Where you stand depends on where you sit

A former colleague was very fond quoting what I now know to be Miles’ Law: where you stand depends on where you sit. That is, what you think about something depends on your perspective. (A corollary of this is, of course, that we are less objective than we might think.)

Several problems on which I have recently advised bring this phrase to mind. The conundrums have been variations on a theme: how to help people who are not physically close together, work well together.

Rufus E Miles: Lawgiver

In a university context this most often doesn’t mean people who are in different continents. There are plenty of examples of research teams on different sides of the world who work effectively together: meeting every now and again to discuss results; corresponding by email; sharing findings by email or over the web; and talking by phone or Skype. Of course, in these situations there is likely to be an agreed goal and methodology, often tied to specific funding; and the success of the project will reflect on all participants (or at least on all of the Principal Investigators), so the incentives to collaborate are there.

More likely the problems arise when people are on the same campus, sometimes in the same building, but not so close together that they bump into each other habitually. For instance, maybe an academic department is spread across several different buildings; or maybe there’s a problem in getting administrative staff within a faculty office and those in a registry to work well together. And often the answer cannot be to simply move them closer together – the reality of the physical estate, or at the least the cost and relative priority of doing this, make such things impossible.

So what to do?

Firstly, help them to see why it matters. Think about how their working together contributes to a bigger goal. And then tell them the story of this – in newsletters, face to face in meetings, make a short film, however you need to bring it to life. But make the narrative real – not about corporate goals and abstractions, but about the difference that they can make to real people’s lives. Help them to see that they’re involved in a big and noble task. Now this is easy if your team is helping to bring peace to the world, harder if it’s about resolving timetabling squabbles. So sometimes you have to look to a bigger goal (for instance the benefits education bring to people’s lives, and the role of effective timetabling in making this happen in a cost-effective and sustainable manner) to make the story. But unless you’re working for an evil crime lord, there’s a positive narrative in there, waiting to be found.

Secondly, regular information flows about what’s going on help bring people together. You could initiate - or help to initiate, if you’re not the one in charge - a system of team briefing, so that everyone gets the same information, face to face, on a regular basis. Once people have a shared knowledge base its easier for them to make the connections between others they need to work with, and understand why someone else’s problem is their problem too.

Finally, there’s a need to help the people know each other as individuals. An email address is easier to ignore than a voice on a phone; a person who you recognise and meet with from time to time is harder to ignore than an extension number that sometimes you dial. Who’s who lists with photos can help – whether on the intranet, in a printed (or emailed) guide, or a noticeboard, they help to make staff members individuals rather than simply cogs in the machine. Or how about finding an excuse to bring them physically together from time to time - ideally a combination of work (makes the reason to be there compelling) and some social, get to know you, time.

These ideas tie in with John Adair’s thinking on good leadership: which means a necessary focus on task, team and individual. Get these things right, and your problems of disconnect amongst your team or your colleagues will begin to disappear.

Happy Birthday, Janet

(Or, five things you need to think about to make a shared service idea work)

Janet – the Joint Academic Network – is thirty this month. There’s a website giving some of the history of Janet, and fascinating it is. (I particularly like the second upgrade to a whopping 256kb/s. At the time this would have been spectacularly fast – but my! how things have changed.)

It’s a good example of a shared service. Undoubtedly Janet provided staff with connectivity on a uniform and high quality basis which they wouldn’t otherwise have had, and thereby enabled collaboration between universities. This makes it very important: the UK’s universities are very impressive internationally, and it’s only by making the most of our strengths that they can continue to be so.

Janet’s just one of the shared services in higher education which makes a positive difference. Other examples of sector-wide shared services include UCAS and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. And smaller groups of universities collaborate: internal audit services such as UNIAC or the Kingston City Group; and there’s a fascinating development in Wales: the Wales Higher Education Library Forum (WHELF), which includes all HEI’s in Wales, the National Library of Wales, and NHS libraries in Wales, is jointly procuring a library management system. These are all good things which grow the capacity of individual universities, and which enable more value to be had for less money – what’s not to like?

And for this reason shared services have been very popular with governments and funding councils. But it’s felt to me that the promise has never been fully realised. The 2012 Finance Act included provision for cost-sharing groups to have VAT exemption, which removed one barrier. But there are others, more practical, about managing the transition to a shared service. Here are five things which you should think about, if considering whether a shared service approach might work for you.

How core is the service to your operation? If you share the service you inevitably lose some control, whether it’s over the details of things are managed and prioritisation when things get tough, or whether it’s in the specification and working out what matters in designing the shared service in the first place. If the service that you’re thinking of sharing is critical to your offer – because it’s a fundamental building block, or because the specific quality, price or location matter to those who you serve, think hard about whether sharing is right for you. It’s an expensive mistake to rectify later.

How stable is the environment for the service? Sharing is a long-term activity, and if there’s foreseeable disruption round the corner, you need to factor this into your considerations. Many shared services have at their heart a common database or IT system for managing processes. How would the model look if the technology underpinning it changed completely? In the same way that cloud computing changed fundamentally the business model of many organisations in the field, so other technological (or legislative) changes will make a difference too. This need not be a show stopper, but time spent thinking about the core of the shared business model and how stable this is will be time well spent.

What is the business model? There are many activities in universities which get cheaper and better by being larger – think about the many processes which involve bulk handling of data, and once you’ve got the workflow it doesn’t cost much for a computer to repeat a calculation or a process. But if this is true for universities it is true for other sectors as well. Take payroll, for example: if several universities shared their payroll operation then the unit cost of managing a salary payment would certainly be cheaper. But banks and other commercial providers are managing payroll systems which pay millions of people every month: that’ll be cheaper still. Unless a shared service provides a benefit which is unique to the sector, then it’s quite likely that the financial savings will be outweighed by those available by looking at a different sort of provision. And that’s a big impact upon the business case.

Are you doing it for efficiency or for service quality? Shared services can deliver either, but if you’re thinking of sharing an existing service then you need to be very clear about this. You’ll have staff, buildings, customers and systems involved in what you currently do, and thinking about the change that a shared service will mean for them, thinking about how you’ll manage this, and whether the efficiency savings will really materialise is an important exercise. You’ll get more buy-in from staff and customers if you’re talking about making things better; you’ll have a stronger business case if you’re talking about efficiencies and cost saving. And it’s really hard to do both at the same time.

Do the sharers have the commitment to learn to trust each other? The human dimension is really important, and easy for management teams to overlook. Put simply, the people who will make this work come from all of the different sharing organisations, and unless they trust each other enough to work openly, honestly, and without a hidden agenda, then even mighty efforts can be frustrated. Time spent at the outset of a shared service project in bringing teams together, letting them get to know each other, and learning to work well, is critical to the project’s success. Remember the forming, storming, norming and performing model for team-building? You need to go through all four stages, and do so consciously. Make sure that it’s someone’s job to see that this happens, and listen to their concerns.

Don’t let these issues put you off – the benefits of good shared services are real and long lasting. But if it was easy, there’d be more of them.

Eight things that a new line manager should know

A couple of interactions today – an email from a former colleague, and a conversation with a fellow consultant – got me thinking about line management, and what advice I’d give my younger self.

Line management can feel overwhelming, particularly if it’s the first time you’ve taken on that role. It’s also a very important job – we spend so much of our time at work, and often invest in our work so much of our persona and values, that the quality of our management can have a dramatic impact upon our well-being. So, no pressure then.

Here’s eight things I’ve learned which might help.

Be yourself. One of the hardest things to do when managing someone is to get really good and clear communication with the person you are managing. One important thing you can do is remove the layers of artifice that a stilted relationship can bring. You don’t have to be mates with the people you’re managing (and a bit of distance is not a bad idea) but equally you don’t have to be a robot. If you can be authentic in your relationship with your team, there’s a better chance that they’ll hear you, and trust you enough to tell you things. Authenticity doesn’t have to mean baring your soul to the world, but it does mean remembering that you’re a person as well as a role holder.

Set direction. If you don’t get the job done there’s no point in the whole thing. So be clear in your own mind what it is that you’re trying to do, and then make sure that your team know too. And use this as a fixed point to steer by: how are you doing, has the need changed; is there a better way you could do it. But always know what it is you need to achieve. Remember also, if someone hasn’t heard what you’re trying to say, the best thing is not to blame them for not listening, but see if you can explain it some other how.

Remove obstacles. Your team are doing the work, you’re managing them. That means delegate, let them do the work, and focus on removing the barriers that can get in the way. That might mean helping your team develop skills; that might mean holding a mirror up to your team (I probably mean that figuratively); that might mean making sure that they have the tools to do the job; that might mean a pep talk so that they don’t make an impassable mountain in their minds. But look at yourself as the coach, the sweeper, the resource finder and the problem solver, and they’ll be free to do a great job. Which people mostly do want to do.

Listen. Carefully. It’s easy to get wrapped up in your own view of the world and not see other ways of looking at things, and your team can be a great help to you. But you have to have ears to hear, and the listening skills to hear what isn’t being said, or is being said elliptically, as well as what is being said. My experience was that as I got more senior in my career, two things happened. Firstly, my jokes seemed to get funnier, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t true. And secondly, very few people just chatted with me. And it’s in these conversations that you can find out a lot of useful things. I don’t mean that you should be an eavesdropper: no one will trust you then, which is pretty much fatal to a managerial relationship. But equally don’t think that your words are the only important ones to hear.

Good enough is good enough. This is a tough one. We all want to do things really well, and we all will have personal and professional standards about what we want our work to look like. But if you stop when something is good enough – when it meets the need, when it ticks the boxes – then you’ve got more time to do other things. The quest for perfection will bring you long hours in the office, and you’ll get less done than others. Is this what you set out to do?

Tell the truth. Always. If people know that you’ll be straightforward with them, they’ll by and large do the same for you. And that is a huge blessing. It doesn’t mean be cruel (you should never do this), or be too blunt, or lack tact, but it does mean make sure that what you mean is what you say, and that you say it clearly. It doesn’t always make for comfortable conversations, but it does build respect and trust.

Say 'thank you'. When someone has done a job for you, thank them. When you see something being done well, say so. When someone has gone the extra mile, tell them, thank them, and try and do so in front of their manager. People are predisposed to hear bad things and to be aware of problems - I suspect it's part of our basic survival instincts - which means that you have to say a lot of thank-yous for them to be noticed. But they are one of the most powerful tools that you have, and can help a team achieve the impossible. Don't save 'Thank you' for someone's retirement speech.

You will make mistakes. You will get things wrong. You will feel like you don’t know the first things about people or your job, and that there’s no hope for you as a manager. Don’t worry – everybody does this (and if they say otherwise they are lying, to you and possibly to themselves.) And when you make a mistake, fess up. Say sorry if you’ve wronged someone. Tell your manager, and say what you’re going to do to put it right (managers love it when their team do this bit). Ask for help. But stop beating yourself up about it. There’s plenty who’ll be happy to beat you up, and there’s no need to help them.

This isn’t all the things that you need to know and do – but when I reflect on my experiences, and when I’ve talked to others, these ideas always come up. And remember where we started: you’re doing an important job; it’s hard; but it’s definitely worth the effort.