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Musing on knowledge workers, leaders and managers
I was reading a blog post the other day where someone was trotting out the differences between a manager and a leader and expounding the theory that managers are no longer needed in business as the knowledge workers require leadership not management.
OK, I understand the argument and, to some degree, am happy to support it. For a start I’ve been doing it for more years than I can remember so why would I think otherwise?
My issue with this kind of evangelical stuff is that too often those who are picking up on the message are not getting the full picture, won’t really understand what they need to do about it and it will end up, for them and those that they inflict it on, as another failed initiative; just one more management fad.
Let me be blunt here: Every business needs to have someone in a management role. Sure, it is going to involve a lot of boring stuff; admin type things that the swashbuckling leader, swinging from the chandelier with a knife gripped between their teeth would look on with scorn, but if you don’t have some form of management, then that leader will soon end up as one famous leader did, caught by a river, surrounded by the opposition and getting massacred.
Sir Richard Branson is often held up as a leadership role model, and quite rightly. His group of companies has grown in my lifetime and I have watched with admiration some of the audacious deals that they have pulled off as the man at the top has kept popping up in the headlines in a series of adventures. Not all of the latter have come off of course, but he has entered our hearts as an example of that swashbuckling leadership style I refer to above.
How has he built such a successful brand? It isn’t just about leadership; it’s about being able to blend that entrepreneurial spirit and the visionary leadership with management skills that can sort out the detail of the deals. The devil is in the detail is a very true saying and you need some completer finishers on the team to nail all of that stuff down. Read Sir Richard’s books or any of those written about him, and you’ll see that he works with the right people on all of these deals, buying in expertise when and where he needs it to augment his own people.
If we are talking in hierarchical terms then I would rather see a good leader at the head of a company than a good manager. I think that a good leader will take an organisation to where it needs to go, seeing the opportunities, setting the agenda and the direction and inspiring their people to sign up to the dream. But it will be the managers who ensure that all of the things that need to happen do happen, when and where they need to.
If you follow these thoughts on a regular basis you will be aware that I am passionate about developing leadership. I firmly believe that business leaders will be the ones to take us out of recession, not the politicians. The latter can only recycle money; business can create wealth.
I am even more passionate about people. It is people that make organisations work, and the organisations that treat their people fairly will prevail over those that don’t. Yes, let’s develop the knowledge worker concept, but in doing so let us also recognise that amongst those knowledge workers are the managers. Lose sight of that and you will lose.
Can Facilities Managers learn from the Costa Concordia sinking?
Managing an emergency evacuation is something that every Facilities Manager should have begun to learn about from the start of their career, and continue to learn about for as long as they are in the profession. I say continue to learn because although there is a core element to managing any emergency situation, every one that you handle will have nuances that will add to your repository of solutions. It’s why there should always be a drains up session afterwards to help you understand what went on and why.
Whilst there will be a process in place for emergencies it can be a dangerous trap if you try to be too specific because the reality is that there is so often something that you didn’t expect, one of those nuances, that can see you having to improvise. But the biggest problem with process is that it can be what has led you into the disaster or caused you to misdiagnose the remedy. When something goes wrong it’s no good saying “that couldn’t have happened” because it just has, and it can be easy to lose sight of what you have to do, especially when the nature of the emergency is fast changing. That is where having a well drilled team with a good, proven, communication system comes into its own.
The Costa Concordia disaster that unfolded across our news media last weekend is an interesting case for a FM to consider. Whatever the alleged failings of certain individuals amongst the crew there was enough professionalism from the remainder and the rescue services to get a large amount of people to safety in difficult circumstances once the crucial decision had been made. It is getting the people out and away to safety that takes management. It needs calm authority and clear command to keep those that you are evacuating under control, for panic is something that you should fear. I blogged a few months back about my experience at my local supermarket where the fire alarms went off and employees were pushing through the shoppers shouting “Fire, get out”. There was no sign of any effort by management to ensure a safe evacuation of the store, but fortunately there was no panic amidst the shoppers.
People can behave badly when they think that they are in danger and you are channelling them through the bottle neck of the exit doors. “Women and Children First” is nothing more than a chivalrous gesture and it has no legal standing, so if you are trying to get people out are you going to slow things down by trying to pull men out of the flow? However I might feel about such behaviour my view is that you move people through as quickly as is safe to do so and make sure that you are getting them clear on the outside.
Is there anything that we as FMs can learn from the Concordia sinking? I hope that we can get past the hysterical journalism and think about what we would do; trouble rarely comes at a convenient moment, so how are your routines for assembling your people in the right places, how well do they know what they need to do, how do your lines on communication work, what back up plans do you have? Set some time and get your team together to work through these things. However good you think you are there will be something that you can polish, and don’t gloss over anything that may not be robust. Make it better; you won’t get a second chance when the alarm sounds.
Useful Tools – Pareto and the 80:20 Principle
“We couldn’t get our heads out of the trench for long enough to see which way the bullets were coming from”. The speaker was one of the many people I worked with; in my younger days, almost all of my male colleagues had been in the armed services. I thought that the expression was wonderful and much better than not seeing the wood for the trees. Over the years that I have been at work it has been very apt because, so often, people are fire fighting the small stuff so much that they can’t work on the things that would deal with the cause of all that small stuff.
My colleague’s problem would have been solved by what we call in management speak the helicopter view, but it is one of the reasons why the military always like to capture the high ground; they can see what is going on and that makes it so much easier to manage.
In business we have that dreadful expression “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I say dreadful, because I’ve heard it parroted so many times by people who want to spend so much time measuring and pondering over the results that they rarely ever get round to managing anything, but the expression is true. The trick in making it work is in what we mean by measuring.
If you are under constant fire you don’t have enough time to do the job properly let alone start producing all sorts of statistics, but measurement doesn’t always have to be so formal. Try this as an example: Walk into one of the working areas at your firm and just stand to one side for two or three minutes. What do you see and hear? Is it quiet and calm, or are people looking harassed with ‘phones ringing and high levels of noise? Is it tidy or is there stuff piled all over the place?
What you have just done is measure with your eyes and ears and you will have formed a pretty accurate assessment of that team. This may well be one that you would not have got from their numbers, because the performance statistics may well show that the chaotic team are hitting their targets, but observation is every bit as powerful a measurement tool as the graphs that come off the computer: There is nothing wrong with measuring by rule of thumb.
If you are a young manager wanting to make things work better then start by using those eyes and ears that you got as standard equipment when you came into the world. Even when you are under terrific pressure there will be information that you can use to help you. You will know where your biggest problem area is, so think a bit about why. Pareto’s 80:20 principle suggests that 80% of your problems come from 20% of what you do, so try putting that to work. Say you are getting 10 calls a day from Finance about invoice queries. If you can put that one thing right that could mean those 10 calls stop, and then you suddenly have that time free to look at another problem. You won’t solve every one, but if you can start to give yourself time to stick your head up and have a look around you are on the way to gaining control.
And if your boss is into formal measurement, just tell them that you are working to the Pareto principle, the 80:20 rule. Pareto is a probability distribution, but also works as a rule of thumb.
great customer service starts from the top
Customer service has been prominent in my thoughts this week, especially as I have experienced some really good service, together with someone trying to put right something that had gone wrong.
Many years ago I came up with something that I called the Ghent Agenda, named in honour of some really good service I had experienced from hotel people first in Brussels and then in Ghent. It was a blueprint for our facilities management team to raise our game, and it did make a difference, but it is how you make these things happen that intrigues me.
It is the leader that sets the tone for the way their team will work, and various old and new adages describe this; setting the tone, leading by example, walking the talk and so on, and these are, like all such sayings, very true. More so than many realise, because the way a leader acts and behaves will have a huge influence on their team (very much in the way that children are influenced by their parents).
It is all very well to try and influence your team towards providing a high level of service, but how do you yourself behave? Is the example that you set one that you would like your team to follow as they deal with your customers? For example, how do you treat people? You may be good with your team, but how about others?
My premise here is that leading by example, or whatever we want to call it, comes from setting a personal standard first. If you truly want to be a role model then you have to become that model and apply the standard. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Sir Laurence Olivier during the making of the 1976 film Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman’s character had to portray levels of exhaustion commensurate with having being awake for 24 hours or so, and kept himself up to experience the effects. When Olivier asked him what he was doing Hoffman explained his need for accuracy in portrayal, only for the former to suggest “Why not try acting, dear boy, it’s much easier”.
And that is the issue, acting is much easier, but leadership is not acting. If all you are portraying to your team is an act then you will be found out at some point, so you do need to live the role.
If your team here you tell them about the importance of giving good customer service, of treating people with respect, but then see you behave poorly towards others then how can they truly believe in the message when the person delivering it lets them down? And if you do not strive to apply the standards to yourself in everything that you do, are you not applying double standards?
We can’t be perfect. We are, after all, only human, but if we are going to try to achieve the highest standards then we have to raise our game. A record of continuous success does not come without constantly pushing yourself and your team, and that is what the better leaders do, and they push themselves hardest.
If you want to be that great role model for your people then try to apply the highest levels of behaviour in everything that you do; be polite and show respect to others, regardless of who they are. If you treat the ticket collector on the train or the barista in the coffee shop the way you want your people to treat your customers then you are setting the right tone for them. Lead from the front.
does your meeting space facilitate good decisions
Meetings are a fact of modern business life; they are one of the catalysts that help move business forward by getting people together sparking ideas, planning strategy and similar dynamic activity, or at least they should be, but all too often they are nothing more than a waste of everyone’s time.
Some of the reasons for meetings failing are in poor planning, preparation, chairing and team issues, but what I want to look at here is the room itself because that is something that facilities teams can influence and make a bigger contribution to business success that we might realise.
Often meeting space is fitted in around the office as best as we can rather than consciously designed and I’ve seen some horrors over the years. As an example, let me first set the scene: We were bidding to win the outsourcing of a service for an international business. On offer was a 3 year deal with options for extension, but the basic contract was worth around £5m. We were invited to present for 40 minutes plus 20 for questions, told we could bring 4 people and use an SVGA presenter. All pretty standard for such a session and we turned up prepared and rehearsed.
We were taken up to the room on an upper floor and on the corner of the building. As the door opened we could see that it was long and narrow. Three tables were end to end down the middle with 6 chairs either side and one at each end, and 11 of these were occupied. The door was in one of the short walls and one long wall and short wall opposite the door were windows through which the low winter sun streamed.
So basic maths will show that there weren’t enough seats, and common sense will tell you that we couldn’t project onto the door with any degree of success and to project on to the one possible wall meant that half the people would have to turn around and, in any case, the sunlight would wash out the slides.
As Bid Director I had covered for not being able to run the presentation; it’s always a risk, so you prepare for it. I’m also used to standing to present, so standing against the door for the hour that we were there was not really an issue even if it was unusual. As for the outcome, well, we got into the final two, so we did OK in difficult circumstances, but what was the point in making use of such a room for the buying team? The people facing the windows were covering their eyes a lot of the time to avoid being blinded and the solar gain was making the room like a sweatbox. We were only there for an hour, but they had five presentations to sit through and debate on, and I would question the quality of the decision making under such conditions of discomfort.
This is an extreme case, but I’ve encountered poor facilities in many offices and hotels that I have visited over the years. The point is that meetings are about human interaction, so having the right sort of space for people to interact in is crucial to making meetings successful. As FMs we can look at providing spaces that can be used flexibly and provide an environment in which people can be productive and contribute.
Decent meeting space is an investment, but it costs about the same to do it right as to do it wrong, so it’s well worth looking at if you can.
Showing courage when the chips are down delivers trust
Engendering the trust of your people is crucial to leadership and, without it, they will not follow for long, but it is also a key factor for those that the leader will be answerable to, for most business leaders are, themselves, answerable to a board, shareholder and investors amongst others. Each of these groups will have different agendas and serving each requires a division of loyalty that, in turn, is an area where many leaders fail.
What you need to be able to do is to do what is right. That is what is right to achieve the objective that you are expected to deliver.
Your people will have had this explained to them as you have sold them on what they need to do and when they need to do it by. You will have explained the importance of that deliverable and, if you have done your job well enough, they will have bought into it. They will trust you to be right but, more importantly, they will trust you to protect them from interference in their efforts to succeed.
Every business will have a way of working that may not be something that a functional or divisional leader can influence. We tend to call these things office politics and they are a fact of life for most of us. Now a leader needs to be on top of these things and be able to ensure that they are able to fight their team’s corner, but this is something that not all leaders are good at.
It is so easy to lose sight of what is right for the organisation when office politics come into play. Good leaders know when to fight these battles and when not to. They know what their priorities are and how to juggle these against their resources. They know what they have to do when things get tough; to make the right call every time.
There will be times when they have to go to their people and explain that the rules have changed and what was the goal is no longer so. They understand that they need to be truthful with their people because that is what will retain their trust.
Equally, those above the leader will need to trust the person that they have placed in a position of responsibility. There will be times when they have their own hard decisions to take and require the leaders of their businesses to deliver. This is another potential pitfall for the leader; when pressed to deliver something from above that could threaten their people, how do they call it?
Take someone with a long term project to deliver, but who is then faced with a requirement to cut headcount. This is a time for hard truths: You have to be able to look at the overall position and make the right call. Now that might be to accept the cuts, knowing that it will mean failing your project objectives, but in the knowledge that there is no other way that will work for the business. In that case there will be a hard sell to your team, but explaining the what and why and making sure that people understand is the right thing to do.
On the other hand you might dig your heels in and fight to show that there is another way to those above you. This might be a personal risk, but it is a better risk to go with what is right than to fold when to do so is wrong.
Showing courage when the chips are down delivers trust.
Things That Go Bump In The Night – part three
In crisis or incident management there is a lot that can go wrong. One outfit that I worked for had a crisis management manual that was spilling over into a third 4 inch thick ring binder. Yes it was well researched and worked well for desktop exercises, but how are you going to work with that when you are stuck out in the car park in the wet and the wind trying to sort out which page you need?
One of the big problems with thinking about what disaster might befall you is that you go down the input specification route; you plan for all sorts of things that might happen when many of them have the same two or three results and they are that you can’t use all or part of the site, or all or part of its services.
My contention is that it doesn’t matter that much why you have the problem. That just gives you a clue as to how long you have the problem for, for example if you have a gas leak outside the site and you can’t get in (or get evacuated) you can’t use the building for a few hours, but if you have a fire it will be a few days disruption to, possibly, having to move to new premises. In both cases it is the loss of use that needs priority.
All of the functional groups within the building will have their own continuity plans and the FM team need to be aware of these and support as necessary, but it is the FM team that will take most of the early actions in managing the incident.
In these pages you’ll find stories of some of the major incidents that I’ve been involved with. In The Day The Town Stood Still it was a pretty routine day when something came up, and that then escalated to a point where the improbable coincidence of a second problem brought us close to the edge of a disaster. If the team at the second site had not been effective in dealing with the flash fire, the gridlock caused by the first problem preventing the Fire Brigade from getting through might have seen us lose a building. There is a very fine line between OK and Oh S**t! sometimes.
Does fortune play a part? Maybe it does; there are times when timing or nature will be on your side, but mostly it is thinking, training and practice that will make the difference. If you’ve thought things through, planned and prepared through getting people trained and have drilled them then most of the risks are mitigated or reduced.
But to finish off this series with a final foul up, I’ll tell you about the one that really got me into FM. At the time I headed up the Operational side of a logistics business and the property maintenance team worked for HR. We had a problem with the flashing that covered the join between the wall and roof of the warehouse above the goods inwards doors and a decent repair was budgeted for.
I arrived one morning to find a queue of lorries outside. The cause was obvious; scaffolding completely blocked access to goods in and our operations were paralysed. It cost us dearly, but was easy to put right. The cause was poor communication; no-one had bothered to consider that we needed to work through the repairs. Facilities came under my control from then on so that there would be no more such incidents. and led to me making the move to FM myself.
We’ve got a backup for our backup – more things that went bump in the night
Continuing in the run up to Halloween with tales of things that went wrong, this week we turn to a bit of a farce that we enjoyed along with our friends in Information Technology.
One site I inherited when I moved from Logistics to Facilities Management was a multi story office block that was almost wholly occupied by IT people and was one of two main centres for that trade. The building was also one of the main hubs for the company’s data network and, as such, was something of a sacrosanct site.
The FM work there had been part of the IT team, but we had inherited those people along with the site. They knew their job and they knew their building but, until we arrived, they had never had a ring fenced budget and, every year, something had been lopped off to fund IT project overspends.
As we dug deeper into the backlog of maintenance one thing that I had placed on the high priority list was the emergency backup generator system. This was a thing of legend at the site and beyond; “They have a backup generator for their backup generator” people would tell you around the company in terms of some awe. The generator room in the basement had taken on qualities that might have been employed for a shrine, and the full time engineer that they had taken on to maintain the system played the role of high priest to the hilt.
Access to the room was something of a privilege, but my regional maintenance manager and I were reluctantly granted an entrance on the basis that we were now in charge. The room was pretty spotless and the two engines, one a Gardener and the other a Rolls Royce (no less) gleamed on the plinths.
The system was explained patiently to us. In the event of a power failure there was a battery backup that would allow a few minutes of power while the Gardener engine kicked in. If, for any reason that failed to fire up the Rolls Royce would deploy itself and, in the event of a long term power outage, the engines could be run alternately to keep the data flowing.
But it had never been tested. Yes, there was a switch that allowed a simulation power cut to see if these beauties would kick in and that was tried annually, but the overall system had never been tested. So I announced that we would, and requested a date when it would be convenient for us to do so.
The entire IT hierarchy were appalled and the ranks massed to oppose this folly, but in the end we got our way. We put in a bypass power source from the main switch so that the building would not actually lose power and threw the switch on the original circuit to make the generator room think that the mains had gone off.
The battery back didn’t work. It didn’t even have power enough to start the generator let alone support the building. But we had also found when we installed the by-pass that two thirds of the building, including a pair of new computer rooms, were already by-passing the backup system because corners had been cut in funding projects.
We found the money to put things right, but the backup myth died. These things have an importance at their own time, but times move on. We put a lot into that building to prepare it for the 21st century, but it has gone now, replaced by an apartment complex. Happy memories though!
Computers & automation can help get things done, but who programs the machines? It’s us, the people
At the moment am working on a supply chain project for a client supplying into a just in time manufacturing business looking at the various processes supporting the supply of components and sub assemblies work well enough for the lines to keep running.
Delving into these though there is the one factor that, however good or bad the process, the whole thing depends on and that is the human element.
In many ways what you have is more of a chain mail that a chain of single links, but there are points at which the whole thing holds or fails on a single link and one challenge that you have is to assess the risks. These things are a balancing act and the amount of engineering redundancy you build in is a cost so you make the appropriate decisions on whether or not you go for eliminating the risk or just mitigating it.
One of the things that I enjoy about these sorts of projects is that they are a microcosm of business in general, but they are quite easily modelled and fiddled around with. You can accurately predict things such as the effect of failure. You may not be able to eliminate the risk of the occurrence, but early warning of the problem might be enough to avoid the worst consequences.
Automation and robotics take away some of the issues of human frailty in these chains and computer simulation will help the decision making process: It becomes easy to make decisions when the magic box has worked out all of the possible permutations and told you what your three best options are complete with all the consequences of each. All you have to do is to chose one and do what it suggests.
This is all very well, but one of the key skills in managing, as well as in leadership, is in making good decisions. It may well be the best thing in some circumstances to have the machine give you options, and even to evaluate them for you, but there are many times when you will not have such support and so to come to the right decision in those times.
So to have your own decision making process is a vital tool for your skill set. It isn’t that hard to make a decision if you have a system that works for you, but the basics have to be a pragmatic approach to the facts as they are know and an ability to understand what the consequences of the choices you have will be.
Taking a calm approach and working with what you know, and what you can find out within the time available, will almost always lead you down the right path. It is, in essence, what the computer is doing when it models options in a supply chain sense. Sure it can do a lot more and much more quickly, but the only experience it can apply is within the algorithms that it has been programmed with, and they came from people.
It is us, the people, who gain the experience that we can apply to decision making, whether that is in making the decisions ourselves or explaining to the computer software how to examine them. Automation has made enormous strides in delivering consistent standards and reducing costs, but it all has come about from people.
People with ideas and leaders with vision do guide the way, but there are all those people who turn up and just make it all happen. These are the unsung heroes who really good leaders acknowledge and cherish.
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