I am now in line to be kicked out of my job. It is not on the grounds that I have stolen money or harrassed anyone or even was incompetent, it is simply that my manager dislikes me. She somehow sees my very person let alone my manner, offensive. She complains I repeat myself and write too long emails and yet goes on at length repeatedly around the office whining the same stories to everyone about her washing machine. She complains I do not meet the 'high standards' of the department, primarily on the basis that I lack 'team spirit' a very ill-defined criterion which basically comes down to whatever she thinks it should be. It has nothing to do with being a colleague as I have worked successfully with the other seven people in my office and tens of others across the company. What is alarming is how a single manager has so much power, how she can set different rules for me to my colleagues. I am supposed to eat elsewhere, I am supposed to knock more loudly on her door than my colleagues, I have to notify her in a particular way if I have to go to the doctor, something my colleagues do not have to do. She complains that I am too outspoken but also that I defer to her too much. There are no objective measures of her criteria which allows her to say such contradictory things at one time. She spends so much time socialising with senior staff, taking up a large part of the working day, that they take her views without question. I have tried to talk to her manager and simply have been told he cannot discuss the case. There is no-one I can turn to bar the union representative and I have no idea what you do in such situations if you are not in a union.
For me the severity of this step is great. I am liable to be kicked out with no pay and so will immediately default on the mortgage payments on my house meaning that my fears of having it repossessed have only been delayed by a year. It seems unlikely that I will work again as I will be unable to get anything but a highly biased reference from my manager. I have explored the problems with this particular manager before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-british-managers-so-bad.html
Looking back I wonder if I could have done anything different to forestall this problem and the answer seems to be no. The case against me has been built on such insubstantial complaints that if it had not been these then it would have been something else. Basically the difficulties were two emails which apparently were critical of how my unit worked, though you would struggle to find that meaning in what I wrote. I suppose that I should not have said that I had no ability to control scheduling, the thing that the correspondent was making a mild complaint against. Apparently I was supposed to accept blame for things I cannot control. I was told I should not have said a colleague was off sick, even though that is completely the reverse approach to the previous place I worked. There they felt if you did not reveal the cause of the shortage of staff as something legitimate like illness then you were effectively criticising the company for not looking ahead sensibly to recruit sufficient staff. A more established in my office made the identical error some weeks later and while he has been chastised for it he is not being kicked out. I also said that my job did not involve cleaning up, which is a statement of fact. However, in a twisted way, this has been portrayed as being an unacceptable statement, on the grounds that it is both disparaging to cleaners who do a wonderful job; makes me appear as arrogant due to my qualifications and experience and yet also is said to show I have no pride in myself and thus, by implication no pride in my colleagues, thus violating the team spirit requirement. This statement was apparently so offensive that it led to a complaint being telephoned in by a visitor.
The last damning charge is that I did not inform my manager correctly before going to a hospital appointment despite it being in the Outlook system she can access for weeks and me talking about it with her for 10 minutes precisely a day before I went. Apparently it is fine that she forgot the conversation and she argues that she cannot afford the few seconds it takes to check the Outlook calendar. It is also apparently acceptable for her to stamp around the office demanding where I am, when just asking one of the colleagues could have revealed that. My behaviour is portrayed as 'discourteous' whereas hers is apparently beyond reproach though to most readers I would assume it would appear at best childish at worst idiotic, but maybe I am wrong in modern British society.
This is the key factor: indignation. In our powerless society, it seems that no-one can be anyone I am the first to admit that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. In addition, I have never done anything that is so severe it should lose you your job. Is it fair that individual words, assuming they are not racist, sexist or otherwise insulting should be enough to bring down your career? Maybe in this era of unemployment it is sufficient and we should all look at every single word we use thinking how it might be turned against us.
Of course, it is impossible to see through someone else's eyes, so what to us might be anondyne, apparently can be highly inappropriate to someone else. I have neither violated what society would deem acceptable nor what my company does, just what my manager 'feels' is unacceptable. That is not even direct criticism, but apparently something that seems to her as being insufficiently ardent in singing the praises of the unit she runs. From my historical knowledge such mentality seems very much like a personality cult and I am someone like those who stopped clapping some seconds before the rest of the people having heard one of Stalin's or Mao's speeches. Of course, I will not be killed but at the age of 44, my career is over and I have effectively become unemployable for the rest of my life.
As I have noted before, it is no longer sufficient in the UK to complain about something, you have to stamp and shout at your loudest. Neither is it sufficient to be irritated, annoyed or put out, you must be utterly appalled, completely indignant, generally way out of proportion to what has happened: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/12/rise-of-indignitaries.html I suppose given the prevalence of this trend in society we should not be surprised to find it in the workplace. It is exacerbated by procedures like performance reviews, appraisals, probation periods, fixed-term contracts which put immense power into the hands of often poorly trained managers certainly without an ability to detach personal prejudice from their judgements of work effectiveness. It is a kind of focused discrimination, not on race, age or gender, but simply on who they like or dislike. Staff of all levels will not discuss or debate or really just complain they become indignant as if even the most minor misunderstanding has been concocted with malicious intent, both offensive in itself and aimed at bringing the company into disrepute. Of course, none of these things is done that way. However, not being indignant gives away the few grams of power they feel they have snatched and, horror of horrors, they might be forced to admit that they are sometimes wrong, something my manager seems incapable of acknowledging. Thus, by being so offended, she can play, 'it is so terrible I cannot even talk about it' card, shutting down any reasonable rational debate.
As I have noted before, the clamping down on discussion let alone the suggestion of different approaches or Heaven forbid, even mild criticism, is damaging to British business: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html I have no idea when I might work again and it seems unlikely that it will ever be for a large company. I am naturally bitter that years of study and hard work can be trashed by the prejudice of a single individual, but I imagine it is a common occurrence. There was nothing I could have done once I got the job. If I kept quiet I was being rude and not taking sufficient initiative, if I spoke I was being rude and arrogant. There was never a way of winning and never any redemption for my 'offences'. I just post this as a warning for people who might be in similar positions, I do pity you, yet I fear this approach in the workplace will become even more common as incompetent people remain in position and unemployment rises higher.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Powerpoint Heretic?
I keep expecting the use of PowerPoint, the system for making presentations to die in business. My predictions of 2010 are not being lived up to: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/09/managing-time-at-work-challenge-of.html and as I highlight here many of the problems persist. PowerPoint is now coming up to 22 years old. Whilst different facilities are available, the basic approach of landscape-orientated slides which can hold about four items of information has remained. The criticisms of PowerPoint notably by Edward Tufte from 2003 onwards do not seem to have dented its usage. It is not a good format for presenting the kind of complex information that is often necessary to be discussed in business. In some ways it stops the content becoming over-specialised for a general audience, but the constraints imposed by making the words fit to the slide size (often hemmed in further by company logos and frames) and yet still be legible often in large rooms means that the content is over-simplified.
Further problems come from how easy it is to make numerous PowerPoint slides so that you end up with a situation in which the audience is 'hypnotised' by the passage of similarly looking content without engaging with the content. It is unsurprising that watching a procession of very similarly looking objects, pretty much like a herd of sheep going through a gateway leads the audience to fall asleep. My principle is that you should have half as many slides as you have minutes for a presentation, so if you are presenting for 30 minutes you should have no more than 15 slides; saying that 30 slides in 60 minutes seems excessive and perhaps there is a sliding scale with the ratio falling to a third by the time you reach the hour mark. However, this view is unpopular. A colleague severely criticised me when I put forward this principle saying that he found a presentation of 10 minutes which used 98 slides to be acceptable, a rate of one slide every 6.1 seconds. He said many contained a sequence of single images and I said, well, then do not try to make a 'flick book' on screen these days it is simpler and less distracting to have a looping animation of what you are showing. It is ironic that PowerPoint facilities such as animation are, in most cases, just used as decoration (and a distraction) rather than actually communicating a point in a more appropriate way.
People read about 70 words per minute at a relaxed pace for content more sophisticated than 'simple', it rises to 100 words for simple content, though I know some business schools who expect 250 words per minute from their students. Now, this means that for an average slide, at 70 words per minute you would expect it to take about 45 seconds to read it given the amount of content there. However, these reading rates are derived from books where the idea is often continued on for a number of sentences. PowerPoint is renowned to providing a whole series of different ideas or factors quickly in succession. Thus, while your eye can look over the content in 45 seconds the brain may take longer, especially as there is recent evidence that such mental faculties begin deteriorating from the age of 45 so encompassing much a business audience.
Demands for the audience further diffuse their ability to concentrate on content. Many audiences become indignant if you do not provide handouts of the content you are parading on the slides. However, if you do that you add a third form of input into their minds on top of your voice and whatever is on the screen. PowerPoint has increasingly enabled the use of audio and video resources so how do you put them on to a handout, print them out as a 'flick book'? In addition, anyone who asks for handouts is effectively saying that they are not actually going to engage with what you are saying, they will flick through it later. I accept that people with particular disabilities benefit from handouts but then they are using them instead of what is on the screen not in addition to that content. There have long been slide presentations, dating back to magic lantern shows of the 19th century and many of them were very tedious. What the difference has been with PowerPoint is the ability to add words on to them so duplicating visual and aural communication of the same message, especially as so many presenters simply read from the slide. I always feel that this suggests the audience is illiterate and the presenter is filling the role of the mice who read the headings in the movie 'Babe' (1995) the director knowing that the reading age of much of the audience was pretty low (it is a children's movie).
Due to these difficulties, PowerPoint presentations often become a ritual rather than any form of communication. It is like watching holy communion and brings similar benefits to you. As yet I have not heard of any priests using PowerPoint for their sermons though I may be mistaken. Religious officers have a history of knowing how to present, it is something that they have been doing for centuries. Of course, some people feel that they can brighten up their content with unrelated images or even random sounds.
I am fascinated with the industry of creating 'business images' often surreal portrayals of 'business people' faking a meeting or bellowing at each other through megaphones or wandering around a desert pulling something like a ball and chain. I wonder what the working conditions are like for these people who have to model strange activities in these deserts. If the image whether a random shape or one of these photographs is of use, why not simply have it to represent the idea you are trying to communicate? Why have the words and the picture too? Of course, in international business images can be culturally confusing though I also note having worked with Americans and South Africans that words even in the same language can obfuscate more than they can clarify.
Back in the 2000s I found such any different approaches to the slog through numerous slides was challenged and I was told that it showed I lacked ability in using PowerPoint, apparently a necessary minimum requirement. There was no discussion of the intellectual engagement, purely a focus on the cosmetic aspect. It was more acceptable to have an excessive quantity of slides for the time allotted than to try a different approach which stepped away from the ingrained expectations of PowerPoint. I certainly believe that 'less is more' in terms of PowerPoint. Often you can put questions up which you then answer orally for the audience. You can use it to present diagrams of illustrations that provoke discussion. Ironically, Bill Bailey in his 'Dandelion Mind' tour does this surprisingly well when discussing 'Doubting' Thomas in art. Part of the problem of these approaches are that they are dependent on using PowerPoint in the way it was designed to be used, i.e. as an aid to an oral presentation. Now, however, you have to prepare slides for different purposes. I am now habitually asked to put my slides on to websites or email them to people. Thus, I need to have enough words on them that someone who does not have me standing beside them talking about the content can still understand them.
Increasingly I make two versions for these different audiences so reducing the benefit of the time saving offered by PowerPoint. However, someone looking for the content to read online or be emailed to them would far better receiving a piece of prose, a report going into the details in some detail or simply summarising them. There is no point in having slides if you are simply going to print them out or read them on your own computer screen, you might as well simply have a body of text including appropriate illustrations. You would not expect to put pages of a Word document up at a presentation so why do you expect to give presentation slides to someone as if they were a report? PowerPoint has become so fetishised that it is difficult for many people in business to think about communicating without using it even when it is not an appropriate medium for what you are saying.
Perhaps my views are beginning to take root in some isolated places. Whilst I am being pressured to write more and more wordy texts so that I can go through the ritual of twisting round so I can read my own words from an inappropriate way of presenting them, i.e. vast and close to my face, a young colleague has listened to my views. I have now attended two presentations in which he has eschewed PowerPoint except to introduce the fact that he is not going to use it. At the last presentation he pointed out to the audience that, whilst they were apparently not aware of it they actually knew all the points he was about to raise about customer demands already. He gave them three questions and in the space of fifteen minutes the audience of fourteen came up with all the findings that he would have presented. Perhaps they felt cheated of their ritual of slide watching, but I have a feeling that they gained the message more effectively. We need to keep reminding ourselves that it is the effectiveness of what we are doing in terms of communicating what we have to say that must be the starting point. Otherwise it is like picking up a hammer or a saw and struggling to think what we could build with them rather than planning to build something and then taking the appropriate tool out of the box. Trying to defy the dogmatic, orthodox PowerPoint approach, however, may expose you to being treated like a heretic of old.
Further problems come from how easy it is to make numerous PowerPoint slides so that you end up with a situation in which the audience is 'hypnotised' by the passage of similarly looking content without engaging with the content. It is unsurprising that watching a procession of very similarly looking objects, pretty much like a herd of sheep going through a gateway leads the audience to fall asleep. My principle is that you should have half as many slides as you have minutes for a presentation, so if you are presenting for 30 minutes you should have no more than 15 slides; saying that 30 slides in 60 minutes seems excessive and perhaps there is a sliding scale with the ratio falling to a third by the time you reach the hour mark. However, this view is unpopular. A colleague severely criticised me when I put forward this principle saying that he found a presentation of 10 minutes which used 98 slides to be acceptable, a rate of one slide every 6.1 seconds. He said many contained a sequence of single images and I said, well, then do not try to make a 'flick book' on screen these days it is simpler and less distracting to have a looping animation of what you are showing. It is ironic that PowerPoint facilities such as animation are, in most cases, just used as decoration (and a distraction) rather than actually communicating a point in a more appropriate way.
People read about 70 words per minute at a relaxed pace for content more sophisticated than 'simple', it rises to 100 words for simple content, though I know some business schools who expect 250 words per minute from their students. Now, this means that for an average slide, at 70 words per minute you would expect it to take about 45 seconds to read it given the amount of content there. However, these reading rates are derived from books where the idea is often continued on for a number of sentences. PowerPoint is renowned to providing a whole series of different ideas or factors quickly in succession. Thus, while your eye can look over the content in 45 seconds the brain may take longer, especially as there is recent evidence that such mental faculties begin deteriorating from the age of 45 so encompassing much a business audience.
Demands for the audience further diffuse their ability to concentrate on content. Many audiences become indignant if you do not provide handouts of the content you are parading on the slides. However, if you do that you add a third form of input into their minds on top of your voice and whatever is on the screen. PowerPoint has increasingly enabled the use of audio and video resources so how do you put them on to a handout, print them out as a 'flick book'? In addition, anyone who asks for handouts is effectively saying that they are not actually going to engage with what you are saying, they will flick through it later. I accept that people with particular disabilities benefit from handouts but then they are using them instead of what is on the screen not in addition to that content. There have long been slide presentations, dating back to magic lantern shows of the 19th century and many of them were very tedious. What the difference has been with PowerPoint is the ability to add words on to them so duplicating visual and aural communication of the same message, especially as so many presenters simply read from the slide. I always feel that this suggests the audience is illiterate and the presenter is filling the role of the mice who read the headings in the movie 'Babe' (1995) the director knowing that the reading age of much of the audience was pretty low (it is a children's movie).
Due to these difficulties, PowerPoint presentations often become a ritual rather than any form of communication. It is like watching holy communion and brings similar benefits to you. As yet I have not heard of any priests using PowerPoint for their sermons though I may be mistaken. Religious officers have a history of knowing how to present, it is something that they have been doing for centuries. Of course, some people feel that they can brighten up their content with unrelated images or even random sounds.
I am fascinated with the industry of creating 'business images' often surreal portrayals of 'business people' faking a meeting or bellowing at each other through megaphones or wandering around a desert pulling something like a ball and chain. I wonder what the working conditions are like for these people who have to model strange activities in these deserts. If the image whether a random shape or one of these photographs is of use, why not simply have it to represent the idea you are trying to communicate? Why have the words and the picture too? Of course, in international business images can be culturally confusing though I also note having worked with Americans and South Africans that words even in the same language can obfuscate more than they can clarify.
Back in the 2000s I found such any different approaches to the slog through numerous slides was challenged and I was told that it showed I lacked ability in using PowerPoint, apparently a necessary minimum requirement. There was no discussion of the intellectual engagement, purely a focus on the cosmetic aspect. It was more acceptable to have an excessive quantity of slides for the time allotted than to try a different approach which stepped away from the ingrained expectations of PowerPoint. I certainly believe that 'less is more' in terms of PowerPoint. Often you can put questions up which you then answer orally for the audience. You can use it to present diagrams of illustrations that provoke discussion. Ironically, Bill Bailey in his 'Dandelion Mind' tour does this surprisingly well when discussing 'Doubting' Thomas in art. Part of the problem of these approaches are that they are dependent on using PowerPoint in the way it was designed to be used, i.e. as an aid to an oral presentation. Now, however, you have to prepare slides for different purposes. I am now habitually asked to put my slides on to websites or email them to people. Thus, I need to have enough words on them that someone who does not have me standing beside them talking about the content can still understand them.
Increasingly I make two versions for these different audiences so reducing the benefit of the time saving offered by PowerPoint. However, someone looking for the content to read online or be emailed to them would far better receiving a piece of prose, a report going into the details in some detail or simply summarising them. There is no point in having slides if you are simply going to print them out or read them on your own computer screen, you might as well simply have a body of text including appropriate illustrations. You would not expect to put pages of a Word document up at a presentation so why do you expect to give presentation slides to someone as if they were a report? PowerPoint has become so fetishised that it is difficult for many people in business to think about communicating without using it even when it is not an appropriate medium for what you are saying.
Perhaps my views are beginning to take root in some isolated places. Whilst I am being pressured to write more and more wordy texts so that I can go through the ritual of twisting round so I can read my own words from an inappropriate way of presenting them, i.e. vast and close to my face, a young colleague has listened to my views. I have now attended two presentations in which he has eschewed PowerPoint except to introduce the fact that he is not going to use it. At the last presentation he pointed out to the audience that, whilst they were apparently not aware of it they actually knew all the points he was about to raise about customer demands already. He gave them three questions and in the space of fifteen minutes the audience of fourteen came up with all the findings that he would have presented. Perhaps they felt cheated of their ritual of slide watching, but I have a feeling that they gained the message more effectively. We need to keep reminding ourselves that it is the effectiveness of what we are doing in terms of communicating what we have to say that must be the starting point. Otherwise it is like picking up a hammer or a saw and struggling to think what we could build with them rather than planning to build something and then taking the appropriate tool out of the box. Trying to defy the dogmatic, orthodox PowerPoint approach, however, may expose you to being treated like a heretic of old.
Monday, 5 December 2011
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.
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.
Friday, 3 June 2011
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.
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.
Monday, 7 February 2011
'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.
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.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
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.
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.
Monday, 7 December 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Living in a Guesthouse
As regular readers may have detected I am no longer unemployed. After being put under investigation the moment I signed on as unemployed, spending £5500 in savings (very fortunate that I had predicted unemployment for over a year and had saved hard) and getting only three days' work in four months, I have now got a full-time job. It is promotion, a little more pay and has greater responsibilities, which is useful for when I have to apply for work again next year. It is only a 1-year contract which means I will have to start applying for jobs, probably by Easter at the latest and even then none of my bosses can tell me whether my job will be there let alone in the current form beyond July because of restructuring. However, I must be grateful for small mercies as it does mean some money before Christmas and at least a short break from hour upon hour of filling in application forms running to 5000 words.
The job is 130Km from where I live and for one year there seemed no point in selling my house and moving. I thought to rent a small flat and stay in it during the week and return home on the weekends. The trouble was that it soon became apparent that whilst rents were much the same as in my home town, though the new town is smaller and has fewer places available, I could not get over the hump of affording the deposit on a flat, usually £1,100-£1,500 (€1208-€1648; US$1826-US$2490) for a one-bedroomed flat or a studio flat. I would have needed to get the job three months ago to have been able to afford that. It turns out my new employer should have recruited me (or someone) at least three months back as the running down of staff in the offices I manage means we have now gone the point of no-return for many activities, we just have too few staff, let alone experienced ones. I have pressed for more recruitment but even if we got someone straight away we are going to run into problems before they are in post and working effectively. That, however, is another symptom of British business, you pare so far back to the bone to the extent that in the next steps you take the leg will drop off and you find you cannot walk any more.
Anyway, the aspects of the business aside, I had a choice of commuting 260Km to and from work each day through rural southern England, beautiful yes, but very hazardous given I come and go in darkness and the heavy winds and rain we have been having or I move into a hotel or guesthouse. That is what I did. It might seem that paying £40 (€44; US$66) per night would be more expensive than renting a flat. Of course, I can rent by the night so I do not have to find the deposit I do not have and also I do not have to pay for gas, electricity and water; nor do I have to pay for a separate television licence for the flat and I also get out of having a second council tax bill. Every local council wants you to pay in full even if you only live in their town for part of the week so it is very likely I would not be able to get out of paying in my home town and in my work town. Food bills of course would be cheaper, as the guesthouse only provides breakfast. However, I can eat subsidised at work and I found anyway that if I eat two cooked meals a day (on the first night I ate in a local pub) I simply feel bloated. Sandwiches bought from a shop are proving more than enough for my evening meal. Of course over the Christmas period, unlike with a flat, if I am not in my work town I have to pay nothing. It may not be ideal but it is less ridiculous than it might first appear. In the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions my employer is happy for me to work from home one day per week saving even more cash.
One thing I would warn you if you intend to visit a provincial British town in the next few weeks, is arrange your accommodation early. I ended up at the eighth hotel I tried, all the others were full. Having got on alright with the current hotel I tried to book again for next week to find almost all the rooms had already been booked and I could only have more expensive ones. Why so many people are rushing to very ordinary British towns, mid-week, I have no idea. Potential guests keep turning up at the guesthouse where I am now and being turned away, implying that demand still remains high and possibly unsatisfied. Perhaps it suggests that the kind of working-living pattern I have adopted is far more common than you might think. Being a British location none of the guests actually talk to each other. We all already have our selected places at breakfast and only those in groups actually speak, the rest eat in silence. Today a woman with her partner appeared, but otherwise all of the residents of this place seem to be male and working either in offices or building sites.
In some ways it feels very traditional as if I were in a Charles Dickens or an Arnold Bennett novel or perhaps in a movie like 'The Lavender Hill Mob' (1951) or 'The Ladykillers' (primarily the 1955 version, but the principle pretty much stands for the 2004 one as well).
The difference is that in this age in which space is maximised and we are all so very much more private than we ever were fifty years ago, we do not all sit down to dinner with the landlady at the head asking about our day. Instead we all hide away in our rooms, equipped with private bathrooms (though this institution does have 'standard' rooms from which residents must go down the corridor to use the bathroom or toilet and that is very traditional) and our slimline televisions fitted into the wall. In addition, very handy for bloggers the place has wi-fi. It has quite a weak signal, some from properties nearby are stronger and I tried piggybacking on a neighbouring hotel's stronger network to no avail. Now I have stopped my laptop whining that I am not connected to the company system, which seems a mad difficulty given that laptops are designed to be taken off site, I can sit in my room listening to the odd bumps and the groans of the plumbing, coming from neighbouring rooms fitted together as if we were a three-dimensional tetris game. Though it is a small space and I will be gone from here tomorrow to spend the weekend at home and I have been allocated a different room for next week and a third for the week after, it does feel like a refuge. Perhaps something I really need at present away from my usual setting and engaging with work once again and work in which the bosses are pretty challenging. I was appointed over other candidates due to my ability to manage staff and get the best of them, but the first task I am assigned is to get more work out of fewer people when the existing batch are already working flat out and only completing work through (unpaid) overtime.
Anyway, this was not how I envisaged the next phase of my working life. This stage may be ephemeral but it is interesting to end up with quite a different lifestyle one which owes a lot to historic patterns of work and residence and yet has many elements of the challenges of modern British society from people being non-communicative to ICT problems laid on top.
The job is 130Km from where I live and for one year there seemed no point in selling my house and moving. I thought to rent a small flat and stay in it during the week and return home on the weekends. The trouble was that it soon became apparent that whilst rents were much the same as in my home town, though the new town is smaller and has fewer places available, I could not get over the hump of affording the deposit on a flat, usually £1,100-£1,500 (€1208-€1648; US$1826-US$2490) for a one-bedroomed flat or a studio flat. I would have needed to get the job three months ago to have been able to afford that. It turns out my new employer should have recruited me (or someone) at least three months back as the running down of staff in the offices I manage means we have now gone the point of no-return for many activities, we just have too few staff, let alone experienced ones. I have pressed for more recruitment but even if we got someone straight away we are going to run into problems before they are in post and working effectively. That, however, is another symptom of British business, you pare so far back to the bone to the extent that in the next steps you take the leg will drop off and you find you cannot walk any more.
Anyway, the aspects of the business aside, I had a choice of commuting 260Km to and from work each day through rural southern England, beautiful yes, but very hazardous given I come and go in darkness and the heavy winds and rain we have been having or I move into a hotel or guesthouse. That is what I did. It might seem that paying £40 (€44; US$66) per night would be more expensive than renting a flat. Of course, I can rent by the night so I do not have to find the deposit I do not have and also I do not have to pay for gas, electricity and water; nor do I have to pay for a separate television licence for the flat and I also get out of having a second council tax bill. Every local council wants you to pay in full even if you only live in their town for part of the week so it is very likely I would not be able to get out of paying in my home town and in my work town. Food bills of course would be cheaper, as the guesthouse only provides breakfast. However, I can eat subsidised at work and I found anyway that if I eat two cooked meals a day (on the first night I ate in a local pub) I simply feel bloated. Sandwiches bought from a shop are proving more than enough for my evening meal. Of course over the Christmas period, unlike with a flat, if I am not in my work town I have to pay nothing. It may not be ideal but it is less ridiculous than it might first appear. In the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions my employer is happy for me to work from home one day per week saving even more cash.
One thing I would warn you if you intend to visit a provincial British town in the next few weeks, is arrange your accommodation early. I ended up at the eighth hotel I tried, all the others were full. Having got on alright with the current hotel I tried to book again for next week to find almost all the rooms had already been booked and I could only have more expensive ones. Why so many people are rushing to very ordinary British towns, mid-week, I have no idea. Potential guests keep turning up at the guesthouse where I am now and being turned away, implying that demand still remains high and possibly unsatisfied. Perhaps it suggests that the kind of working-living pattern I have adopted is far more common than you might think. Being a British location none of the guests actually talk to each other. We all already have our selected places at breakfast and only those in groups actually speak, the rest eat in silence. Today a woman with her partner appeared, but otherwise all of the residents of this place seem to be male and working either in offices or building sites.
In some ways it feels very traditional as if I were in a Charles Dickens or an Arnold Bennett novel or perhaps in a movie like 'The Lavender Hill Mob' (1951) or 'The Ladykillers' (primarily the 1955 version, but the principle pretty much stands for the 2004 one as well).
The difference is that in this age in which space is maximised and we are all so very much more private than we ever were fifty years ago, we do not all sit down to dinner with the landlady at the head asking about our day. Instead we all hide away in our rooms, equipped with private bathrooms (though this institution does have 'standard' rooms from which residents must go down the corridor to use the bathroom or toilet and that is very traditional) and our slimline televisions fitted into the wall. In addition, very handy for bloggers the place has wi-fi. It has quite a weak signal, some from properties nearby are stronger and I tried piggybacking on a neighbouring hotel's stronger network to no avail. Now I have stopped my laptop whining that I am not connected to the company system, which seems a mad difficulty given that laptops are designed to be taken off site, I can sit in my room listening to the odd bumps and the groans of the plumbing, coming from neighbouring rooms fitted together as if we were a three-dimensional tetris game. Though it is a small space and I will be gone from here tomorrow to spend the weekend at home and I have been allocated a different room for next week and a third for the week after, it does feel like a refuge. Perhaps something I really need at present away from my usual setting and engaging with work once again and work in which the bosses are pretty challenging. I was appointed over other candidates due to my ability to manage staff and get the best of them, but the first task I am assigned is to get more work out of fewer people when the existing batch are already working flat out and only completing work through (unpaid) overtime.
Anyway, this was not how I envisaged the next phase of my working life. This stage may be ephemeral but it is interesting to end up with quite a different lifestyle one which owes a lot to historic patterns of work and residence and yet has many elements of the challenges of modern British society from people being non-communicative to ICT problems laid on top.
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