Well, thank you. As they say after that introduction, I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say to you.
And before I start, I've got about 60 slides and we've got about 60 minutes, and my normal delivery is one slide per minute.
So you'll be all right. We will get to the wine on time. But notwithstanding that, could you interrupt if anything's not clear?
Because I'm anxious that I give you something useful as well as that which I thought you might like to know.
So please do interrupt if if something needs clarifying and I'll catch up the time and we will get to the wine in time.
So you've already heard my CV. I started off as a physicist and soon found that there was no money in physics.
So I went into business. I ran some companies for seven years.
I then got fired. We're talking about managing people, managing teams.
I was the managing director of APL Sea.
Fighting with the chairman and board meetings is a really bad idea if you want to promote a successful management career.
So I got fired. I was then unemployed or a consultant, as we call them in Oxford,
and I met some rich guys who wanted to invest in technology based businesses and we started a couple.
Oxford asymmetry was sold for 300 million. The university made 11 million for a cash investment of zero.
They thought this was a good idea. So they recruited me to build a business innovation so they could have more spin outs.
And that's what I did for ten years after I retired.
From there I joined a couple of companies as a non exec.
So you can say I started my life in industry, dabbled in finance, dabbled in academia, and now I'm sort of back in industry as well.
So it really achieved nothing going round all this pain and anguish.
But this will explain to you some of my prejudices. And now I'm supposed to be talking to you about managing people, managing teams.
And the first thing the first point to make is it really matters.
Everything that's done in the company is done by a person. And if you're not going to do it all yourself,
you need to be getting other good at getting other people to do what you want them to do, which may well not be what they want to do.
I've seen more companies fail through lack of cohesion than any other cause.
I mean, sometimes the market fails, sometimes the technology fails.
But with a great market and a great technology, incompetent management can wreck a huge amount of shareholder value.
And that being so, I think it's probably worth spending an evening thinking about this stuff.
When the going gets tough. You don't want to have to start building relationships with the people you work with.
And very early in my career,
the first managing director job I had was for one of the subsidiaries of one of the companies in the Oxford Instruments Group,
and a colleague of mine was the managing director of Oxford Medical Systems,
which was based in Abingdon, but had a subsidiary in Florida run by an American called Jack Frost.
And my friend and the head of the American subsidiary used to meet once a month, either in the UK or in the States.
And this seemed to me a terrible waste of money on trans-Atlantic airfares.
And I said to my friend, Why do you do this? And he said, Well, it's important for us to communicate with each other when we're not having problems,
so that when we are having problems, the communication is already open, he said.
It's a bit like a concert pianist.
Concert pianist spend a long time playing the piano when nobody is listening so that when people are listening, it all comes out right.
And I think this is a theme through my talk, really.
If you communicate when you're not under stress, when you are under stress, at least you've got viable communication channels open.
So if you're going to run a business, if you're going to manage a piece of a business, see this as an important part of the job,
not a personal characteristic of you as a manager, but as a professional skill that if you're good at your life, will be easier and more successful.
So it's a professional skill. Many managers never get themselves any training in this subject.
They think they can make it up.
It's a major risk if you get it wrong, as I'll well as I demonstrated in my own career when I got fired from Michael Vick.
So transactional analysis is a way of looking and structuring the interaction between two people.
And I've just spent ten weeks on a part time course on this.
You can spend four years covering this. I'm going to tell you about it in about 4 minutes.
So this will be a superficial presentation, but if you're interested in it, it's worth looking.
The idea is that each of us can operate in one of three ego states.
These are conveniently enabled labels parent, adult and child when we're operating.
Being in a parent state, we are supporting, we are using our experience and we have some pat responses we give people when we're operating in adult.
It's all about data processing facts, reporting back, asking for reports back and of course the resulting gratification of being adult about things.
And finally, when we're behaving in child, it's all about intuition, creativity, spontaneity, having fun, enjoyment.
None of these are more important than the others. They're equally respectable.
And we all do. All of them. Some people do, some more than others.
And these on the standard transactional analysis diagram, these are shown as three blobs.
Now, if we initiate an interaction with someone, we'll label ourselves as the agent and they can label them as the respondent.
Let's look what happens. So I say something to you and you respond.
A stimulus and a response. This is all pretty straightforward, but it gets quite complex in a minute.
So let's look at a transaction.
I arrive at Oxford Railway Station and there's someone in the booking hall sitting on the seat sobbing.
I walk up to this person and say, Is there anything I can do to help?
And they say, Yes,
I've just had some really bad news and I've got to get home to Birmingham and I don't know what time the train is and I'm very distraught about it.
So this is me taking a parent role, inviting them to respond in a child role.
In other words, I'm saying I've got the power. Can I use my power to help your problem?
And this is called a complimentary transaction and it's all very comfortable because I can go and look up the train
times and help them and that and they'll feel cared for and I'll feel smug and that'll be a complimentary transaction.
So that's nice. Let us now look at what can go wrong.
And this is called a cross transaction. Same scenario I go and say can do anything to help.
They stand up, smack me on the nose and say, Who the [INAUDIBLE] do you think you are coming interfering in my life.
In other words, they're telling me what I'm doing wrong. So they're being parent.
I'm being parent. And there's a lot of pain involved. You see this all the time,
but this is an across transaction and the only way out of it is for one or other of us what we can either separate and break the transaction off,
or for one or other of us to change roles. For example, I could move into an adult role and say, I'm terribly sorry, I just am.
And then I start reporting, which is a characteristic of adult behaviour.
I want to help, but if you'll fine, I'll go away and I apologise for it, for disturbing you.
And they say, well actually no I did.
Then they can go adult and say I did overreact a bit, but perhaps you could just give me a hand lifting this big heavy case off the platform.
So that's the basis of transactional analysis.
Now, there's a lot more to it than that.
And the important point, I think, is that each of these three aspects is entitled to equal respect and has a legitimate place in life.
So if you're always childish, you shouldn't feel bad about it.
You may be a creative genius.
This was the system was initiated by Rick Byrne in 1964 and there's a couple more books here, one by him, one by someone else.
This word joins is not a typing error. He really is called Van Jones.
So if you're interested in that, that's all I want to tell you about transactional analysis.
Let's now get on to leadership styles. I'm talking I'm still talking as I was last time about 1 to 1.
Relationships will do one to many later on. If you look at the ways leaders can operate, you could characterise it in two orthogonal dimensions.
So you could say, how supportive are they?
In other words, do they care what you, the people being led, think?
And the other is how directive are they? Do they tell you what to do or do they trust you?
And if you spread, if you define for styles of leadership around this sector one sector,
two sector, three sector for that sometimes called type one, type two, type three, type four.
If we just look at the bottom left hand corner type one leadership, highly directive, low supportive.
If I smell smoke, I will tell you to get out of the lecture room quickly using the doors at the back.
I don't want a discussion. I want you out now.
That's type one leadership and that's the way you work when you've got subordinates whose capabilities you're not sure about.
And similarly, you can go round the the chart.
Now you can describe these for.
Stiles is directing, coaching, supporting and delegating.
And with different members of your team, you may have to use different styles.
The important thing is that as you go round the chart,
you don't want to miss out any steps and the progress you make if you define progress as moving from right to left depends
on the stage of the development of the people that you're trying to manage or the person you're trying to manage.
And of course, your skill. I will assume that having been on this course, you will all be supremely skilled.
Not all members of your team will be at this at the same stage.
They never are.
You may well have people in your team who are very unself confident and who really do need you to tell them what to do every half day or so.
They may well be members of your team who are so good at what they do and know you so well and who you trust so well
that you just see them once a month when they come over from the States and they get on with doing what they do.
So different members of the team can be at a different stage, but as you and your team progress, you and the individuals in your team progress.
It is dangerous to miss out a stage.
For example, if you've been working with someone who works for you and you've been directing them and you suddenly start delegating stuff for them,
it may well be a symptom of you just having got fed up of telling them what to do and you're not delegating, you're abdicating.
What's more, they will probably well, if you're lucky, they might lift up the baton, but on the other hand, they may just collapse under the strain.
Similarly, if you've been supporting someone in fear in Sector three and you suddenly start telling them what to do,
they will be very demotivated because they've been used to low direction from you
and high support and suddenly they're getting strong direction and no support.
And jumping straight from coaching to delegating may also destroy confidence because, you know, suddenly I've got no support anymore.
Doesn't my boss love me? So you can make up your own examples.
But it is important, I think, to know where each of your team are in their relations to you on this chart.
And take take it step by step. And of course, you can go both ways if someone's struggling.
You may need to move back a notch until their self-confidence gets going.
Let's look at the variables in these relationships.
The first one is the self-confidence of the person who's working for you.
The second is your confidence in them.
Third one is their confidence in you and of course, your confidence in yourself.
Now, I will assume for the purposes of this course, that everybody's full of self-confidence and they enjoy the confidence of their subordinates.
This is not, of course, always the case,
but it's it suffices to make that assumption for the illustration that follows as the relationship moves around the chart.
It's interesting to look how the other two vary, the other two being the subordinates self-confidence and your confidence in them.
So we start in directing. Your confidence in them is low and their self-confidence is low and you tell them
what to do and they feel cared for and you feel in control of the business.
And then as you move around the chart, your confidence in them increases and hopefully their sole self-confidence increases as well.
So they become more and more autonomous as your relationship progresses.
And that's great while it's all going well. But let's look what happens when it goes the other way.
Assuming you've got someone who works for you and you've been delegating to them and
you've given them objectives every four months and they've been delivering the goods,
and if they've had problems, they've asked for help. But most of the time they're good and their work starts to fall off for whatever reason.
Maybe a work related reason, maybe a non-work-related reason.
Then your confidence in them starts reducing. But we have no idea what's happening to their self self-confidence.
They may still feel they're doing a great job, but you know they're not.
This is really tricky.
And unless you can actually find time to sit and watch this relationship, you only find out about this when there's a huge crisis.
And what I'm hoping to do is sensitise you to it so you see it before there's much blood.
There's one other aspect of this that I should mention, and that is history, says this little man pulling his truck of gold walks in a path like that.
And let's look what the truck knows. The truck goes to the left until he turns around and the string goes slack.
Then the truck stops for a bit until the strings gone to the other way, and then the truck moves back the other way.
The two important things to note about this is, one, there is a lag in the reaction of the truck to the change of direction of the little man.
And so that will be with your people.
If you change what you want to do, you should not assume that the whole team is going to change direction on a sixpence because it won't.
First thing is, they have to work out what it is you wanted them to do. Then they have to stop doing the way doing things the way they did it before.
Then they have to start doing it the way you want to do it. If you change direction sufficiently rapidly, they won't have a change at all.
They'll just take the average of what they thought you wanted.
The other thing to note is that the truck doesn't move with the same amplitude as the little man.
And that's also the case with physical things, but may not be the case with people.
If you've got your team dynamics right, you may get a much bigger energy from the response that you actually put in in the stimulus,
and that's what makes it all worthwhile. And so that's enough about leadership and management.
Let's now look at selection techniques, because a good way of successfully leading a team is to have a successful team.
My colleague Tom Hockaday, who some of you may have met, who now runs ices, is one for the bond MMOs.
And one of his bond Moz is that good people do good work.
So when something when you see a piece of work that is really competently done.
Surprise, surprise, it's done by a supremely competent person.
HOCKADAY His second edict is equally illuminating, and that is that perhaps,
perhaps if you meet an idiot and then you go and meet his or her boss, it turns out the boss is one as well, because who would employ an idiot?
So good people do good work. So therefore, if you can, if you can select and assemble a winning team, your life will be a lot easier.
So let me talk a bit about selection techniques and specifically I'm going to talk about interviews, psychometrics and networks.
I mean, again, there's probably a two year course you can do on selection techniques.
This is the ten minute version. So a bit about interviews.
I've interviewed lots of people. I've been interviewed by lots of people. I've watched lots of interviews.
And the first thing is to give you the health warning. You must avoid prejudice with respect to age, gender, sexual preference or race.
Some people suggest that you should ask the same question to every candidate.
I have been in organisations where I've been issued with a list of questions and you're not allowed to ask any other questions.
This is the law and it doesn't work for an interview situation.
I don't believe so. I'm not going to advise you to break the law, but I'm going to advise you to think rather than following.
Strictly laid down rules because what you want to do is find out as much about the candidates as you possibly can.
My approach is to ask factual rather than hypothetical questions, but always with an eye to the green stuff at the top.
So before the interview and this is obvious study the advert and the job description you've written.
I've been to interviews where I've seen the interviewer leafing through the job description on their desk while interviewing me.
This is not good. So you may well have written the job description three months ago, or Job may have written the job description.
But bear in mind that the person who's coming for the interview will have been reading this document all the way on the train as they came,
so they will know what's in it. And you really need to know at least as much as they do about the job that you're interviewing them for.
Really read their application before the interview day.
I've seen managers who said, Oh, I'm on my way to some interviews now and I've not had time to read the CVS.
This is stupid because hey, it's rude to the people you're trying to recruit and B you may well recruit the wrong person.
And what I like to do is to look up their name and previous employers on the Web.
You might even resort to Facebook. Don't forget, it's public information, so you're allowed to know it.
Compare the facts in the application with what you have asked for.
I make when I'm applying for a job, but when I'm recruiting for a job, I'll make a list of the key points and then I put down.
If I'm applying for a job, how I meet all their requirements and if I'm recruiting,
I look for how they meet all my requirements and just compare the facts.
If there's a mismatch, it's not necessarily a no no.
If the candidate has addressed it, note it as a discussion point.
So, for example, if you've put in the job description,
we're looking for three years in a senior management position and the candidate hasn't got three years in a senior management position.
But you've still, for some reason, decided to interview them, investigate whether they thought about it, because it may be.
Well, no, I haven't had three years in a senior management position, but I did actually start my own business and sold this lot of stuff.
So although I didn't have any staff, I do actually understand the basics of profit loss and cashflow.
So look for the mismatch. But don't say wrong.
If they've addressed it. Look for gaps in the CV this, particularly if you're recruiting senior people.
There's a standard trick in CV writing that if you've been to prison for a year, you don't put it on your CV.
You say, You know, I was with such and such a company till 1997 and then from 2000 I was with this company.
Now, if you see, that's all intakes is difficult to do.
So what I do with complex CVS actually put them on a spreadsheet and this is my CV on the left
hand side of the jobs I've had and the right hand side is the training I've had roughly.
Now, I'm not suggesting you go to this multicoloured level with everybody you interview,
but if you've got someone who's had ten jobs for a senior job, if you put this in, there'll be a white bit where they were in prison.
So so it's it's sometimes worth going to this level of effort for a complicated CV and the senior job.
And when you're interviewing people, it's better if there's more than one of you for several reasons.
One, it's much easier to observe what's going on if you're not interacting at the time.
It's important that you decide in advance with your colleague what it is you want to know.
In other words, which bit of the CV do we want to dig into?
Which part of the job do we really want to talk about? Decide with your colleague who will cover what?
It's really bad manners to steal other people's questions.
So I would suggest that for this exercise you use a pro forma.
This is the one I use, design it yourself, fill in as much as you can in advance.
I have name at the top and I always write the first name of the candidate in large block capitals there.
It's really embarrassing when you're interviewing someone if you forget their name.
So if is at the top right hand corner so your eyes don't have to go down very far, you can address them by name.
The personality and appearance is already getting a bit iffy from the legal point of view because on the other hand,
if it's a job where personality and appearance is a key requirement, then I think it's allowable.
I put down under education and career progression most recent first.
So I'll put year company what they did and the rest I fill in as the interview proceeds.
But before we start the interview on the questions, I'll have two or three words for each question and who's going to ask it.
So finish as much as you can in advance. You don't have to fill it in in sequence as bits come out in the conversation,
particularly if there's two of you, your colleague can draw the file while you write something down on here.
Identify the order of questions and who asks what.
Don't write stuff you may regret.
Sometimes if you're in a problematical interview with a really dull person, you can make yourself feel better by writing down this guy.
Very boring, and it may amuse your colleague who's sitting next to you.
This is a really bad idea because if they don't get the job and if they then sue you,
this document may well be disclosed in a court of law and your side doesn't look very good if you're writing that sort of thing down on the interview.
So so just bear in mind, this piece of paper may well be read by someone who doesn't like you.
So that then brings us on to what to ask and what to not what not to ask.
I am not from the confrontational school of interviewing.
I like to start with an easy one about their CV. It's usually can you expand on on this bit it's not a pressurised thing gets them going.
Always ask factual. Ask factual questions because people are much, much less likely to exaggerate or lie about facts.
So if you say, would you say you were a competent sales manager?
What they're going to answer if you say, what's the biggest sales team you've ever managed?
They might stretch it a bit, but they won't lie outright.
Don't ask hypothetical questions. Do you think you could manage a team like the one we have?
What are you going to say? Don't tell them the answer in advance.
We are looking for someone bright and entrepreneurial. How would you describe yourself?
And so they'll pretend to think. I think I'm quite bright and aren't.
Yeah. I mean, these are all real.
But one of the do things is ask open questions. When.
When your brain is getting a bit jumbled in the middle of one of these things, remember the two words?
Tell me. Because if you say Tell me about.
And then anything on the piece of paper in front of you that gets you off the hook and gives you time to recover your presence of mind.
But then. Whilst whilst they're telling you about whatever it was you've asked them, ask them to expand on it.
So how successful was it? Oh, the turnover shot up.
But look for facts in the answer. What was the turnover before and what was the turnover afterwards?
Oh, it was three quid and then it was five quid. Now, that's not that's not what we're looking for.
If it was 3 million, then it was five. And when you say it was 5 million, was that in your section?
Oh, no. That was the company's turnover. There was another product.
There was nothing to do with me. So all the time facts are much more difficult to exaggerate and how, why and when not?
Questions with a yes or no answer, you know. Did you think this was successful?
Yes. Well, by how much did you increase the turnover?
And this is controversial because some people think that people should really be put under pressure at interviews.
I don't think you get a realistic assessment of people under pressure.
I think they have a much more realistic performance if they're enjoying it.
I'm not suggesting you should have drinks and nibbles and everything,
but I think if you're trying to develop a relationship with this person who might be working for you, this is a good time to start.
You're selling the job to them, so don't be nasty.
Most people don't want to work for a nasty boss. Now, why are you selling the job to them?
Because if this is the candidate you want, you don't want them to think.
I don't want to work for him. He's nasty. Don't argue with your colleague in front of interviewees.
Most people don't want to join a disunited team.
I was in a meeting with some lawyers who were pitching for our business and two of them had an argument.
This was when we were recruiting lawyers to work for ICE's patent attorneys to work for us.
And they just disagreed. And they insisting we just sitting there watching these two clowns.
Putting each other down. So don't argue with a colleague. I mean, if you must argue with your colleague, do it after they've left.
I didn't really agree with what you said about that, but not in front of the interviewees.
Assume they will be nervous.
I mean, we're all nervous when we go for interviews, unless we're particularly thick skinned and they may well behave non.
Typically, they may be too smiley, too giggly, too shaky, too silent.
So help them to settle and don't jump to conclusions.
And after the interview, immediately review your notes.
It's very easy at the end of a long day of interviewing to slam your bank, jump on the train and think, I'll look at it tomorrow.
But then you get in the office tomorrow and there's something urgent and you get through to lunchtime.
I really must look at that interview. By this time, your colleagues flown back to Canada.
So you then conferring with him by cell phone and it doesn't work.
So immediately review your notes, confer with the colleague if you've got one on what you've learned.
Different people see different things in interviews and getting as soon as you've had the interview is a good idea.
Review with your colleague. How you did this is particularly useful if you're doing a series of interviews,
so you're doing two in the morning and two in the afternoon after the first one.
Say, How did we do? And you say, Well, I think it would be better if I talked about this and you talked about that,
or perhaps we should do these two points in another order,
because you can then improve on your performance, on your performance as the day progresses.
Get back to candidates as soon as possible, preferably by phone, preferably yourself.
This is very. Difficult to do if you have a punitive H.R. department who won't let you do any managing.
But if you can do this, it shows courtesy and starts to build a working relationship with the people you're trying to recruit.
And if I've had an interview and the person I spoke to phoned me up the next day,
even if it's only to tell me that I might be on for a second interview, that's better than never hearing anything.
A colleague of mine has just was made redundant some time ago and he's been
looking for jobs and he goes for interviews and never hears anything at all.
This is not only impolite, but it means that the people doing the interviewing are just not competent.
So do get back to them as soon as possible. As soon as your companies rules will allow.
Always. I should have underlined that. Get references. So a bit about getting references.
Sometimes people will only give written ones. For example, I think if if you're getting references for teachers, education authorities have a rule.
We never give telephone references, so you can't have one.
But if you can, I prefer to phone the referee. Say who you are, what the job is, and that the candidate is nominated.
Then if they say, Well, he never asked me.
That tells you something about the candidate. But assuming that the candidate is kosher, that's all right.
Ask the referee about facts. Start date, end date, salary and so on.
Then you get on to the. More fuzzy things ask about strengths.
People are quite good to tell you about their ex-colleagues strengths.
I don't ask about weaknesses, but I ask what advice the referee would give the new boss.
And that's the same as asking about weaknesses. But it's not so not so much pressure on the referee and also the referee.
He shows the referee that you care what they've got to say because they can then go in to parent you.
If going back to the transactional stuff you have now assume the role of child.
Oh please. Can you tell me what I need to know about this person?
And it's always good being parents. So they'll say, Well, yes, you want to be.
And make sure that you give very clear instructions and don't expect them to ever do
much on a Thursday morning because he always goes out drinking on Wednesday night.
So you find out about weaknesses without actually being explicit in asking for weaknesses.
If you decide not to bother with references,
work out in advance what you're going to say to your investors or your boss when the appointee turns out to be a con artist.
In other words, always, always, always get references.
Many jobs are filled from networks rather than from recruiting adverts or head-hunters.
Sometimes your own network will produce a candidate.
Sometimes one of your mates will say, Can I have the job? It is really important to try and treat them as any other candidate.
If they expect to bypass the process. They're probably not right for the job because they have not accepted the jobs in your gift.
And if they're insubordinate now, what are they going to be like when they're an employee?
I was running a company and was advertising for a sales and marketing.
A manager and a mate of mine who lived in Holland applied and I thought he was the man for the job.
Nevertheless, he went through the process.
He had the interview with all the people that everyone else had interviews with, yet fill an application form.
We had a night away with all the candidates came all of that.
Now we ended up appointing him. Now, I could have saved the Head-hunter fee and appointed him, but I would never have known that he was the best.
And so I think this treat them as any other candidate is a really important thing to do.
You will spend some money on it, and you will also avoid some errors where you then have to fire a mate, which is an unpleasant thing to have to do.
Don't grab. This is a low effort, low cost way of recruiting unless you really do get the right person.
And even then I will get someone who isn't you, whose judgement you respect to check it.
And it's much easier to hire people than to file 5 a.m.
I had a a chairman a long time ago who said that to me. And he's absolutely right.
I have had a lot of people have fired a few. It's not pleasant firing people because it means.
You probably made a mistake recruiting them in the first place.
It's a bit easier if someone else recruited them, but you still have all the human angst and you never feel good about it.
So. Don't say.
We must get someone to do this job, however bad they are. A bad employee generally creates more work than they resolve.
And now another subject which you can spend your life studying is psychometrics.
So again, I want to give you a taste of this, and if you are interested in it, you can do it properly later.
The idea of psychometrics is there questionnaire based tests to parameterised.
Sorry about the word personality and behavioural traits.
In other words, you give someone a big list of questions they have to take.
Agree strongly. Agree. Disagree strongly, and anything in between.
And then there's an algorithm that produces a result. There are lots of different sets of psychometric tests.
Myers-Briggs is probably the most famous one. That was 88.
Questions that you sit down and you tick boxes. And that rates you on four different axes extroversion, introversion and so on.
It's used by some dating agencies and some recruitment agencies.
I think they're fine if you use them as a way of raising questions and things to talk about in a subsequent interview.
I don't think they're decision making tools. I think they're subject raising tools.
I used to go into companies with management problems to sort them out,
and I got someone to do one of these on the top team, a sales director, production director and so on.
And it's quite difficult presenting the results of this back to the people, particularly to senior people.
And one way to do it is to, in the subsequent interview, to say,
what I can't understand is this is showing me that you have a strong something
or other and I can't understand how that's come through in the question.
So I had a sales director and he came through as as argumentative on the test.
So I said I liked him and I said, well, you know, this,
this has come across showing that you're quite argumentative and you actually stood up and said, no, I'm not.
And then we both laughed. So it was all right. So they're good.
But but it's I don't think they're anything other than a way of getting into a conversation,
because it's only in the conversation that you actually get to what you want to do.
And now this has all been 1 to 1 stuff so far. So it said on the advert that I had to talk about teams a bit.
So this is now more about one too many. So I just I should to I'm sure you all know what management is, but I'll tell you what I mean by management.
A manager is given authority over some resources owned by somebody else.
And the the owner of the resources gives the manager authority in order to achieve an objective set by the owner.
And this would be news to some managers who thought they actually owned everything they were managing.
So the fundamental tasks of the manager are, one,
control the resources that we've been entrusted with to coordinate the activities of the staff that we're responsible for so
they don't fight amongst themselves and finally manage the boundaries between what we control and the rest of the world.
So it's fairly straightforward. But looking at this with the team in mind, I'd like to divide our team into two.
One the ones we control directly, i.e. staff and the machinery and assets that we've been trusted with.
And I'll call them insiders. And then there's all the members of our team that we don't actually control.
So there's the advisors, the accountants, the lawyers, the bankers, the local government,
all the people who you need to do stuff who you don't actually control.
Of course, you can fire the outsiders if you want. I mean, companies change their accountants if the accountants don't do a good job.
But it's time consuming and disruptive. So there must be a better way.
And the end of the talk. I want to talk about how you control people you don't own.
There's a book came out in 1936, which is a cliché called How to Make Friends and Influence People.
If you haven't read it, you really should. I had a another of my great management disasters.
I was working for a company and I was I was the managing director of a subsidiary, and I was called in by the board.
And I lost my temper with the board because I was all hyped up for my presentation.
And they just sat there and I got no response.
And this was, again, not a great career advancing move.
I left the company shortly afterwards. I did actually leave that one rather than getting fired.
But I went on a one week course run by the Dale Carnegie Organisation, which was utterly brilliant.
If you not read this, read it. It's not embarrassing.
I mean, you might not want to be seen reading it so you can get it in a plane cover or something, I suppose.
But it's good stuff and it matters.
It's just as relevant with employees as it is with outsiders.
I mean, I've been talking about managing employees and influencing outsiders, but of course, you need to influence employees as well.
You can't tell everybody what you want them to do in detail.
So you have to influence them so that they think the way you think.
In the company. Assuming it's a manufacturing company, you need people who will say what you sell, what you're going to sell, develop it.
And there was obviously going to be feedback between the people developing the product,
their offering and the marketing department and product development where you're going to get it from.
You're going to buy it or make it. Delivering it and particularly delivering what the customers think they've bought and collecting the money.
And the leader the leader might well not be you. I mean, I assume you're all going to be leaders of multinational companies,
but if you're not if you are someone with a vision but without any enthusiasm for executive authority, you may want to employ a leader.
So don't necessarily assume it's going to be you. A couple of words about investors.
You don't always need investors.
Sometimes you can start a company on your overdraft and you can get it into cash generation quick enough so you don't need investors.
And which saves an awful lot of time spent on trying to raise investment.
But when we're trying to raise investment, which most companies do, the investors will like to see a full team and start-ups hardly.
I would say never have a full team. They don't have people doing all that stuff I put on the previous job.
They have two or three people, each of whom does more than one of those.
It's important when you're trying to raise investment that you recognise that you haven't got a full team and you have a plan.
In other words, we are subcontracting out our website management for the time being and that's the plan.
Then we're going to take it in-house in year three and edit it today.
This is sometimes difficult because of team dynamics, because there may well be someone in the Start-Up team who all the members of the team,
except this person knows, are not going to make it full time.
Talking about the long term may be problematical. I worked for a company where the chief executive was quoted in the Financial Times that
he didn't think that the technical director was going to be in it for the long run.
This was extremely demotivating for the technical director who read it in the paper.
But on the other hand, don't wreck the business because you don't want to offend a mate.
It's sometimes cruel and a bit about authority.
He has the standard company structure. Some owners employ directors or employ managers or employ workers.
This shows who's accountable to whom. Who decides whose salary people get and who gets fired?
Who gets hot? And so on. And that's all very well.
But you could equally draw it this way,
because this chart shows the people who do useful things in selling stuff and making stuff and collecting money and so on.
Who is supported by the managers? Who are supported by the director?
And it's quite useful to see who's supporting whom.
There was a conversation about spread of management. How many subordinates do we think a manager can manage?
I was on a a management training course and the lecturer said that the general
assumption is that people can't really manage and support more than six reports.
And there was a Noel at the back who said, Well, I've got 15 reporters and I don't seem to have any problem.
And the lecturer said, Well, Jesus chose 12 and he made a mistake with one.
So what makes you so much better than him? So I think if it's more than six, you're probably not supporting them properly.
And each member of the team has two roles.
There's a functional role, i.e., salespeople sell and production people produce, and there's a social role in the team dynamics.
And if you represent these as orthogonal axes, it helps you remember that there's no that they are mutually independent.
There's no reason why someone who is brilliant at writing software should also be brilliant at team coordination.
You might almost say there's an opposite correlation.
One joke, you know, the the definition of an extrovert software writer.
They look at your shoes and there's no reason why anybody should be good at both.
And in the team, you need to cover all the functional needs, obviously, but you also need to have enough social skills to cover all the social needs.
I am in an hour and 40 minutes.
I'm going to be singing with seven of my friends. I do this every Tuesday night as eight of us sing together.
We've been doing it for 22 years and some of my friends are good singers and okay music readers and some are good readers and okay singers.
Some are good at both, but a bit difficult to work with. And some of them are sort of okay as musicians, but really good at defusing fights.
So we have the social and the functional capabilities on orthogonal axis.
The point is that between us we cover the functional you know,
we've got some people who sing high and some people loosing low and some people who are good readers and some people who are adequate readers,
but also the sociology. And exactly the same happens in the company management meeting.
You'll have people around a table and some will be brilliant at doing what they do and a bit spiky,
and some will be quite good at stopping people fighting.
And you do need both of these covered. And I felt I should say a bit about matrix management.
That hierarchical system that I drew before contrasts with the matrix system where you have a sales manager,
a design manager, production manager, shipping manager, and then on a different axis you have product managers.
And when it's like this, the functional managers rule and allow the product managers access to their resources.
Another way of drawing this is to rotate it and have the products at the top and the salespeople down the side.
In this company, the project, the product managers role, and they employ bits of the function.
And the design manager only gets to stay in work if enough of the product managers want something designing.
Now, of course, both of these are oversimplifications because you can either have the functions at the top or you can have the products at the top,
or you can rotate the thing. Quite often there's a balance of power between the functional manager, the function managers and the product managers.
And the matrix can rotate.
But it is crucial that you, as the leader of this thing, understand the power structure and how you can optimise it in real life,
however hierarchical the staff charts, there's always a deal of horse trading.
So really all organisations are matrices to a greater or lesser extent.
You know, there was that organisation chart. Andrew is a simplification of real life.
Shared resources like shared toys are always a management challenge.
So the leader I view needs to be able to set up a structure that works, then run it, and if you can't run it, you need to change it.
And there's been lots of people who've designed have developed an idea of different team roles.
I won't go into this in any detail, but these are the Belbin ones.
So for example, number two, a resource investigator is the person in the team who goes outside looking for new stuff,
new products, new techniques, new suppliers and so on. Schaefer is usually the chief executive who shapes the company.
Team worker, for example, is the person who is really good at stopping fires and so on.
Now, if you've got six people in your team and you want to know how the team looks,
you can stick these characteristics around the edge of a circle and you can.
Put where you think one of your members of staff is, and then you can put what you think another member of staff is.
And then if you add all this lot together, you can see how your team's looking.
For example, if you've got a whole bunch of extroverts in your team, you probably haven't got enough on the number six team worker.
And that means your team will spend a lot of time fighting with itself.
I mean, you see this a lot when people recruit top people, you know,
they get the best designer and the best production person and the team just blows up.
They did a really cruel experiment in one of the business schools where they actually characterised a bunch of MBA students,
and of course they're already a self-selecting sample and put them in a team.
And there was it was absolutely ineffective because each of them was leading the team.
You can see it every week on The Apprentice, if you like, that sort of thing. And you've got this in the in the notes.
But I just wanted to point out that for each role there are strengths and weaknesses on the one I'll draw you to is is the teamwork.
And because you might think that the team worker is a universal asset.
So the teamwork is support team member strengths, underpins their shortcomings,
improves internal communication, generates team spirit, everybody's friend.
And of course, the strength is the humility, flexibility, popularity, distaste for friction and competition.
But the weakness is that if they're underemployed, they will go out of their way to create a crisis for them to resolve.
So they tend to gossip, you know, did you know what he said about, you know, all that stuff?
So there are strengths and weaknesses in each of these.
So and watch it. Now I mentioned that I end up talking about how you influence that which you don't control.
And this, of course, is important with inside as as well as with outsiders.
The first thing is to invest in the relationship. Remember my friend going across the Atlantic once a month when he wasn't having a crisis?
And that, of course, means understanding their priorities, not yours. Now, it's difficult to say.
You must understand your banker's priority priorities in the present climate.
But I think if you want your banker to be an asset to your company,
you do have to understand your banker's priorities and align your interests with them.
So why is it going to be good for my company's bank if they lend me 50,000 quid?
Well, unless I can make that case, my chances of getting the 50 grand is less.
Activist. I can't spend too long on active listening.
But what it means is not turning your brain off while the other person's talking.
Go and see them when there's no overt agenda. Remember a concert pianist who does most of his playing when nobody's listening?
Do the communicating when there isn't a crisis so that when there is one, you've already got the channels open.
An amateur musician will practice in practice until they get it right.
A professional musician practices until they can't get it wrong.
We want to create professional managers. So really, you need to practice too.
You can't get it wrong. And I made this slide when I first was running this innovation because we
recruited some people who found it very difficult to work with this university.
I can't. Why? Why? But in fact, it's generally applicable to you working with any large organisation over which you've got no control, only influence.
And I suggest you think of the university or this large organisation as an elephant to which you're connected with a thin rubber band.
And my recommendation is that you walk along with the elephant in whichever direction the elephants going until it gets used to.
At that point, you can start to pull gently on your rubber band, but if you pull too hard or too suddenly,
you'll break your rubber band and have no further influence over the elephant.
Now, this is the case if you're talking to local government.
If you're talking to your financiers, if you're talking to the university,
any big organisation which has got a much greater mass than you that you're trying to control by influence,
this walking with the elephant, reword it into management speak is building up your influence with the elephant.
But I don't think you'll ever have complete control because you won't.
Thank you for your attention.