Voices at the Boundary
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An account of a boundary crossing meeting between 12 AEEU shop stewards and 8 New Intermediaries
Held at Esher Place on 25th July 2001
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One plainly spoken remark at the final round up of the meeting brought us to the edge of our seats:
"We've given you more than you've given us"
What a blow to hear this from one of the AEEU convenors after around 4 hours of lively conversations together! I (Tony) admit I had been on a bit of a high, enjoying the contact with a group of people I do not usually meet, whose roles seemed quite different from ours, and whose life experience was different too. Then bam, suddenly you hit the ground and it feels like you failed. It was then hard to know what to do in the last few minutes - should we defend ourselves, get more generous and attempt to give something more, or should we simply register that this is where we got to?
The remark upped the concentration levels in the last session. It provoked everyone in the room to question what had we given and what had we got from our experimental boundary-crossing day together. And in a way the remark seemed to carry with it just a whiff of the conflict-ridden industrial history which was behind our conversation - in other words, was this a fair exchange, or loaded to benefit the other side ("management")? Can we trust this, or have we been in some clever way lied to or cheated here?
Fiona and John responded by registering the remark, without trying to defend. If there had been time, this might have been the kicking off point for a further, deeper round of conversations between us. Since it was the end, and I promised to write something about the day, the best I can do is write something about what I thought the day was about, and what I noticed. I'm happy to accept that others might have noticed different things, and even disagree with what I have recorded here - maybe there would be 20 different versions, but I suspect not, because it felt like there really was some "meeting of minds".
Impressions leading up to the meeting
An interesting email had gone round the New Intermediaries group from Uly (who with Fiona had set up the session with Mike McCartney and Ian). Apparently the shop stewards had been looking forward to our session together but had asked Mike: "Can we beat them up?". Mike apparently had told the stewards to be constructive, and Uly pointed out to us there might be some emotions around about consultants and about change.
Why would we want to come along to a meeting where we might get beaten up? I suppose we each had our reasons. As a self-employed consultant, I want to stay in touch with others. I'm always worried about being in a bubble - isolated, cut off from the rest of the world. When I was younger I worked in some factories making bread, Christmas puddings, refrigerated display cases, gear boxes, but I haven't been in one for 10 years or more. As a consultant today I'm working mainly with service companies (like hotels, banks, government, water utilities), many of them non-unionised. Talking with colleagues I realised that we work more often with "managers" than the people who are directly making things and delivering service to customers. Yet we're helping managers make decisions often about changes that affect frontline staff. And service company decisions affect manufacturing companies, since they are customer and supplier to one another. We're all in a chain, or a larger system, and I wanted to meet some people on the receiving end of the management decisions we influence.
And I suppose this is what we mean by boundary crossing. When you realise you're in a chain like this, and depending on some other person or group, then going up to the boundary fence to talk, making an occasion for conversation and contact, facing up to each other as honestly as you can, instead of being "too busy". We've noticed that when a lot of change is happening but this kind of direct talking is not happening, then people fall into misunderstanding, mistrusting, even fearing and hating - and the whole organisation suffers. Maybe we are thinking along the same lines as the union when it talks about Partnership.
Driving to the meeting was strange and a bit destabilising. I expected to be going to a factory, or a run down old office building, not to find myself driving through a private estate with expensive houses, and then to be drawing up to a historic French chateau. The challenge to my expectations continued as I looked around the casually dressed consultants being greeted by Mike and Ian, both wearing shirt and tie. Didn't it used to be the managers and consultants who wore the suits? I was starting to realise the union really was casting off its old image, and showing it had reinvented itself. This could be interesting.
As we entered The Gallery, I suppose I was disappointed to find it laid out like a cinema - how could we have a proper conversation like this? Quickly, with the help of the convenors/shop stewards, we rearranged the chairs into a circle. In doing this we were creating what we considered to be important conditions for a decent conversation - no desks, no barriers, the chance for everyone to make eye contact and giving an equal position to everyone.
Getting Started
Mike welcomed us, referred to the People Equation and invited an opening round of introductions. As we listened to each person in turn, the last 20-30 years of industrial history seemed to come alive in the room. Each story had something heavy about it, and was challenging to take in. I did not know what was coming next - the convenors had lived through their companies being sold off, closed down, smashed up, renamed, bought out, downsized with huge jobs losses. Often their hopes had been raised only to be cruelly dashed. Just here and there was a glimmer of pride about new moves into teamwork, or partnership, or taking on staff, or a respected leader.
Here are some of the voices I heard:
"Today we're 800 shopfloor workers reduced from 6000 in 1979. The name of our company has changed 5 times in that period."
"Two years ago I moved from Scotland to the mobile phone factory in Portsmouth. There are 350 people there many of whom would not join the union. Now it's closing and the work is moving to Czechoslovakia where labour costs are cheaper. What do I think of the management? I'll try not to swear. I don't get on with what they say. They look after each other even when they're not doing their jobs properly. They'll all have a job but I'm redundant and moving back to Scotland."
"We keep having name changes, mergers, buy-outs. In the last one we were taken over by venture capitalists, who persuaded us they wanted to build the company up and float it on the stock market. Sounded brilliant, but we were wrong to believe it. Now they're selling of the profitable parts - anything is up for sale, and soon we'll be working for one of our competitors."
"I work in the Isle of Wight, and we do not have too many problems there. Our head office is in Scotland though and my job is to try to smooth things over between the workforce and management."
"We're an engineering company, going into Investors in People, introducing team-working over the last 2 years, and partnerships with our customers."
"We've introduced team-based working and it's a big success."
"Consultants don't ride real motorbikes"
Once the introductions were complete, we moved into "home groups" (ie convenors in one group and New Intermediaries in the other) to being thinking about:
In the New Intermediaries group we seemed loath, at first, to look at ourselves and focused, as is natural for us, on others. We considered both the outside events-driven aspect of change (as a self-employed person when you lose a contract) and the inner aspect (how you feel, react, cope, adjust, grow, learn…). In exploring who we represent, we seemed to have to juggle between caring for
At the end of it, we tend to put the client first, and have difficulty working with the client if they seem to be ignoring the needs of their people or the wider company.
Mixed groups
We divided into 3 groups, each containing a mix of shop stewards and consultants, and sitting outside in the sunshine we shared conclusions from the last round, explored each other's experience and developed a conversation together.
I noted that to convenors change means changes to shift, new technology, multiskilling, teamworking, laying people off, new managers, closures, renaming companies…. and that the impact of change is worse since the move from "personnel" (interest in people and their welfare), to "Human Resources" departments (more interested in profit, and what's good for the company, than in the welfare of individuals).
"There used to be a human face, but that's all gone now that we've changed from personnel to HR. This brings with it alienation and high sickness rates."
In exploring the shift to HR, we learned that traditionally the personnel person was male, had shop floor experience, and had probably worked as a convenor. The new HR person was often female, well-educated but lacking in shop floor experience…
"I'll tell you what's at the root of it: all men are bastards, and the HR women knows it. That's why she can't deal with us!"
The picture developing was of an industry in decline and contraction, with jobs moving abroad or lost no matter how well people had worked; almost a sense of the pointlessness of continuing to try to be efficient when the odds are stacked against you.
"Gradually they're going through the whole factory, each time there are redundancies they're trying to weed out the bloodsuckers."
"Our biggest problem is twilight shifts. People don't want to work them because it stops them seeing their families. When you force them the absence rates go through the roof and we get more discipline cases to fight."
"We have all sorts of problems. Disciplinary cases over absenteeism. Redundancies to deal with…. and I don't like it when they keep changing the selection matrix, giving points for disciplinary, absence records and all that. The only fair way is last in and first out, then we all know where we stand."
Exploring the question of how to build trust I realised that this is what the convenor is working to do all the time: to bond together the shop stewards, to build relationships with management so that communication is good, encouraging the workforce to adapt and protecting jobs.
John found the language convenors were using rather black and white, and wanted more shades of grey. He also noticed frequent references to "bollockings" suggesting a workplace that was confrontational, still a battle ground. We discussed how stress affects us during change, and how fear may be behind some of the difficult relationships, but when trust had been badly broken as in the case of a factory closing this was difficult to accept…
"All managers are bastards, looking after each other. They lie to you, say one thing and do another. It doesn't hurt them. It hurts us"
John also asked whether in thinking back to the days of personal there was an idealisation of this time - it was being looked back on as a golden age. Ian agreed.
During lunch I learned that the convenor role is unpaid, that you do it alongside your other job but it takes up a lot of time. You get a lot of grief and not a lot of thanks, including phone calls at home, perhaps on a Saturday night to sort out something that is going wrong on one of the shifts. And if you ever leave and apply for another job you would not put down that you'd been a convenor - this would suggest trouble-maker!
I also learned that in one of the successful team-based organisations, the power had begun to shift. When managers wanted to introduce continuous improvement, they approached the convenor who said
"Do you want to have one of those useless suggestion boxes where only 3% give you any ideas, and nothing ever gets introduced, or do you want to do it for real because I'll tell you how much we could improve things, but only if the team gets to share 25% of the value."
This was a little challenging and the managers have gone away to think!
In one of the other groups they uncovered the devastating social impact of factory closures: crime shoots up, and local commerce collapses. The often unspoken aspect of this was the absence of choice for these people being born into families where they have fewer options and less career mobility than their managers. A closure spells a very harsh future.
In the third group I understand they explored a specific instance in which a convenor said good morning to a manager who blanked them, considering in some detail the options available and consequences of letting this go by, or dealing with it directly.
Whole group
After lunch the whole group gathered on the lawn in a large circle. This was a chance to share what we had been learning across the 3 groups.
The consultants' learning included:
"The I'm Alright Jack stance has reversed - now it's the HR people who are blindly following the book, and the shop stewards who are saying let's talk."
"The Convenor role is a management job in that it is all about how to motivate and organise other people."
"The Convenor is a consultant like us, inside the company while most of us are external. It is a link person who takes soundings, and gets all the ideas coming in. Unlike us you seem to have a clear idea of who you are responsible for."
"There are 2 languages being spoken - the business language in which people are assets who can become liabilities and can be discarded… and the human relations language about relationships and trust, in which the costs of breaking trust are obvious."
The Shop Stewards' learning included:
"Don’t shit on the union and I don't shit on you - it's the relationship and trust you build up."
"When management want us to change, the acid test is when you go back to them and tell them what they have to change to make this possible."
"Half the management team are not trained to deal with people, and what's worse they're all afraid of the one above them."
"It sounds as if all managers are bad - they're not. One production manager will listen while another says go fuck off. It's a question of respect. Behaviour breeds behaviour."
"Generally when a manager says they want change because of the way the company is going, we go with it
This seemed to highlight a sense of responsibility for ensuring the success of the company:
"The best way to screw the factory is to do as you're told"
Dave told a story about a lathe operator with 30 years experience, told by a business school graduate with a pad full of calculations, how fast to set the speed and feed on his machine. The graduate gave his orders not realising that titanium was stronger and tends to grad the cutting tool if machined too fast. The experienced lathe operator followed the orders and did expensive damage.
What does it take to build trust?
This story led on to us examining the question of what does it take to build trust. Andy reminded us that…
"People with power will not change until people without power kick their butt!"
This led to a couple of suggestions:
The conversation about conflict that followed drew from Fiona the consultant approach to handling conflict:
"When it happens don't bury it, don't try to smooth ruffled feathers because the conflict will get acted out anyway in another way, in another place. You have to surface it, and make the time and space to talk honestly. It's dreadful how little time we give to this when it's so important."
Daryl from the Isle of Wight told us about the hour he had spent every month with his workforce to take moans, build trust, introduce change such as new tools and produce an action plan. The effect was brilliant, but all senior management in Scotland noticed was 50 man-hours lost and ordered the sessions to stop. From which Andy observed that it would take thousands of pounds worth of consultancy to introduce something like this, and it could be destroyed overnight. We discussed the impact of language. Mike noticed that accountants would often seek to cut "maintenance" costs, but would accept "asset care".
Why are leaders like this?
Maybe they're victims of success, feeling pressure of overwork, and delegating like overworked parents relying more on TV/ computer/ nanny/ grandparents to look after their children.
Does this make convenors and consultants into nannies?
Which provoked Colston to ask:
"How much parenting can be outsourced? What is core and what is not?"
We considered how it might be as simple as leaders being polite, saying good morning, treating their people with respect. There were different views on how important saying good morning was.
Steve observed that the manager often gets the emphasis wrong and causes their own problems:
"Managers spend time chasing the hard issues, and they're always firefighting because they ignore the soft issues. If they sort the soft issues there won't be any hard issues"
Bob from the London Ambulance Service described his new Chief Executive, a very nice bloke who believed that manners maketh man. He visits each ambulance station every month and sits in the mess. He says middle managers need to be educated and gives out his phone number to everyone to call him personally if they have a complaint about their manager. He goes out as third man in the ambulance, and earned great respect on one occasion through turning away a drunk, rather than driving him to hospital.
The conversation turned to giving and building respect. Ian put it something like this:
"I respect you're going to say no to me, and I'm going to say no to you, so we respect each other."
What to do about crap leaders?
Was it enough to have conversations like these today? Had we not started to build some relationship and some trust here? Mike argued relationship yes and trust no, not yet, and it was clear that having this kind of conversation may not be enough to shift a bad manager into new behaviour. Maybe this kind of conversation takes people up to the boundary, but what about crossing it? What would create a shift that managers could not walk back from?
We heard from Fiona about the Sainsburys' managers who walked round a store with a mother and screaming 2 year old. We talked about Back To The Floor, and the London Ambulance Service Chief Executive.
Steve described the kind of leader that he wants to have:
"A driving force. Someone who'll chat to anyone, even the people standing outside smoking, and without bollocking them for smoking. They'll be straight with you. No bullshit. Making decisions, and taking risks."
The Convenor as Leader
We considered the role of Convenor as leader. David said this meant representing their members in the best possible way, to ensure the company is doing well, and mentoring the managers if need be.
"The days of table thumping are over. Protection of jobs by protecting the company is in everyone's interests."
"It is not all about what managers are doing right or wrong. As Trades Unions we're failing because most managers and most members even don't know much about Trades Unions."
Andy put the question "what do you want to create?"
Closing round
And so we return to the closing round in which we were provoked: had the consultants given as much as we gained? Well we tried, and maybe this write up helps a bit to explain what we were doing and why.
Shona asked if we could tell her about the convenors' shortcomings from a management point of view. In response to this I urged convenors not to be defensive, setting aside the past and having confidence in the pressing need for their work today. Alan asked me if I was in a union. I said no. A few moments later he made a bid to recruit Hazel and Hewlett Packard. Full marks for opportunity spotting!
The closing conversation settled on the wish to keep up the process we have started and to invite the third voice into the room (managers). Mike suggested an invitation course, and suggested New Intermediaries could be brokers for this, and when the time came it would be about getting conflict out along the lines of "What pisses you off about them?".
Mike gave a short closing speech.
"Unions were formed to force issues, picking up the cudgels. Now this is still needed but shouldn't be taken literally - it is a metaphor. We continue this work today by being professional, by having something to say that adds value to the business."
David said something encouraging just as we were departing:
"The barrier is already beginning to be broken"
Where does that leave us?
We held a wash-up session after we left the convenors and these thoughts emerged there and in some of them in our reflections subsequently.
Well we all went up to the boundary fence and gave voice to the issues. It was starting to bubble nicely. If we had longer, we would have got further. But this far feels OK too.
I'm not sure as consultants we were consciously holding anything back, but equally I'm not sure each of us fully understands our impact on the other. It seemed that the convenors expected something different from us as consultants than they got. Did they expect a loaf of bread instead of being shown how to make bread? Was cookbook fashion, telling people what to do, what convenors expected from previous experiences with consultants?
What was not explored that might have been revealing? Well what about when we as consultants have influenced a manager who is planning to close a factory, or issue redundancy notices, or introduce new technology that threatens jobs? This would represent consultants impacting on convenors and the people they represent. What decisions are we involved with as consultants (and as convenors) that hurt some people, for the greater good, or so we think? What did I experience in a hotel company and a water company recently where they had to cut costs and jobs? What did I decide to do and why? What part did I play 6 years ago in a pharmaceutical company that was closing factories? I did not bring this into the conversation. Don't know why (fear?) but it didn't come up. When might we as consultants have been brave enough to stand by a principle, against the pressure of opinion? When is it right for us to support decisions that may harm individuals? I think these are murky areas but potentially fruitful to explore.
Colston observed that convenors' customers are no longer just the shopfloor, but a much wider group that they seek to influence including first line and higher management, trades councils, party politics, and as HR have absented themselves from the "scene of the crime", convenors are left to pick up the broker role, or internal change agent, on behalf of the company. He also raised a concern that as the AEEU seeks to become more professional, more like management, it's foundational values may be lost.
The conversation leaves me excited. Relieved not to be beaten up! It feels like something new has happened, and that there are further possibilities. It was an experiment, therefore a bit fuzzy around the edges, not sharp, clear and well-defined. It is in the spirit of our kind of consultancy work, which is "getting talking going" rather than "writing reports as experts".
Andy is interested in taking further the interest several people expressed in learning about acting. A further event involving managers would be even more exciting and is likely to happen at some time. Fiona is talking about getting the City and venture capitalists involved somehow. All we know for certain is a conversation has started. We have given each other respect. Some new possibilities have been created. This is what we think boundary crossing is about.
Thanks to Mike, Ian, Fiona, Uly, Lynn Williams and Richard Fulham for setting this up. Thanks to all for joining in. Apologies to many of you who said interesting things that aren't captured here! Please feel free to set the record straight!
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Tony Page
On behalf of Andy Harmon, Anne Radford, Colston Sanger, Fiona Coffey, Hazel Jennings, John Wilkes, Uly Ma and the New Intermediaries.
You can contact any one of us using email at info@newintermediaries.co.uk
26th July 2001
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