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First impressions count, but you can’t judge a book by its cover
Two very conflicting statements, but both are encountered pretty much daily in business, so which is true?
We talk a lot about the first 10 seconds, the 30 second elevator pitch, the 6 word pitch and we micro blog in under 140 characters. We talk in sound bites and all know people who have the attention span of a gnat. Novelists have to grab their readers with a killer opening sentence or the book will go back on the shelf. A lot of things have that immediacy these days, so there is a lot to being able to grab attention.
Being able to do this is a good discipline anyway; to be able to scope a project or business plan on one side of A4 means that you have thought it out and, probably, have it right. To be able to put a point across in three or four sentences in a meeting is effective and saves everyone time. If you can cut to the chase and avoid all of the peripheral, often irrelevant, issues it is a great business skill and well worth practising.
I am a great fan of the three minute presentation as a discipline. To be able to report on your work area’s KPIs, to update on project progress, run through your plans for the next month or whatever in 180 seconds makes you focus on the important points. It also steers you away from bogging down with the worst excesses of visual aids and presentation tools. A three minute presentation is also easier to learn by heart, or maybe with just a few crib notes, and so it provides a great way of improving your skills at talking on your feet.
Making the right first impression may well get you hired for that job or win your company that piece of business, and there are a lot of sources of help geared to pointing you in the right direction. From the view point of the person selling, whether it is themselves a product or a service, I always recommend trying to master the approach.
But when you are the person hiring or buying, why are you allowing yourself to be so shallow? Why are you risking your business (and your reputation) on what can only be a kneejerk reaction? Let’s face it, would you really want to hire someone who made important business decisions without thinking things through? Sure experience helps you reach decisions quickly, and there are times when you need to make a snap decision, but are we really willing to accept that decisions are routinely made on gut reactions?
Yes, you can judge a book by its cover, but to do so is to run the risk of missing out on a gem, hence the adage being that you can’t. Perhaps it should really be that you shouldn’t, but my point is that, when you are making a choice, you should make as thorough as possible evaluation of your choices to give yourself the best chance of reaching the right decision.
My buying background influences that thinking, but so does my general management experience, the number of industrial accidents I have investigated, the number of disciplinary cases I have examined, the strategic and tactical plans I have evaluated let alone the hundreds of prospective employees or promotees I have interviewed and assessed.
Of course we have to sift, but the later stages of evaluating anything or anyone should be thorough. Making snap decisions at that stage makes very little sense, and I suggest that those that do are taking an unnecessary risk.
Is the customer king? Or is it the client? Why is the difference important?
Recently I’ve been doing some work with clients on the joys of customer service, in one case the delivery of product direct to those that have ordered it and in the other the delivery of service to various sites where the contract, and therefore the service level, has been placed with a central client.
In the former case things are straightforward; the product is requested and the customer advised as to when it will come. As long as the promise is kept the customer is happy and will come again, or at least in theory, because there are times when the customer doesn’t take account of the fact that what has been ordered has to be put somewhere when it arrives, and they don’t always realise quite how large a delivery might be. Back in my logistics days I had software developed to flag exceptional order quantities; “Do you really want 1000 boxes or did you mean 10 boxes of 100?” Far better to check than to send a lorry load out knowing it might all come back. It is all good customer service.
Where you are dealing with a centrally placed contract though things can get more difficult. Let’s call the contract placer the client and the recipient of the service the customer here. Now the client will specify a service level and this will probably be fairly well stripped down on price grounds, but what do they tell the customers to expect? It should be the client/customer organisation that ensures that they are able to play their part in the contract and sometimes the communication is good, other times it is nonexistent, but in most cases there is no effort whatsoever to make a connection between the two parts of the business and it is left to the contractor to be the interface.
One of the great benefits that I have enjoyed in my managerial career is to have worked in sales, operations and purchasing and so have seen how these three disciplines interlink (or not) and maybe I have a greater sense of perspective as a result, but I still recall a career low point when I took over an FM contract that had been centrally placed with no thought to what was going on at the sharp end.
Off I went to the first Quality of Service quarterly meeting of my tenure. We sat either side of the table with the client as they ran through the KPIs. Most were within the required standard, but a couple were not and we got the required dressing down. That dealt with what was actually contractual and relevant to what we were paid, but then we got on to “end user feedback” (complaints). Now there we got pretty well hammered by the people we were serving on a day to day basis in every area except for the ones where we were failing the KPIs, but it didn’t matter to the client because it wasn’t in the contract. They still went through the motions of giving us a hard time, but it was pretty half hearted.
We turned that contract round in spite of the intransigent client team by talking to the people at the top of the organisation about what they really needed from us, not to deliver just for them, but to enable them to deliver what their customers wanted. You have to think down the line.
Contracts should be about what a business needs to succeed, and should be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs. You should never paint yourself into a corner, should you?
On the anniversary of 9/11, an awful piece of emergency management
This morning I went out to do my usual Sunday morning shop for the week at one of the major chains local emporium. They have adopted the civilised approach of opening the door at 0930 even though the ludicrous Sunday trading laws mean that they can’t serve you before 1000, so I can, at least, wander round filling my cart and be back home at a reasonable hour to get on with my day.
I was accompanied as usual by a companion who, like me, is a veteran of managing large establishments and running countless emergency evacuations of such places, and so when a bell sounded a couple of times and an alarm started up we resignedly began the journey from half way round the store towards the exit: We know the signs, especially when my companion was literally shoulder charged by one of the store employees running towards the store room and bakery area.
Sure enough the public address burst into life and a message asking everyone to leave the store began, but then an extraordinary thing happened. From the Staff Only area that the lady who had bounced off my companion had vanished into, employees began to emerge shouting “There’s a fire, get out!” and running, yes running, towards the exit.
My companion and I were making a calm departure having abandoned our shopping carts at the side of an aisle out of the way and the other shoppers were also leaving in an orderly fashion, but not the employees, they were weaving and bobbing as they rushed to get out and the “There’s a fire, get out” was heard several times from more than one of them as they rushed past us.
It was truly one of the most extraordinary scenes I have witnessed at an emergency evacuation. I have been in some tight corners over the years, some of which you’ve read about here, but this morning I felt genuine fear. Thank goodness there was not a panic amongst the shoppers, especially as we got near the narrows of the exit. My companion was not too steady having had a fall at home the night before and, large as I am, I’m not too sure that I could have shielded them adequately in a stampede.
Fortunately we, and everyone else, got out OK, but I am writing to the company concerned with some observations. Given our experience of these things we did not hang around for the aftermath, but decanted to a rival store up the road where I may start to shop in future on the basis that I might be safer.
The other observation I will make is that, having assembled the store team in the centre of the car park two of the supervisory team, presumably having completed the roll call, appeared to realise that the main entrance had been left open and, seemingly, unguarded for about three minutes. They then both began to run back to the entrance. Why run through a car park with some, like me beginning to drive out and others still driving in unaware of the drama? Why run anywhere at all?
Whether there was a fire or not is not important, what matters is that an emergency evacuation should be carried out in a calm and controlled manner and this one was not, it was almost a “How Not To” demonstration.
All in all it was a shameful performance. I would love to do a debrief using the CCTV footage (assuming they have it) and to try and help improve. I’m still having problems believing it happened.
Why am I so keen on planning and preparing for crisis management? I was born to it
I’ve written here a few times about various aspects of incident management and, as one or two have remarked, maybe I’m a bit of an anorak about these things. They may have a point because, to some extent, incident management has been with me since I was in short trousers.
My childhood was spent living on country estates, more that usually with a farm attached. We didn’t own these places, my parents worked there so that explains my interest in customer service; I was, in fact, born into service. But the incident management side of things comes from that background too. In recent years risk assessments have become a fad in many ways, but they are just a formalisation of what I was taught to do in the late 1950s by people who understood such things intuitively.
So how does what I learned all those years ago down on the farm fit with the management of modern property? Well take one sort of incident management that a typical facilities management team should have down pat, that of fire. One of the things that we handled with considerable frequency was fire. Not just the risk of fire (and I have seen a barn fire at close quarters), but managing fires that we would start on purpose. We would have at least one managed conflagration a week as we burned refuse, burned off fields, bracken or whatever. And when I talk about burning refuse I mean bonfires that the average village would be proud of on November 5th; you can create a huge weekly pile from a 50+ acre estate.
These things are not done willy nilly, they are carefully arranged, taking into account the wind, time of day and nature of what you are burning. A compost heap large enough to keep Time Team busy excavating it for a week will burn for days if it spontaneously combusts. Siting the bonfire, compost heap or whatever is carefully thought through. Precautions are taken and what you’ll do if things don’t go as planned are worked out. We were taught to understand consequences and about accepting responsibility.
On a farm or large country estate there is a lot of serious kit and danger lurks all around. As kids we were brought up to understand and respect things, so maybe it should be no surprise that it is so ingrained in me. That’s not to say that I don’t take risks; I do, but I think about it first. From what I learned as a child I got to think about things like always checking my escape route(s) when I stay somewhere away from home, like counting the seat rows between me and the nearest two exits when I fly, like my winter survival kit that I carry in the car from November through March.
I had the benefit of learning about these things to the degree that it became automatic. It was only later in life when I became responsible for large numbers of people that I began to think about it and to analyse what I was doing and why as part of developing drills and desktop run throughs. When you have a bloody great fire every week on purpose you are doing it for real, but when you are running big buildings, thankfully, you don’t, so you need to have dummy drills.
Practice does make perfect which is why I have ridden my teams hard on these things, and that is why we coped so well with some of the incidents that have described in these columns. It’s in my blood.
when it comes to leadership, one size does not fit all
I’m talking about effective leadership here rather than use other adjectives like good or great. This week I am writing about leadership that works in that it gets people following. To digress for a moment, the term following is something of an ambiguous concept here because, in most cases, the followers are usually in the van doing the things that the leader steers them to do, but the leader getting behind the followers, watching their backs, is as much a part of leadership as anything else.
It may be a slightly abstract concept, but the leader is not necessarily in front with their followers behind when it comes to the execution of the leader’s plan, and that does need to be understood. You can still lead from the front, sometimes you have to, and other times it’s just good to do so, but most of the time you will in the rear. Good leaders learn this, great ones do it intuitively.
Back at effective leadership though, the point that I wanted to make this week is around styles of leadership. Everyone is an individual and has their own motivational triggers; some will respond best to flattery, some to bribery, some, odd as it may seem on the surface, to bullying (please don’t interpret that as me being in favour of such things). Understanding individual needs is very important in a small team where you need every member to have total trust in each other as well as in the leader. In a larger team it is good for the leader to know all of their team, but such things take time and effort that might be better deployed on other things in the short term.
The crucial need is to instil in the team a feeling that individual failures are acceptable because the trust and support within the team will compensate. There is a point at which the desire to not let your colleagues down kicks in and drives performance up, but that comes from knowing that you can fail whilst believing that you won’t because people have shown confidence in you.
One of the easiest leadership tasks is taking over a team with low morale or who are faced with adverse circumstances. Here a siege mentality can be created without too much effort and an “us against the rest” spirit flows through your team. One of the problems with this approach is getting out of it once you’ve got the team firing on all cylinders because it has dangers in the long run. Using a little paranoia to kick start things is all very well, but you do need to ensure that it is quickly replaced by the confidence that will come as positive results flow in.
Overcoming fear of failure is one of the hardest things to do, but it can be done. Fear of failure will paralyse even the best team. If you allow people to fail and deal with those failures in a positive way they start to lose the fear of failing, but it goes beyond the individual; you need to have that collective feeling within the team that people will cover for each other. As long as everyone can see and believe that all are doing their best, that mistakes are dealt with positively (and that includes dealing with some things in a disciplinary sense when the need arises), then fear of failure starts to fade from the culture.
There is no one leadership model; as a leader you have to be able to understand what will work best in any set of circumstances.
planning for riots – another day on the facilities front line
Recently we have seen the worst civil unrest I can recall in this country, although the poll tax riots and other isolated incidents were pretty grim at the time.
The suffering of people affected by the theft and arson, whether they be the victims or those trying to help, is beyond anything that I can imagine and my thoughts also went out to colleagues in the facilities management industry who were responsible for some of the premises that were attacked or threatened. We always have plans to cover various scenarios, but on that scale?
The sheer wanton destruction of property brought to mind some of the predictions of what we could expect overnight on the 31st December 1999 and into the morning of 1st January 2000. On the run in to that date change there were a number of people predicting Armageddon as computers failed to recognise the new date and many people who should have been a lot more rational became almost panic stricken.
Later in 1999 I was summoned to a meeting with senior managers from some of my client companies to re-review the crisis plans for the end of the year. With many city centre properties there was an obvious concern over business continuity if large scope rioting were to occur and access to the buildings was restricted or denied for one or more days in the aftermath.
This was all good, basic, facilities management stuff. We had looked at all of the implications that we could think of, working with colleagues from IT, HR and others and had run three desktop exercises earlier in the year, refining the plans after each. We were well prepared, but not complacent because no-one really knew for certain what was going to happen. I was convinced that the millennium bug was a myth, but could partying get out of hand for example? We couldn’t be sure, but we could be prepared, and we were.
But the doubts of senior people would not go away, and they gradually became less and less rational as the weeks ticked by. Eventually one of them called me at home one Friday evening, “I’m just checking that the number in the emergency pack is right for you at home” he said, “I thought that you might have put a false one in”. Well, it was the right number, was there anything else?
Well there was. He wanted an assurance that I would spend the end of year night at one of the London offices. Why, I asked, and was told that it was essential that I was on site in the event of a riot. The idea was that I could take personal charge and prevent any mob accessing the building, although how was up to me. Err, no, my plan was that, at the first hint of trouble of any magnitude near any of the sites, we would pull the security team out and arrangements were in place for that. We knew that we could cope with the loss of a building; that was a long standing arrangement, and so the risk of any of our people being attacked or killed trying to defend one was to be avoided. We could not stop a mob.
After I put the phone down that Friday evening the Berkshire Belle and I discussed the concept of me stood outside of the front door of head office, arms akimbo ordering the mob to desist seemed a bit of a King Canute job really. Seeing the violence of recent events I think that we had made the right call.
Standards, Good Practice or Guidelines – why and when do we need them?
I’m writing this with facilities management in mind, but it is applicable to business, society et al. It’s on my mind because of something lurking round the corner that I have been involved in commenting on and thinking about the specific has got me thinking about the general point of why we have such things as standards, rules and the like. What is the point?
If one were to live entirely in a vacuum you could do without standards of any sort, but once there are two or more people you start to need to define things; boundaries for example and ways that you will behave towards each other. So in life and business we have a range of things that are set out; money and measurements need some definition so that we can trade, and other standards come along such as the notorious EU efforts to define the sausage, along with more sensible things like regional wine & cheese definitions.
All of these are good because they allow us to function in our lives. Then we have laws, many of which are stupid (because they are unenforceable), but society has to have some foundation. Some laws help, others hinder, but we rub along.
Experience is a big part of life in all its forms. The wilderness can still be a dangerous place as witnessed by the Eton school party last week, and we learn that there are dangers in pushing the boundaries (one of the things about elf & safety for me is that it could be a danger in the long term if we remove all risks and cease to learn; if we remove all risk of falling over, will we forget that it hurts?). As we have evolved we have learned all sorts of things that we can pass on, and these become as Good Practice.
In business we do a lot to encourage good practice; benchmarking and peer groups, professional bodies, continuous professional development and so on, and these are often taken a step further by trade bodies that have codes of practice for their industry. All of this is good because it takes us forward and gives our customers and markets confidence.
And then there are the standards. Imagine what life would be like if we didn’t have an electrical wiring standard; visual signage standards are another good example of a beneficial standard that we work with on a daily basis. We don’t even perceive some of the standards that rule our lives like those that allow us to use our various mobile devices, but they are there and we all benefit from them in life and work.
But then there are another range of standards, and these are closer related to the Euro sausage that we might think. To some degree they are good things. ISO, BS and CE assure us that something has been made to a standard that we can rely on; that we can plug something in and not put ourselves or our families at risk of electrocution, say, is a good thing and one I will defend.
However, I think that there are dangers in taking good practice and turning it into a standard without good reason to do so. Often good practice should be adopted just because it is good, not by enforcing it. Leaders drive good practice forwards; complying with a common standard can stifle that, and also competition and that is bad.
So let’s keep standards for where we need them and let business leaders thrive as unfettered as possible, because that is the path to recovery.
just another quiet day on the facilities front line, then Anders Breivik came along
News from Norway last week shocked the world, and we feel for the families of those who lost loved ones. The media have made much of possible motive and the whys and wherefores, but I am more concerned about the impact on those who had responsibilities for the security of people at the two venues that were targeted, because those of us in facilities management walk in their shoes.
I’ve written here about the time, just after the Columbine spree killings in the USA, that one of my sites had a suspected gunman outside. That came to nothing, but we learned some lessons that we built into the way would handle any future incident. I’ve also covered a suspicious package incident, one of three that I have experienced, but I have also had someone gain access to one of my sites and start brandishing a knife, demanding to see their estranged partner, and four or five other incidents involving domestic issues that got to the edge of violence come to mind.
When you are managing a site where there are large numbers of people, probably also with public access, you walk a tightrope. Now I don’t want to suggest that this goes on all of the time, but you don’t know when an incident will occur. When one does, then speed and level of response needs to be on the money if you are to have any chance of dealing with it. How you cope with something like the second incident in Norway is mind boggling and I can empathise with my opposite numbers up there. What they must be going through is something that I never want to have to face. My thoughts are also with the forces of law and order. Expectations on them are enormous and the media cane them whatever they do these days.
In our world, the FM team need to be well trained and to understand what they should and should not do when something flares up, but also in spotting the warning signs. We do have a variety of states of alert, and raise the level of vigilance if we are warned of a specific threat, but so often incidents arise without warning, especially the domestic ones. All of the incidents that I have mentioned came on ordinary days, albeit a couple of the suspicious package ones were are the height of the IRA campaigns. One minute you’re quietly getting on with something and the next you’ve switched to crisis mode: that innocent looking visitor grabs your colleague, pulls out a 12 inch kitchen knife and holds it to your colleague’s throat.
Thankfully the majority of us don’t ever face these situations, and those that do probably only get one in a lifetime, so how do you prepare? The start for the reactive side is in the basic emergency process; you get used to handling these things in a calm and structured way so that when something happens it is dealt with. Regular practice helps, both in desktop exercises and live ones, to settle the team into being able to react effectively when an alarm is raised. The proactive side needs a culture of vigilance, and that applies to the whole team; you have to have an escalation process and you need an intelligence network.
If you do these things then you have a chance of reducing the risk. I doubt that we will ever prevent a determined solo attack like that seen in Norway last week, but we might be able to limit the impact. When did you last review your process?
Leadership lessons from the News of the World & Wayne Rooney?
Over the last week there has been much discussion in and around the media on leadership, primarily concerned with the roles of Messer’s Murdoch pere et fils. Personally I find the sight of politicians haranguing successful business people on the subject of accountability completely risible, but hypocrisy is the hallmark of modern politics and, sadly, we quietly accept it.
One day we might see genuine leadership from those we elect to office, but I doubt that it will happen whilst they all subject themselves to their media advisors; you can lead a committee, but you can’t truly lead by committee.
Where the Murdoch chaps fit into this week’s thoughts is the question of their position relative to what they knew. The whole sorry mess has seen much hysteria, but there is a basic issue at the heart of it as far as leadership goes, and that is that the leader should be setting the tone and that will be promulgated throughout the organisation.
How well that is done is another facet of leadership, but you cannot always guarantee that everyone will do the right thing; there are all sorts of possible failures from people not doing what they should whether that be through innocent or malicious reasons. I well remember a negotiation training course where a good syndicate group would have worked out that, at a critical stage in the deal, they would have to brief their notional team on keeping their powder dry. The boat must not be rocked at any cost, and so the syndicate would go through the role playing of talking the senior management team through what was needed of them. We would then roll the timeline forward and, of course, one of the senior team would have stepped out of line and torpedoed the negotiation. Sure it was cruel, but the syndicate members needed to be able to react to such situations because they do happen.
Now I make no judgement here on whether or not the M team knew what was going on over at NOTW or not, but it is patently obvious that you cannot delegate and be absolutely certain that your standards, policies or instructions will be upheld. You accept the risk and build in appropriate measures to mitigate against such risk, one of which is that a transgressor will lose their job.
To be conducting the questioning of the Murdoch’s along those lines is to mislead the public at large and is therefore another leadership failure , but let’s not get me back onto politicians, let’s just return to the point of the leader needing to set the tone.
Elsewhere in my newspapers this week I note that a certain Mr Rooney heads the table of footballers whose name is most popular amongst fans buying team shirts. It seems that more people want to have his name on their backs that anyone else which, on the basis that he has followers, makes him a leader of sorts.
I don’t follow professional football much these days; the game has lost its charm for me, but I respect Mr Rooney’s ability and application in his job. What does nothing to earn my respect is his behaviour, and this is what he shares with the NOTW.
The NOTW was successful because people wanted to read what it told them. It too was a leader and generated large amounts of advertising revenue because of its followers. But, like Mr Rooney, there were behavioural aspects that should have been curtailed, and in this the Murdoch’s failed.
Leaders can be good or bad. We need the former.
They call my right hand men Himmler & Hess and want me fired Part 2- more tales of life on the facilities front line
Last week left my team and I somewhat on the back foot. The clients were ganging up demanding my head to head off the changes I wanted to make and, in at least one case, to waste a 6 figure sum. My team’s morale was on the floor and, quite frankly, I just wanted to get back down the M4 before the fog set in as the winter darkness fell, but this was not the time to be walking (OK driving) away. Read more…
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