The Rise And Fall Of My Blood Pressure

I have always said that this would not be a blog that was about the steady deterioration in my health, but occasionally things that arise in that area of my life have a wider application.  Regular readers will know the following two details: that I have suffered from Type 1 Diabetes for over twenty years and that I have a real bully of a line manager.  Now, hyper-tension, i.e. high blood pressure is an ever increasing condition among the global population especially in the West.  It has a particular impact for diabetics as it can lead to retinopathy, the swelling and bursting of blood vessels in the eye leading to the eye working less effectively and subsequently scarring and potentially blindness. 

Since about 2002 all diabetics in the UK have been prescribed three tablets in addition to any injected or tablet form insulin they take.  One is a mild aspirin to help with the condition of your heart, one is an anti-cholestrol tablet and one is a tablet to lower blood pressure.  When I was first prescribed the blood pressure tablet it led to me 'zoning out' because after the morning rush my blood pressure fell away anyway, so I was put on a lower dose which I have remained with for almost a decade.

When I joined my current job back in June 2011 the Occupational Health unit was in chaos something which still has not settled down and more than eight months since I started, I am still waiting for my initial assessment.  In the meantime my GP, the nurse at the medical centre and the diabetic clinic at the local hospital have all noted how my blood pressure was running high.  This contrasted with my blood pressure for the previous twenty years, bar two periods of being bullied, first by a colleague in 2003 and by my line manager in 2010.  This time they expected it to fall away now that I was in work after a period of unemployment.  Of course, this line manager has turned out to be incredibly self-centred and pig-headed fussing about how everything appears rather than what is being done.  She will not tell you how she wants something done as she assumes her way is common sense, but if you do it differently you are criticised for hours about how nasty you must be to think that that way was acceptable.  This sense that you do things in a particular way with some malicious intent or are constantly plotting to undermine her is clearly not healthy either for her or for her workforce.  Not surprisingly my blood pressure has not fallen.

The latest incident came around me having to go to the hospital.  When you move into a new health authority area they always like to check you out, this is doubled if you have a long-term health condition as I do.  In addition, in contrast to where I used to be treated, this authority has its various facilities spread over 17Km meaning various trips to reach them.  As I maintained a high blood pressure and within six months had developed Grade 2 retinopathy in one eye and Grade 1 in the other (Grade 1 is the lesser) I was called for more appointments than ever. 

ow, the appointments are always during working hours and I get them scheduled early in the morning or late in the afternoon to reduce the impact on my work.  One day when I had three appointments one at a health centre and two in different parts of the same hospital I actually took leave as my line manager whined so much.  I put all the appointments on to my computer diary to which my line manager has permanent access but she complained that I should not expect her to read this diary though she can check it in seconds.

One morning when I was at the hospital she was stamping around questioning my colleagues about my whereabouts.  I had spoken to her about the appointment just the morning before and outlined where I was going and how long it would take and what time I would be back.  My predicted time of return was only out by 15 minutes and that was due to public transport disruption (you cannot drive when you are going to have treatment on your eyes).   Somehow in the 24 hours between the conversation and me being at the appointment my line manager forgot all that I had told her bar the bare outline that I had something wrong with her eyes.  Thus, I get a forceful email going on about how discourteous I had been not to let her know precisely where I was and when.  Of course, I had done that both on my computer diary and orally but neither format was acceptable to her.  I began leaving her copies of the letters I receive from the hospital but that apparently was unacceptable too 'because of confidentiality'.  Given that it is my confidentiality in question, surely that decision should be down to me.  Finally she said I must send an email precisely seven days before the appointment, with the details I have already put in the computer diary.  When I asked why she could not have told me that weeks earlier and why she had to be so indignant about these little issues, she said all I did was make sustained allegations.  Of course, like many line managers she is untouchable so even a anodyne suggestion of the kind I made can be portrayed as 'inappropriate' and something against which 'measures must be taken'.

It can be no surprise that with such capricious behaviour and the fact that she has to make such a grand fuss about every small issue, with extreme language when a simple suggestion 'please do it this way' would have sufficed, my blood pressure is rising higher.  The only solution given that I cannot get my line manager to modify her behaviour and get no-one at the company to take steps to restrain her, was to have my dosage of blood pressure tablets increased.  This proved to be a matter of less than a minute with my doctor.  The outcome brings us to the nub of today's posting.

Fortunately I did not take the stronger dose blood pressure tablets until the weekend.  I guess I probably needed a x1.3 or x1.5 strength over what I had before rather than the double dose as I woke up on Saturday morning feeling incredibly good, too good in fact.  The fish in the tank were beautiful and I found myself staring at them.  At times my speech would wander off and words would just become very long.  This had a great comic effect for the woman who lives in my house as it appeared as if I was on a narcotic.  In myself I felt very different.  My blood pressure has been so high at times that my girlfriend has been able to feel my heart thumping on the mattress when we lie in bed.  In addition, my limbs have felt very heavy and in my mind's eye their flesh has been dark like aged steak, I guess from me imagining all the blood pulsing into them.  Now however, I see the flesh as a whitey-pink and my limbs feel lifted up by balloons.  The other thing is that my work life is not haunting me right through the weekend in the way it did.  The downside is that I have lost a lot of initiative and it took a lot of will power to get out of bed on the Saturday to do all the chores I have to complete.

It seems incredible that I can have an effect like that from something issued for free (because I am diabetic: prevention is much cheaper than cure in the long run) on the NHS. From when I got diabetes I became conscious that never again could I live without medication and that I was fortunate that I lived in a country where this would be for free and was readily available. I am also worried that my peace of mind has become dependent on a medicine, it seems all too much like 'Brave New World' (1932), 'a gramme is better than a damn' in reference to the drug soma which features in that story.  As an aside, the answer on Ask.com about that quotation is completely wrong.  I want to be able to build my own happiness rather than have it prescribed.  Having spent weeks in counselling as a result of my line manager's behaviour I was able to reduce the worst impacts but clearly not completely free myself of them.

I am glad that I can reduce my blood pressure and hopefully head off serious damage to my eyesight.  However, I am also dismayed that I have not ability to change my working context in order to prevent me facing this kind of pressure simply due to the quirks of a single person who never seems to never have to answer for her actions despite the fact that they cause so much trouble not just for me but a range of staff; a colleague in my department under the same manager has had a heart attack and a stroke most likely provoked if not caused by the manager's treatment of that person.  The consolation is that with these tablets at least my free time is now time off from the burden of working in that context and that, I feel will have a cumulative effect in that I can forget work and really recharge rather than struggling to free my mind of worries about what will be the petty issue my line manager is going to harangue me about for weeks to come.

Why Are British Managers So Bad?

You would think that in a period of high unemployment that the person in a job would be the best that you could get. The government is keen to remove the ability for workers to bring a tribunal against unfair dismissal, but it already seems it is pretty easy to remove people from a job. With all these lists of competencies we each have to match, let alone set targets for each month and year, it is easy to find something that an inefficient worker is unable to meet and so remove them on those grounds. However, in terms of incompetent managers that seems to happen very rarely and rather these are tools for them to intimidate the workers below them with.
 

Time after time recently, meeting with people from within my own company and from others in the sector, I hear about bad managers. I am talking about the people at the level of managing a team or and office or two, something between, say 5 and 50 staff. I have no idea how many there are of them in the country, but certainly the places I have worked, they are numerous and for the large part very poor at their jobs. British business has always suffered from cultural problems. It has had a senior management content to take high pay for little work, with no interest in innovation and happy to add more than one job at a time to their activities. This is one reason why so many successful British companies have been run by people from ‘outside’, even if from Britain, they have not been part of the Conservative-Anglican mainstream, rather immigrants or the grand/children of immigrants or from different religious groups including Nonconformist Christians. It has had a middle and lower management which is terribly self-centred and at best paternalistic, but too often bullying. It has had a workforce with little interest in personal training and development and with a tendency simply to blame outsiders for their problems whilst also be unwilling, certainly since mass unemployment returned in the 1980s to risk challenging bad practices in the workplace.
 

In this structure, the average manager can behave how they like and this is what makes so many workplaces stressful and so inefficient. What has exacerbated the problem is the return of 1980s managerial style. I have seen managers walking around telling workers that they should be grateful for the jobs that they have. It is not sufficient simply not to complain about things, workers need to be seen to be lauding their managers at every given opportunity, a tendency which eerily is reminiscent of officials in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. To be passive is now to be disloyal. Loyalty has become a key trait that managers want demonstrated again and again by their staff. A key reason for this is that managers know that they do blunder and in the blame culture which permeates so much of British business, they know the only way they can escape from having to face up to the consequences of their actions is to conceal them and this can only be done if they have sufficiently terrified the workforce into keeping quiet, or, even better, taking the blame themselves.
 

Loyalty is vaunted as a necessary trait for keeping your job and is often associated with ‘professionalism’ no matter what the nature of the job. The sense that someone who is ‘disloyal’ to their boss, typically because they are ‘loyal’ to the wider company or the customers, is unprofessional is an attitude which managers perpetuate, to add additional pressure on workers not to reveal their manager’s shortcomings. Usually quickly added on top are descriptions like ‘unusual’ and ‘not fitting in’, to make it easier to remove any work who dares complain, or in fact, increasingly is seen as insufficiently vigorously supportive of the manager’s approach no matter how flawed it might be. The worst managers even begin chiding workers in other areas. In my company a colleague was shocked when my manager gate-crashed a meeting she was in because she believed it was discussing an area of work which she had an interest in. In fact she was mistaken, but that did not stop her redirecting the meeting to cover that topic. My colleague who had arranged the meeting, sat stunned at the gall of the manager and simply agreed with everything she said to bring the meeting to an end as quickly as possible. However, even that was insufficient for the manager, who, after the meeting was over, lectured the woman for whom she has no line managerial responsibilities for twenty minutes about how her attitude was wrong. It was not that she had not agreed with the manager it was she had done it in a sufficiently deferential style.
 

Deference and gratitude are two terms which come up increasingly when employers talk about what they want from their staff. You could have conducted a survey in 1811 and had much the same answer. These traits seem more valued than ability to use IT or organise meetings or any other skill necessary for an office of the twenty-first century. Deference and gratitude simply promote the status quo, they do not lead to innovation. Deference and gratitude are what meant that the Indian princes, the Japanese Shogun and the Chinese Emperor found themselves overwhelmed by the imperial powers who had allowed a little room for challenging and innovation and so had advanced technologically.
 

As I have noted before, there are major problems when no-one has the courage to challenge the statements a manager makes. It creates a vicious circle as the manager feels that without complaints they must be doing everything perfectly alright and they are encouraged to develop more and more outrageous projects. If anyone makes an alternative suggestion they are told that they are in a minority so their view cannot be legitimate and this discourages them and anyone else from ever raising a question again. This attitude is not a new one: it appears in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ first published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 in the third volume of ‘Fairy Tales Told for Children’.
 

The self-centred attitude of so many managers lead to ‘one-way traffic’ in terms of communication. Not only do the managers not listen to their workers, they feel obliged instead to lecture their workers at length. Again this seems characteristic of the Soviet system in which the ‘leader’ was lauded at length, from the head of the state right down to the leader of the unit. Under such regimes, it appears to have been necessary to keep telling the workers at length that they had such a great boss and that his/her boss was great too and so on. My current manager is the worst in this respect that I have worked for. Colleagues joke about ‘Songs of Praise’ (named after a BBC television religious programme involving lots of hymn singing) sessions held by my manager. In one two-hour meeting for which no agenda had been circulated, the manager spent 100 minutes going on about how everything she had done was so wonderful and successful. She made no reference to the success of the team or the efforts that had allowed her to receive praise from her bosses. This is incredibly demotivating, let alone simply a waste of time to have such a long meeting at which nothing was advanced.


The self-centredness and the belief that there is only one truth explanation for any situation, however temporary or ill-founded it may be, can be seen as stemming from the attitude that I regularly highlight as being endemic in British society, the 'me first' attitude. This was promoted during the Thatcherite era and causes harm to the UK everyday not least how people drive and use any public service. I guess I should not be surprised given people behave this way when simply moving around a town or going shopping or using a hospital or a school that they apply such behaviour to their workplace where they feel so much more vulnerable and in need of being in total control in order to ensure that everything turns out precisely how they want it, down to the smallest degree.


Aside from ensuring that every worker within their area is cowed, the main job for managers seems to be to kow-tow to their superiors. My current manager spends much of the day making friends with those above her. This causes many problems, because even though she is useless at management, the people you would complain to her about simply think she ‘is wonderful’. She massages their egos by constantly praising their initiatives and ideas. Networking is fine, but when it simply becomes about sucking up to people it uses up work time for something which provides minimal benefit to the company and in fact can be harmful. Of course, experienced senior managers can often see through this and make an effort to call on the views of a wider range of staff. However, in these circumstances, the worker who speaks up is liable to suffer later from their manager. The anger the manager unleashes comes from a number of bases. As they see any suggestions that differ from a plan as best irrelevant at worst insulting, they feel upset if you make a suggestion to a senior manager because in their view you are simply being blatantly rude. Second if the idea is a good one, they are irritated that they had not thought of it and so have, in their mind, lost ‘points’ to you, even if you are unable or unwilling to play in the ‘game’. In this second situation, they are liable to take on board the idea as their own or, at very least, say that the idea came about because of how supportive they have been.
 

With all of these concerns with keeping down their workers and buddying up to their seniors, it is no surprise that so many managers cannot see beyond their own personal concerns. This is not aided by the fact that they think that their view of the office and the wider world is the only true one. My manager told me recently that there was ‘my perception’ of how things were going and then there was the ‘truth’, which of course was her perception. She could not accept that there was my perception and her perception, let alone that mine had some legitimacy. This is the third manager I have had who has believe that their viewpoint is the only true one and this has led to ridiculous demands such as re-writing a report to remove the views tens of people had expressed in a survey because, in my manager’s eyes, these people were not speaking the ‘truth’ even though they had simply outlined their opinions and the information had been captured.
 

The sense of the ‘truth’ extends down to individual words used in print, orally or in emails. Poor managers waste ages complaining about individual words and phrases. Me saying that I was ‘trying to fit in’ with my manager led her to go on for 10 minutes about how that was an inappropriate phrase. There was apparently no need to ‘fit in’ with what she wanted because all that she wants is common sense and that is what should be driving everything that I do and I am ‘unusual’ in not understanding that. Certainly on the basis of a majority view of what was ‘common sense’ we would not be doing many things the way she compels us to do them.


Training is seen as the cure-all for any discrepancy between the manager’s view of the world and that of their workers. Alarmingly the perception seems to use the sense of training as ‘re-education’ is used in Communist China, i.e. a form of indoctrination. Bizarrely managers think that by sending their staff on some training course they will come back with the ‘right attitude’ rather than new skills or wider perspectives. Interestingly, the managers themselves seem to feel no obligation to attend any training. You soon find they have been on no managerial training courses and simply ‘learned on the job’ perhaps even at ‘the University of Life’ which apparently is fine for them, but utterly useless for developing effective workers. Funnily there is no recognition that sending someone on a decent training course is actually going to make them more confident, more perceptive, more skilled and so more liable to challenge the narrow-minded behaviour of their manager.
 

As managers see their perception of things as the ‘truth’ and often ‘common sense’ they see no need to actually tell anyone how they view things. To them it would seem a waste of time outlining anything that should be so blatantly obvious to everyone. This causes major difficulties and a lot of wasted effort as workers try to guess actually what their manager wants, fearful of making a mistake in their guesses for fear of being chided as discussed above. The manager is dismissive of the efforts, finding it difficult to comprehend that proposals do not match perfectly the vision held in their minds. This leads to repeated iterations, painfully slowly edging towards the model the manager desires as the feedback in the blame culture is only about what has been done wrong, not what needs to be done to make it right.
 

Another problem with this assumption that the manager’s view is common sense is that the manager feels t no obligation to remember what they have previously said. Thus their workers can get caught out by their capriciousness. My manager initially asked for one copy of a particular form to be submitted, then weeks later decided this had to be three copies. Some weeks after that she decided it had to be two copies. Her changing her mind would not have been a major issue, nothing more than rather irritating. What made it so much worst on each occasion she gave a new number she became indignant that we could have thought that the previous number she had demanded was acceptable. Not being able to remember her command she assumed we had taken the initiative and come up with that figure ourselves. Thus, we were harangued for daring to make a decision without reference to her, though this was precisely what we had done. The same applied for moving meeting days back and forth in the week. Again, it should not be a huge issue but she shouted that ‘I could never have wanted it on a Thursday, I do not think that way’ despite Thursday being the precise day she had ordered the meeting moved to. This capriciousness again seems reminiscent of the Soviet system with workers fearful of not complying with some industrial plan that was liable to change weekly without warning. I have been advised to save every email and even keep a notebook to log every instruction I am given. In addition to being time consuming, I am sure she would still challenge what I had recorded as being imagined or misunderstood by me, especially as she could not longer envisage herself ‘thinking that way’.
 

This short-sightedness of managers can have some incredible outcomes. I have worked with managers who have been oblivious to bullying occurring even though workers even a number of offices away have been aware of what was going on. My manager entered the league table for being so wrapped up in her own vision of the world to not even comprehend what was being said. I am not a rich man so lunch consists of a sandwich I have made eaten at my desk. Early on in this post my manager stormed into my office demanding I look at something and saying dismissively that she did not accept people sitting at their desks as having a legitimate lunch break and so she had the right to interrupt them. When I complained about the issue of my lunch break being ‘violated’, offering to have it at a set time if that was what was required, my manager made repeated righteous statements that she would strongly defend me from having my lunch break ignored. She did not understand at all what I meant when I pointed out that the only person doing that was herself. Of course, she has a different view of how she behaves and that view is the ‘truth’, so she appears unable to comprehend a different perspective on what has happened.

 I have worked for numerous companies over the past two decades, in part due to short-term contracts and three turns of redundancy. However, what has struck me is how prevalent such bad practice is across business. I accept that I have not worked outside London, southern England and the south Midlands, but the managers I have had have come from across the UK, so I do not imagine they would be any much different if I worked under them in Scotland or Wales. I know I am not alone in experiencing such outdated, self-centred approaches to management that seem oblivious of modern methods. What we appear to have is a kind of 19th century attitude reinvigorated by trends of the 1980s and revived once more by the current Depression. Ironically at a time when British companies need to be working more efficiently, this corrosive managerial behaviour appears to be increasingly common. Too many people I talk to have the same anecdotes to recount as me. No-one appears to be challenging these approaches and so British business will continue to suffer in the face of strong competition all because too many managers cannot see that satisfying their egos is not what a company should be focused on.

Fear Of Putting A Foot Wrong In A New Job

As noted in my last posting, after 12 months of unemployment I have finally found work.  Whilst that has lifted a great deal of burden off me and lifted the threat of losing my house and never being able to own one again, it has opened up new fears, which in my weariness after joblessness, weigh heavily on me. 

One key fear is that I will not be able to do the job.  Much of the feedback I received from interviews over the past year has been incredibly negative.  One company sent me three pages of criticisms of my performance in the interview and another accused me of having lied on my application form because when they met me they felt I was incompetent and could not have been the man who appied.  When I was a teenager you were told that if you saw a vacancy for which you could match 4 out of 5 of the requirements you should apply for it.  That principle has long gone.  These days not only do you have to match 25 out of 25 of the listed requirements but also show evidence of what you have done.  I think this may be one reason why youth unemployment has reached a level even higher than in the 1980s even though overall unemployment has yet to reach that decade's peak.  Recruitment has become 'mechanised' and so the young without vast experience now do not even get the chance to show their potential because they are filtered out at stage one for not being able to say they have 3 years' experience using every piece of industry software listed on the job specification.  The increase in industry-specific qualifications which I have also noted on this blog, is an additional factor in this too.  By the time I applied for recent jobs, I was stretching every crumb of experience so as to match the specifications.  I was scrupulous in never lying, not even exaggerating, but now fear that I am simply not as confident or as skilled in the wide range of activities my job expects me to undertake as the interviewers believed as a result of my desperation to get interviews.

Other fears stem from coming into a new office and company environment.  I made a huge mistake in going to work for my last employer.  I had not checked what kind of working culture they had and so was really caught out when I found that it was a culture from the 1950s.  The snobbery and social class division at the company was incredible.  I was told that I should not be at the level that I as at, not because I could not do the job (I actually did it far better than my predecessor), but because of my social background.  I was told this blatantly by my line manager.  Bizarre things such as me being unable to say what my favourite recipe cooked on an Aga (a range oven burning wood or coal costing around £6000) was used to show how unsuited I was for the post.  I do not anticipate this in my new job, but it has made me very cautious of 'not fitting in'. 

In two of my last three jobs I have been bullied.  In my last full-time post a manager took a personal dislike to me from the start and taking individual words from emails portrayed me as setting up a 'resistance group' within the company.  She went around eliciting any negative comment or even neutral comment, that she could use to compile a list of complaints against me.  None of the complaints had substance and the word were taken out of context and blown up into some fantasy.  It made me phobic of saying or doing anything, knowing that even good work could be twisted some way to appear as a flaw.  The trade union representative found it incredible that she could do such things.  However, like me he recognised that these days you have little ability to fight back when someone even in a slightly more senior position decides to use the system against you.  Her behaviour cost the company thousands of pounds but they seem to have taken no steps to head off something like that happening again.  Procedures are wonderful for helping run a company smoothly, but too often in the hands of someone with a personal grudge, as I have seen happening too often to colleagues of mine, they can easily be used as a method of bullying.

Two jobs back from that I was bullied for a year by a colleague on the same level as me.  He was incredibly arrogant believing that anything that came out of our office had to have been influenced by his ideas and so should have his name on it rather than mine.  He was terribly impatient and assumed that if he sent an email it would be received instantly and in turn he would expect an instant response.  As anyone who has worked in a large company knows, this does not always happen.  I have had emails arrive between 4 and 14 days after they have beens sent and internal mail has arrived up to 2 months late.  In addition, I had other work to do other than that which involved him, often on behalf of more senior staff or with a greater urgency.  On aspect on which I was employed was my ability to time manage and prioritise, which I did.  Yet, of course, that often meant his work involving me had to wait in a queue, something he could not accept.  He was also critical of me for not being married or having children and so felt it meant I was immoral.  In fact I led a quiet, celibate life free from drugs and alcohol abuse.  This was not enough, the simple fact that I was unmarried implied to him that I must be a reprobate and unsuitable for work alongside him.  Both these bullies were 'nice people' liked by those they were not bullying and in both cases it proved impossible to make more than a handful of people understand how much I was suffering from working with them.  Bullying in 2 out of 3 jobs make me fear it will happen again, to the long-term detriment of my career.

I have certainly learnt not to say anything of my private life; not to have a photograph of my girlfriend or her child on my desk, because I have found these would be things used against me.  At my last job so many characteristics of my girlfriend (being from abroad originally, coming from a 'low' social class [daughter of a police officer], being a single parent, running her own business) were criticised and these criticisms were added to those of me, even though she had never even been within 120 Km of the company site while I was working there.  From now on I am going to keep all mention of my life outside work a complete secret.  Conversely, though, I do worry that I will be charged with being 'distant' or 'cold' because I cannot bring a wife along to work social events.  It seems ironic in an age when you have to complete extensive 'equal opportunities' forms every time you apply for a job, outlining your nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, marital status and any disabilities, to then find that even minor elements of these will, in fact, be used as a basis on which to criticise you.

Another thing I have learnt in the past 2-3 years is not to hold too tightly to the truth.  I think that I feel a real discomfort when lies are spoken partly because of Asperger's tendencies (and going for a proper diagnosis of that, I have now been persuaded, would be best put back if I want to keep my job).  However, as I have noted before, we are in an era of management culture which again smacks of the 1950s, with bosses feeling freer to say 'my way or the highway', to compel workers, no matter what their level to 'put up and shut up' rather than raising concerns about what is planned.  Of course, this is a trend which is prevalent in Chinese companies and government so I guess we should not be surprised to see it so common here in the UK.  In addition, the 'whip of unemployment' is back in full effect just as many employers were crying out for in the mid-2000s.  I am certainly cowed by it and know that in the coming year I am going to have to bite my lip and not speak out even when I see a plan which is bound for disaster.  It is ironic given that I have been employed for my expertise in 17 areas and have reached office manager level, that my views are not only not solicited but even raising concerns risks me losing my job.  You can term this the 'Titanic mentality' but it seems increasingly prevalent in British business and as a consequence projects are going to be driven through without sufficient discussion or reflection, based on the enthusiasm of one or two individuals rather than drawing on the knowledge of a range of staff.

Related to having to remain silent about any potential flaws in proposals is the need to check word-for-word everything that I write or say.  In my last post, emails would be checked literally word-by-word by my line manager and single 'offending' words were used as the basis for complaint. It was not about the overall content or the thrust of an argument, simply about the vocabulary used.

I speak plainly and clearly, but now need to learn how to discuss issues, no matter how controversial they may be, in language as circumspect as that used in the court of the Japanese emperor.  When a single word in a set of minutes or a report can be used to suggest you are trying to undermine the company, you have to check and check again.  Not only that, you have to quickly understand what your managers and colleagues understand by certain phrases, even if that understanding is out of step with the rest of the industry.  In the age of desktops and laptops we are all our own secretaries, but from now on, I am going to get as much written by other staff as possible so at least to put a 'fire gap' between me and the readers of the minutes or reports, knowing that so much will be 'lost in translation' as we battle to know what the readers (not only those who the material is intended for, but anyone who may stumble across it later too) understand by individual words.

Another challenge for me is length of communications.  As I have noted before, there is a demand for everything to be very brief as if Twitter has become the baseline for our communications.  Again I have been criticised for the simple length of what I write, not the content.  I have failed to learn the unstated acceptable length for an email, which of course varies depending on the particular recipient and the subject being discussed on that occasion.  The length dismisses any discussion of the actual content and so makes it pointless for me to even bother communicating.  I have no idea what the acceptable length of communication is in my new job, but you can guarantee that I will be sending lots of single sentence emails filled with abbreviations; with separate emails to cover different aspects of a single case, rather than risking putting them into a single email or report.

My experiences make me feel as if I have become an outsider in the workplace and that, despite all my years of expertise, have missed out on the training on what seems to so many employers to be the 'standard' and only acceptable approach to working in an office.  Ironically it ignores things which on paper should be basics of office work, such as clear communication and avoiding discrimination on any basis.  I am certainly going into the workplace fearful of saying or writing anything wrong.  This has effectively castrated me as an employee, not willing to risk making comments on any proposals, let alone taking any initiative or leading an activity for fear that even minor differences from the 'norm' will be used to attack me.

'I Don't Want To Hear That': Censoring In The Workplace

Before Christmas I attended a Christmas Fayre held at a local primary school.  It had the usual games, stalls and refreshments that you find at such events held by churches, schools and other organisations.  Being a small school some of the stalls were in classrooms.  As I made my way into one classroom and joined the queue to buy some Christmas items, I looked at the work on the walls.  It is always interesting to see what is being produced by children, especially as the curriculum is far wider than in my day and a lot of the work has been printed off the computer rather than hand-drawn and coloured.  I was in the classroom used by Year 5 children, i.e., aged 9-10.  On the wall was a series of notices admonishing the children to behave in certain ways, seeming rather old fashioned in style, but that may reflect the tone of that school or of the particular teacher of that class.  Anyway, the one that concerned me most encouraged children not to speak.  It told them not to say anything unless it complied with the following criteria: it had to be True, Helpful, Inspiring, Needed, Kind', as you can see this gave the acronym THINK.  I suppose telling people to think before they speak is not really a bad principle.  However, it seemed to reinforce more unsettling trends I have been encountering in society and in the workplace, in particular, so I was unnerved to see them coming into primary school teaching.


Let us look at the criteria.  I suppose none of us would be against encouraging children to tell the truth.  However, in western society, especially in education, the truth is always being contested.  If it was not then knowledge would not advance, and to some degree this even applies in primary schools where the children are testing out ideas.  If one child said 'Father Christmas exists' and another child said 'Father Christmas does not exist' who, among 9-year olds, would be telling the truth? Does the school rule out any of the mysteries that children often receive from their parents.  What if a child said 'God created the World in 7 days' and another 'the universe started with the Big Bang' and so on?  It certainly rules out any child telling a fictional story; perhaps that school only deals with non-fiction. As to the other criteria, they are all incredibly subjective.  How does a 9-year old understand 'inspiring' and presumably if they did not think what they were saying 'needed' to be said then they would not bother; similarly with 'helpful'.  Perhaps 'kind' is easier to judge, but if the child is not being particularly insulting to another child or shouting at them, then how do you apply this to other statements.  Generally it seemed like an new way of saying 'children should be seen and not heard', a very Victorian precept.


This attitude that seems to be penetrating, even if in just some isolated cases, into schools is already widespread in the workplace.  If I had a pound for every time in the past decade that I had heard the phrase, 'I don't want to hear that' in a work situation then I would be wealthy enough not to need to be applying for a job at the moment.  I imagine it stems from the revived fashion for 1980s style management, encouraged by methods seen on programmes such as 'The Apprentice' in which managers are stern and distant and bellow at their employees as if they are all idiots.  Lord Sugar has been very successful in bringing the methods used my sergeant-majors, including the insults and humiliation, into the office.  The key difficulty is an assumption that the manager determines the parameters of what is a permitted topic and even what language can be used to describe it.  This assumption is one I have often encountered and seems to be increasingly common with each passing year. 

I accept that such an approach is a stamp of authority.  However, it puts a far greater distance between the manager and the workforce, often artificially.  In any given office there are always at least one or two people who could easily step into the manager's shoes and, in fact, in many situations do the job better.  However, in the UK workplace we seem to now have very stratfied approaches and no sense any longer that employees, through hard work and training can progress up the company hierarchy.  These days managers have to be managers brought from somewhere else (though often from elsewhere within the same company), rather than promoted internally.  I accept it is difficult to set one employee above their previous colleagues, but that should not mean that there is an automatic sense that people on a certain grade will never become managers whether in their own office or elsewhere.

Defining the language which people are permitted to use when speaking is discriminatory.  We are not talking about abusive or even crude language, but terminology and ways of expression which I have witnessed being shot down by 'I don't want to hear that'.  I have generally worked in Southern England and the Midlands, but with staff from regions right across the UK, from many parts of the EU, from Canada, the USA, Australia and China and numerous other countries, especially in South Asia.  In addition, I have worked with men and women, people aged 16 to 78 in my work and from all social classes, even interacting with nobility from time to time. 

With this variety there is often wide diversity in the use of words and phrases in the work context.  I have encountered challenges with which floor a meeting is on with Americans (for whom the first floor is the British ground floor) and with a Liverpudlian who pronounced the word 'staff' the way I pronounce 'stuff'.  I even had to work out what a delivery driver meant when he said 'I need to fucking fuck that fuck', which to many would have been abusive, but was expressed in a neutral tone and meant he was going to back up his lorry; I had to interpret it from the context (I was reminded of this reading a China Mieville story in which the language of an alien race alters so there is only a single sound used for all words and sentences are understood purely by the context, partly as a defence against manipulation of the society by people alien to the planet).  Ruling out words and phrases on some criteria which is, again, not articulated, only assumed to be 'common sense', is prejudicial as it descriminates against the speech of particular workers be that on a social, gender, regional, ethnic or age basis.  Of course, it is simply another tool for the manager to constrain other employees left to try to guess at unwritten words and having their comments demoted in relation to the already privileged statements of the manager.


Setting the parameters of what is a permitted topic and what is permitted language helps to separate out managers from the level below them (which in many companies can often be another layer of managers who in turn are separating themselves from the level below).  Usually the parameters are not defined; they are simply things the manager is ignorant of or for some reason does not feel relevant, but rather than saying that, simply the manager holds up their hand and says 'I don't want to hear this' and that is literally the end of the conversation.  There is no explanation; no attempt to help the colleague develop so they say different things in the future.  People saying 'I don't want to hear this' tend to assume that their opposition to some approach is common sense. Typically, however, ruling out certain approaches so peremptorily is not done on any criteria than either the manager does not want to hear 'bad' news or the person addressing them has started referring to things that the manager does not feel confident about and is unwilling to reveal the gap in their knowledge.  No-one in any company or organisation knows everything, but when we have to comply with 20-50 essential specifications to get a job then none of us dare admit that there is something we are weak on.  The only solutions that are allowed to be presented in so many companies now are the ones which the manager understands already and naturally this is detrimental to any innovation and even different ways of addressing a particular problem in order to work out solutions.

Too many managers not only do not want to hear about things they are unfamiliar with, but they do not want to hear anything they deem to be 'bad'.  This marks an interesting change.  Back in the early 2000s I remember a counter-trend which was that I would be asked for 'war stories', taken to mean examples of situations or projects similar to the ones we were dealing with but which had gone badly wrong.  Back then people did not want to hear success stories, rather ones outlining all the potential problems they could avoid.  It was easy to tell this from not only comments and requests I received but also from looking at the number of hits on the reports that myself and numerous colleagues had loaded up to the internal information database.  The hits on the 'war stories' exceeded those on the success story reports fivefold.  Of course, this did not mean that people wanted to hear about the unsuccessful parts of their own projects, but I believe they were far more willing to speak about them, otherwise myself and the people I worked alongside would have had no material from which to write our 'war stories', a situation far more common now, a decade on.

'Bad' is a loose word anyway.  In my experience it encompasses anything that brings doubt about the success of even a single small aspect of the proposal made by the manager themselves.  If they are fixated on even the most hare-brained scheme, you risk your job to highlight even one of the erroneous assumptions or ill-informed decisions in the project.  This is insulting.  What is the point of recruiting capable people, questioning them at length about their knowledge and capabilities; sending them on training courses and to conferences, only then to dismiss any observations that run counter to the leader's vision for the company/department/office.  What is the point of me having these skills and knowledge if you are not going to even let me draw on them?  I remember challenging one boss on two schemes of his.  I pointed out that in one cases there were already 146 examples of what he proposed to develop, already on the market.  In the second I highlighted to him that sending British staff for 3 years without a chance to return to the UK in that period might cause a rapid turnover of staff and questioned how he was going to pay them in China given that the reminbi (also known as the yuan) was not convertible; even seven years on from then and with China having taken steps in this direction, full convertibility has not been achieved.  You would think my points were valid, but they were dismissed 'I only hear bad news from you' I was told and 'you seek to stop anything I plan'.  The sense that anything that tempers or modifies the plan as envisaged by the originator is seeking to stop it entirely, rather than improve it, makes it difficult to develop pragmatic responses and adjustments which would actually make the plan work better or, in some cases, actually feasible.  As with what can be raised, the 'all or nothing' approach hampers what should be the productive evolution of business activities, drawing on the skills of the full range of staff the company has taken so much effort to recruit.

The exclusion of anything defined as 'bad' (and this is defined by the beholder rather than any objective perspective) excludes a lot of the input that is needed when planning and executing plans in business.  One basis for this attitude is the sense that we must all be hyper-positive about everything that happens in the company (the more I write the more the managerial style I am characterising seems to be similar to that of the Five Year Plans of the USSR and China, ignoring the flaws and continuing with unflinching optimism).  In fact, excessive positivity can be dangerous. A study in 2009 by Canadian academics Joanne Wood and John Lee, University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic, University of New Brunswick. They felt that making self-esteem affirmations actually reinforced established behaviour rather than bringing about change. This is easy to comprehend, because if you feel good about yourself then they begin to feel that the way you are doing things must be the correct way, even if this means disregarding signals to the contrary. In an extract last January in 'The Guardian', supporting the release of her book, 'Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World' (2010), Barbara Ehrenreich outlined how the insistance on positivity when dealing with cancer actually can be a hindrance to effective treatment. Her article went on to discuss something which I am on the verge of experiencing, the sessions telling the unemployed to be positive and to see their period of unemployment not as something negative and limiting, rather as something opening up new opportunities. I can say from my own experience that unemployment shuts down so many opportunities, to go anywhere, to socialise, to get things repaired and, in fact, to get another job, because employers prefer applicants currently in work over the jobless.

Now, I am not saying we should all be gloomy about the future and recognise that that can be debilitating.  However, we seem to have got to a situation in which we feel that good news should be the only news we hear, everything else should be dismissed.  This leads to an imbalanced and in turn inaccurate appreciation of the real situation.  This position is exacerbated by another trend in the workplace which I have highlighted before, the insistence on brevity.  See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogging-blog-10-demand-for-brevity.html  I suppose in our sound bite age this is to be expected.  No-one of today can stomach the kind of political speeches people would stand listening to for hours in the Victorian era and even 30-minute long programmes seem tiresome to some viewers; we have 60-second news broadcasts even on BBC3.  However, this intolerance for anything longer than a single email page or some texted or tweeted lines, has turned into an assumption that anything which is longer than the personally defined tolerance level is wrong.  It does not matter what the content actually says, the length makes whatever is contained in the message wrong in the view of far too many managers.  Complex situations, analysis of different elements of a process, of different markets or customers, often need to be thoroughly analysed.  Of course, you can fragment the reports, looking at a single customer or market at a time, but then all comparison goes out of the window.

Managers should make judgements.  Often for jobs I have applied for 'evidence of decision making ability' is listed as an essential specification for a manager.  However, excluding and bad or neutral news and insisting on only the briefest of reports or contributions, actually takes the decision making away from the manager.  Instead they are given a number of brief, positive options and they simply plump for one or other.  Without a rounded picture and full information about the options, and vitally, the context in which they will operate, the manager cannot make an actual judgement, they can simply 'pick' an option or go with the one which is best sold to them rather than one which might be most beneficial for the business.  The insistence on 'positive & brief' also rules out a combination of elements from different options.  You cannot see the downsides of any option or where its weaknesses might be countered by bringing across something from another option.  I would argue that this kind of culture not only led the 'Columbia' space shuttle disaster of 2003, but also to a whole host of problems in the UK, for example, the defective software used for air traffic control and most recently by HM Revenue & Customs.  Business and public service is complex.  It deals with complex situation which require answers which generally are not simple, but typically multi-faceted and with positive, neutral and negative points about each option available.  However, simply because of a fashion to make managers feel more in control, business and public service culture's insistence on 'positive & brief' will continue to lead us into difficulties because better answers will never even be allowed to appear.


P.P. 09/02/2011: I was reminded of an incident I experienced a couple of years ago, which combined with my knowledge of Chinese business suggests that this trend is even more prevalent in Chinese companies than it is with British ones.  We were having an end of year meal in a restaurant for a number of staff and freelancers who had worked with a new unit, focusing on China, inside the company I was then working for.  Most of the staff of the unit were British but it was headed by a Chinese man who had lived in the UK for some time and his personal assistant was a more recently arrived Chinese woman.  Both of them read and speak English fluently.  The head of the unit offered anyone who wished a lift in his car to the restaurant.  I was the only one who accepted, the others made their own way there.  The head drove with his assistant beside him, I was in the back.  Whilst I was junior to the head I was certainly far more senior in the company than his assistant.

As we approach the restaurant the head pulls into a car park which is clearly labelled as being reserved parking only for members of the company who owned the building the parking sat beside.  I saw this and tried to alert the driver to the fact.  His assistant turned and very vigorously told me not to question the head's driving and when I repeated trying to alert him to the fact that he could not park there his assistant shushed me as if I was a child and then told me I should not say anything.  I found this laughable but was also offended.  The head proceeded to park and get out of the car. His assistant followed in his footsteps saying nothing.  The head then walked away and continued until he saw the sign.  Of course, he had to turn round and come back and move his car farther down the street or risk being clamped and fined.  However, time had been wasted that could have been avoided if I had been permitted to speak.

I know this is a single incident but it seemed painfully characteristic of the problems that the centralised economies of China and the USSR faced in the past which led them in the 1980s and 1990s to move towards capitalism.  However, the attitudes of not questioning authority figures or their immediate agents seem to have persisted from the Communist context into the capitalist environment.  Given the success of China in the global marketplace, perhaps it is no surprise that British companies are apeing this behaviour.  Yet, as I have outlined above, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to warnings of things that may go wrong might work for a short time but ultimately will lead to you running into problems that could have been avoided with just a little care and some attention.

P.P. 21/05/2011
I was interested to catch an episode of Evan Davis's BBC2 programme, 'Business Nightmares' broadcast on 19th May 2011.  He featured serious blunders by companies such as HBOS and Marks & Spencer particularly in taking over foreign companies.  He concluded the programme saying that these examples and others stemmed from when the man in charge of the company had a grand idea but did not permit anyone to present an alternative or to caution him about what he planned to do, not simply about the plan in general but also specifics within it.  Consequently, these cases turned into 'business nightmares' that damaged the company.  As I have noted in this posting, this tendency to see anything which does not fit entirely with the boss's vision as a unwanted criticism that the boss is unwilling even to hear, is increasingly prevalent throughout UK companies, causing not only problems for the company at the top level, but hampering its efficiency and successful progress at all levels, so still damaging the company in the long term.  Davis is a far more respected commentator on business than myself, but his argument that, for a company to prosper, a vision needs to be tempered with practical considerations and that bosses should not 'turn a deaf ear' to these reinforces what I have witnessed working for a number of companies.

Blogging the Blog 10: The Demand For Brevity

Given what I have written recently about running out of steam in terms of blogging, I was interested to read on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8497427.stm that interest in blogging among teenagers, aged 12-17, has halved from 2006 with only 14% involved in keeping blogs, though among people aged 30+ it rose from 7% in 2007 to 11% now.  To some degree this is no surprise, young people like to 'own' the technology they use and are resentful when others such as their schools, colleges or other public bodies let alone people like politicians beginning trying to use the facilities to try to get their message across.  Once adults are involved it stops being 'cool'.  This may be why young people have not engaged with Twitter which with its brief often text message style communication would appear to be suited to them.  However, who is the most renowned Twitter user in the UK?  Though many pop stars and DJs use it, the figurehead here is Stephen Fry, a gay actor, presenter, writer and raconteur aged 52.  In fact if you search for Stephen Fry on Google, the most popular suffix to his name is 'Twitter'.

There is another reason which, I feel discourages young people from both blogging and Twitter and that is because it needs commitment.  It is far easier, for example, to post an odd mood statement once in a while or upload some photos or link to a YouTube clip from a Facebook page once in a while.  Online friends may be concerned if you do not add anything for a while, but the core of the page with your picture, interests, etc. remains whatever you do.  Conversely, campaigns, for example about the 'A' level biology exams, are now based on Facebook or MySpace groups rather than someone blogging their grievance.  These things come and go rather than continuing for months.  So what is enduring at present are things you do not have to keep doing but can engage and disengage from at will.

For a blog, if you do not see a posting in the past month, you tend to assume the site is dead and you look somewhere else.  Of course, even aged blogs can be useful and I often find postings about things from a few years back there, but in terms of speaking about the individual behind the blog and what interests them, then a stagnant blog is not useful.  Blogging is like keeping an old fashioned diary and while some people do that many people who start one have given up by March, so lasting about as long as the average blog.  Perhaps one reason why I am still blogging is because I have kept a diary every day for the past 32 years anyway, some of it has formed the basis of postings here.  Blog implies chronology.  The word comes from 'web log' and a log is something like captains of ships keep noting day by day activity.  If nothing is reported it is at least moribund if not dead.

One explanation in the BBC article about the reason for the decline of blogging among the young is the ability to give 'status updates' much more easily, and this is what they term 'micro blogging', though, really that is a misnomer, because no log is kept, it is replaced by a difference status indicator.  Another explanation is that blogging is seen as too involved as you have to string some paragraphs together and that is seen as too burdensome.  This, I feel ties into a development which I have began to experience, especially at work.

In my company, some senior staff see even a single panel of an email screen of text as 'too much' and I get complaints about 'lengthy' emails.  The trouble is often issues are more complex than a couple of paragraphs.  Especially as I have experienced using individual words from emails back against me, taking them out of context, I now take a great deal of care with what I write.  I was told I needed more modal verbs, like 'could', 'would', 'should' and to make phrasing more ambivalent rather than certain.  Yet the demand for short email messages cuts against this.  Email is a terse form of communication and now we are being pressed to make it epigrammatic.  Haiku is a difficult skill that most of us cannot pull off.  The hazard of summarising things for Powerpoint slides, which only really comfortably hold four points, has long been identified for contributing to the explosion of the space shuttle 'Columbia' in 2003 as it meant that in presentations minor, but vital technical issues could not be commuicated to the necessary audiences.

The assumption that all ideas can be contained within a particular length of communication is a dangerous one, as is the assumption that 'long' automatically means 'bad' or 'inefficient', especially as no other information about what was wrong or superfluous in the email is given; the length itself is now an offence no matter what content it touches on.  I have pointed out that mine only have multiple paragraphs when dealing with complex issues; many conversely are only a single sentence or even just a clause.  People seem, also to forget, that emails are a record and ironically those people who whine about long emails seem the ones most likely to send you reminder emails about what they sent you last week even when you have it.  I know as a society we have a shorter attention span than people of the past (fancy attending a 2-hour speech by a politician as in Gladstone's day anyone?) but there need to be limits as to how far we try to force communication into being as brief as possible.  While none of us want turgid lengthy text, we also need to see that a thorough exposition of an issue, especially ones seeking a decision in business, is vital and not to discourage them simply because it is not the fashion.

Employers Demanding Unquestioning Loyalty

I have noted that with the recession and the rise in unemployment, employers are returning to the oppressive behaviour of the 1980s.  Though most companies were not involved in using the financial approach that brought about the credit crunch and recession, they have certainly been happy to exploit it and drive back what they felt were the excessive gains made by employees during the past decade.  I was advised as a manager to crack the 'whip' of unemployment and remind employees that they should not complain about anything, including shortcomings in planning and operations that they see, because they should be grateful that they had a job. 

This morning I heard that 7 out of 10 employers look up their prospective employees on social networking sites and will not employ those using 'bad' language or portraying themselves as drunken in pictures on the website.  Apparently 28% of sackings are now based, not on the employee's behaviour at work but their moans about their work on websites.   I accept that such people are probably foolish to show themselves in that light on easily accessible websites, but when has it been the employer's role to police the morality let alone the spare time behaviour of its employees?  This seems particularly rich when we hear about the often sordid behaviour of leading business people.  Now we seem to have one moral code for the rich and another one for the ordinary people.  Have we really gone back to the 19th century that quickly.  What next?  Children working up chimneys?  Homes for 'fallen' women?  This is the 21st century and I would rather employ someone who had a life outside work and was a well-rounded individual with a social life than someone who obsesses over only work and has no friends.  That sad loner character might be fine for some jobs, but in an age when so much of business is about networking and in particular business with China involves a lot of socialising and drinking, you need someone who can cope.

If you are employing people in their late teens, twenties and thirties and these days it applies to people in their forties and fifties too, why should you expect them to behave any differently to anyone else in that age group?  In the UK, (young) people go out and get drunk, then take photos of it, that is a fact of British life; no employer will ever change that.  Naturally the employers would baulk at anyone telling them or their children how they should behave in their spare time.  Of course, again the rule seems to be that the privileged can behave how they like and the rest of us should lead dull lives in which we thank God every day that our employer has been so generous in giving us work and allowing us to remain in it.  Whatever happened to free will?  Well, as in the past, it again seems to be becoming the reserve of the already privileged.

You might say that even if the employer cannot police behaviour outside the workplace they can expect their employees to be loyal and not to bad mouth the company.  I would argue that that is an unhealthy approach to running any business whether in the public or private sector.  I suppose it is simply an extension of the attitude to customers that puts up facilities for them to complain but when they do the company simply lectures them about what a good service they are actually receiving and why they should be grateful for that, as far too many UK companies do (try complaining to an airline).  To say to employees that they have to pretend that everything is perfect in a company is coming at the issue from entirely the wrong end.  If you run a good business then your employees will willingly, voluntarily in many cases, bear testament to that.  If you are running your business poorly then you need to hear that.  Too many employers forget that it is often the people at the frontline of a business who see where improvements are needed.  Of course, there is an arrogance that such people know nothing and too many British businesses ignore the voice of the 'footsoldiers'.  I would point them to the John Lewis Partnership which continues to prosper despite hard times because of its full involvement of the workforce.

No company will ever suppress bad news about it.  Even if you stamp down on every Facebook page, every Tweet, every blog entry about your company, then it will still spread by traditional means such as word of mouth.  You have to remember that you have no control (even the intelligence services have found this) over former employees who will often go out of their way to draw attention to what you are doing wrong.  The only way to combat such bad publicity by current and former employees is to listen to them while they are working for them and rather than jump on discussion, if you feel something needs to be different to how they feel it should be done, then you should be in a position to defend how you are doing it.  Suppressing comment about your business is lazy and means that you will miss the vital warning signs that could save you from serious problems in the near or more distant future.

The other thing these employers forget in these days is that 'no news' is actually 'bad news'.  In many ways, despite wanting to attract the best staff, they patronise us and assume we do not investigate them before we even start applying for jobs with them.  In the same way they forget these days that in an interview, they have to impress us as much as we have to impress them; again higher unemployment is making them entirely lazy in this respect and they assume applicants will take any job offered. So, we investigarte.  If I find a dearth of information about the company on the internet, social sites, blogs, etc., then naturally I am going to be suspicious of them from the start.  In addition, I can learn nothing about the company's strengths and weaknesses.  Of course, there will be official sites, but only a fool takes those at face value.  I am far more likely to take my expertise to a company that is open about how it works and its challenges than one in which all of this is hidden and any critical comments are suppressed.  Companies without discussion inside stagnate and walk into pitfalls they could have avoided.

Another serious mistake that employers make is to assume that loyalty to a company is the same as loyalty to particular members of staff.  Weak or bullying managers make this mistake repeatedly.  They emphasise the employees must be loyal for the good of the company, whereas in fact they make it clear that they mean loyal just to them.  This can damage an employee's standing in the company as when the weak and the bullies fall as they will sooner or later, those who seemed to back them can suffer too.  A good manager, like a good company does not suppress comment whether positive or not, in fact they solicit it as a valuable check on their own activities and because of the benefits, noted above, for the broader company.  A manager choking off comment because they fear what they will be told, is damaging their company because it is not getting those measures from frontline staff and the warnings about current or upcoming problems that you need to keep a business thriving.  You only had to watch a single episode of the series 'Back to the Floor' ( shown on BBC 1997-2002) to see that.

Policing expression of your employees' views let alone censuring their spare time activities is the sign of a vulnerable, insecure employer who forgets that workers are people and are better for having a full life.  Critically, it is far better for the longevity of your business that you do not use the 'stick' of loyalty to suppress the comments you need to hear.  If you work to earn that loyalty not only will have have a more effective workforce but you will attract solid business now and good employees in the future.  Blocking expression is just the sign of a poor employer and one heading for bankruptcy.

Sledgehammer Management

My last post was around my concern that by trying to be a liberal manager who appreciated a lot of the trouble that his employees were going through (I am not allowed to call them 'my team' because apparently they 'belong' to my own boss not me) that I would end up being too much like the manager, David Brent, in the television series 'The Office' making embarrassing fauxs pas.  I do think some of my employees do look on me as if I am rather odd, but I guess that comes from being a Goth in the workplace and from the clothes I wear resembling some hybrid of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes (1984-94) and the Herr Flick character from ''Allo, 'Allo' (1982-92; played by Richard Gibson with David Janson taking over for the 9th and final series in 1992), especially in the very provincial town I am now working in.  However, generally I seem to get on pretty well with those who have been assigned to me.

The same cannot be said for those above me, especially my immediate manager and, fortunately to a lesser extent, her successor.  Like many companies, ours is currently under pressure, making a loss and looking for ways to do the same or more work with fewer staff.  There are no redundancies (something the management wants us to keep reminding our staff, the 'whip of unemployment' being cracked on a regular basis) but when people leave (the best always go first from a company that is struggling) they are not replaced.  The new requirements of the Border Agency have been put on one of my units meaning extra work for the staff remaining.  At this time of year with illness and with one person on maternity leave not covered, it is tough to ensure all the work is being done.  It is, but most of the staff are working flat out and all of them doing jobs outside their job description to cover missing staff.  New systems are being brought in, but letting someone go off for the necessary training can really dent the capacity of my units.

So, what does a new manager do in such circumstances?  Well, I was repeatedly told by my boss that my staff were 'inefficient'.  This is taken by the workforce, unsurprisingly, as seen to mean 'lazy'.  So I started by surveying all their activity and in fact I feel many of them are working too hard.  They are very flexible in adapting to extra jobs to cover missing colleagues and to some degree this is where any inefficiency is creeping in, that hardly anyone is now doing the work they were employed for or trained in, they are doing fragments of 2-3 other people's jobs and are adapting very well.  Such steps are fine in the short-term but they are hardening as the weeks and months go by and there is a fear that when the 'music stops' with the reorganisation in the Summer that people will be left fixed with this collection of functions that is not rational, simply dished out ad hoc.  I am told that staff should 'rise to the challenges' and seek regrading if they feel their work is now of a higher level, though, of course, that takes time and is very uncertain especially with a freeze on posts and promotions. 

Repeatedly I am told that the units would not be in this position if they had more of a 'can do' culture.  The sense that they are working below full effort is not based on any objective measurement it is simply because someone who resigned from one of the units a year ago had complained that they were 'bored' in their post without exploring why that might have been the case; it was simply assumed she had too little work to do and that assumption, from one person's passing opinion, has become the basis for all approaches to the units even while the numbers have continued to fall and new work assigned to them.

For challenging, what in my mind is an inaccurate perception, I have been summoned to three very unpleasant meetings in which I have been accused of being 'disloyal' to the management, and then ironically accused of trying to create an adversarial environment in the company, wherease in fact I have been battling to reduce the feeling of 'them' and 'us' that has been built up and that I was dropped into.  My management style was well known to my boss before I was taken on.  I had an hour of interviewing and activities and am always explicit about how I manage.  Ironically I was told I was taken on because of my sensitivity to the workforce which is certainly what seems necessary at this time not just because of new work and the economic situation but also company reorganisation.  With six months to go we have little idea what the company will look like or how various units will be grouped.  We keep being told there will be no job losses, but that is little help as we cannot plan our work for the year ahead with so little information.

Of course, a lot of this stems from the attitude of my boss who even back in 1983 would have jarred with how businesses are actually run let alone with current management practice within the company and best practice as outlined in all the training I have attended over the past six years.  She accused my staff of lying to me constantly and accused me of not only being disloyal but also naive.  In that case, the last laugh is on her for employing me for my expertise and experience.  It turned out this week that once I was appointed I was used to threaten others in the company with her saying that I would have some kind of enforcer role for her policies.  The level of fear this has engendered is unpleasant.  One colleague at another site stopped me mentioning something only indirectly related to the manager, about a policy not even the woman herself.  The level of concern reminded me of the Eastern bloc or contemporary China.  The woman might have been over-cautious but her manner was as if she expected the room to be bugged or one of her staff to betray any views she expressed.  You cannot have discussions about working effectively in such an environment.

My challenging of my boss's views led to me subsequently being told that what I was writing in the term of mundane minutes and emails was in fact would form the basis of disciplinary action and might even be the basis of litigation against me.  I was accused of trying to create 'a resistance movement' in the company! I had expressed to colleagues the need for more staff in our unit to carry out the tasks we have been assigned and to end any secondments until we have less pressure, but apparently that is improper to face up to reality and I should have kept on with the lie that they were not working hard enough.  My first contact with the union at this company was to ask for advice for facing disciplinary action despite having only worked for four weeks so far at the place.

The challenge is, of course, that for the second time in my career I have a boss who believes that her view of things is the only truth.  She does not accept that there are differences of opinion or that she might not have the total facts.  Consequently someone who even diverges mildly from her opinions is 'lying' (she lays this accusation against people very freely) and as a result must have some perverse and sinister motive that leads them to say anything contrary to the 'truth'.  In her world there is no room for compromise.  Her talk of loyalty is not about loyalty to the management, let alone to the company as a whole, but to her. We will all fail in this regard, because we cannot be inside her head and see things the way she does, so even those who are very loyal to her in person, often slip up, especially as she has been loath to give us any detail of the future she wants.  I have now stood up to her three times in person and fortunately she now feels that rather than being her enforcer I am beyond the pale and she will not work with me any more.  Of course, steadily I have found that she has irritated many others on my level in the same way.  She seems entirely oblivious to the damage she is doing to morale at middle management to shop floor level among the staff, persisting with her view that all of us are wrong and are lying.  She is not the first boss I have had like this, the previous one I had to make an official complaint against because she would not accept that a member of staff had been bullying colleagues over a sustained period of time and so felt that any complaints against him were 'lies' as they were out of step with her view of the man.

I have had enough of bosses like this.  You wonder how they get to where they are as they must irritate the people above them as well, but I suppose when someone does not have authority over you, then the impact is far less.  The arrogance of this kind of bosses is incredible and whilst I wish no-one harm, you want them to have a kind of 'A Christmas Carol' experience to waken them up to the reality which is not their 'truth'.  I can see why Charles Dickens wrote that story about the employer Scrooge.  Whilst it is set more than a century ago, such characters seem unfortunately persistent in real life.  More practically if I had not been so badly off financially I would have resigned from my post last week, less than a month through.  Of course, my boss would write me off as a liar who was misguided about reality and so it would make no impact on how she saw what is actually going on in the company beneath her; it could not penetrate the cast iron assumptions that she clings to.  Naturally, I see no future with this company and in January will again start applying for jobs hoping that there are more companies where David Brent rather than Margaret Thatcher is the dominant norm for running the place.

Trying Not To Be David Brent

Having come back to work after four months of unemployment into a more senior position overseeing two offices, three managers and two supervisors, I have quickly become painfully aware of how easy it is to fall into stereotypical office behaviour.  I have noticed that in my attempt to get to know the staff I have been appointed over, I am in real danger of behaving like the David Brent character, played by Ricky Gervais (who also co-wrote the series) in the BBC series, 'The Office' (14 episodes; 2001-3).  Like him, I am middle aged, probably a bit overweight and try to come over as confident when in fact being a little uncertain of my position (I was surprised to be given the job over the 3 other candidates and as it is do not know if I will even have any staff following the restructuring in July 2010).  He tried to be 'in' with the employees and also to be an effective manager but ended up acting in highly embarrassing and ineffectual ways and ultimately being made redundant.  I have noticed that my attempts to engage my staff in conversations have sometimes similarly backfired leaving me feeling similarly humiliated, though perhaps I am better than Brent in that I realise when I have made a faux pas rather than ploughing on regardless.  I found 'The Office' pretty unfunny.  For anyone who has worked in such an enivronment (it was set in a stationery company - Wernham Hogg [their slogan 'Life is Stationery' with its apparent unconscious pun on 'stationary' reminds me always of the slogan for Shanks refuse comapny: 'Shanks. Waste Solutions']), in its Slough office but is applicable to many industries in many UK towns.

I am conscious of using 'management speak'.  Sometimes it is difficult to avoid it when people promise to 'keep me in the loop'.  I have avoided 'touching base' with anyone or thinking about 'blue sky solutions' and certainly have not 'run it up the flagpole and see who salutes', but today I was charged with ensuring there was a 'can-do culture' in my offices after I protested that the constant banging on about 'efficiency' was translated by staff as simply accusing them of being lazy.  The most comic instance of this was when in a meeting at a previous company a member of staff complained that they and their employees were being 'sucked off into other activities' and then there was discussion about whether other people had been 'sucked off', a wealth of Frankie Howerdesque innuendo followed.

There are many potential pitfalls in the week ahead, notably at the office Christmas party next week.  I have insisted I will not be dancing so avoiding a very Brent-like appearance.  Striking the balance between frosty and being chatty with people who live very different lives (all but one of them is a woman) and who as yet I do not know at all well, is a challenge.  You do not want to walk past them silently or simply grunting a greeting or farewell so you flail around for some common topic to talk about and you can only say so much about the weather, especially as my office has no exterior windows.  This is treacherous ground and you end up saying something about how alert a person looks and that is risky.  One of my staff was sitting at her desk with her eyes closed and I bowled up commenting on how she must have been tired by her lunchtime shopping whereas in fact a colleague I could not hear was talking to her and she was listening attentively.  This made me look inconsiderate by talking over this colleague and simply babbling out foolish comments.  I now feel uneasy when around those colleagues.  I have had to adopt a more aloof demeanour but am always concerned that puts distance between you and staff and so you do not get alerted to developing problems until it is too late.  It is particularly critical in the current post where the staff have had their morale constantly battered by my predecessor still with the company who felt the workers never work hard enough and explicitly said they lie to her about the burdens of her work.

To some degree her manner is a little like some of Brent's superiors in 'The Office' but she is also like more senior managers I have encountered in real life.  As yet I have not reached those lofty heights and so can only speculate whether being up there blinds you to the fact that there is more than one way to do something.  She is the second boss I have had who thinks their is her perception of how things are which is 'true' and any other perception is not only wrong but if articulated then it is a 'lie' despite evidence to support it.  Different opinions are not lies.  I do wonder if this is one reason why British business is always in such a state because of this dogmatic attitude that seems all too prevalent.  The problem for me is that now my boss feels that I am helping to promote the 'lies' and so am disloyal to the management tier when in fact anyone in my position would have come to much the same conclusion that the staff are overworked and under-resourced and uncertain about the future (there is no idea in the company how it will be structured by the summer time) further sapping morale.  Whining on about seizing opportunities, being adaptable and working more efficiently is going to do nothing to improve the situation simply to undermine the staff even further.  If I follow her line, work will not get done, but if I follow the line I feel is appropriate I know I will only get a bad reference.  I find myself in lose/lose situations quite often, but here I reall feel as if I have stepped right in and am now up to my neck in one.