Osiris Training

The England football manager claims he only needs 100 words of English to manage the team. On the understanding that like the England team your team understands the basics what would your 100 words be? I came up with Yes, top priority, well done. After some thought I added No, not good enough and stay in budget.

If you don’t do the small talk about holidays, football and kids what’s left just a few motivational phrases, don’t let me down, don’t let yourself down, just do what we did last time, you can do it. (95)

Of course body language greatly extends the vocabulary he said head bowed, hands in pockets as he scurried back to the car park after another boring and frustrating meeting in which Wayne forgot his papers and Joe knocked over the water jug.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for the unexpected published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

John Terry, Chelsea and England captain, told his team mates they needed to man up, grow some balls and take responsibility for their own performance and the teams run of recent poor results. As far as inspirational speeches from leaders go it was not on a par with William Shakespeare Henry v. His exhortation to be a man was particularly ironic since he had lost the England captaincy for behaving like a man with a fellow plays girl friend!

The call to “man up” is very much in line with the shake your fist and shout a lot school of leadership. Would a female chief executive ever tell her colleagues on the senior management team to “man up”?

I ask this because after a brief spell when it appeared that leadership styles were     changing in favour of a less aggressive, less competitive approach to one based more on collaboration and cooperation, old style macho management seems to be making a return. May be the harsh financial climate encourages a harsher management style or may be the “real” men are just reasserting themselves after flirting with their feminine side. Either way this is bad news for those of us who think fear is not the best way to motivate staff and that you don’t need “balls” to be a leader.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

How high your heels are, how often you change your hair style and how much your designer handbag cost are not the type of observations you expect to read about in a serious article about a chief executive of one of the biggest  local authorities . Then again this article was only masquerading as serious journalism when in fact it was a general criticism of the pay of chief executives by way of a personal attack on one of the few women in the top jobs. I am not surprised that a paper like the Daily Express should argue that before local authorities cut services they should cut the pay of their chief executives as if somehow that would save a single library or day centre from closing after all they are not on bankers bonuses! Nor I am surprised that such ill informed journalism should continue to trot out the line that no local authority manager should be paid more than the Prime Minister. Presumably the logic is that this is a more important job. So does that mean that the PM should be the highest paid person in the country? No none of this nonsense surprised me what did surprise me was that they should target a successful career woman and do so by criticising the height of her heals and her hair style. Of course I know this rage has no sympathy for immigrants who are swamping the country and taking our jobs and houses and is leading the fight against the work shy scroungers who cheat the over generous benefit system but I thought the paper had a high female readership. May be they only buy it for the crossword.

Contrast this with an article the following day in the Guardian about the increasing number of women becoming Top Guns in the RAF. The article stated Women have been flying fast jets in the RAF since 1994 it did however make no comment about the impact of wearing a flying helmet on pilots’ hair styles. Presumably it’s leaving that in-depth examination to the daily express.

Blair McPherson author of An Elephant in the Room- an equality and diversity training manual published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Your income, your life style and even your life expectancy is determined by your job which in turn is determined by which university you went to which is largely determined by which school you went to. Nothing new in this, why do you think the rich pay so much for their kids to go to private school? Don’t Oxford and Cambridge have more pupils from private schools? Isn’t the Cabinet made up of people who went to Eaton and then Oxford or Cambridge?

What is new is how competitive it is to get into University. Which means brains and academic achievement do not in themselves guarantee a place. Your university application needs to be supported by an impressive list of interests and skills which make you stand out.

Sporting prowess has always been valued by university admission tutors but we are not talking about playing for the school first eleven you need to have represented at a county level at least. Being a chest champion, playing a musical instrument and voluntary work with the homeless are clearly not something you can suddenly embark on in your last year in the sixth form. You need to demonstrate that you have always been a talented, creative and interesting person with a social conscience and a good team spirit.

Just as your parents started your university fund when you were born acquiring the right experiences can’t start too early. You need to do your home work to get your grades but you also need to keep at the piano lesions , if bat and ball aren’t your thing then swimming or cross country will have to do and of course you can’t drop either of those foreign languages but they  may be helpful on your gap year in Africa.

In other words your very bright working class kid has even less chance of getting a place at the right Uni.

Blair McPherson is author of An Elephant in the Room-an equality and diversity training manual published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

They call it a Saturday night special it’s the gun used to settle drunken arguments or shoot an unfaithful lover caught in the act. When used at close quarters it doesn’t require much skill to do maximum damage.

Gang members prefer semi automatics that spray bullets for dramatic effect aimed at a group rather than an individual, often fired from a car in what is referred to as a “drive by” .The perfect American combination car and gun.

Bank robbers opt for more powerful pump action shot guns fired a couple of times into the ceiling to prove you’re armed and serious. But your average Joe carries a hand gun like a colt 45 just for protection as is his right under the American constitution.

I mention this because with cut backs in the police force and fears that rising unemployment will lead to rising crime people will want to protect themselves ,their families and their homes. Gated communities and private security are a characteristic of the USA which is already being imported.

I am not suggesting the British public will at some point start carrying guns but what if air ports and banks and other terrorist or criminal targets were protected by private security firms due to police cut backs? Wouldn’t they have a case for being armed? How long before we routinely have guns on our high streets?

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Multiculturalism was the recognition that we lived in a multi faith, multi ethnic country and that we should acknowledge this and even celebrate it as this diversity enriched our society. For Local Authorities the problem came when we tried to adapt our services to make them culturally more appropriate and sensitive to this diverse community we aimed to serve. Lacking expertise and confidence but keen to be seen to offer a service to all irrespective of faith or race we turned to existing groups within these communities and offered them grants to provide the service we were struggling to adapt. If there was a mistake it was assuming that that was the end of our responsibilities.

Giving money in the form of grants and contacts to faith groups and minority ethnic groups is part of the government’s policy to support the voluntary sector as an alternative to the public sector. The challenge is to encourage and financially support faith groups and ethnic minority community/voluntary groups to provide services such as day care for older people but to do so in a way that promotes integration not segregation.  Does this mean a condition of funding is for the service to be open to people of a different faith or race?  How realistic is this?  When I worked in Birmingham I visited a voluntary sector run day centre which was attended by both Muslims and Hindus separate kitchens ensured meals were prepared in a culturally appropriate way, a common language and shared experience appeared more significant than religious differences.  However only a few miles away a more traditional group of Muslims not only consider it unacceptable to share facilities with Hindus they required separate facilities for women.  Both groups wanted funding from the local authority claiming they were better able to meet a community need than the Local authority.

Blair McPherson is a former Director of Community services with a large local authority and author of An Elephant in the Room an equality and diversity training manual and Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future both published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Swim. ‘swim’ they all shouted. ‘swim faster’. But it does not matter how fast you swim you can’t out swim a shark. So it’s a good job that it wasn’t a shark. It did however prove that he could swim a lot faster than he thought. This seems to be the thinking behind the Welfare Benefits reforms. We can all swim a lot faster than we think given the right incentive. Homelessness and hunger or fear of it are powerful incentives.

This has of course been tried before and it worked. The idea of means tested benefits and the workhouse was to make it so degrading to seek financial help and so unpleasant to be accommodated that even the most work shy idle good for nothing would rather do any job however poorly paid than live of the state.

The safety net was there for the genuinely destitute and the ‘deserving poor’. Of course the system did breed fear and resentment among the ‘lower classes’. Many people soon realised that they were only a redundancy, in mortgage default or an accident away from the poor house door (bed and breakfast emergency accommodation).

What if there was no work to be had even at below minimum wage? Well some enlightened Local Authorities created employment so as paying the unemployed to fill potholes in the roads. I do notice the roads are once again full of potholes.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future. Published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Increasingly we are becoming a more diverse country and we are becoming more aware of the need to take account of culture and faith in delivering service to the whole community.

In the past local authorities have given grants to voluntary organisations who provide services to people from these ethnic and religious groups in recognition of their own failure to proved appropriate services.  When these were small amounts of money providing low level, small scale services it hardly seemed important to establish exactly who was receiving a service it was enough that more sections of the community were benefiting than would otherwise.

Two things have changed a bigger role for the Community/Voluntary and Faith sector in providing services in which small grants become big contacts and these services no longer supplement local authority services but replace them. Secondly a concern about the philosophy behind these services, who can access them and whether they are outward looking organisations supporting good community relations or inward looking.

I believe that we have reached a point in the debate about multiculturalism and community cohesion which reinforces the role of local authorities in influencing how these organisations operate.  In practical terms this means the local authority should influence through grants and contracting arrangements. However these are blunt instrument and it will be more effective to develop a partnership approach where the local authority is represented on the management board and gets involved in the running of the service.

  In a previous post I helped bring together a number of small voluntary groups within the Chinese community all of whom were competing for small grants none of whom had suitable premises to operate the service they wanted to provide and none had the infrastructure or expertise to run anything other than a small scale advice service and luncheon club.  In return for access to a purpose built day centre, office accommodation and guaranteed funding to staff the service we reached agreement on a management board that had representatives from each of the groups and the local authority, the local authority was to be involved in the recruitment of all staff and the recruitment process was to follow local authority best practice thus avoiding any concerns about nepotism.  The local authority provided a finance officer seconded part time to provide financial advice to the centres management team and board.  The local authority also provided access to training for staff.  This model could have all sorts of variations but the common characteristic would be very hands on approach from the Local Authority. Of course this does mean the faith/voluntary/community group gives up some independence and control in order to gain greater and more secure funding and not all small groups will consider this acceptable.  I have been in negotiations with one such group over a number of years trying to persuade them to accept this type of partnership but despite shared agreement on the needs of the local community they have consistently maintained a position which is in effect “just give us the money and let us get on with it.”

Blair McPherson is a former Director of Community services with a large local authority and author of An Elephant in the Room an equality and diversity training manual and Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future both published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Put a live lobster on in a pot of boiling water and it will jump out. Put a lobster in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature and it will just lie there until cooked. The temperature in the public sector has been slowly rising but most people haven’t yet felt the effects.

Plenty of professionals have given warnings and common sense tells you budget cuts of 28% are not efficiency savings they are a fundamental change in what the public sector can do. The first to feel the impact will be the old, the sick and the poor. Money is a good insulation from the effects of a reduction in state support. Private education, private health insurance, private security, private pension and a private jet. I doubt the well off will notice the difference. It will be a few years down the road before the average person starts to feel the full force of a “stand on your own two feet” Government approach. By which time the public sector ethos will have been so diluted as to be unidentifiable, the structures dismantled beyond recognition and our lobster will be well and truly cooked.

Blair McPherson

Author of Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future published by www. Russellhouse.co.uk

We are seeing big budget cuts in the public sector. Major management restructurings are taking place as organisation seeks to cut up to one in four management posts. The resulting redundancies and early retirements are draining an already small pool of experienced managers and creating a skills and experience gap. To fill this gap we will need to find answers to the following questions.

Why are some groups underrepresented in management posts? What is discouraging them from applying? How can we spot and identify talent within the organisation and how can we grow more of our own managers?

We know women are underrepresented at a senior management level in most public sector organisations and that staff from ethnic minority groups find it harder to get into management posts. If we want to fill the skills gap we need to get serious about removing barriers and actively encouraging talented individuals to seek management posts. 

This will involve talent spotting and fast tracking people. How do we decide who to fast track and how do we ensure we don’t fall foul of our commitment to equal opportunities? We could adopt a Britain’s Got Talent approach where we give everyone who believes they have talent the opportunity to impress a recruitment panel, identifying people to go forward to a long list for fast tracking.

A large organisation or a local partnership of small and medium size organisations could make a strong business case for investing in a ‘grow your own’ strategy. The key elements of such a strategy would be management coaching, mentoring and management learning sets.

Management coaching with its emphases on 360 degree feedback and one to one sessions, has proved popular with senior managers but has even greater potential to speed up the development of managers at other levels, if we could only find a way of supporting the bigger numbers. Likewise mentoring is often available to senior managers but needs to be extended to all managers as part of benefiting from the wisdom of a more experienced colleague. Management learning sets are a very cost effective way of sharing experience and providing peer group support in periods of uncertainty. They work well when sets are made up of managers from different services or organisations but who work in the same locality. They do not need to be externally facilitated I have seen some very effective work carried out by senior managers who themselves have benefitted immensely by the experience of working alongside front line managers.

Identifying where the budget cuts will fall and reducing costs by cutting management posts is just the start. Delivering the savings and transforming services needs skilled managers at a time when some of the most experience and skilled managers have left the organisation. The pool of external talent is limited successful organisations will grow their own.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk