Alan Wingrove's Blog

Although, as an ardent rugby fan, I am disheartened by the current shambles in England’s Rugby Football Union (RFU), their current difficulties provide reinforcements of the need for good leadership and robust and timely management in dealing with poor performance; whether in sport or in business.

Poor performance needs to be addressed as soon as it happens – waiting to see if there will be any adverse effects, whether internally or externally, to your business is folly. The longer these issues are allowed to fester, the worse they become and they can give the rest of your team the perception that:-

-   Certain members of the team can do what they like, almost with immunity, because of who they are

-   That, as management haven’t challenged it, this behaviour is acceptable

-   You are not a strong enough leader to deal with the situation

-   You have not got the backing or support of your managers to deal with it

Think about the adverse media coverage Mike Tindall’s behaviour attracted, followed by media coverage of various players engaged in heavy drinking sessions until the early hours of the morning and completed by Manu Tuilagi jumping off of a ferry in New Zealand.

Perhaps, because he had played in the 1999 and 2003 world cup squads Mike Tindall thought he could behave as he wanted, without reproach. However, as one media story put it, “When the vice-captain is doing as he chooses, what chance do you have with the rest of them?” There is no doubt that team manager, Martin Johnson, together with the team captain, Lewis Moody, should have put a clear marker down – one that would have set the standard expected from the rest of the team for the remainder of the tournament.

Letting poor performance fester can be detrimental – to the leader, the team and the goals of the organisation. A short time into the campaign Martin Johnson’s full attention was diverted away from the team’s performance on the pitch, as he was spending more and more time in front of television cameras defending the behaviour of his vice captain. As well as the strain it clearly put upon him, this kind of digression is not fair to the remainder of the team and it is unlikely that 100% of their attention is on achieving the goals of the organisation – in this case, winning the World Cup.

Lack of achievement can result in the ‘blame-game’ – where people start to surmise about the capabilities of their leaders, together with the relationship they have with their peers and their respective line managers. Some commentators are saying that Martin Johnson did not have the full support of either the RFU board or the players and that Mike Tindall had refused to apologise for his behaviour. It has also been said that Lewis Moody showed a lack of leadership both on and off the pitch. (I would agree with his lack of leadership on the pitch, but that’s another story!) There is not a good word being said about any of the other team members, which many of them, quite rightly, could consider to be unfair.

Attack is no defence – whether it is by the person who is alleged to have performed badly or by their leaders who failed to tackle the poor performance in a timely fashion. Recidivist players have complained of being treated unfairly and are appealing against subsequent punishments for their behaviour; Martin Johnson is standing down as manager and the acting RFU chief executive, Martyn Thomas, is leaving. The rugby director, Rob Andrew is being heavily criticised and the RFU Council is described as being in disarray.

Again, instead of dealing with the internal issues, members of the RFU leadership are busy blaming each other, the media and ‘greedy players’ – anyone as long as it doesn’t involve them looking in the mirror.

And it could be you … now look at your own organisation. Do you have an employee whose poor performance frustrates the rest of your team? Have you let the perception that they can do what they like evolve? Is the behaviour of other members of the team deteriorating to the same level as your poor performing employee? Finally, have you considered who is ‘to blame’ for your current situation?

Even if the answers to the above questions are leaving you feeling uncomfortable, rest assured that you are not dissimilar to the majority of leaders and managers. This is because we all like to be liked – in Martin Johnson’s case, it may be that they had difficulty in changing role from a teammate of Mike Tindall to leader – and we do not find it easy To have ‘difficult conversations’ with our staff.

Unfortunately, we are seeing the macro effect of this within the RFU and yet a micro version of it is happening in businesses around the country every day. Perhaps we can all learn from these bitter lessons and change our own leadership behaviours at work.

Today the unemployment figures are the highest for seventeen years, with youth unemployment being the highest ever. Yet, this comes the day after the Young Enterprise charity published research showing that 75% of bosses say school leavers and graduates lack basic workforce skills. They include such things as punctuality, commercial awareness, competent spoken and written English and ‘soft skills’ such as how to behave in a professional environment.

So what does that mean for you? When advertising posts you may get an inordinate number of applications, so you need to think about how you are going to sift through these. Please remember that each application needs objective consideration – the last thing you need is a complaint that your selection process has discriminated against an applicant in any way!

It also means you need to consider your interview and selection process, to make sure you get the person with the skills, abilities and attitude you are looking for. The good news is that you have the opportunity to select the best, so invest the time at the beginning of the process and you can make a long-term investment.

We all have a view about the recent riots in London and other UK cities, which resulted in 16,000 police being on the streets of the capital on Tuesday night (9th August).
The question that I would have been posing Tim Godwin (Acting Commissioner) is, “So, how will you reduce the number of officers and still keep control?”
This is a lesson for all businesses – if you react to any situation, is your reaction sustainable and how will you return to normality?

I have just written an article about the impact of ‘information overload’ caused by Information Technology. Read the full article at http://www.learning2achieve.com/blog

Executive Business Coaching has a pretty diverse clientele, from the sole trader all the way to large corporations. The public sector recognises that with increasing demands on it’s Senior Officers it often needs the help and experience of Executive Business Coaches from outside of the organisation. It often helps them to see more clearly the future strategies they need to employ to be both more effective and cost efficient.

Alan was recently asked to run a course in Bermuda and you can read below about the Commissioner of Bermuda Police and the comments he made about the course.

‘Mr. DeSilva was promoted to Superintendent in 2006 and served as the Divisional Commander of the Operational Policing Division, including the Island’s three police stations, uniform patrols, CID and operational support units. His last posting was as head of the Service Delivery Improvement Team where he led the Service through an organisational realignment in 2007 and the development of the BPS Strategic Plan 2007-2011. Mr. DeSilva attended the International Strategic Leadership Programme at the Bramshill campus of the National Policing Improvement Agency (UK) in 2008. He holds an Executive Diploma in Strategic Leadership, and he is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute of the UK. He is also a graduate of the FBI National Academy in the United States, where he attended their Executive Development Programme in 2005. Mr. DeSilva is a certified Diversity Trainer and is a member of the Diversity Institute of Bermuda.’

Testimonial

Alan and Terry delivered the first management course I attended early in my career, but it remains the most impactive and impressive training experience I remember. Their course helped me to identify my strengths as a young leader and opened the door of my management developing journey. Now as Commissioner I am committed to developing leadership at all levels in the Bermuda Police Service and I have called on Learning 2 Achieve to deliver a number of similar programmes to our staff. I speak to each course personally and the overwhelming sentiment is: this is “must-have” training for all developing managers.

Michael A. DeSilva

Commissioner

Bermuda Police Service

 

To Find out more about the Performance Landscape programme Alan used, please have a look here

Alan Wingrove – is that me in Google?

Have you ever put your own name into a Google search? When Executive Business Coaching, it is something I often recommend my clients do, as it is amazing the trail of your past you unintentionally leave on the Internet. This information is there for others to view and, if you are aware of your profile and how to use it, can form a major part of your personal brand.

Try entering your own name into a Google search and see what it reveals about you. I have tried it with my own name, as my ‘branding energy’ goes into Executive Business Coaching and I have worked hard to integrate my experience from the public sector (police) with an ever growing experience of the commercial world, where the majority of my work has been for the last five years. When Google does a suggested fill-in list, it shows Alan Wingrove, Alan Wingrove Tesco (not me!) and Alan Wingrove police. I was quite intrigued by this last one, as I thought there would probably be entries there that relate to me, even though I left the police in 2005– and I was right.

The first entry is a site called ‘Wingrove world-wide’ and relates to numerous people with this surname and, lo and behold, I am shown on here as Chief Inspector at Gatwick and contactable on a Sussex Police e-mail address; a post I left in 2002. Some of the other entries relate to my time at the Police Leadership Academy, Bramshill and articles I’ve written about policing issues. I still hold an interest in policing and have some strong views about the organisation, which I am not slow to express – mainly on our blog Performance and Strategy and in Ezine articles.

Initial results are from sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and these tend to combine my past career with the police and my current Executive Business Coaching. All of this information builds up a picture, as it will about you, and there have been a number of articles in the media and professional magazines about how employers use social network sites. Whilst questions are asked about whether it is ethical to use these sites to research applicants for a position, there have been a number of examples where an employee has posted derogatory comments about their organisation, or people within it – especially their managers!

The Chartered Management Institute Network recently had a discussion on their LinkedIn group about whether it is right for employers to research applicants’ social media profiles and Adi Gaskell, from the Chartered Management Institute, made the important point:

“Personal branding is likely to be an ever increasing field for people to take an interest in. I think it’s naive in the modern world to expect recruiters to not put your name into Google and the various social networks to see a bit more about you. Your job is to ensure that what appears is the kind of thing you want other people knowing/thinking about you.”

The same is true of potential customers. Consider what you do with a business card that is given to you. I put the company website into Google, to see what that tells me and then I do a Google search on the name of the person who gave me the card. You may learn a lot about the person – and, occasionally, that isn’t congruent with their website. To give you an example, I was given the business card of a consultant from a security company which had a good website but the Google search on the individual revealed that he had been required to resign from a high profile public sector organisation – worth knowing!

Here are some tips on how to start working on your professional profile now:

Make sure you know what a Google search will reveal about you. It may seem strange, but do this from a computer that you don’t normally use, as your personal ‘cache’ may distort the outcome.

On social sites keep your personal profiles private.

Remember that whatever you ‘Tweet’ or ‘post on your wall’ on social networking sites is in the public domain. There have been numerous examples in the media recently where high-profile figures have had their comments made very public – and ‘it’s personal stuff’ is not an excuse.

It is hard to create a ‘personal brand’ and easy to destroy it.

You need to consider it now. I am fortunate in that ‘Alan Wingrove police’ doesn’t reveal anything I’m concerned about or that will adversely affect my Executive Business Coaching, but that history extends to more than nine years ago. Don’t wait until you want to use your to create it, as you cannot delete what’s already there.

According to a survey by uSwitch 22% of small to medium business enterprises (SMEs) intend to hire new staff, but just 2% of them would actively seek to recruit public sector workers.

Almost a quarter of small businesses would hire a public sector worker if there was no one else for the job, but 10% would never hire a public sector worker. The survey, says uSwitch, reveals “a widely spread perception that public sector industry has developed over-indulged staff with unrealistic expectations of the workplace” with 55% of SME owners believing public sector workers to be unrealistic in their expectations about pay, holidays and employment terms, and only 11% of those questioned considered public sector workers to be as productive as their private sector counterparts.

I have coached senior leaders from the public sector who will do excellently in the private sector if they can just learn to use the language to market their transferable skills to a commercial organisation. However, they first have to overcome the damage of being ‘rubbished’ by the rhetoric currently being espoused about the public sector. If you continually tell a person that they are useless then they internalise that message and lose their self confidence, which has happened to some really good senior leaders.

Re-installing that inner belief and self-marketing ability is where the services of a good coach can provide real benefit.

Sometimes people use great coaching questions without realising it, which was certainly the case two days ago when the BBC interviewed a NATO representative about them taking control of the military operations against Gaddafi’s forces in Libya.

The representative proudly stated that further strikes had taken place against the military forces and reiterated that the mission was to ‘protect civilians from being killed and injured by the Libyan government forces’. He was then asked, “So, if the rebel forces start killing civilians whilst attacking government strongholds similar military strikes will be made against them, is that correct?” A brilliant question that visibly made the interviewee think and his initial weak respone was, “We don’t think the rebels will kill civilians.” This was met by an excellent and simple follow up question of, “Why?”

This did not get answered but was a good example of how a senior leader can be helped to think through alternative scenarios in order to recognise the bias of their original position. Strange that twenty-four hours later there’s talk of providing the rebels with weapons and the politicians are still adamant that they are not taking sides. Perhaps they should consider alternative scenarios too.

When coaching senior executives on their strategic initiatives I often find myself asking, “What will success look like for you?” After listening to their answer, being that most strategic initiatives effect staff and stakeholders, I have found myself asking a follow up question of, “What will success look like for those involved?”

Now imagine asking those questions of those in charge of the United Nations intervention in Libya. Irrespective of whether it is right or wrong to be intervening in Libya, the question for me is, “What will success look like for the UN?” It would be easy to answer ‘for Gaddafi to relinquish power’ or ‘for pro-Gaddafi forces to stop killing and injuring those opposed to Gaddafi’.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a common aim within the UN Security Council’s Resolution. Some suggest the objective is to freeze the military situation on the ground so diplomacy can proceed. Others have expressed a more literal interpretation of the resolution and say the role of the no-fly zone should be to protect civilians and population centres. Another interpretation identifies the aim as defeating Gaddafi’s forces, which is, arguably, something well beyond the intent of the resolution. Also, to what extent will there be ‘mission-creep’ subsequent to the no-fly zone?

Similarly, it would be fair to ask, “When you have achieved your strategic initiative, what is your ‘return to normality’ strategy?” As with most strategic initiatives, for the residents of Libya it will, in all probability, be a new ‘normality’, but normality never the less.

It’s a difficult decision to enter into another country’s internal conflict, but not one that should be taken without a clear understanding of the strategic objectives and a ‘return to normality’ strategy and I am concerned that the western world has entered yet another conflict without an exit strategy.  They didn’t exist in Bosnia, either of the Iraq wars or Afghanistan and I just have a fear that we could leave yet another nation struggling to recover after our ‘assistance’ has ended.

Hopefully I will be proved wrong – and I’ll be pleasantly surprised!

Yes, that’s right – I would like to publicly thank the Bank of Scotland for their efficiency.

On Tuesday morning (8th March) I received a telephone call from them, asking me if I was using my credit card to purchase some lights. That’s when I – and they – realised that some rat had cloned my card. I followed their requested procedure and they cancelled the card. Whilst I was on the phone to them I received a text, from another member of their staff, informing me that an attempt was being made to use my card again.

I know that identity theft is the largest crime in the UK and I was impressed at how quickly the misuse of my card was picked up and checked out with me. The unfortunate thing is that every respectable person is paying for the damage these rodents cause, both in what we pay for goods and for the ever-increasing resources every bank has to put into trying to combat these thefts. I wish them every success in eliminating these vermin and would like to reiterate my thanks for their help.