’m passionate about in any job I take on is giving myself time to be able to do things properly. Anticipation is really 90% experience allowing you to expect the unexpected. You also develop your own toolkit of things that allow you handle things quickly when the need arises to stop matters getting out of hand.
Being able to anticipate is also a product of reading the situation and spotting the possibility of a problem and preparing for it, taking remedial action. “Perfect planning prevents p**s poor performance” as one of my team used to put it, and that really summed it up for our team. Yes we had our fair share of panics in the early days, but we worked on them, thought about them, talked about them and would listen to any idea, no matter how daft it might have sounded at the time.
Over the first year we had got most of the seasonal issues better planned and, no matter how well our solutions worked we would always review them because sometimes they were too good and we could get the right results with less effort and/or cost. Sure there were times when we got it wrong as well (I used to tell them that if we were perfect we’d be running FM beyond the pearly gates), but getting it wrong teaches you far more that getting it right.
Having the drains up in a non threatening way I also covered recently. Building a team where people can speak frankly requires a tremendous trust in each other. It isn’t the easiest thing to achieve, and you can lose it in an instant if you’re not strong enough as a leader, but when you have it the team can, and will, fly. Team spirit is another major factor in being able to anticipate problems and head them off at the pass. The team will be watching each other’s backs and playing for the good of the team rather than for themselves.
I’ve used the FM environment here to illustrate the point, but it applies just as much across the whole business spectrum. A fired up and motivated team will have the bases covered and negate the violent swerves because they will see things coming. A business in this shape is not going to get caught up in the pendulum swings because they don’t need to. They can make and cope with the fine adjustments to strategy by deployment of the right tactics to achieve objectives.
The only circles you will find a team like this going round are of the Plan, Do and Review kind as they constantly improve their performance.
Use your environment to help the environment – the ultimate in recycling?
In Facilities Management (FM) we pride ourselves on our buildings and how we run them, and I think that we have been early adopters and champions of sustainable and environmental issues. But are we doing enough? In terms of what we can do in our own right we probably are close to it, but how much are we influencing the people that we look after?
Whether we are an in house or outsourced FM service provider we are unlikely to be able to bring about significant sustainable changes on our own, but there are ways that we can collaborate with others to influence and be influenced by them. The key to this is, to use the word in its original meaning, our environment.
Consider the environment in which the building(s) we manage and the people who use it live and work in: The local geographic environment. Do we talk to our commercial and residential neighbours on issues of common interest? How about the local authorities; do we have any dialogue with them? What about how people get to work? Some of these issues will fall into the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) remit, so are you talking to them about what FM can offer and finding out what they have on their agenda? There are a lot of opportunities.
Consider the business environment that the people in the building work in. What business are they in? What do they want to showcase? What is the image that they are trying to portray to the outside world? Do you talk to the PR and Marketing people (other than when they want a desk moved)? FM has a lot to offer; we manage a lot of the things that interface with the outside world that can affect image and people’s perception of the company.
Your building’s occupants have an outside life, and that is another of the environment that FM impacts on. We manage the place where these people work for about a third of their day. We recognise that impact in terms of job satisfaction and people retention, but do we acknowledge that it also has a powerful impact on people’s moods and they way that they will interact with family and friends when they are away from work?
The ripple effect of the things that we do in the building(s) we manage goes out into the world around us, but often we are too involved in managing the splash to see where the ripples go and their impact. If we take that analogy literally, we know that ripples on a pond will cause erosion in the banks, so what impact are our ripples having in our local and business environments?
There is the “I’ve got enough on my plate” argument, but I would counter that by suggesting that getting to grips with some of these issues can take away existing pressure points and give you more time to manage. If your occupants are more content then you’ll have less complaints and the same applies to neighbours. If you’re building good relations with various internal and external groups you’re raising the FM stock and gaining a fan club; neutrals are better than enemies and fans are better than neutrals.
Over the years I’ve run all sorts of schemes, some of which seemed very off the wall to begin with but all paid dividends. There’s not room to list them here, but feel free to ask. Talk to others and collaborate on mutually beneficial projects. Using your environment to help the sustainable and environmental agenda is something to consider: The ultimate in recycling?
The art of diplomacy
On my recent US trip I got to chatting on the plane with my neighbour on the subject of tact. Exploring some of the differences between the way Americans and Brits do business, he felt that we place too much emphasis on what he termed diplomacy, hence tact. Straight talking is the way to go, he said.
It’s an interesting point, but I’ve always worked on the basis that people are, thankfully, all different, so you work at a relationship and modify your style accordingly. This has worked for me over the years whether that relationship is private or business, and for the latter, whether it’s been with my boss, my team, my peers, supplier:customer or customer:supplier. I don’t claim to have always got it right first time, but I usually made it work.
Where there have been failures it has tended to be through a lack of clarity. This was one of the reasons why my new friend felt being diplomatic was wrong, that we just danced around the point whereas his approach went straight to it.
In theory that is all well and good, but in practice I’m not so sure. One of the arts of leadership, and something that is very effective in negotiation, is in getting someone to do what you want them to do, but because they think that they want to do it. Being direct will rarely get you your desired result in those circumstances, but a more tactful approach usually will.
The direct approach is also something that does not cross cultural boundaries too well either, and so is often wasted if used in international dealings. Where did diplomacy come from in the first place? It came through cross border dealings where reaching a compromise was often the way to peace and survival.
Compromise is also often a dirty word with those who like the direct approach. I’ve been on many teams where, when we’ve been discussing our approach to an upcoming negotiation, there have been people who have wanted to take a “no compromise” position. Well, there are two key problems with that way of working. The first is that you are leaving yourself with a limited position and, to a degree, painting yourself into a corner which you should never do. The second is that, if you succeed, all of the compromise falls onto the other party. Maybe that isn’t a problem in a one off deal, but it is not the way to be building long term relationships.
Using tact, taking a diplomatic approach and being prepared to reach compromise are not signs of weakness. They are the trademarks of someone who will make successful deals over a long period of time and who will also probably be an extremely good leader.
People who act like this get things done, build happy teams and they make deals that people are happy with. They establish that reputation and people want to work for and with them. They will not be regarded as a soft touch either, because no-one that generates that level of success over a period of time can ever be a soft touch. They just become respected players, and that is another good thing because they don’t let ego get in the way.
You may sometimes have to be direct, but don’t forget that it’s people that you have to work with to make things happen. Knowing how to work with people is therefore crucial to success. Tact and diplomacy will serve you well as tools, so learn how and when to use them.
Lead well and prosper.
TCB
Nobby Styles, Wayne Rooney – Teamwork & Leadership
The differing fortunes of two men inextricably linked by the fame of the football club for which they have both played highlight one of the teamwork and leadership issues that I was taught and which I continue to try and pass on.
Teams are made up of individuals, but the synergy that a team can generate to become far greater than the sum of its parts is what makes great teams. In the case of football, not the eleven best, but the best eleven will be the team to beat.
Not everyone reading this will remember England winning the world cup, but most will remember us failing miserably in the recent competition in South Africa. In the recent series, we took a squad of decent players and yet, on the pitch, the performances were largely pathetic. In 1966 we had a squad with a few genuine world class players; Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Gordon Banks and Jimmy Greaves were genuine top class internationals who would have graced any country’s side. Wilson and Cohen at full back likewise maybe, and these were backed up with experienced club pros like Jack Charlton, Roger Hunt and Geoff Hurst plus younger coming men such as Ball and Peters.
We lost Jimmy Greaves part way through due to injury and Alf Ramsey chose to leave him out thereafter. One of the finest goal scorers in the world and he had to sit on the sidelines. And yet we won. We won because the best eleven were on the pitch. Ramsey had chosen a team that worked and would not drop one of them even to allow one of the most lethal goal scorers of his time back in.
By contrast, the recent England squad also included one of the most lethal goal scorers of the current generation, but despite him being on the pitch we failed embarrassingly. That player was Wayne Rooney, in the news in the last few days for a spat with his club that saw him agree to stay after all for a massive pay rise.
At the same time another man who had worn the same club and international colours was having to sell his treasured mementos of 1966 to help him in his old age. That man, and what a man, is Nobby Styles. With all due respect Nobby was not a world class player, but he was a team player and, like the others, he played his heart out during the ’66 campaign. He played for his team mates, he played for his country, for the fans and for pride. They all did and they won; we won.
It was all about the team. Even Greavsie, grounded in the dug out in his team blazer, exploded with joy when the final whistle blew.
I think that Manchester United were absolutely stupid to bow to Rooney’s demands. No-one is bigger than the team and they should have set the example by sorting the lad out. There is no sign of leadership in the outcome of that sordid affair and it was brought into sharp contrast by the gratitude of the little man with the big heart for the sum he got for selling his treasures.
I don’t begrudge Rooney his wages. He’ll pay his tax and spend his cash so the economy will get it back in various ways, but he’ll never have what Nobby Styles has: Nobby is a World Cup Winner. No-one can ever take that away and the memory of his jigging around with the Jules Rimet trophy will live on long after Rooney’s greed is forgotten.
Who would I have on the board of Me plc?
My friend Kwai Yu asked who would be on the board of Me plc. Having thought about this for a couple of days I’ve come up with some possible solutions here. I’ve taken a Fantasy Football approach with some of these, and have grouped them, as you will see, by category. So the nominations are:
The Entertainment Board.
First to invite would be Lionel Blair. If you wanted to personify the word irrepressible, then that would be Lionel. A positive mood to board meetings would be assured by his presence. Next up is Jane Russell. Here I’m not sure whether this would be as herself or one of her characters; maybe from the Outlaw, or Gentlemen prefer Blondes? Whatever, a smart cookie that one. Then I’d ask Doris Day. Let’s face it, whatever scrapes she got into everything always worked out in the end, and I’m an eternal optimist, so I’m sure that we’d go together well. We’d need legal advice maybe, so who else but Denny Crane; what could I add? Denny Crane! The final member of this board comes from the sporting world, and would be the late Sir Bobby Robson, the only member of this team that I have met. Two words sum up the reason for his inclusion; passion and loyalty.
The Former Colleagues Board
This one is made of people with whom I have worked and kicks off with Diane Santos. She was my boss for a time and was as straight as a die. I may not always have agreed with her, but I could always trust her. From the same team, her boss John Robson. John taught me huge amounts about leadership just by doing what he did. Later our paths crossed again when I was his business landlord and I’ll always hold him in high regard; a true gentleman. Very much in the same line is Mick Linsell, one time MD of Royal Mail and, for a time, my boss squared. Another who showed me the ways of leadership just by doing his job. And he stood up to Anne Robinson on live TV and came away with a draw.
The Historical Board
This one doesn’t go too far back, but I’d start off with a couple of politicians from the days when they were real people. Barbara Castle would be first pick. I may not have shared her political leanings, but here was a lady I would have liked to have known and maybe to have worked with. I’d team her up here with Sir Winston Churchill. Another with whom I would often have disagreed, but I love his way with words and his fighting spirit, a quality he shared with Barbara. Then there would be Leonard Cheshire, he of the Cheshire Homes and of Bomber Command. For me truly a great man and one who would bring a single minded courage to my enterprise. Finally here, and from much farther back, Vasco da Gama. I have a great admiration for those who just sailed off into the unknown to find what was there, even if that turned out to be death.
The Musketeers
Back in July ’96 I joined three guys, Chris Drew, Kelvin Little and Ian Tolley, in a team that we came to call the four musketeers (I was Porthos). We did truly live up to the One for All and All for One philosophy. We all still keep in touch even though we parted company in early ’99, having blazed a trail in those two and a bit years.
The winning team? The Musketeers I would think.
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