The Internet still amazes me even though it’s an everyday tool I’ve used in my work and personal life for years. When you think about it, it’s incredible that there is so much information out there and anyone can find what they need just by typing a few words into a search engine. Imagine telling someone fifty years ago that you’d be able to do that in the future – they’d have laughed! Never before have people been able to tell ‘something’ to find ‘something’ they want and then get it – instantly. Whether its general knowledge, videos, photos, music or a picture of the street you live on – it’s there and you can get hold of it!!!
As they say, ‘information is power’ and there’s an awful lot of it being held by the companies who own the big search engines. Google is my search engine of choice and I’m sure a lot of you also use it. However, talking to the guys from my university spin-off company, Robertson Cooper, I hear that Google goes well beyond ‘search’ these days. They know (and will tell you if you know how to ask) about the wants and needs of their massive user base – they know because we tell them by typing in our search terms! By using a tool called ‘Google Analytics’ it’s possible to see what people want to know about things like well-being at work.
More broadly, companies can now see what ‘the World’ is searching for at the click of a mouse. Another way of putting it is they’re now able to see into the population’s minds!!! They can see the trends and patterns in people’s needs and then respond to these accordingly. For example, our analysis has shown that more and more people are now searching on ‘defining ‘employee engagement’ and this tells me that employee engagement is starting to occupy people’s thoughts and suggests that this is what they would like to hear more about.
This kind of intelligence is becoming increasingly important as it’s now possible to take a ‘dip sample’ of how we, as a nation and global community, think about well-being at work and where we think the secret to achieving it lies. Is it resilience? Is it physical fitness? Is onsite counselling the key or is having the right kind of leadership for well-being most important? The answers will be different depending on when and where the question is asked, but the technology means that these questions can now be answered without undertaking costly large-scale market research surveys. This has to be good news because if suppliers and experts are clear about what people want, it increases the chances of creating a world in which they can find it…. in the end that means happier customers and better businesses!
I have read with interest the growing “Bloodgate” saga that has developed at Harlequins Rugby Club. One month ago, the story was that a player had deliberately feigned injury by chewing on a fake blood capsule so that the team’s expert goal-kicker could return to the field. The player was punished with a 12 month ban from competitive rugby; no other Harlequins staff were implicated. At the time, sport commentators agreed that it seemed strange that one player could, on his own, make a decision to cheat in this way. The evolving story is an intriguing insight in to how a seemingly over-aggressive leadership style and a lack of confidence in an employee’s perceived ability to question leadership decisions has led to the damaging publicity that now clouds this famous rugby club and to an extent the game as a whole.
Not surprisingly, the player wasn’t happy with his year-long ban and appealed the decision. As a result of the second trial the player’s ban was reduced to four months because it was concluded that he was acting on ‘orders’ to cheat. These orders were given to him by the Harlequins Director of Rugby. Furthermore, the player alleged that he lied in his original trial in accordance with instructions from the club’s senior management. He says that he was left with little choice but to tell a fabricated version of the truth that did not fully disclose the club leadership’s involvement in the incident. For his part in this deception, the player states that he was offered a new four-year contract, extra holidays and an apology from the club. For their part, the club was heavily fined and the Director of Rugby was banned from coaching rugby in Europe for three years. It started to look like Enron all over again but on a sports field!
The story reminds us of the pressures leaders are put under to succeed and why some may try to justify making a decision that is not in accordance with the rules. However, what interests me is hearing about the player’s relationship with his line-manager and the reasons why he felt compelled to act in the way that he did. The player portrays the now ex-Harlequins Director of Rugby as an autocratic leader, commenting, “He did not discuss his decisions with me. He gave directions and these were followed. I did not feel able to challenge his authority”. I believe that it’s imperative for a leader to have some understanding of the impact that he/she has on others around him/her. An overly aggressive leadership style, especially one with no open dialogue with others, can reduce levels of engagement and act as a barrier to the commitment of employees. This is an example from sport, but the implications span all industries. Pressure to succeed and the challenge that it takes to get there is important, but it needs to be balanced with the kind of support that encourages open conversations between leaders / managers and their staff. And that includes making it ok for staff to challenge any leadership decision if it doesn’t feel right!
In a previous blog I have talked about the pressure that tennis players experience at Wimbledon and how this can be seen as a privilege as well as a burden. However, after watching the World Athletics Championships recently it occurred to me that the pressure that athletes face is different in nature. In sports such as tennis, football and rugby the participants are pitting themselves directly against their competitors. They can practice the skills and techniques required to give themselves a better chance of winning on the day. However when that day comes, the challenges they face (i.e. the opponent) will always be different. In contrast, sports like athletics seem more often to involve challenging and competing against oneself – and that requires a certain mental toughness.
Think about it – the arena doesn’t change and all of the behaviours involved are the same – it all comes back to the athlete and their mindset. Take one of the sprint events for example: Although the athlete is obviously racing against seven other people, he/she is also racing against his/her own times. When the athletes are at the starting line it should be possible to predict, based on previous performances, where each athlete will finish – but often this doesn’t happen. When an upset or surprising result occurs it can only be for one of two reasons – either an athlete puts in an amazing performance and runs a personal best, or someone else cracks under the pressure and makes a mistake or performs poorly.
So what causes some people to rise to the occasion whilst others underperform? There are plenty of examples of favourites coming into an athletics championship and not achieving the times, heights or lengths that we know they can. Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell is a perfect example of a favourite who has never ‘done it’ on the big stage. Despite breaking the world record for the 100 metres twice in his career, Powell still finds himself without an individual gold medal at one of the major championships. However, athletes such as Usain Bolt and more recently Jessica Ennis of Great Britain, have been able to convert their favourite status into world titles.
Jessica Ennis came into the World Championships as favourite to win the women’s heptathlon. Nonetheless, she still had to convert this promise into a winning performance. When the big stage arrived she ended up breaking her own personal best and coming away with the gold medal.
When any favourite comes into an event it goes without saying that they have the natural ability to succeed – they’ve proved that in the past. When they fail to reach these high levels something on a psychological level is holding them back. Jessica Ennis actually has a psychology degree, and one could argue that a self-awareness of how pressure affects her is her first step towards harnessing it. Awareness is a good start but it isn’t everything – indeed, Jessica has often cited the support of her family as a major reason behind her success. On top of this it seems that she, with the help of her coaching team, has built up a mental toughness that allows her to rise to the big occasion. She showed us last month that she is now able to focus on a clear goal and, with the support of those around her, compete with herself to achieve the ultimate standard in her chosen sport – winning gold medals.
My university spin off company Robertson Cooper has asked me to include this poll on my blog for the next couple of weeks. The data gathered will directly feed their Annual Well-Being Report which will be published in November.
I was listening to a radio debate last week about the government’s rejection of the McKinsey report that suggested a 10% decrease in NHS staffing would be necessary in the short to medium term to reduce costs. There was some suggestion in the discussion that the loss of clinical staff was unthinkable, but that the NHS could lose swathes of administrative staff whose only purpose is to fuel the bureaucratic machinery of the health service. Similar claims are frequently made about other areas of the public sector such as government departments and the police service. This week David Cameron’s proposals for spending cuts under a Conservative government also included provision for a substantial reduction in bureaucracy in the public sector.
There can be little doubt that in organisations as large and complex as those in our public sector there will be considerable room for efficiency improvement and process streamlining – witness the significant investments that have been made in ‘Lean’ in recent years. However, there are risks in allowing the need to reduce bureaucracy to become the dominant mantra for organisational improvement. To take the NHS as an example, both within Trusts and between them, there are substantial management demands. Effective NHS managers are not solely bureaucrats and at their best they enable efficient, effective healthcare delivery and free up clinicians to focus on patient care.
In the Police Service, do we really want to get rid of civilian staff so that police officers spend their time compiling statistics to monitor crime rates and photocopying? Haven’t we been there before? I think most of us would prefer to see them dealing directly with criminals and their victims. High quality administration is essential to the efficiency of public services and it should not automatically be seen as an unnecessary overhead – we have to be wary of knee jerk reactions that lead to a narrow targeting of administrative support staff as the only way to reduce costs. Public service organisations need to employ and manage a range of staff who can work together to deliver service excellence in line with their demanding targets. This will be very difficult to achieve if administrative support staff are made to feel that they are a barrier to this, rather than an essential part of the mix.
A new TV campaign is being launched to encourage people to take up – or return to – the social work profession. Not surprisingly, the recent string of distressing and high profile child abuse cases has made even the most dedicated social workers think twice about their choice of career. The problem, as Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said recently, is that “It is a job that makes a difference in ways that most of us can only begin to imagine,” but its success stories are “rarely heard”. The ‘Help Give Them a Voice’ campaign aims to counter the negative effect of publicity given to cases such as that of Baby P, by attracting more than 5,000 new social work recruits to the profession. This will certainly be a challenge – albeit one worth undertaking.
Of course social work is not the only one of the “helping” professions to suffer from such problems. Teachers lives can be changed forever by accidents that take place on school trips, or by the abusive behaviour of pupils in the classroom. The police face unique pressures when they respond to demonstrations and terror alerts, illustrated by the criticism and injuries suffered by those policing at the recent G20 demonstrations. I recently wrote about the health challenges facing front-line staff in the NHS, which for many includes working long hours and making life-and-death decisions while coping with constant exhaustion.
Of course, it’s essential that those we trust with our lives should be held to account when things go wrong, and there’s no doubt that the media play an important role in achieving this. But as Ed Balls says, it is so often these negative stories that grab the headlines, while even the most dramatic successes go unreported. The questions facing the new social work campaign, and others like it, are how to appeal to those who might consider entering one of the key worker professions and how to overcome the doubts raised by all the negative publicity surrounding them.
To answer these questions, the government will no doubt have been thinking about what attracts people to these professions. Edgar Schein’s excellent work on Career Anchors provides some useful insights here, with the idea that for each of us there is one core driver that needs to be satisfied for us to be fully engaged and happy with our work. There’s no doubt that the career anchor of “Service/Dedication to a Cause” is a core driver for many people who enter key worker professions, although given what I’ve been talking about here, the anchor of “Pure Challenge” might be more easily satisfied by these roles! We also need to understand the pressures created by these jobs, so we can support key workers to improve the way they manage them personally, but also the way that the organisation manages pressure for their staff. Putting ourselves in the shoes of potential key workers won’t solve this difficult problem, but it’s a good place to start. Managers and key workers must find a way to work together to make these critical jobs more fulfilling and therefore more attractive to new recruits.
My university spin off company Robertson Cooper has asked me to include this poll on my blog for the next couple of weeks. The data gathered will directly feed their Annual Well-Being Report which will be published in November.
In the big football match of the weekend, Manchester United Vs Arsenal, we saw a perfect example of rules being applied in favour of common sense. The Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, was sent off (essentially sent to the stands) with all of 30 seconds remaining in the game. His crime? To kick a water bottle that sat on the grass next to him in frustration when his team had an equaliser disallowed in the last minute of injury time.
Ok, so it’s not setting the best example, but we have to remember the context – Wenger had just seen his team dominate an important game, go ahead with a stunning goal and then fall behind as a result of a disputed penalty and an own-goal. In this situation, when a goal was disallowed in the dying moments of the match, how many of us would have kept our cool? The Arsenal manager’s frustration was understandable and yet the referee, who otherwise had a good game in difficult circumstances, immediately decided that he had to be sent off.
There are parallels with the workplace here because we can’t always see or feel the pressure that others are under. When we witness a stress reaction or extreme behaviour it’s important to take a moment to think about what might be causing it. Think about your own behaviour – imagine being massively overloaded at work at a time when you are also buying a new house outside of work or your wife / partner is due to have a baby. If you over-react to something or someone at work and end up with a formal warning (or another outcome equivalent to a sending off in football) you would be unlikely to see this as just. You would want the opportunity to explain your reaction in the hope that your manager would understand that, while not ideal, it was an understandable one-off in the circumstances.
Interestingly the referee has since apologised to Wenger, thereby acknowledging that a mistake was made. This is a good thing, but it would have been a far more proportionate reaction to recognise the pressure of the situation in real-time by simply asking him to pick the bottle up and sit down for the remaining 30 seconds of the game!
Posted by Cary Cooper 
