Osiris Training

Despite what Eric Pickles the Communities secretary would have us believe multiculturalism is not dead. I believe that we have reached a point in the debate about multiculturalism and community cohesion which reinforces the role of local authorities.

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.

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 was 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  consistently maintained a position which was  in effect “just give us the money and let us get on with it.”

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

When it comes to the future of the NHS is it really likely that the doctors, nurses and related professionals have got it wrong and the politicians have got it right? 

Political leaders and public sector senior managers don’t spend a lot of time thinking they might be wrong they do however spend a lot of time trying to persuade people they are right. This is not surprising but if we are so sure we are right why do we think everyone else is wrong and how does this affect the way we act towards them.

If people don’t agree with us we assume they have not understood what we are saying and that once they are in possession of the full facts they will come round to our way of thinking. Isn’t this the real motivating behind those” consultation” exercises and isn’t this the purpose of the “discussion” in the senior management team or the open meetings with large staff groups?

 If despite being made aware of the facts they still don’t understand then they must be idiots either that or they do know the truth but are denying it because it suits their own self interest to do so. Isn’t that when someone says “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”?

However reluctantly political leaders will concede that that have got things wrong in the past the problem is conceding this possibility in the present. This is not about admitting they got it wrong after the event or being prepared to say sorry this is about conceding during the decision making process that you might be wrong.

If leadership was just about sticking to the plan no matter what then being an effective leader would simple be about obstinacy when in fact it is about knowing when to abandon a plan and come up with a new one.

 That’s why when it comes to really big decisions political leaders should ask themselves, what if I am wrong?

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future and People management in a harsh financial climate both published by Russell House www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

The amount of decision making allowed to managers is very small. Their main task is to spread motivational ripples down the food chain, encouraging others to meet a range of very demanding targets over which they themselves have very little control.

This statement is taken from a recent Durham Business School report. The analysis was referring to employees in the retail business but on reading it I thought it capture what it must feels like to be a manager in today’s public sector.

As the harsh financial climate bits increasingly unpopular decisions are made about service cuts and staff are made redundant or redeployed. Decisions that are made at the top of the organisation. Increasingly managers have little or no influence over these decisions as they are routinely bi passed because those at the top consider them to be either too close to be dispassionate or disinclined to dismantle their own little empires. As capture in the often heard phrase “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”.

At one time managers would have been involved in identifying ways to make efficiency savings and drawn up restructuring plans to reduce costs. The urgent and dire budget situation involving year on year cuts means more dramatic action is required. So instead of being asked how could you make some saving in your staffing budget managers are told one in five management post are to be cut, services like HR, IT and Pay roll are to be out sourced and increasingly the organisation will commission and contract rather than directly provide services.

This culture inevitably seeps into the day to day operations, targets are imposed not negotiated, attempts to discuss decisions even at a senior level are viewed as dissent and any criticism is seen as disloyalty. A safety first attitude means managers are over cautious, disinclined to innovate and tending to refer every minor decision upwards. Not that there are many decisions to make as posts are frozen there is no recruitment, the ban on over time allows for no discretion and defiantly no agency staff. The training budget has been centralised and is virtually nonexistent so no decision to be made. The standard answer to any request is we can’t afford it. Which just leaves approving annual leave requests! 

This doesn’t mean being a manager has got easier because as the Durham report states managers are expected to be positive despite dismantling services and abandoning professional values they are expected to be enthusiastic about the changes and keep their staff on message.

Blair McPherson author of People management in a harsh financial climate and Equipping managers for an uncertain future both published by Russell House. www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

They say the job would be easy if it wasn’t for the staff! Often it is just one member of staff, one person who disrupts the harmony in the team. Not everyone in the team dislikes them but nobody likes them. This individual is hard work they always seem to want to do things different to the rest of the team if everyone else wants the window open because it’s hot they want it closed because it’s too draftee. They don’t see why they should give way just because they are in a minority. Or may be its just two individuals who seem to rub each other up the wrong way and end up not speaking to each other. This is all very immature but don’t assume that these two scenarios don’t happen in senior management teams.

What’s needed is some team building. You could try and get the team to go for a drink after work but that’s not likely to work after the Christmas meal fiasco. We couldn’t agree when to go, where to go or whether partners were invited. Truth is we didn’t want to socialise outside of work so team building would have to be in work time, not optional and with a skilled facilitator.

 The away from the office day was expensive, hard going and only reinforced views.

Then I read about two top premiership league footballers who couldn’t stand each other but when the transfer window closed they found themselves in the same team. Throughout their time together at the club they never spoke to each other. During this period the club was very successful and their striking partnership was considered the best in the league and the bases of the team’s success. In his autobiography the team manager wrote that he was never able to get to the bottom of the animosity between the two but didn’t care as long as they got on with their job and did it well. He also revealed that although this team was often held up as an example of people working well together most of the players did not socialise together. He went so far as to say people don’t have to like each other to be good at their job or to work together well they just need to know what is expected and deliver.

This seemed to go against everything we are told about successful teams, the importance of good team spirit and the role of the manager in achieving this. Except it didn’t. I worked for a very authoritarian chief executive who didn’t care whether his team got on together or not, in fact he encouraged people to compete as in” I asked each Directorate to deliver a identify 10 % cuts and Education have already come back with a plan to deliver 12 %.” Performance targets were achieved and exceeded budget cuts were delivered and the authority moved up the league table. Success was achieved without any socialising outside of work, debate was discouraged and criticism viewed as disloyalty.

Maybe the chief executive read the same autobiography after all he was a massive football fan.

Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future and People management in a harsh financial climate both published by Russell House www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

The senior management team probably had a lot of fun drawing this up. No doubt the management consultant who facilitated the session(s) made a pretty penny. I hear the going rate is £1000 a day. The resulting wall chart is titled Our Shared Culture”. There is rather too much writing for the chart to be read from a wall but in any case I can’t imagine anyone willingly decorating their office with it. At the top it says “Shared by everyone” and here is the cleaver bit each letter in the word SHARED is used to form the first letter in a word that represents how people are expected to behave. So S is for Supporting, H is for Honest and A is for Accountable and so on. Under each of these new words is a description of the type of behaviour that is expected.

It sounds a bit Blue Peterish but I have been involved in drawing up similar charts for the front of a business plan or a power point presenation for a staff conference. The exercise of drawing it up is useful in getting the senior management team to be clear about what they mean by the organisations values and what this means for how they expect people to behave. As long as the exercise doesn’t extend beyond the morning coffee break and those involved don’t think that producing a chart will change the culture of an organisation.

What’s the betting even members of the senior management team won’t remember what the E in SHARED stands for by the Christmas team meal? Staff are pretty immune to this type of communication compared to the sophisticated advertising they are bombarded with from the media .In any case culture change has gone out of vogue in the current harsh financial climate. Not that there isn’t a lot of change happening at work, no, it just that culture change would mean getting  the staff involved in drawing up the values and agreeing how people should behave and that would require  a lot of conferences and workshops that we can no longer afford.

Culture change was about changing the way people behaved through changing their thinking so for example focusing on customer care. Now we don’t really care what people think as long as they do what needs to be done. Changes are imposed rather than negotiated because it’s quicker, there is no alternative and if we asked staff they would tell us they didn’t like it and would prefer not to do it. This is usually expressed as” we are standing on a burning platform” so we have no time for discuss we must act and “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas” so there is little point in wasting time learning of your objections .All this is very short sighted because change which has no buy from staff and is not better for customers is not going to work in the long term. But the long term is not the problem at the moment.

Blair McPherson author of People Management in a harsh financial climate and Equipping managers for an uncertain future both published by Russell House www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

Discontent and rebellion all around as the Tory led coalition government continues to force through legislation to turn the NHS into a Health Care business. The public sector is not a business it was set up to serve the whole community it was not required to make a profit, to break even or show a good return for investors. The NHS was established to ensure that people received the best medical care irrespective of their circumstances because good health care was considered a right not a privilege or something that had to be earned.  As medical science has advanced and life expectancy increased the cost of the NHS has risen. Successive government have tried to control the costs of the NHS and persuade voters, tax payers and patients that the NHS does not have an open budget.

First like other sections of the public sector managerialism was to be introduced to the NHS with the aim of making it more businesslike. The new manger class were to introduce changes that would make services more efficient. Ways of doing things from the world of business were to be introduced like bench marking, performance targets, customer care, staff engagement and annual appraisals but most important of all tight budget controls. Mangers were to ensure the medical and care professionals stayed within their budgets.

The costs continued to rise. The assumption persisted, despite the lack of evidence, that the NHS was inefficient. What made business efficient? Competition. Therefore that’s what needed to be introduced to the NHS. The internal market was tried basically getting different bits of the NHS to compete with each other. It didn’t work because at the same time as section of the NHS were being split into providers and commissioners they were being required to cooperate and better coordinate. So if an internal market doesn’t work then open up the market so that others can compete for providing health care.

And that’s where we are today. As the health care professionals can’t be persuaded that these changes will lead to a better service or won’t lead to a worse service new organisational structures will be imposed to transform the NHS.

These reforms are no more likely to succeed than previous one as they don’t have the support of the majority of health professionals; they place an emphasis on competition when the increasingly fragmented health system requires co ordination and co operation and they break a political promise not to mess with the NHS.

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

So size does matter when it comes to bonuses. Apparently a £million bonus for a banker is offensive and not justifiable when ordinary folk are enduring a pay freeze. So is it the size of the bonus that has caused such outrage. Does that mean that a bonus say of one hundred thousand pounds would be acceptable? What about 10% of salary surly that’s a modest reward for exceptional performance?

The bonus culture is a very private sector arrangement like so much modern business practise imported from the USA. The idea is that to succeed as a company you not only need to attract and retain the best you need to keep them interested by offering big rewards. So because you are already paid a shed load of money and don’t have to worry about paying the gas, electricity and mortgage this month you need the prospect of a massive bonus at the end of the year to keep you motivated!  

The whole bonus culture thing is alien to the public sector. When the heavy snowfall disrupted public transport and made roads impassable the nurses at a local hospital stayed overnight to ensure there would be staff to care for the patients in the morning. The meals on wheels driver could not get down the side roads to deliver meals as they had not been treated. So he got out the van and trudged through the snow it took a lot longer but it meant every elderly client got their hot meal on a bitterly cold day. No bonuses were involved.

When attempting to address the absenteeism problem some colleagues suggested we give a bonus to staff who had no time off during the preceding 12 months. The rest of us balked at the idea not only because it assumed that people were taking time off when they were fit to work but because we had visions of very ill people dragging themselves into work as the year end approached in order to get their bonus. As someone else pointed out we already pay staff to come to work.

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

NHS managers are too busy to address staff health at work. So said the headline in the Health Service Journal (HSJ). The report on the launch of the Healthcare Management unit code of conduct provided the opportunity for Dame Carole Black to express her disappointment and frustration at the lack of buy in by the NHS. Of the 370 organisations signed up to date only 8 are from the NHS. 

Dame Carol said: “Individual chief executives always tell me they understand the agenda but they’re too busy or they don’t believe the business case.”

Too busy to effectively deal with absenteeism? Too busy to deal with bullying and harassment at work? Too busy to deal with violence and verbal abuse in the work place? Too busy to look at the impact of increased workloads and staffing reductions? What else are senior manager too busy to do? Listen to staff; ensure fair recruitment and development, promote good patient care? 

The online response from managers was swift and angry .No, not too busy for the health of staff but too busy for a bureaucratic form filling, tick box exercises designed to give the impression the DH is doing something. The initiative was dismissed as an exercise that focuses on support of staff with chronic health conditions, encouraging staff to stop smoking and offering healthy food in the staff canteen. In other words things Trusts already did, had already tried or had already discounted.

But it still left me feeling that chief executives don’t think the health and welfare of their staff is a good use of management time which must be reflected in how managers within the NHS behave. I am sure the NHS is not the only public sector organization where managers are too busy to manage.

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

Libraries are about more than housing books. Libraries are one of the vehicles for local councils to deliver community cohesion, social inclusion, community engagement and equality and diversity. Libraries are a place where you can access the internet. Libraries are venues for homework clubs, mother and toddler groups, rock concerts, councillors’ surgeries, and benefit advice sessions. Libraries work with schools to promote reading, with adult learning to promote life skills, with the Prison Service to promote numeracy and literacy, and with social services to promote safeguarding children and adults.

Libraries are local, they are community centres. The best attract all ages and all sections of the community. If we didn’t have local libraries then we would be inventing them.

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

Times are hard in local government. Big financial savings are required. Do we close a family centre or a museum; do we keep small rural libraries at the expense of closing a day centre for older people?

It’s a no-brainer: services to vulnerable people come before culture. Or is there a case for cultural services being fundamental to delivering the big agendas of regeneration, community cohesion, social inclusion and wellbeing?

The significance of culture for local authorities is best understood by describing the range of services provided by local authorities that fall within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s remit. These services include libraries, museums, arts and archives.

Cultural services are not about aesthetics and taste but about the way communities describe and express themselves, how they portray themselves and about their sense of identity.

Community art can be used to help give a place an identity and a positive image by building on a place’s heritage. Art projects can be used to harness the creativity of a community and to express loss, anger, celebration and aspiration in the face of economic and environmental change.

The outpouring of creative energy that was harnessed to help coal and shipbuilding industries adjust to loss and change was invaluable. Art, drama and music traditionally have been ways of rebelling and expressing dissent in a way that petitions, reports, and letters can never capture. Performing arts can provide an awareness-raising experience and connect with sections of the community that are often described as hard to reach.

An example of this nationally was the group of elderly people who got together with a record producer to release a version of The Who’s My Generation, drawing attention to the poor quality of life endured by many older people in society today.

Lancashire where I used to work has its own sinfonietta, comprised of some of the country’s finest musicians. Linked with the Sure Start programme in Lancashire, the sinfonietta puts on baby-friendly concerts. Classical musicians play Mozart live to young children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Cultural events such as music festivals can engage the young or showcase minority ethnic cultures through Caribbean carnivals or Asian melas. Art exhibitions can record a place’s past or reflect present diversity. Plays in schools, films made by community groups and radio adverts designed by young people can engage a wider audience in addressing juvenile crime; bullying, binge drinking, graffiti and littering. In this way drama, music and art can bridge the generation gap and bring together sections of the community that might otherwise have no contact.

Libraries can provide venues for creative social activity, especially for the old and the very young. Libraries also provide access to computers to people who otherwise may not have access to email and the internet.

Museums provide the deep mines of heritage from which many communities extract their ideas about their past. In Burnley and the surrounding area, the terraced housing, canal-side warehouses and the large Asian population are all a direct result of the cotton industry. Well-preserved cotton mills that capture the noise, heat and risk to health and safety are not just interesting school history trip destinations, they are how your grandparents made a living and they explain why Burnley is different from other parts of Lancashire.

The economic benefit of a vigorous cultural services policy can equally match the social benefits. Cultural services – museums, arts and archives – attract visitors as part of tourism. It is estimated, for example, that for every £1 spent by Bolton council on its museums, an additional 60p is generated through the economic/tourism multiplier.

Arts development, including theatre, sculpture and crafts, also provides and supports an environment in which creative industries can thrive and support employment. In Lancashire it is estimated that each £1 spent on arts development generates an additional £5 from outside agencies, which in turn generates an economic multiplier.

Cultural services can influence a place’s image and have a positive impact on people’s view of where they live. An active cultural landscape is an indicator of whether a community is forward-looking, self-respecting and inspirational. These factors can be as important to the local economy as access to good road and rail links and a skilled workforce.

Investing in culture and investing in an area’s cultural infrastructure requires local authorities to see the links between culture, regeneration, community cohesion, social inclusion and wellbeing. It requires recognition that, far from being the icing on the cake, culture is a fundamental ingredient in making for a better place to live, work, visit and invest in. In my experience it is not the local politicians who need convincing of this but my fellow local government officers.

I wrote this article in 2007 but it still seems relevant today www.blairmcpherson.co.uk