Month: March 2017

I just picked up on this quote here 

I spent Saturday with some of our volunteers talking about how we might evolve our local networks and communities. We’ve made real progress in our relationships with our volunteers in this area – and I know this because people keep on stopping me to tell me that we have. 

So I’m sitting on a table with people talking about potential next steps and somebody said to me ‘I don’t know why you just didn’t do this when you started. It obviously needs to change’. 

My answer was in two parts. The first got a nod. The second part got a nod and a laugh. 

i) I wouldn’t have listened long or hard enough at that point to be confident I was doing what was right, rather than what I felt to be right. My decisions wouldn’t have been informed by enough data points

ii) You would have probably told me to bog off as you wouldn’t have trusted me 

There is truth in both of those statements. 

Change takes time, restraint and trust. Before I could ask a group of people to consider change I had to show that we (the organisation, my team and I) were committed to supporting them in the now and understood what they already did and what we wouldn’t want to lose. Then I had to give them confidence that the change would be better (we are still talking…) and that it wouldn’t break what we already had. 

There is debate over what percentage of change programmes fail. Whatever that percentage is my bitter experience tells me that without investing in understanding the now and the pains of transition any attempts to change will, more often than not, struggle. 

The challenge isn’t setting the vision, that’s the easy bit. It’s getting people to want to build a sturdy bridge to it and helping them understand you will get your hands dirty with too. If it is your vision then that’s the least you need to commit if you want it to be other people’s vision too. 

I was on one of the first tubes this morning. On the way to catch an early train from King’s Cross. It’s strange to pass through a station this large when it is devoid of people. It’s beautiful and unnerving all at once. I missed the bustle. For all our complaints about hating the commute, for those of us who travel in London regularly, there is a safety and familiarity in the crush. 

An acceptance and understanding of a shared rules in our own community. Where we know to queue for the Jubilee line, but no other ones. And where we know which signs to ignore in our most familiar stations to shave 30 seconds off a transfer. Millions of people who have never met coordinating their movements together. It’s both unnatural and a beautiful thing. 

By the time most of you wake life will be carrying on as normal for some and be changed forever for others. London, as a city, will be changed yet resolute. There are signs everywhere of a city impacted by sad events over many years – CCTV, the station warnings about suspicious activity and the posters. We keep going, we keep travelling and we keep hoping. I don’t know if it is defiance or habit, but maybe maintaining habit in the face of threat is an act of defiance in itself. 

I’m due at the House of Commons for a reception next week and my colleagues visit for work more often than I do. It’s a special place. Symbolic and vibrant.  I don’t know how that experience will change in the aftermath of yesterday’s tragic events. It will be sad that it might. My thoughts are with the victims, the families and friends impacted and the emergency services that responded or lost a colleague. 

My thoughts are also with the communities that, by undesired and unwarranted association with the incident, will be impacted in the way they are treated. For our own benefit and for London’s we need to maintain our habits, but also our reaction. The last year has been tough and undoubtedly divisive. Now is a time to focus on the sanctity of human life and what we have in common. The events of yesterday need to represent a need to unite and heal, not an opportunity to further create schisms. Hate and distrust creates and fuels hate and distrust. The common enemy we need to unite against is simply anyone who would seek to divide us. 

If you are reading this on your way to work then try and build a bridge today. Try and speak to someone that you wouldn’t normally. Try and build a human bond with someone that wasn’t there before. Our relationships are what make life worth living. Show your defiance wherever you are by bringing your communities a little closer in response to a tragic and divisive act. 

London will keep waking up each day and we will keep living and working together. 

I remember hearing a story about Kenny Dalglish. It may or may not be true. It may or may not be about Kenny Dalglish. It goes a bit like this. 

At the very successful Liverpool side of the 1980’s a new player joins the squad. He notices that Kenny Dalglish isn’t in training and asks a coach where he is. The answer he gets is that Dalglish is playing golf.

The new recruit is outraged that Dalglish isn’t training with the rest of them and demands to know if he is allowed to skip training to play golf too.

The reply he gets is elegant and simple ‘You can go play golf when you can play golf in the week and then play football as well as Kenny does every Saturday’. 

I’m hearing less about Results Only Work Environments recently, perhaps as it was just one of those phases that we go through where people focus on exciting words. I am, however, hearing more people focus on outcomes being critical. If you focus on quality of decision making, work in line with core principles and then drive good outcomes you will find flexibility enough for everyone to succeed. 

My first HR Manager sat me down after 2 years working together and said she had confession. She had been waiting two years for me to miss a deadline or for a project to go out of control. I asked why that was concerned and she said it was so she could coach me on the fact I’d miss deadlines without more discipline in writing things down. It was my first HR job and I hadn’t realised the way I worked wasn’t the norm. 

She said it took some time for her to understand that I had a slightly abnormal memory and (whilst I have plenty of weaknesses) my mistakes wouldn’t come from forgetting what needed to be done or underestimating complexity. As with many people my strengths and weaknesses, for all these years, probably are quite similar now to then. She needed to support me on those areas – and not assume that my challenges and risks were the same as the rest of the team. 
If your requirement of people is that they all work in the same way then you mitigate their weaknesses, but also blunt their strengths. There is nuance in there – only an idiot or a genius would start a large project without a clear comms plan, stakeholder map and consultation methodology  – but there is scope for us to embrace difference without breaking organisations.

But remember the test is that this only works if your team can deliver at their best on a Saturday. One day we’ll get to a point where flexible working means creating the conditions where people work best, not just where they get a day at home each week. But that’s for another day. For now just take a step back and think about how much of you work and your team’s is really designed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.