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I always grab the opportunity to look around someone else’s workplace, so when I was recently in Ayr, Scotland, to present the results of a feasibility study for a new ports apprenticeship I asked if I could join an early morning tour of the port offered to delegates.

I wasn’t disappointed. The port managers present were primarily interested in what cargoes the port shifted, the depth of the channel, the types of cranes they used and so on. And we were all fascinated to hear how well the port of Ayr has done out of this winter’s bad weather: as politicians scrambled to get more grit on the roads, it was working flat out importing salt from Spain. Every cloud has a silver lining.

But I was most interested in the people, of course, and the balance between capital investment and investment in people. Modern ports are high-tech businesses and Associated British Ports, owner of the port of Ayr, is clearly committed to serious capital investment. We were shown a portable crane, for example – well-adapted to the flexibility on which the port prides itself – which cost well over half a million pounds.

So the team comes second to capital investment? Not a bit of it. Think of it in historical terms. When dock work meant emptying a ship’s hold by hard manual labour, or with very basic tools, docksides were swarming with low-skilled workers who, in truth, weren’t much valued. Had they broken a shovel, beyond getting yelled at, the capital cost was manageable. Break a £600,000 crane, however, and the position is very different.

For me, the relationship between capital investment and investment in people is really clear. It’s not a case of either/or: one without the other is simply bonkers.

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I have written before about people claiming to have learnt lessons only for similar mistakes to occur again, and again - and again. Now we have an independent review into the tragic case of a family where, despite contact from 100 care professionals of 28 agencies, a father was free to rape his daughters over a 35-year period. The author of the review, Professor Pat Cantrill, notes that the authorities pledge to learn from their mistakes every time a horrific case of child abuse leads to a serious review. “But”, she says, “we never seem to learn from them.”

I can think of a number of reasons why it is far from straightforward to actually learn from these reports. One reason is undoubtedly that the reports are often published as executive summaries. Inevitably, this must mean that lots of potentially valuable details are missing. I also suspect that summarised recommendations lose their bite and become bland – perhaps sufficiently bland to be easily dismissed: “We knew that before, tell us something new.” I have observed a similar reaction to case studies (and, after all, that’s essentially what a report is) where people distance themselves from the events described because they can’t imagine they would ever have got into such a pickle. A case study, ie, a description of something that happened to someone else, isn’t real.

Even when reports are published in full, there are still some major hazards to overcome if lessons are to be learnt. For example, there are usually far too many recommendations - inviting “recommendation fatigue”. Three absolutely critical “must do” recommendations would suffice. And, regardless of the number of recommendations, the reports need to be worked at, not just read. They need to be trawled through, again and again by different people, with different perspectives, to extract relevant lessons; then the lessons have to be adapted and customised to suit local circumstances; then they have to be sold to whoever needs to implement them; then the resultant actions will need to be monitored to ensure they actually happen and to measure their impact. Lots of “thens”. All this is damned-hard, daunting work that is unlikely to be tackled with the seriousness it deserves – especially if you are convinced that the events described could never happen to you.

Learning lessons from other people’s mishaps seems an obvious and straightforward thing to do, but it clearly isn’t as easy as it seems. Learning from your own mistakes is difficult enough. Learning from other people’s mistakes (second-hand learning), when you haven’t experienced the pain first-hand and have little real incentive to do the work involved, is much tougher; so tough, that it doesn’t happen often.
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A former colleague once said to me: “I’m not a completer-finisher, I’m afraid”. I heard an echo of it the other day when I heard someone else described as “not a completer-finisher”. Well, I’m not naturally a completer-finisher either, but I’ve managed to learn some completer-finisher skills and I’m impatient with those who use such labels as excuses.

The various “team wheel” approaches available – including Belbin, Myers-Briggs, Margerison-McCann and maybe others I don’t know – are useful tools that help us all to understand the complex variety our colleagues present to us, and use that variety to help us to do things better.

I’ve often said that every group tackling a new challenge needs a bloke in a leather jacket in the team who’ll come at the problem from a fresh angle and open up new opportunities. These various team wheels take my informal language and offer a structured tool (and a tool which includes the female equivalent of “a bloke in a leather jacket” of course!).

But it doesn’t work if people are allowed to believe (or kid themselves) that these behaviours are fixed for all time. I’m naturally an ideas man - keen to learn, pass on what I know and to solve problems – but I can’t run my business, or do the other things I do, unless I dot some ‘i’s and cross some ‘t’s. I hate chasing people but it has to be done sometimes. From being ticked off for lack of attention to detail when I was young, I now find myself doing the same to others! I have changed. I can’t change my personality, but I know what I’m good at and I’ve learned to get much better at the rest. Knowing the difference between these two is crucial to good people management.

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I thought I’d just heard a sneak preview of an April Fool’s joke. Someone on the radio reckons MPs are getting a basic pay hike of nearly £1,000 from the first of next month, taking their salary to £65,737 a year. Yeah, right. Pull the other one, was my immediate reaction. But no – this was the mainstream BBC news, not a revenge prank by some grieving 6 Music disk jockette, and remarkably true.  

This is the economics of the madhouse. MPs do an important job and in an ideal world would earn more. But in such a world so would the millions of hard working private-sector employees who haven’t had a pay rise since the start of the recession, not to mention public-sector employees in less high-status jobs who are looking forward to zilch in the next couple of years. The trouble is we are currently living in far less than ideal times and should all recognise that the name of the game at present ought to be pay restraint, including for bankers, barristers, and backbenchers in the House of Commons.

Not surprisingly, the public-sector unions are up in arms, though they deploy the less than convincing argument that all their members deserve the same percentage pay rise as MPs. Thankfully, both the government and the opposition – with an eye to the general election – say ministers and shadow ministers will forgo the rise. However, this is surely not enough.

As the coming months will show, there is no shortage of candidates for seats in Parliament. Cash reward is clearly only part of the motivation to seek election, and anyway the basic salary of an MP is getting on for three times what their average constituents earn. After a year of revelations about parliamentary expenses and constant talk of the need to cut the structural fiscal deficit, this is surely one of those moments when all our political representatives should show some genuine civic leadership and either say "no" to this pay rise or donate it to charity (though perhaps not to the Homeless Duck Foundation).

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Years ago, while working on an action learning project with Imperial Chemical Industries, I met a remarkable fellow occupational psychologist, Sylvia Downs. At the time, I was experimenting with matching different learning methods to learning style preferences. I quickly realised that Sylvia was way ahead of me. She used an extraordinarily simple – yet profound – mnemonic to distinguish between different ways of learning; MUD. Facts need Memorising, concepts need Understanding, skills need Doing. I have never been able to better this. Her little book Making Learning Happen is full of good sense.

Sylvia has recently had her long and varied career celebrated by The British Psychological Society with a lifetime achievement award. Her acceptance speech was typically pragmatic and witty. Among others, she thanked her family for being her “research unit” and told how her daughter had particularly disliked discovery learning. Exasperated by not getting a straight answer to a question, her daughter used to shout, “Just tell me!”

Sylvia’s anecdote reminded me of my early attempts at coaching executives. At the time, I was stubbornly wedded to the non-directive approach, convinced that the “right way” was to act as a sounding board and help clients find their own answers to problems. Sticking rigidly to a non-directive approach sometimes worked, but often didn’t. Sanguine managers could be driven to distraction; they never actually shrieked, “Just tell me!”, but they should have done.

After a while, it dawned on me (not for the first time) that one size doesn’t fit all and I made a simple adjustment. I’d start coaching sessions by explaining my role and offering clients a choice. After briefing me on their problem they could:

1. Ask for my advice.
2. Tell me their preferred solution and ask for my reaction.
3. Ask me to help them explore possible ways forward.

The first assumed I was an expert with worthwhile advice to offer (very dodgy). The second assumed that I, as an uninvolved person, would be able to give some useful feedback (less dodgy). The third assumed that I was a helpful listener/facilitator (much safer).

Amusingly, it was noticeable that when clients opted for the first choice, my advice would invariably meet resistance. I’d then switch to the second and, if that didn’t do the trick, the third. This was better than stubbornly insisting on the third approach when clients believed, often mistakenly, that they wanted to be told what to do.

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I’ve just been to a couple of interesting events, linked to two new publications. One was a debate, held at the RSA, to consider the recent New Economics Foundation (NEF) report 21 Hours (which has been the subject of some comment). The protagonists, Anna Coote, NEF’s head of social policy, and Andrew Simms, NEF’s policy director and head of climate change and energy, reckon Britain would benefit in all manner of ways if available work was shared around. They argue that a gradual shift toward a legal cap of 21 hours on the working week would be good for the planet, help reduce unemployment and enable us to make a better fist of bringing up the next generation. Their opponents, me and Mark Littlewood, director of the market-oriented think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, weren’t so sure.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of economist who thinks we should work all the hours God sends. It just that shorter hours have to be earned. As countries get richer people can enjoy the same standard of living from fewer hours of work. Although it’s fashionable to talk of the UK’s “long-hours culture” this is very misleading. Even prior to the recession – which has seen a slump in the amount of work being done – as a society we were on average putting in fewer hours to meet our needs and desires than ever before in our industrial history. However, the view that we would be able to enjoy even more leisure at the wave of a legislative wand is wrong headed. The result would be a lower standard of living and higher, not lower, unemployment. To be fair to the NEF, it admits it would be happy with increased frugality – a zero growth, low-consumption economy is central to its brand of green economics. But I doubt if most people will sign up to a return to the Stone Age, even though there is a widespread consensus in favour of what might be called “green growth” based on lower carbon production and lifestyles.

More generally, the central premise of 21 Hour Society overlooks the fact that what should really concern us is not the number of hours we work but the control we have over our working time. In contrast to curbs on working time, flexible working both helps boost our living standards by aiding organisational performance and makes people happier. Indeed, our happiest workers are self-employed people – a group that tend to work much longer hours but also have more say over how they allocate their time (or “time sovereignty”, to use the analytical jargon).

Significantly, the importance of workers having greater control over their working time featured heavily at the second of the events I attended, this time organised by The Smith Institute think tank to launch a new book, The Good Work Guide, published by Earthscan. The book’s author, Nick Isles, is a former colleague of mine and well known from his time at both the CIPD and The Work Foundation. But though a friend, I’m being objective when I say that he has produced a good piece of work that deserves a wide readership, especially among those who genuinely want to combine improvements in organisational effectiveness with a better quality of working life than most people currently enjoy.

The power of Isles’s book lies not so much in the way it tries to offer practical steps by which organisations might move toward building good workplaces – important though that is – but rather in the way he nests his proposals within a powerful critique of current conventional economic and management wisdom. As a result, The Good Work Guide takes the reader well beyond the familiar comfort zone of HR pieties and guru speak. However many hours you work this week, I recommend you make time to read it.

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Last week, when I was working at the HQ of a large company, an employee asked me to help her interpret her benefits statement. She’d worked there all her career and had taken every bonus in share options. She intended to gift the proceeds to her grandchildren as her legacy.

She was clearly puzzled by the latest figures and couldn’t understand the corporate double-speak in the accompanying literature that was supposed to explain them to her. It was left to me – someone she barely knew – to break the news to this loyal member of staff that her share portfolio, which had been worth £35,000 according to the previous year’s figures, was now worth £7,300. You can imagine the look on her face when reality dawned.

The arguments about dealers’ bonuses in big banks may be making the front pages, but they are very much the side issue here. How many people are out there right now receiving the same sort of message delivered in a similarly dispassionate way?

Bullying can be defined as an abuse of power. Information, it is often said, is power. How is it being used where you work? Bullying may not always be overt. It may not even be intentional at times. But failing to understand the importance of communication and the link between employee engagement and brand performance is tantamount to bullying when it has such devastating results as it did in this simple cameo.

Employee engagement should be a main focal point for anyone with responsibility for other people in an organisation. It can’t all be driven from the centre. Face-to-face communication, especially in tough times, should be given top priority. So how are line managers shaping up to the challenge where you work? Or is everything being left to faceless names at the centre to cascade the weekly news, whether or not it’s life-changing?

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I see Gordon Brown is being criticised for playing politics by holding occasional cabinet meetings outside London – not to mention the increased costs associated with nomadic meetings. Be that as it may, I have a completely different observation that applies to all cabinet meetings - wherever they are held. It is the shape of the table.

I have never been invited to a cabinet meeting – pity really, I could run a feedback session about their processes and behaviour that would hold them enthralled – but I have seen photographs. In the Times, for example, there was a photograph of the cabinet meeting held recently at Exeter Racecourse. I have also seen photographs of the cabinet meeting at their regular venue, 10 Downing Street. In every photograph they are always sitting along two sides of a rectangular table; a hopeless set up if people want to engage in meaningful discourse.

I realise that I am making an assumption here: namely, that to engage in meaningful discourse would be a good idea at cabinet meetings. Perhaps the whole thing is deliberately designed to minimise the risk of engaging in meaningful discourse? Perhaps all that is called for is a bit of rubber-stamping, everything going through on the nod?

But just suppose, for one wild moment, that it is desirable for cabinet meetings to be organised so that genuine dialogue is actively encouraged prior to reaching informed collective decisions. Surely a round table would be a must where the participants can actually see and hear each other? The cabinet are not alone. I have visited numerous boardrooms with large – sometimes very large – rectangular tables and have never come across a round one. I once worked with an organisation where a round table was offered as part of a refurbishment programme. To my astonishment, the offer was turned down and they elected to stick with their rectangular table. Only afterwards did I find out why. The CEO was a bully and he always sat in the middle of one side of the table (that’s funny, this is the same seat that prime ministers traditionally occupy!). The CEO had a habit of picking on people seated on the opposite side of the table to him and giving them a particularly hard time. People on his side of the table were only in his periphery vision and tended to escape his wrath. So, unbeknown to him, they had a “victim’s rota” whereby people would take it in turns to be sacrificial offerings by sitting in the seats opposite him. A round table would have mucked up their secret arrangement.

Might, I wonder mischievously, this explain the cabinet’s apparent liking for a large rectangular table?

Comments [0] When football is being discussed in the workplace, I normally tune out. I’ve never watched a match, I don't know any of the teams and I definitely don’t understand the offside rule. But it was impossible not to join the debate about John Terry in our office.

Most of my colleagues were clear that you must maintain high standards and expect to be under scrutiny once you become a high-profile leader. Trust was clearly incredibly important to them – pretty much everyone could cite an example of a former boss who had let themselves down with an indiscretion or misjudgment.

When the England skipper was stripped of his captaincy one of my colleagues said: “Quite right – if more CEOs did that when leaders stepped out of line, perhaps people would learn that you can’t do whatever you like; you've got responsibilities.”

I must say I agree. I’ve seen a few examples where a senior manager was relieved of their leadership role for failing to live up to it. Although such decisions shocked people at the time, they had positive effects in the long term.

In Terry’s case, of course, there was no hiding the story from the media, so it had to be dealt with and not brushed under the carpet. My firm has its own version of the media: an in-house mag called ?Whatever! You can guarantee that, if anyone here steps out of line, they will make the headlines in the next issue. It is probably one of the most widely read documents in our office – particularly by leaders hoping that they have dodged a bullet.
A friend asked me recently: “How can you let this rag go out internally?”

I replied: “Well, if you’re an innovation company and there to promote freedom from fear, you’ve got to make room for freedom of expression – I don’t actually know which people are on the editorial team; they don't publicise it. And I love it because it keeps us all on our toes.”
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I really like Joss Stone. She has a voice and a style that seems to have been grafted onto her 20-something physique. I’m also willing to confess that I sometimes find myself humming along to Jamie Cullum or Katie Melua, very talented artists in their own right.

But after I’ve finally downloaded an album or two, I’ll inevitably turn on the radio and have a chance encounter with Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan and instantly regain a sense of perspective about my recently purchased sixth-form soul.

I really don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man. But for me, you really do have to have lived a little before you can authentically transmit the ebb and flow of love and life and all the other intricacies of relationships.

This may seem like a bizarre subject but my contentious pop v blues thesis does have some resonance (honest!) when reflecting on the importance of culture development as a driver of sustainable organisation change. Why? Because it frankly takes a mature attitude (true soul, if you like) from the leadership team to appreciate the importance and therefore the value of internal culture development.

In my experience, especially in these troubled times, true leaders who’ve experienced the power of cultural transformation won’t be the ones issuing popular sound-bites, or schmultzy metaphors. They most definitely won’t be promoting internal marketing to justify, post-rationalise or even sweep up after change.

They will be the ones who will be kicking off the change process by consulting people. They will be passionate about engaging employees with the big picture, goals, the desired culture and the honest change process. Furthermore they will be role modelling the change they want to see, not just talking about or delegating it. These leaders know that effective culture development is critical to achieving change. They appreciate that it isn’t a reactive tool to be used to post-rationalise the new world experienced by the survivors.

So the moral of this tale is, if you’ve got to engage your employees with change (and in this environment, who hasn’t?), better make sure you look beyond the trendy purveyors of pop. It’s worth consulting your leadership back catalogue. There will be plenty of material available - and the tunes are classics for a reason.

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