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According to a management consultant writing in the Guardian news paper (Public Guardian on line)Public service managers don’t have the balls to make the size of cuts required and don’t have the appetite for the necessary radical changes. There answer was to fire the reluctant public sector managers and install interim managers to get the job done. If someone is prepared to say this in print then a lot of others will be thinking it. This must not go unchallenged in the rush to praise private sector expertise because what is conveniently over looked is that public sector management is not just about the bottom line it also requires political sensitivity.

I thing public sector manager do have what it takes to identify and deliver big savings. They certainly don’t lack the” balls” or the ability to be innovative but they do operate in a political environment where decision are not simply based on a strong business case. This is something that those from outside Local Government often fail to appreciate. Local elected members/councillors are locally accountable to local people. Elections in local government take place more frequently than general elections for example in a large county council a third of the seats are up for re election three years out of four. The good thing about this is it makes councillors sensitive to local options but it can also inhibit them from taking unpopular decisions that may cost them votes. However local councils have shown themselves willing to take unpopular decisions. You only have to look at the closure of local authority elderly persons homes to appreciate the strength of public opinion, the level of interest from the local media and the willingness of pressure groups to resort to the courts in the form of judicial reviews. Yet Homes were closed.

Politics is not simply about following the best financially advise but a judgment about steering a course between conflicting interest groups which inevitably means negotiating a compromise. Rural libraries may be expensive to operate and the numbers of users compared to urban areas may mean they are not cost effective but village schools have closed,the village bank has closed the village post office is under threat and your party came to power on a promise to tackle rural poverty and shift the balance of recourses from inner city areas .

Where the strength of local feeling warrants it may be a mobile library service can replace the existing service, may be the library can be re housed in the community centre and run by volunteers, may be a self service system can be introduced based in the village super market. Where there is no strong opposition libraries will close.

Local authority managers need to be politically sensitive and appreciate that they do not  simply work to the bottom line. This does not mean that they do not have the wit, the balls or the know how to deliver big budget cuts and radical changes. Rather than talk of bringing in interim managers as hired guns who will slash and burn and go we need managers with influencing and negotiating skills who will retain the trust of staff and service users through the difficult times ahead.

Blair McPherson was until recently a senior manager in a large local authority he is author of People management in a harsh financial climate. See www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

Happy staff work harder and achieve more. This is probably not a big surprise to most managers nor I suspect is the view that if staff are unhappy it affects their work.   A team of researchers from the Warwick Business School led by Professor Andrew Oswald have conducted a number of experiments on students which confirm this or as they put it “Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, whilst negative emotions have the opposite effect”.

One experiment involved participants completing routine tasks involving adding up numbers, the task was broken up by showing one group a ten minute video of comedy clips and another a clip showing patterns of different coloured sticks. Those in the group who had a laugh performed the tasks better, 12 percent better.

In the past there has been much debate about the impact of skill training, new technology and reward schemes on improving performance. The researchers believe that their findings published in the latest edition of Warwick’s Economic Research Journal highlight the importance of “human emotions”.

In the current harsh economic climate it would be a lot more helpful to managers if researchers could suggest how to keep staff happy whilst freezing their pay, making their colleagues redundant and charging them more for office car parking. I don’t think that posting a “joke of the day” on the office intranet or showing clips of “mock the week” is going to do the trick.

So how are managers to keep staff motivated whilst budgets are cut? It is true that external factors influence peoples’ feelings of well being. If England had won the world cup then the feel good factor would have resulted in increased productivity in the short term. If an individual is experiencing personal problems like going through a divorce then we know their work can suffer. But in general we know that people report they feel happy in work if they get on with their colleagues and their line manager. The implication is that the organisation may be going through a bad time but in this team we still enjoy coming to work. The other key factor for staff in the Public Sector is why they do the job in the first place. Home helps and care assistants are low paid, they could earn more money staking selves in their local super market but get a lot of satisfaction from helping vulnerable  people who are grateful for the support they receive. Contrast this with staff who deal directly with the public on reception or in a call centre who are often subjected to verbal abuse from frustrated and distressed callers.

Happiness at work for public sector workers is determined by their relationships with colleagues and their interaction with the public. Managers are responsible for fostering good working relationships within the team and supporting staff in their dealings with the public. This is not always easy as personality conflicts can erupt within teams, an individual can be viewed by others as not pulling their weight or getting favourable treatment. The manager cannot ignore this if they want staff to feel happy coming to work. When staff are dealing with customers who are angry that their service has been reduced or taken away as a result of budget cuts or a change to a cheaper service provider has caused anxiety and frustration then a managers support needs to be tangible. This means being prepared to take the call and take the brunt of the caller’s anger.

A manager is responsible for keeping their staff happy in their work but this doesn’t involve telling jokes or performing amusing impressions of senior managers not unless you want to be known as a bit of a comedian.

Blair McPherson is author of People Management in a harsh financial climate published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

The team expects you as their manager and leader to make sure they don’t have to work with people who are  lazy, incompetent or difficult. The type of person who can start an argument over having a window open or whose turn it is to wash up the coffee cups. The cynic whose negative attitude brings ever one else down, the one who undermines team work with their “why should I “attitude, whose moodiness creates a tense atmosphere and whose frequent absences mean others are always having to pick up their work.

The team don’t think this individual should be allowed to get away with missed deadlines and poor standards of work, they think they should be confronted with their attendance record and made to do their fair share. And they are right. Some people in the team will be more vocal about this than others but it would be a mistake to see this as a personality clash.

Your team is right to expect you to set the standards of work and behaviour. You are right to suspect that this individual will not respond well to you tackling them about your concerns and they will probably counter with claims of harassment and bullying. Your life could become quiet uncomfortable all the more so if the member of staff claims you are harassing them because of their race or sexuality. Is it worth the hassle, the protected investigation, the formal proceedings, the scrutiny of you management practice? Mangers who are leaders know the answer.

The issue then is how best to support managers who find themselves in this position. The answer is not to pass the problem over to the HR department. To do this would simply propel you even more quickly into formal proceedings resulting in the manager feeling they are the one on trial. Most HR are staff are familiar with the scenario and complain they spend a lot of time digging managers out of holes they have made for themselves and getting very little thanks for it.

The problem is managing people is not easy and some people seem determined to make it harder. Just as managers need to be able to manage budgets they need to be able to manage people .Managers need the skills to challenge as well as support, to get people to do what needs doing but also to be seen as reasonable and fair. Management development needs to focus on developing these people management skills. One way of doing this is through a management learning set where managers get together to examine typical management scenarios, share their experiences and gain some insight into how their behaviour effects those they work with. Another way is to recognise that management is a lot about confidence and experience and a good mentor can help a manager gain both more quickly.

Whilst challenging and confronting won’t make your life any easier in the short term it will certainly demonstrated that you are not shirking your responsibilities as a manager.

Blair McPherson is author of People management in a harsh financial climate.

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

Twenty five percent of this message has been cut as part of necessary budget savings. Some people may consider this a blessing in disguise, others may point out that it may undermine the whole piece. It could be argued that most writers would benefit from a greater economy of words. Restrictions on the number of words should not prevent decisions being conveyed in writing although it may result in the explanations being shorter or not provided at all. However as these decisions are ”no brainers” and not open to debate so this isn’t seen as a problem.

There may be some unintended consequences of this efficiency drive such as punch lines being cut from the final approved draft. However as the current financial climate is no laughing matter the loss of such frivolity is no great hardship.

In the future it will be far more efficient and cost effective to simply post decisions made on the office intranet. If you do not work in the office or have access to a computer we suggest you” buddy up” with someone who has.

Whilst on the subject of economical use of resources it has been decided to do away with paragraphs as these create huge areas of unused white space. As you can imagine if you multiply the white space in the average communication by the number of communications made in just one week by an organisation employing over five thousand staff you could save a lot of white space .A small project group has been set up to look at the feasibility of selling this space to advertisers. Anyone with family or friends in the private sector who may be interested in buy this space is asked to contact Lillian in admin.Here are a list of decisions made this month that will directly effect all staff they include posts to be deleted in the restructuring, changes in pension arrangements and new office car parking charges .Message ends

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

Being useless at the job is not a good enough reason to get the sack. So it came as no surprise to me to learn that only 18 teachers had been dismissed for incompetence in the last 40 years.

As a senior manager I have dismissed staff for theft, verbal or physical abuse, accessing pornography in their work computer, frequent or prolonged absence from work or failing their probationary period but never because they were useless at their job. This is not because I have never come across people who are incompetent at their job. The fact is that with the exception of people on their six months probationary period it is a very long and arduous process to dismiss some one in the public sector for being useless at their job.

This process involves setting clear work targets with time scales, monitoring progress, providing frequent feedback identifying areas for improvement, providing training and support  to help the individual gain or improve skills and giving the individual the time and the opportunity to demonstrate improvement. It involves lots of uncomfortable conversations and keeping detailed records. If the individual is cooperative and has a degree of insight into their own performance then all this effort may see the necessary improvement. However it is more likely that this process will leave the  individual in no doubt about your assessment of their abilities and they will retaliate with an harassment and bullying complaint. This complaint will need to be formerly investigated which will involve the manager justifying their actions and demonstrating that their expectations were reasonable and consistent with their treatment of other members of staff. Managers can find this a very stressful process particularly if the individual claims their performance is being scrutinised because of their race, gender or sexuality. During this period the individual frequently goes of sick with stress.

It is not hard to see why a lot of managers consider addressing poor work performance through the competency process just isn’t worth the hassle. The most common way this gets dealt with is either the individual finds themselves another job, a management or service restructuring takes place and their job disappears or they are dismissed as a result of long term absence. None of these solutions are right. If the person applies for another job the manager may be tempted to give them a glowing reference to get rid of them. They will certainly be advised by HR not to focus on concerns about their competence but play safe and provide a bland factual reference which cannot be challenged at an employment tribunal for constructive dismissal. It is clearly inappropriate to distort a restructuring to get rid of a member of staff and may result in a structure which ends up having to be changed again. It is of course one explanation for frequent restructurings. It clearly not an appropriate use of the absence policy to use it to dismiss someone when the real issue is their performance not their health but it is less contentious presenting someone attendance record than commenting on their performance.

One way or another a determined manager can move on a poor performing member of staff but it will take 18 months to 2 years and they probably won’t use the competency procedures.

Blair McPherson was until recently a senior manager in a large local authority he is author of People management in a harsh financial climate published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Who loves you? Not those you tell will have to work harder and longer or those whose pay is frozen. Not those whose libraries you are closing or home helps you are taking away.

Who loves you? Not the politicians who want cuts without pain and who want you to make the money do more.

Who loves you? Not the voluntary groups whose funding you have cut nor the private sector providers who heard your call for higher quality and then realised you weren’t prepared to pay for it.

Who loves you? Not those who wanted the cash rather than the service who now find the money won’t stretch. Not the relatives who thought the state would pay but now find themselves “topping up”. Not the carers who thought they would get help but now find themselves left to cope. . Not the receptionist who hears the sobs and shouted abuse down the phone as she absorbs their frustrations all alone.

Who loves you? Not those you sacked for abusing their clients or accessing porn on their office lap top. Not those who felt bullied by their manager or harassed by their  colleagues. Not those dismissed because of their absence record.

Who loves you? Not the back office staff recently externalised. Not the losers in the Equal Pay Review which saw the winners as a disappointing few. Not the University graduate trying to get experience and working for free.

Who loves you? Not even your family who see you less often and find you more preoccupied..

Who loves you? Only the dog whose love is unconditional.

Mangers take too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go wrong. Not the words of the English FA but those of Brian Clough a high profile football manager from another era. His words still seem relevant today whether we are talking about the performance of the national football team or a public sector service.

Like all modern managers Clough realised that communication was a two way process and was prepared to listen to suggestions or alternative proposals from team members. He described the process as “If someone comes to me with an idea or a suggestion I listen to them, we talk it over for about 20 minutes and then we agree I was right.” This is what most managers do it was just that Cloughie was more honest about it.

Being right is not always enough. On taking up his now infamous management post at Leeds United in 1974, Clough was quick to realise the need for restructuring. Some long serving staff no longer fitted in with his plans for the future. He realised if the club was to flourish then young talented people needed to be recruited who were prepared to do things differently. Unfortunately for him the organisation was not ready for such radical if essential change. He was fired but his analysis was proved correct as Leeds went into gradual decline. He took has talents to an underperforming club Nottingham Forest, where the need for radical change was recognised and new way of working were embraced. It was there that he made a real difference.

Most senior managers would now recognise the wisdom of going to an organisation that was struggling if you want to make a name for yourself.

Clough was not known for his diplomacy he was blunt and direct his team got plenty of feedback and each individual knew exactly what was expected of them.  He got some spectacular results because where as managers get people to do things leaders get people to deliver to their full potential. He also got talented individuals to   work together to support and help each other.  Brian Clough didn’t do compromise and so it was his way or no way.  Very few of us can operate like this and as he was to learn being the best does not guarantee you the top job because diplomacy and compromise have their place.

It is a fine line between supreme confidence and arrogance and “old big head” as he was affectionately known was always in danger of straying across it.

Cloughie was a charismatic leader someone who achieved against the odds by sheer force of personality. An organisation can only have one such leader and my way or no way is not conducive to partnership working. The modern Public Sector manager has to be a shaper and an influencer not a dictator because no one organisation working in isolation can successfully tackle the big issues like climate change, unemployment, homelessness, health inequality, racism, drug abuse and anti-social behaviour.

Made be the next England manager also needs to be a modern manager, a shaper and influencer, a diplomat rather than a dictator.

Blair McPherson was until recently a senior manager in a large local authority and is author of People management in a harsh financial climate published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

How would you deal with a challenge to your authority? What should you do if one of your most able managers openly criticise your way of doing things? When does health debate become undermining dissent?

A former manager once started a conversation with “Who‘s in charge of this team”. I knew it was a rhetorical question but I felt it was best to confirm she was. On another occasion a different boss said “you obviously feel very strongly about this, is it a resigning matter?”It wasn’t. Now I know I can be very opinionated and sometimes abrasive in the way I put my arguments but I have always considered myself easy to manage because I have never tried to undermine my manager with a view to getting their job, I have always accepted my manager’s right to make the wrong decision and once it has been made clear to me that the decision has been made I have always don my best to implement it.  So for me expressing decent within the meeting is all part of healthy debate so I can’t complain if my managers challenge me in this way. However health debate becomes undermining dissent when you go public. So I am with President Obama on this if you publically criticise your boss, their abilities and their decisions you can expect to be sacked.

So why would any ambitious and intelligent manager put themselves in such a position? In my experience it is usually an indication of a dysfunctional team where individuals do not respect each other, are unable to work together, don’t like each other and can’t be bothered to hide it. The leader is unable to impose their authority the result is internal conflict and high levels of frustration which eventually become more public. Or it is simply a matter of integrity the individual feels so strongly about an issue that they feel is so important that they go public to test out whether there is support for their view and offer to resign if there isn’t.

Of course your average manager with a mortgage to pay and kids to put through university can’t afford the grand gesture so keeps quiet and looks for another job. Grand gestures are for the financially independent and those in senior positions who know that they will get a good pay off.

Blair McPherson was until recently a senior manager with a large local authority. He is author of People Management in a harsh financial climate published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

I’ve been to New York – I’ve seen the future.  It’s fast, efficient, cheap and intimidating.  The future of our public services if they follow the previous pattern of imitating the US business model will be like a New York breakfast.  That is, fast, efficient, cheap and intimidating.

It needs to be fast because everyone is in a hurry.  It needs to be efficient because it’s very busy and people don’t like waiting.  It needs to be cheap or people will go elsewhere and of course there needs to be extensive choice because the customer expects it.

If you know exactly what you want and you know how the system works you can get a cheap, quick breakfast of your choice.  But efficiency depends on people being decisive and the speed depends on people knowing what to do and not asking lots of “dumb” questions in a hard to follow accent.  For those not used to this self service system it is off-putting, even intimidating.  The result for me was not getting the breakfast I wanted but the one easiest to order.  Cheap and quick but not a satisfying experience.  The thing is though you do get used to it!

No doubt this is how it would be if the public sector adopted this model.  I can see that in personal social services people with a physical disability would soon get to understand the system, the middle class parents of people with a learning disability would exploit it to their benefit, most elderly people would be put off except those lucky enough to have a capable son or daughter to guide them.

This approach is not a million miles away from the “Easy Council” and it no frills service based on the economy airline model. This too requires a certain amount of no how and confidence to book on line, to understand the need to travel light due to  weight restrictions and limits on hand luggage, the implications of not having allocated seating and the fact that every thing is an extra which is charged for.

What these models have in common is that they are cheap, they are efficient and in so far as they do what they say they do good value for money.

But I can’t help thinking they are neither customer friendly or accessible to the whole community. Cost and choice are not the only measures of success.

Blair McPherson is author of People management in a harsh financial climate due to be published by www.russellhouse.co.uk in February 2010.

The harsh financial climate in the public sector means we will have to do more with less.  But what does doing more with less mean?  Is it another way of saying be more efficient? Is it part of the myth that there are some painless options for reducing spending with out cutting services or reducing staff? Is it  a belief that technology will save us if we just embrace it? Is it based on an  assumption that if you have less managers they will concentrate more on what’s important? Does it reflect the view that the best way to improve a service is cut its budget and in so doing focus minds and force people to be innovative.

It’s difficult to argue that any organisation couldn’t be more efficient but if the price is to be less effective is that acceptable in public services?  Should the NHS use cheaper but less effective drugs? The NHS spends millions on drugs. Primary Care Trust want GPs to use cheaper generic drugs but GPs want the right to prescribe branded drugs if they think they will be more effective.

In the public sector costs are mostly about staffing, the number of people employed.  So efficiencies are about getting staff to work harder, longer, pay them less or get someone else to do it cheaper. Alternatively you can replace some teaching posts with cheaper teaching assistant posts and not pay them for school holidays. Instead of using expensive supply teachers to cover for absent teachers you can user cheaper teaching assistants. Of course this may impact on quality. The NHS is often criticised for using expensive agency nurses but if a hospital bans the use of such staff it may find it has to close a ward due to staffing shortages with the result that waiting list for operations increase.

Another way of doing more with less is to use economies of scale in procurement. That is get together with others and negotiate a discount for bulk purchasing. This can work with office furniture or computers but it’s difficult to see how this would work in buying residential care for older people where block contracts are to be replaced with people having the money to buy their own care.

Accommodation for all these staff is expensive so if we can get more staff into fewer buildings we will be more efficient. Hence the fashion for hot desking, mobile working and home working.  This is also an example of making use of technology like blackberries and laptops to enable people to work away from the office.  Another example of embracing new technology and reducing admin costs is electronic filing.  Do you know how much it costs just to rent the floor space for all those filing cabinets?  Of course everyone should do their own typing.  The typing pool is a thing of the past, no-one has their own PA any more but on the down side how many hours a day does a manager spend wading through e-mails?

Reducing the number of managers without having an adverse affect on frontline services sounds attractive and would appear to constitute doing the same with less. However, increasing an individual manager’s span of control and responsibility or removing a tier of management essentially means someone doing the job of two people.  As this is not achievable within the working week decisions have to be made about what won’t be done that used to be done.

Partnership working is often given as an example of how duplication could be removed and how, if people would only just look at the bigger picture, take a whole systems approach then they would see it was in their interests to work together to achieve common goals.  The only problem is that managers tend to be judged against their performance in areas specific to their organisation and their responsibility. The NHS might see the value in tackling homelessness, poor housing or long term unemployment in improving people health but hospital managers are focused on waiting lists.  There is also a tendency when budgets are tight and services are being cut for organisations to retreat to core business and shunt costs to partners. So hospitals seek to discharge elderly patients from expensive acute beds as quickly as possible forcing some people to go into expensive residential care paid for by some one else. A jointly funded health and social care rehabilitation service would allow for speedy hospital discharge and prevent unnecessary admissions to care but why should the NHS contribute to funding if it can get the Local Authority to pay for it?

Back office savings are often presented as a painless way of reducing costs to deliver the same service and therefore if not doing more then doing the same with less.  An example of this in local authorities is the centralisation of the human resource function.  Why do departments need their own HR staff?  Bring them all together in one smaller team and save on management costs.  Why not also outsource the majority of the work which is around administration, for example placing job adverts, sending out job application forms, arranging interviews, sending out letters of appointment etc.  Whilst retaining the expertise around employment legislation. The risk is that some of the work that was carried out by HR is now left to managers to do which may not the best use of their time and of course as a result of reducing management posts they are already doing more and with less help following the reduction in admin posts.

It is possible to do more with less, but the risk is ending up doing less and doing it less well.

Blair McPherson