Archive
what’s the connection between the Mona Lisa and an FM?
I had been looking at a copy of the Mona Lisa and then the next day a conversation with a facilities manager then started this train of thought off.
The Mona Lisa contains a number of visual gags and one of the joys of looking at it is to spot these details, but any good painting, or photograph, or view will have all sorts of details that make up the whole visual experience. Just as it is nice to stop and smell the roses from time to time it is also good to let the eyes wander over something and feast on the smaller elements that you’ll find. Even something familiar can yield new things when you stand back and look. Read more…
Monday Musings holiday fun on travel to London
As it is a Holiday Monday I thought a little frivolity could surface and so, having been reading about the Mayoral campaign on a couple trips to London recently, it strikes me that I might make a suggestion.
One issue for both candidates seemed to be to do something about “the monolith that is Transport for London”. If so, then I ask that they axe the DffTCB; The Department for frustrating ThatConsultantBloke. I have a picture of something like this: 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…
Brushing off the Small Print
Over the weekend I was informed by a major UK retailer that toothpaste is not a dental product. You may find that as bizarre as I did, but it is true, as far as they are concerned within the limits of the relevant promotion.
Whatever their logic in drawing that line for their promotion may be my view is that it is another symptom of a malaise that we really should have stamped out by now; that of the Small Print. We had started to make real progress a few years ago with having clarity about things, even in those last bastions of the Small Print, the insurance and travel businesses, but it has begun to make a comeback.
Probably one of the drivers has been the budget airlines where, in some ways rightly, they have segmented their product to offer the customer a wider choice. We haven’t quite reached the “Inside or outside seating sir?” level, but, like many, I began to use budget airlines for business travel and was more than happy to just take a briefcase and be able to waft up to Glasgow and back for about a fifth of what it would cost me for a return fare on the train to London. The trains have followed suit with advance bookings and such since and it all helps to keep costs down if you can make the timings work and accept the risk of not making it to the airport or station in time for your booked return. Personally I don’t find that the web sites that you book through are particularly misleading or hard to use; fortunately I still have enough functioning brain cells to understand that being late is too late whether it is one minute or thirty. Either way I’m late and it will cost me regardless of why I’m late.
I’ve read recently that the Government want to introduce legislation to stop such companies not telling you that there is another 3.5% or similar to pay by credit card until you get to the late stages of the transaction. That’s fair enough I suppose, but in general I’m not hugely in favour of legislation at this sort of level. In fact I’m not in favour of Government interfering in business at all if we can help it, but the problem with some of this is that the people marketing these products view their customers as gullible enough to be drawn in far enough towards the purchasing decision before they clobber them with the real deal. However, this is the dodgy second hand car salesman technique that people of my vintage will be familiar with and sooner or later there will be a backlash.
So much for the B2C world, but we’re not like that in B2B are we? Unfortunately we often are, most often because we haven’t taken the basic steps of being sure about what we are buying and understanding the deal. Like me at the weekend we have rushed into the transaction thinking that we were on to a good deal but not having made sure that it was as good as we thought.
For me the choice was easy enough; pay up or walk away, but what if the deal had been for equipment costing a six figure sum or a three year service contract? That is not the sort of deal that you want to make a mistake on. Take your time to understand what you want and why and always make sure that, Small Print and all, the deal you make will deliver what you need.
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.
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.
Mum, Dad, I want to be a facilities manager when I leave school
Just what did a boss do? I wasn’t too sure, but had decided that I was going to be a boss when I left school. It wasn’t my first choice, that had proved impractical, and my second choice was vetoed by my parents, but my Mum wanted me to be a City Gent, heading off in pin striped suit with a briefcase and rolled brolly every morning; that seemed to sound like a boss and so that was what I would be.
But, again, what did they do? The people my parents worked for were captains of industry; one a director at Beecham’s (long before Smith & Kline turned up), another had his name, and that of his partner, on many domestic appliances in kitchens around the country and another was the Admiral in charge of the Royal Naval College for example.
Any of those suited me, but to become one surely you had to know what they did? TV and films were not a lot of help, but then along came The ‘Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game. There Sir John Wilder made fortunes, lost them and remade them, he had the big office, the big car, was married to a smart and pretty wife (and had a smart and pretty mistress) and got involved in all sorts of Machiavellian dealings with rivals and colleagues alike. Sounded good to me; where did I sign up?
The reality of course was somewhat different as I was to find when I got there. I suppose that the first time that I got close to the fictional Sir John’s life (by the way where is my knighthood?) was the time that I was de facto MD of a business unit turning over around £130M pa. I had the office, the car, the smart attractive wife and the Machiavellian stuff and loved pretty much every minute of it, but then, as with Sir John, mergers and takeovers saw me on the move.
And that is how I got, in the real sense, into Facilities Management. I didn’t set out to be in FM, and have joked that I’d been thrown out of everywhere else. Not quite true, but I had worked in finance, operations, sales, purchasing and IT and hold professional qualifications in both of the latter disciplines, so I wasn’t there just marking time. As a buyer I passed exams in accounting, economics and commercial law amongst others
One of the things that I brought to FM was that wide business background because by then I had realised that what I wanted to be was not a boss so much as a general manager; a businessman if you like. That childhood image of the boss was really where I ended up.
In facilities management a lot has been done to raise the profile of the job, and it is great to see so many young professionals amongst our ranks. BIFM have done a great job in moving things forward and maybe we are close to the point where FM can be a clear career choice for school leavers.
I, like many, came into FM as something of a generalist. If the next generation of FMs can be specialists that is great, but we must not lose sight of the need for FMs to have a wide business education, because it is the world of commerce that FM serves. We need to be able to speak their language and to be comfortable in their world, because that is how we can ensure that they trust and respect what we can contribute.
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.
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.
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