A Vote of No Confidence
Posted by Steve Botham
February 23rd, 2010
I started my “proper” working life at Longbridge - then a factory employing 20,000 workers, the UK’s biggest at the time. To join up I had to walk through a picket line of angry engineers - they were relatively polite and sympathetic to my need to reassure my employers that I was alive and well and reporting for duty. As time went on the striking got worse, the assembly workers came out and filled the nearby parks with mass meetings and angry placards. We faced a weekend when all of us in Personnel were told to go home and prepare to make thousands redundant if crucial talks between management and unions broke down. Fortunately there was a breakthrough but the knock on effect in terms of suspicion and lack of cooperation persisted for many years.
Move forward to the present day. I was facilitating a day long workshop for an excellent group of HR Managers working in local government. At one point we considered the key risks their organisation faced as it prepared for significant change. There were big issues: significant damage to service delivery, inability to simplify processes and bring in new ways of working with reduced resources, antagonistic staff, a new structure with fewer people working but with less commitment to support vulnerable people or children. We looked at the capacity of their middle managers to take their teams with them through difficult change. “Oh my goodness,” one of the managers sighed, “some of them will be great but some of our managers will be an absolute nightmare.” My Longbridge experience was partly driven by very militant unions but it also symbolised a vote of no confidence in the senior managers. It was as if the workforce all joined together to sing “You don’t know what you’re doing.” In change, the organisation as a whole may be able to take the workforce with them during economically difficult times. But some managers “won’t know what they are doing” and will lose the confidence of their teams. The result? At best poorly implemented change - at worst antagonism and tensions for years to come.
The job of senior managers during change is to find the middle managers who are most likely to destroy staff morale or commitment. Leaders need to be looking carefully at who gets their vote of confidence to take people with them through change - and who needs attention now before they create disproportionate damage.
Tags: Change, Longbridge
February 23rd, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Oh such a familiar story. But the managers at the Oxford plant started from a similar environment and made different choices from those made at Longbridge; and had a different outcome.
I would like to think there is still time for organisations to learn from the mistakes of others and help their managers take a different approach. But when you don’t know who will be your boss after May 6th, its difficult to plan far ahead!
February 24th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Paul
you are right May 6th reinforces the fact that we are in a time of great uncertainty. I think this is a time when leaders need to plan - but need to build much more flexibility into those plans but they also need to communicate and prioritise over much shorter time scales. To paraphrase an old saying - a week is a long time in politically driven organisations. Good managers will be more hands on during a period like this - bad managers will be more exasperating than ever!
Steve