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They thought gender was no longer an issue but the statistics on women in top jobs proved that wrong. They assumed race had been over taken by faith in the be careful what you say category but were still wary. They regarded disability as an occasional recruitment issue despite the prevalence of mental health problems in the population. It was sexuality that was making them feel uncomfortable. They kept coming across references to gay, lesbian, bi sexual and transsexuals. “They” were managers. They had heard the one about the man who wanted to be a woman and HR’s advice that he/she should use the unisex disabled toilets. Most viewed that as an interesting HR issues not an everyday management issues. No the hot issue was managing gay men.

Ever since the chief executive had come out as gay the organisation had become decidedly gay friendly. It was most noticeable at head office where there was a dramatic increase in the number of young gay men employed. The organisation had probably always had the usual cross section of people within its staff group the difference was people now felt empowered and able to discuss even flaunt their sexuality. Or at least the men did. But whereas people were clear on the rules for behaviour at work for heterosexuals were they different for homosexuals?

The former chief executive had a bit of a reputation for surrounding himself with young women so was this chief executives behaviour any more unacceptable? However the former chief executive wasn’t in the habit of inviting his junior staff out to lunch or for after work drinks. It was the cliquey nature of this that drew the comments; these same young men seemed to be on a lot of working groups chaired by the chief ex. Clearly some managers felt that some of their staff had more access to the chief ex than they did. And some staff made the most of this dropping into the conversation at every opportunity what the chief ex had said at lunch yesterday or on Friday when a group of them when for a drink after work. The implication was clear, they had a powerful friend.

This was perceived as a potential problem should there be issues of time keeping, attendance or quality of work. Mangers also claimed to feel under pressure to approved applications to attend conferences and workshops which they felt were more about sexuality than of direct relevance to the business.

It was the senior women managers who felt most excluded. They referred to the “gay mafia” and complained they were often out the loop since conversation had obviously taken place outside of the senior management team meetings.

It all came to an abrupt end with the chief ex sudden departure and the instillation by the board of an acting chief ex who was a woman.

Managers are not always comfortable with the diverse nature of the modern workforce. In the past people management issues tended to be about tackling homophobic bulling, inappropriate “jokes” and supporting staff who felt they were being excluded or talked about because of their sexuality. Now we have managers who don’t know whether they are feeling uncomfortable because of a person’s sexuality or because the behaviour is inappropriate.

Blair McPherson 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

The parties over. Leaner times ahead. What was a very well paid career is under threat from public sector cuts and ”hobby consultants”.   Successive Governments shake ups of the public sector, the fashion for adopting private sector ways and the tendency to name and shame led to years of plenty for management consultants. The pace of change has not slowed in fact it has quickened but NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and other public sector organisation can no longer afford the help of management consultants. This is ironic as senior managers in new slimmer management structures could certainly do with some help and due to the large number of senior managers who have recently taken early retirement there are plenty who would fancy “a bit of consultancy work”. 

If you’re a well established consultancy firm you feel the impact of the public sector cuts and you experience the influx of ex directors using their contacts to do a little consultancy work, probably at a knock down price, since this is just a hobby a bit of extra holiday money. This is not to say that these individuals don’t have a lot to offer after all management consultancies were happy to snap up former directors in the good times. Their recent experience made them very attractive as interim managers, useful additions to interview panels and well equipped to do a friendly review of your service prior to a major inspection.

Interim managers in the current financial climate may be considered a bit of a luxury cheaper to act someone up. Head hunters may have had their day in all but the most senior posts. After all HR are perfectly capable of running an assessment centre, doing some benchmarking to establish the right salary and coming up with an advert and recruitment pack that sells the organisation. Why pay all that money to have a recruitment consultant ring up managers to ask them if they have seen the advert or know anyone who might be interested? We know longer need someone independent or with an expertise to give the cabinet/board the business case for moving out of direct service provision they are telling us that’s what we are going to do. And we have become a bit immune to all those evangelists telling us that their model of customer care, quality assurance or business reengineering is the answer to all our problems.

Yes our managers could do with some support we can’t afford to be sending them on expensive MBA’s. Management learning sets could offer peer group support and shared experience, mentoring could provide advice and replace some of that wisdom lost to the organisation through large scale early retirements and executive coaching could help senior managers gain insights and improve their people skills. This type of support has tended to be viewed as management development and part of the training budget, a budget that is an easy target for savings.

 My advice would be invest some of those management consultancy saving into something managers would really appreciate. 

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

Who would make such a provocative statement? The bullish minister for local government, the no nonsense leader of the council, the over confident and ruthlessly ambitious chief executive? It is in fact a quote from the chief of Ofsted from an interview he gave to the Guardian news paper (24/01/12). A sign of the times that we could imagine any one of a number of public sector leaders saying publically what they must have often thought privately. Does this indicate that in the current financial climate public sector leaders expect staff to be unhappy about the changes taking place because they view staff as an obstacle to change. I have heard this summed up in the expression “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”. It reflects a leadership style based no imposing change by sheer force of personality. In the interview the Michael Wilshaw the chief of Ofsted is referred to as having a reputation as a “heroic head” and is quoted as saying “a poor leader runs a poor school; a good leader runs a good school”. So it is all down to the leader!

Some might argue that whilst the leader certainly sets the tone and has considerable influence success is determined by a range of factors such as team work, effective collaboration, political support, adequate resources and may be a little luck. And how far can you go by simply imposing change on a disempowered staff group?

Sometimes a leader must say” this is the right thing to do even if it is unpopular”. I have said it myself but this is very different to saying “I don’t care what staff think”. You would not think much to a colleague from another agency who announced during partnership negotiations that they “didn’t care what you thought”. So whilst low morale may be a consequence of pay freezes, redundancies and fear of unemployment it is not a measure of effective leadership. In fact to boast that morale is at an all-time low would sound like a bully not a leader.

Blair McPherson author of People management in a harsh financial climate published by Russell House. www.blairmcpherson.co.uk  

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You don’t have to wait till the budget is over spent, the savings not delivered, a critical inspection report, performance targets missed or a negative and highly personalised local media campaign against the “cuts”. The simplest way to get rid of a director is to undermine the individual because once members have lost confidence in them the end is near. The easiest way to do this is for the chief executive to remove their support and distance themselves.

In a politically sensitive environment like local government at a time of budget cuts, service reductions and redundancies there is a frequent need to brief the chief executive and leading politicians to ensure they are not caught unaware. It is therefore important to have ready accesses to these individuals. So what do you do when your requests to get 20 minutes with the chief exec are meet with “he is very busy”, “in meetings all day”, “has asked not to be interrupted”. First you check out if your colleagues on the senior management team are experiencing the same problem. Joe says she has a regular one and a half hour slot in the diary every month. She is new and inexperienced so may be that’s why she is offered this level of support. Graham has been around for years he says he just rings up the chief execs PA and says can he have half an hour sometime over the next couple of days. You ask Dave the treasure and deputy chief exec, even though you know it will get back to the chief exec. Dave says he sees the chief exec every morning first thing for half an hour to catch up and discuss any issues.

So why do I find myself sitting outside the chief executive’s office waiting for the meeting to finish in order to dash in and request a quick word before the next meeting starts? I find it demeaning sitting here –I know he knows I am out here. It is a huge waste of my time despite my attempts to use my Black Berry to catch up with my emails. My senior staff are frustrated because I should be at a meeting with them and I have no idea how long I will be sat here.

Even when I grab my few minutes I know it will be unsatisfactory because I will be trying to brief on a complex situation whilst the chief exec looks at his watch. But I need him to know what is happening and what I propose to do otherwise I risk been hung out to dry if anything goes wrong or the media decide to make a meal of it. I can’t afford to give the chief exec the opportunity of portraying me as a loose cannon and risk members losing confidence in me.

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

Pay up, save thousands and avoid the bad publicity that’s the standard advice when faced with a claim for constructive dismissal on the grounds of racial discrimination. I am sure that was the advice given by legal and HR to an NHS Trust, they didn’t take it and were forced to pay a former manager £1 million. The damage to the organisations reputation as the national media focused on the headline grabbing size of the award can’t be measured.

There is no upper limit on the size of an award in such cases. Tempting then to do a deal but that would mean admitting racial discrimination. The legal team would say it doesn’t mean this at all, it’s a simple financial calculation. We may have done nothing wrong, we may be confident we can successfully defend this case but there is a cost to defending this allegation in management time and legal fees so if it costs less to settle than defend then settle.

The complaint doesn’t want to settle it’s a matter of principle they want to expose the hypocrisy of grand sounding equal opportunity statements with the reality of workplace prejudice and discrimination. Mangers don’t want to settle they feel they have done nothing wrong, that the employee is upset because they didn’t get a job or a promotion and just can’t accept they weren’t good enough. Managers expect the organisation to back them.

In the end it will be a financial decision. Most people take the money. We only hear about the ones who don’t and who win.

But any organisation that doesn’t employ a workforce that reflects the local population profile, that has a disproportionate number of staff from ethnic minority groups in basic grade posts and few black staff in senior posts, an organisation that takes proportionately more disciplinary action against black staff is going to be vulnerable to claims of racial discrimination. An organisation that does not collect data in these areas broken down into ethnic origins will have difficulty evidencing there polices don’t discriminate.  Likewise an organisation that collects the data and doesn’t act upon it can expect to pay the price.

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk author of An Elephant in the Room –an equality and diversity training manual published by Russell House

From the world of big business we took customer care, call centres, the bottom line, benchmarking, performance management, annual appraisals, performance pay and employee of the week. We also took branding. The Local Authority was a brand a trusted well established brand in need of refreshing and marketing but nothing a new logo couldn’t put right.

This struck a chord with councillors who were frustrated that the general public  didn’t seem to know or care who empted their bins, ran their libraries, provided home helps for older people, filled in the potholes in the road and funded countless voluntary groups. Frustrated because every time the council tax went up the local media carried comments like” what does the council do anyway?” Frustrated because the switch to fortnightly bin collections was highly unpopular and they were getting the blame when this was the responsibility of the District council not the County council!

The situation wasn’t help by staff who tended to refer to themselves as working for Social Services or Education or Environment  they needed to be encouraged to recognise they all worked for one organisation and that wasn’t the “council” but in this case Lancashire county council. Oneness became the new mantra and managers were instructed to become more corporate which translated into no special pleading come budget cuts.

Oneness internally and branding externally would be shown through the use of the new expensive logo, different to the old logo in its shade of red and modern style of lettering. Branding, the marketing and communications gurus told us required every publication, letter and building sign to carry the new logo in exactly the same place, precisely the same size  and with no variation in colour or type face.

If people visited a library, swimming pool or community centre they were to be in no doubt who it belonged to. There were some tricky conversations with partner agencies who now had to accept that the county council wanted its logo along side theirs as a condition of funding. Since other organisations also wished to promote their brand any literature to do with partnership initiatives had to carry everyone’s logo which made for some very cluttered promotional material.

Of course now the libraries, swimming pools and community centres are being closed as part of budget cuts this branding doesn’t look so clever. And of course the public sector is being encouraged to move away from directly providing services so now your home help could work for any one of a dozen companies who have a contract with the local authority, old people’s Homes are run by the private sector and people still blame the county council for not emptying their bins.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future and People management in a harsh financial climate 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 now being considered by the House of Lords. 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 such as paying the unemployed to fill potholes in the roads. I do notice the roads are once again full of potholes.

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

The media is focusing on the size of the award. A £ million is a headline grabbing figure but the most telling statistic is the fact that whilst 2% of the workforce are black they form 25% of those subject to disciplinary action. 

 The BBC today carries a report that the Central Manchester University Foundation NHS Trust has been found guilty of institutional racism with the award of £1m to a former manager. The trade union that represented the manager calls for an independent enquiry into the Trusts disciplinary policies following the discovery that whilst 2% of the workforce are black they form 25% of those subject to disciplinary action.  The Trust strongly disputes that institutional racism is a feature of the organisation. This comes 18 years after Macpherson enquiry into discrimination in the police first gave us the term “institutional racism”. It is clear that some organisations do not understand what institutional racism is or simply refuse to accept it exists.

This organisation is not racist they say. I am not racist nor are any of my colleagues they say. Just because there aren’t any black senior managers doesn’t mean it is because of racism. We don’t care what colour someone is we treat everyone the same. These are often the same organisations that resist collecting information on the ethnicity of their workforce not only who they employ and who they promote but who they discipline. 

There have been changes over the last eighteen years the casual racism in which people would refer to the “Paki” Shop on the corner or made offensive jokes linking race and intelligence have become socially unacceptable. However black people are still underrepresented in senior posts, a male black manager is still likely to be described as aggressive when the same behaviour from a colleague is called assertive, black staff are more likely to describe their manager as unsupportive, in many organisations black staff are disproportionately subject to disciplinary action. Perhaps as a consequence black staff have less faith in the organisations disciplinary and grievance procedures.

After the energy, enthusiasm and commitment to change following the Macpherson report there is a general feeling that the reality for black staff still doesn’t match the  grand sounding policy statements .There is also a feeling that senior managers have moved on that austerity has brought a new set of challenges and priorities and that whilst individual’s personal commitment remains their time and energy is directed elsewhere.

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk  author of An Elephant in the Room-an equality and diversity training manual and People management in a harsh financial climate both published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Miss congeniality they are not but then they weren’t fast tracked because of their people skills. No it was the ability to manage a budget, hit performance targets and rationalise unpopular decisions. It seems a bit unfair now to complain that they are strident, competitive and unimaginative. I am talking about senior managers on the NHS Top Leaders Program but I could be referring to any group of up and coming mangers in the Public Sector.

These were the findings of a detailed assessment of 900 participants in the NHS Top Leaders Program under taken by the Hay Group Consultants for the National Leadership Council. The revealing and rather unflattering findings were obtained by the Heath Service Journal (HSJ) from the Department of Health under a freedom of information request but not without a battle.

Three quarters of senior managers on the program were assessed as over confident, lacking insight into their own limitations and despite their above average verbal reasoning skills were poor at providing colleagues /staff with clarity. I think this description is not limited to those who are being fast tracked but highlight the management characteristics which get people promoted and not just in the NHS. The problem is that these skills may get you the job but if you are to succeed in the job they do need to be supplement. To transform the service you need to be able to innovate, to develop partnerships and establish a harmonious working environment. To achieve this you will require insight into your own behavior and how it affects others.

Senior managers rarely get this sort of direct feedback. Who is going to tell the chief executive that they are unclear about what they are telling them to do, that the way they response to requests for clarification is seen as abrasive or that any attempt to debate is seen as disloyal. Much easier to help managers gain these insight on their way up when hopefully they will be more receptive.

So we should not be too critical off the senior managers on the Top Leaders Program for being over confident, lacking insight and thinking they are better communicators than they are. They are after all a product of their environment. We should however encourage the type of individual detailed assessment that confronts managers with their skills gaps and a leadership development programs that address these deficiencies. 

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

We don’t have a problem with racism here. I am not a racist nor are my colleagues. I don’t believe our staff are racist and I don’t believe our managers deliberately discriminate against people. Just because we don’t have any Black senior managers doesn’t make us racist. And just because some staff occasionally use inappropriate language well I don’t think they mean any offence by it.

As a senior manager in a large organisation I was surprised at the prevalence of this type of thinking at all levels in the organisation. The consensus amongst the senior management team was that staff were not racist, that inappropriate language and insensitive comments were due to ignorance, we should challenge it wherever and whenever it occurred and we should focus on awareness training for all .

 Two problems with this thinking one it appears to deny black staff’s own experience within the organisation. You cannot have experience racism in the office or staffroom because we don’t have that problem here. There must be another reason why you didn’t get that promotion or why your colleagues don’t include you in their out of work activities and what makes you so sure people are talking about you behind your back? There are a number of explanations as to why the statistics show that black staff make up 3% of the workforce but 25 % of those subject to disciplinary action.

 The other problem is that this kind of thinking assumes that racism is restricted to overt discrimination, racially abuse language and acts of violence against black people. Racism today is more subtle because racial discrimination is illegal and because people in the work place no they will be in trouble if they are found to be racist. People may be more careful in their language but their actions may still be informed by the negative stereotypes, myths and ignorance they are caring around in their head. Stereotypes that are constantly reinforce by stories in the media rather than people own experience of black people.

It was these negative stereotypes leading to discrimination intentional or otherwise that were identified in the Macpherson enquiry into allegations of racial discrimination by the police. It was found that within the police force at the time it was a commonly accepted view that African/Caribbean youths were members of violent gangs, involved in drug dealing or using drugs. This was their rational for stopping and searching ten times as many black youths as white. And of course they considered their actions justified every time they or a colleague found a knife or drugs as a result. Consequently they viewed black youths as perpetrators rather than victims of crime. So called to a stabbing of a black youth their initial assumption was that it was a drug related gang fight. As it turned out it was a racially motivated murder of a young middleclass black lad who just happened to be standing at the bus stop.

This was a very dramatic example of how institutional racism could be experience by a black person. The police officers involved genuinely believed that they were not racist, their colleagues supported them in this claim and the chief constable stated that the force was not racist. In much the same way senior managers in many organisation today claimed that racism isn’t a problem.

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