Lessons for Leaders from the election

The UK’s general election and its fallout were certainly interesting. The outcome means that certainly about funding and policymaking is likely to be harder to come by in the coming years (or months, maybe?). This will have impacts on many areas of professional life.

The fates of the leaders of the two main parties – Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn – are also instructive. I’m not seeking to make any political points, here, but it seems to me that leaders in any organisation can learn two important lessons from the campaign.

Firstly, let’s look at Theresa May.  Before calling the election her party had a commanding lead in the polls, and her standing as Prime Minister was high. She had attained her party leadership and the Prime-Ministership by acclaim, as all other candidates withdrew. Her confident messaging on Brexit, perhaps the defining issue for our political times, seemed to resonate with her party and with voters at large. And so she called an election, clearly believing that a larger majority was hers for the taking. And the campaign was for Theresa May’s Conservatives – the Prime Minister’s personal identify and appeal to the voters.

But as we all know, it was not to be. The campaign exposed the lack of depth in her manifesto - for instance, cabinet ministers not involved in drafting key policies, and only aware shortly before publication of key and controversial policy commitments. This led to the removal of a manifesto commitment about social care costs within a couple of days of its being announced. Another issue was the repetition of one key message – Strong and Stable Leadership – to levels approaching parody. When a question time audience openly laughs at the Prime Minister, it is clear that something isn’t right. And a theme emerged of a person who was unable to respond to real issues; who appeared to have taken the election for granted.

Even so, the election outcome was a shock for many. The opinion poll from the impressive Professor John Curtice – which turned out to be pretty damn accurate – was ignored and talked down by all pundits and all parties for the first two-to-three hours of results. But by the next morning it was clear that Theresa May had lost her overall majority, and had lost the ability to command without consensus in her party.

What had gone wrong? To my mind, she had committed the sin of believing her own propaganda. Her message of strength and stability had not been tested by an internal party challenge. She had had no feedback at that point. She ran a tight circle within Number 10: her policy staff were said to exclude many of her own MPs and minsters from effective discussion. And so no voice was there to say that that things may not have been as she saw them. Theresa May 0, Hubris 1.

And what of the other side? Jeremy Corbyn went into the election with many convinced that his party was going to be humiliated. His own allies were setting a low bar for success – anything above 200 seats, according to Len McCluskey of Unite, would be good. And note that this 200 seats mark would mean losing 30 current seats. His enemies within his own party had been seeking to have him removed as leader ever since his election. And opinion polls and spread betting companies were suggesting that the party might finish with as few as 130-150 seats, plumbing depths not seen since the 1930’s.

Although the Labour Party was uncharacteristically united during the election campaign, the mood amongst its candidates was not good. Few reportedly featured Jeremy Corbyn on their literature; the campaign was a defensive one, targeting marginal seats held by Labour. And the campaign had some poor performances, with a shadow cabinet member hidden from view to avoid media focus on her apparent inability to work with numbers; and Jeremy Corbyn himself in difficulty over the gap between his personal view of nuclear weapons and that of his party.

When the results were in, Labour had come a distant second; with fewer seats than Gordon Brown won in 2010. It was clear that there was no realistic prospect of a Labour Government: the parliamentary arithmetic just did not allow it. But the narrative was all about the fantastic performance of the Labour Party.

• 40% of the vote! (Never mind that the Conservatives had got 42.4%). 
• A +9.5% swing to the party. (Never mind that the Conservatives had a +5.5% swing). 
• Thirty extra seats! (Never mind that the party wasn’t in power.)

What had Jeremy done right? He clearly had authenticity and communicated better than his adversary. That got the election result. And he managed expectations very, very well. Everyone expected humiliation; he ended up only defeated. This becomes a triumph in itself – defying the odds, the underdog emerges unbowed. And we do all love an underdog, don’t we?

So, leaders, take note.

Firstly, you’re probably not as brilliant as you may think. You need to listen to others. Don’t be like Theresa.

Secondly, manage expectations. Under promise and over deliver. Everybody loves a positive surprise; nobody likes to be disappointed.

Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn live on to fight another day. Theresa is still PM, although clearly her tenure is time limited. And Jeremy will fight the next election as leader of the Labour Party, if that is what he chooses to do. But Theresa now needs to bring strength and stability where she cannot. And Jeremy can no longer be the underdog: his party expects him to deliver government. Tough times for them both.

Copy that, Minister

Jo Johnson, Universities minister, has taken time from piloting the Higher Education and Research Bill through Parliament, to taking strong action – or at the very least issuing a strongly worded press release – enjoining universities and the QAA to do more to prevent plagiarism. Specifically, to take action against essay mills.

Properly cited lyrics, so it isn't plagiarism

This is an issue which has been bubbling around for a while. The government brought together stakeholders last summer to consider the problems; in August 2016 the QAA published a pretty thorough analysis of the issues and made recommendations about what could be done.

The problem is simple to describe. There is a concern that some students are buying essays written by others and passing them off as their own. This is plagiarism, and is cheating. It isn’t clear how many students are doing this, but a few businesses which supply such essays are obviously doing decent business, and by implication the number of students doing this is non-negligible.  The Telegraph cites 20,000.

The QAA recommend a three-pronged approach:

• Partnership working by the sector to tackle the problem
• The possibility of legislation, perhaps like that in New Zealand
• Using regulators to prevent essay mills from advertising.

Jo Johnson’s statement focuses on the first and third approaches: the sector should sort it out, by means of guidelines and tougher penalties for students; the QAA should also go after the essay mills’ advertising. Legislation isn’t ruled out as a possibility, but is definitely kicked into the long grass. And, gratifyingly for the minister, some proper outraged press coverage about those naughty students.

I’m torn as to the best approach on this.

Early in my career I handled cases of student cheating, and plagiarism was by far the most common ‘irregularity’. This was in the very early days of the internet; pre Turnitin, and spotting plagiarism was down to eagle-eyed markers. And it was often pretty obvious: passages copied from books without editing, meaning that ‘as I argued on page 34’ for instance, showed up as out of place in a 6 page essay. Often the source material was cited in the bibliography. Whilst there was no doubt that the work had been copied, and without proper attribution, it was difficult with examples like this to see it as a deliberate attempt to deceive, as opposed to a complete lack of understanding about what the essay was trying to test. Often coupled with poor self-organisation meaning that at the last minute the student panicked.

In such cases throwing the book at the student would have been wrong, and that was often the academic judgement. A clear fail for the essay; a requirement to resubmit; and work to help the student understands what the problem was: this was a good remedy.

In the case of a student submitting as their own an essay which they’ve bought online, it is harder to be so forgiving. There seems to be more agency involved in committing the exam irregularity. Buying an essay and passing it off really isn’t a failure to understand the practices of academic referencing; it’s a straightforward attempt to cheat. And on that argument, the minister is right. Sort it out, HE sector.

But legislation surely can’t be a bad thing to get on with. Even if the ‘crime’ is committed by the student who submits the purchased essay, there really isn’t an argument for leaving the essay providers untouched. The notion that these are bought for ‘research’ purposes is laughable. The idea that tailored exemplars are a good way to learn is not a strong one. (The use of model answers afterwards to help feed back to students on their performance is a different question.) And the New Zealand law, which empowers the higher education quality regulator to prosecute essay mills, does not look like a bad law.

Would it solve the problem entirely? No – essay mills may be based outside the UK, and beyond the scope of the law. Would it help to convey the message that the practice is wrong? Yes. Would it help to demonstrate that the UK takes academic standards seriously? Yes. Is there a convenient current parliamentary vehicle to achieve this? Unbelievably, yes there is.  The minister could do more to make this happen now.

There’s another angle here. A student who submits a plagiarised essay may get caught, and face a penalty, or may not. But what is absolutely certain is that they will not learn as much about the essay topic as a student who reads and writes and submits honestly, even if they fail or get a poor mark. The plagiariser knows less than the honest student. And this cost is borne throughout their life. To plagiarise is to fail.

If universities could convey this message better to students, we might be getting somewhere important.

The people have spoken

The votes are in, and there’s a clear favourite: the book I write should be about the future for professional services in higher education.

It's a start, anyway ...

Over 55% went for that option; nearly 40% for the option of organisational change in higher education; and 5% said I should write something else entirely.

A lot of people also highlighted – correctly – that there’s an overlap between the topics. Or at least a causality. If the future of higher education is one of change, then let’s get the organisational change right. Conversely, change is better when the reasons for it are correctly identified.

So perhaps there’s room for two books here. But one at a time seems like a good rule, so I’ll go with the will of the people.

I’ll be setting up a dedicated website for the new book, and a mailing list so that you can stay specifically in touch about that. (In due course there’ll probably be one of those sign-up widgets but in the meantime, if you’d like to receive weekly emails from me about the book, drop me a line: hugh @ hughjonesconsulting.co.uk …)

That means that this blog here will continue to focus on broad topics of interest. Who knows, maybe even managing organisational change in higher education might show its face from time to time.

I'm writing a book ...

I think it’s time to write a book. That sentence was easy to write; I expect it’ll get harder.

My first decision is the topic, and I’d like your help. I’ve got two possible subjects in mind, and it’d be great to hear which you think is the best.

The first topic is about the future for professional services in universities. We know that change is always a constant, but at the moment, with changes in HE policy and funding; changes in technology; and changes in society, it seems like there's a lot we don;t really have a handle on. So what do you need to know now that will help you over the next twenty years or so?

The second topic is about re-organisations in universities. Sometimes it can feel like the ink doesn’t dry on an organisation chart before it's changing again. So why do these happen? What can you do if you’re being re-organised? And if you have to lead a re-organisation, how do you make it work?

I’ve set up a (very) short survey, and I’d like to know which of these you think is the best. Or perhaps there’s another topic you’d rather see. If you’d like to hear more as I write, that’d be great too – please let me know.

You can take part in the survey here.

Please let colleagues know about the survey – the more voices, the better the final choice …

Thank you!

The haves and the have-nots of the academic world

The Guardian today ran a story on the casualisation of academic staff at UK universities, headlining a Sports Direct comparison. The story is based on a UCU campaign against a lack of security for academic staff. What’s behind the numbers and the issues?

Firstly, the issue. Universities have three types of employment: permanent contracts; fixed term contracts; and ‘atypical’ contracts. Each of these comes in full-time and part-time mode. ‘Atypical’ is a tricky category: there are lots of reasons why. Here’s what HESA have to say about the definition (scroll down and expand 'Terms of employment'  for the source):

"Atypical staff are those whose working arrangements are not permanent, involve complex employment relationships and/or involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider. These may be characterised by a high degree of flexibility for both the work provider and the working person, and may involve a triangular relationship that includes an agent. Source: Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Discussion Document on Employment Status, July 2003, paragraph 23.

In addition to this definition from the DTI, some HE specific guidance has been devised by HESA in consultation with HEIs. Atypical contracts meet one or more of the following conditions:

• are for less than four consecutive weeks - meaning that no statement of terms and conditions needs to be issued,

• are for one-off/short-term tasks - for example answering phones during clearing, staging an exhibition, organising a conference. There is no mutual obligation between the work provider and working person beyond the given period of work or project. In some cases individuals will be paid a fixed fee for the piece of work unrelated to hours/time spent,

• involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider - but not as part of teaching company schemes or for teaching and research supervision associated with the provision of distance learning education,

• involve a high degree of flexibility often in a contract to work as and when required - for example conference catering, student ambassadors, student demonstrators."

Notice here that of the four special conditions the second and fourth cover a lot of ground. And this is the UCU’s point: teaching a module on an hourly-paid basis counts as atypical; being a tutor bought in to cover a short-term teaching need counts as atypical. These are the hourly-paid lecturers which universities often rely upon.

(It’s worth noting that ‘atypical staff’ can also include PhD students who do some teaching as part of their PhD study. This is a normal part of their PhD; witho7ut this experience they would be hindered in their future career.)

Universities say that they need flexibility: sometimes running a course depends on getting sufficient students to make it worthwhile. In this case, if your staffing cost is flexible, then the threshold for being able to run a course is lower (you don’t have to factor in the risk cost of redundancy if it doesn’t run). On this argument, the possibility of employing people on flexible contracts means that more courses are offered than would otherwise be the case.

The other problem highlighted by UCU is academic staff on fixed-term contracts. Such people have a job with regular hours – they can be full-time or part-time – but the contract has an end date. Legislation means that there has to be a reason for the fixed-term-ness (such as time-limited funding), and universities will argue that most research grants, for instance, are a fixed pot of money, to deliver specific outputs by a certain date. There’s also reasons like maternity cover: a person is needed for a specific period for a specific reason.

So what does the data show? It’s possible to recreate (or nearly so) the UCU data using HESA staffing data. HESA staff table 1 gives you numbers of full-time and part-time academic staff and also atypical academic staff at each university. Table 6 gives the number of academic staff – full-time and part-time – in Teaching only, Teaching and Research, Research only, and Neither teaching nor research roles at each university. And finally table L gives the proportions of staff, across the whole sector, in those same four categories who are on fixed-term contracts. With some simple arithmetic it’s possible to work out how many academic staff at each university have what UCU calls insecure employment – that is, are on a fixed-term contract or an atypical contract.

The headline data is stark.

• 52.3% of all academic staff – that is 145,575 people - are either on atypical or fixed-term contracts. 

• 67.4% of staff on ‘Research only’ contracts – 32,488 people – are on fixed term contracts.

• 54.4% of staff on ‘Teaching only’ contracts – 28,251 people – have fixed term appointments.

• 35.3% of academic staff on full-time or part-time contracts (that is, excluding those with atypical contracts) are on fixed-term contracts. That’s 70,015 people.

There are some things that the data doesn’t show.

One big one is that fixed term contracts can become a career pattern. 20 or more years of renewed two- or three-year fixed-term contracts is not unusual for researchers. It’s hard (very hard) for people to plan on this basis. Starting a family is a brave option without security of income. Getting a mortgage can be difficult without permanent employment.

A second big question is the proportion of teaching that is done by staff on these contracts. It isn’t unusual for a researcher who has been awarded a large research grant to ‘buy out’ their teaching duties. This can mean an hourly-paid tutor, or a fixed-term part-time role. So teaching, particularly at a research intensive university, may not proportionately be carried out by the faculty whose names you’ll find on the website. This doesn’t mean that the teaching will be bad: the tutors will still be knowledgeable, keen and expert. But is it quite what was expected?

It’s important to be measured. ‘Sports Direct’ are notorious for Victorian working practices; universities are not in the same league. But there are a lot of people who are not making a stable career in academia. They’re working on the margins. They’re the ones without an office, or even a nameplate on a door that students can find. And the data shows that there’s a lot of them about.

Redesign in progress

I'm having a redesign of my blog, to match the redesign of my webpages which will soon be launched.

Apologies if anything  looks a bit odd (or perhaps a bit more odd than usual) over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully the new site should be up-and-running by early November.

Book review - Shifting Stories, by Andrew Scott

[This is a review which I've posted to Amazon]

Andrew Scott is a skilled coach and facilitator (I have worked at an organisation which engaged him to facilitate strategic change) and in Shifting Stories he sets out a powerful approach – the ManyStory approach – which he has developed from his rich experience.

The heart of Shifting Stories is the recognition that we all tell ourselves stories about the world, and our position in it, to help us understand and deal with challenges and situations. (Sometimes these are tacit, unconscious stories, sometimes quite the opposite.) Andrew Scott helps the reader to understand how we can surface and articulate those stories, and by doing so, put ourselves in a position to create new stories and transform situations. This is not a pious and preachy book; it is well-structured and clear, with examples of how the approach can change individuals and groups as they resolve conflict and adapt to changed circumstances.

I would place Shifting Stories alongside other works which I have found to be insightful and helpful. Its identification of the importance of scripting reminded me of some elements of Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people. The recognition of the importance of people’s emotional response to change and to conflict, and of addressing this as a means to dealing with the substantive issues, has parallels in Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch: how to change when change is hard. I am not saying that “Shifting Stories” is a retelling of these ideas, or is in any way derivative. Far from it! Instead, it complements them, and its grounding in a British organisational context strengthens the message, for me at least.

I work as a management consultant supporting a specific sector – higher education – and can immediately see lessons from Shifting Stories which will enable me to be a more effective practitioner. It is definitely a book which I will come back to: the clear and specific guidance about implementing the ManyStory approach, and the examples of when it works (and, very commendably, when it did not work) makes it an important part of a consultant’s toolkit. I can imagine the same for those whose practice involves coaching.

And it should have a far wider audience. Any manager keen to develop their skillset and approach to management would do well to read this; any person with aspirations to organisational leadership will benefit from Andrew Scott’s understanding about narratives and their power to shape organisational behaviour and performance. And any person (that means all of us, I think) will benefit from the insights in the book about how to make sense of the stories we all use in our personal and professional lives, and how to create a better story.

Andrew Scott writes with a light touch and an easy style. The book is engaging and lifts the spirit with hope and possibility. The interesting discussion towards the end about what makes a good story is a fascinating point for the next step in the development of the ideas in the book. I’d be interested to explore how the notion of the hero (see Joseph Campbell, The hero with a thousand faces; and Christopher Vogler, The writer’s journey) might influence the development of storytelling as a tool for organisational development. But that is another book, not yet written. I’d commend the current book – Shifting Stories – as a good read, with a clear message about a powerful tool for individuals and managers.