Q: My staff seem to get sloppy in accounts. They end up making elementary errors. How do I prevent this?
One of my favourite cartoons from around thirty years ago shows a comb on its back with its teeth in the air. A flea is running joyfully along bouncing from one tooth to the next. It says, “Life is easy when you know how!” Ahead there are several teeth missing.
Running a workplace brings the cartoon to mind every day. No matter what you do, the second law of thermodynamics trips into action. This, you will remember from a recent blog, if not from your physics’ text books, suggests that everything is going to break down eventually. Whether it is cleaning and tidying your room or asking for the accounts from a clerk, there will be a progression from order to disorder and even chaos. I suppose it mirrors life as we know it, Captain. My own existence seems to be pretty entropic in that there are bits and pieces of me breaking down slowly, including memory. But it’s important that the clerk gets the figures right, so what do you do?
All workers, when faced with humdrum repetition, begin to commit mistakes. Even airline pilots. The skill for the MD of a company is to reduce repetition and increase challenge for all staff. Challenge here is made up of variety. Different kinds of work at different times of the day. Different workers cross checking the clerk’s figures. Physical activity to compensate for hours in front of the monitor. There is nothing worse than predictability for the mind. The synapses become fixed and the person retreats into a fantasy world to escape, losing touch with the reality of his or her daily tasks as s/he, like the flea, begins to take the job for granted.
So, ensure that a worker knows what is his or her core work – the work that is essential to the company’s smooth operation - and then seek to embroider it with unlike activity. Stimulate the left and right brain, the physical and the mental, the emotional and the rational. Everyone should have a mix of business as usual and project work. That’s how staff and company flourish.
Not to do it is a form of abuse...
Q: I am thinking of using a credit card protection company to handle our fraud controls. What could be the consequences?
Prejudice with no Pride
I think the best way of illustrating the problem is the following little case study. I suffered at the hands of racial prejudice today. Not the obvious kind but the pervasive institutional kind. I’ll tell the tale as quickly and succinctly as I can.
My elder son is in Japan. He takes size 12 shoes. You can’t get them in Hiroshima. I ordered them from a company called Walktall. My billing address is in London. They took my money for two pairs of shoes. Later, their credit card detectives said that because the order came from West Africa (Ghana) someone may have stolen my credit card. Customer Care said that this thief could be trying out the card to see if it worked and would then move on to bigger things. Hm two pairs of big shoes for someone in Japan. The mind boggles. I never realised that thieves took such surreal and longwinded routes to achieve their ends.
What is at stake here is something rather significant. Knowing the business world as I do, I am often confronted by businesses hiring companies to work as contractors. They bring in these specialists and hand over responsibility and accountability to them. It never occurs to the business owners that their entire customer relations are hinged upon the behaviour of these contractors. Thus it is, in this case, that the contractor’s credit checks include orders from Ghana, which to most WASPS means ‘err...somewhere in Africa’. There was no attempt to cross-check the contractor’s rescinding of the order by Walktall. In fact, the supervisor I talked to was as assertively blind to the whole question of cultural insensitivity as 19th Century missionaries wandering around the dark heart of the Congo to bring God to people who, they believed, had no souls.
“We are protecting our customers” she kept on averring, oblivious to the fact that this one disgruntled customer then becomes a catalyst for dozens more to walk away from the site at Walktall. She had no skill in placating me but preferred to accuse me, implicitly, of ignorance of credit safeguards and a nuisance.
So my son has got no shoes. Walktall is diminished to Walksmall and I am more aware of the incipient problems people from Africa face when they try to improve their countries’ economies.- via their dealings with the west.
Q: I am a plant - or should be - but I agree that there could be a difficulty in being a plant AND being a top executive - under what circumstances do you think that its good to have a plant as an MD?
Plants on top
You find Plants at the top of incubator companies based upon innovative or creative products for the market place, in professions where art and design dominate and, very occasionally, where a company has foundered and run out of vision. In the latter, usually, the Plant has a short shelf life aimed at bringing in a Big Idea to turn round the company's fortunes.
Generally, Plants are much better utilised, as noted in the last blog, in an insulated region of company life, focusing on innovations in company structure or in creating new products, say in the R&D Department.
As a company grows, the progenitor - should this be a Plant - has to give more and more time to management rather than creativity. His/her creativity decreases as a consequence and the momentum of the enterprise falters. The art is to bring in Belbin's Shaper type with a leavening of the other types to handle the business while the MD sits back and monitors, tweaking here and there to ensure the kind of ethos with which s/he is most comfortable. Then s/he can get on with the exciting business of keeping the company at the forefront of novel products.
Q: The stuff you wrote about Belbin. What team type is usually the hardest to fill at the top level?
The Plant
To get to the top of most organisations requires a forceful personality and the Shaper fits the Belbin bill. Most top teams I have worked with have a preponderance of Shapers. They run the company's departments, enjoying leadership and power and making things happen. But they can be poor team workers, preferring to compete for company resources rather than allowing funds to be siphoned to where they are most needed. They can be strong on vision and are often role models for industry and drive. Often, too, at this level, there are fewer completer-finishers, coordinators and resource investigators. These types MUST be part of the team that a Shaper runs.
The type that I find least of, is usually the Plant. Belbin's notion of a Plant is what we normally term an 'ideas person'. Creative, rather than innovative (innovative people develop and refine, import and implement what exists already), they bring a total left field freshnes to an organisation. But they can be difficult or eccentric, preferring independence, marginal existence, games playing and frank critique of existing structures to fitting in. I know of one organisation which was offered a post-doctoral student who was so asocial it was as though he had Tourettes - and they built a labratory around him to keep him insulated from staff who couldn't cope with his outlandishness and resourced him to get a Nobel prize. In some professions such as advertising, Plants are naturally thicker on the ground. In public sector organisations they are rare at the top.
That is why the latter tend to use consultants to bring in fresh ideas and stimulate discourse. What they are buying in, mostly, is an innovator. It's safer. Hiring a Plant can be tantamount to opening up traditional systems to a barrage of idea-missiles, only some of which strike where they are desired. But the more moribund a company, the more it may need this heavy duty offensive.
Q: I am a new Chief Exec and I am appointing a new team to run my organisation. It is deemed to be failing. Give me some pointers.
Building a team
Like a football team full of stars that wins nothing, try to get away from appointing the most obvious candidate for a post. In a top team you need to marry driving forces who can run departmental areas with cohesive, collaborative and creative personalities who can work together to run the organisation.. In the sports analogy, your stars must be complemented by selfless runners. Too many forceful individuals can lose the sense that they must subordinate themselves to the Executive Team's needs in order to further the organisation's as well as their own careers.
I find Meredith Belbin's team roles an absolute must in developing the team you need for the circumstances in which you find yourself. His work is based on decades of research and I've never found it wanting.
It will help you analyse what you need and shape your selection processes.
Q : '' What should I be doing as the CEO of an SME to develop my senior staff ? ''
Leader as Coach
Part of your role is to educate and train the next generation. Try to avoid telling only part of a story to your team. Always put them in your own position, gathering and facing all the countervailing evidence; the personalities, power based conflicts, statistics, documentation, strategies, tactics or market trends. Make sure they know that they are able to sway outcomes if they are intelligent enough with their arguments. Summarise. Announce your decision. Minute their support.
Imperative:always ensure that they accept that, at their level in an organisation, they are committed to cabinet responsibility. Once a decision has been made, they are there to implement and defend it until further notice. Woe to any of them that counsels staff against the decisions of cabinet!