UTurn^TV

I would never say that I am a particular creature of habit but one thing I do like to do every day is start  each one very slowly.  I like my early morning coffee and breakfast watching the news.  I would like to say that it’s a nice, stress free way to roll into the day but watching the news in the UK sometimes makes that impossible.   This morning was one of those mornings.

I watched an item on the BBC Breakfast News show about the latest guidance from NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) under the heading of ‘Tackle work stress, bosses told’.  You can see the webposting for the article here:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8343074.stm.

During his interview Professor Mike Kelly, Director of Public Health at NICE said “better training for line managers is critical”.  Of course as a Management Trainer I would naturally and wholeheartedly agree with him.  However, given the general state of the economy and businesses in this country at the present time I can’t help thinking that his view is somewhat naive and shortsighted.

It is widely known that one of the first things that businesses cut when times are tough is the training budget.  Training is, more often than not, seen as a luxury.  When cash flow is king and orders are down it’s very easy for a business to adopt the ‘you’re lucky you’ve got a job’ approach with employees.  Attending to staff’s mental wellbeing will be seen by many as the cherry on the icing on the cake.  That’s not to say that employers don’t care about their staff; the vast majority do but the priority for many businesses today is simply survival.

Large corporates, with budgets to support training and staff wellbeing, do much better at this.  The practices outlined in the NICE guidance are generally commonplace and, whilst no organisation is perfect, there is a tendency towards greater accessibility to the appropriate services that make a workplace a good place to be.

For me though the real difficulty with this analysis is that with almost 5 million Small & Medium Enterprises operating in the UK there are a huge number of workers who will never get close to the kind of training and support needed to support their mental wellbeing.  The finance is just not there.  And whilst some might say that there are government agencies which can and will provide partial funding for this type of support, most SME owners and managers that I meet through my work have neither the time nor the patience to wade through the bureaucracy required to get a ‘yes’ to a measly 20% contribution to the cost of training.  Their general view is that by the time funding is approved, the need for training, the member of staff or the situation that drove the initial enquiry will have moved on or changed in it’s own natural way in the way things do in business.

As someone who has managed a large numbers of people over the years it has always struck me that businesses create their own problems by repeatedly putting the wrong people in management positions in the first place.  I have seen so many excellent people promoted into management positions because they are the best technically at their job. They very quickly begin to struggle because their natural, inherent, talent actually resides in their technical skills not in their ability to motivate, support and direct the people in their team.  This will often create the kind of scenarios we are all familiar with such as poor working relationships, stress, high levels of sickness and staff turnover, not to mention poor productivity and performance.

I have occasionally been in situations where I have had to push to get the agreement to employ or promote staff into management roles who were definitely not the best technically at their jobs.  Often getting resistance from Directors and Senior Management it was always the hardest part of my job to persuade the decision makers and budget holders that they were the best people to employ.  It always worked out for the best not only for the newly promoted manager who was given the opportunity to shine at what they did best but also for the team that they were managing.  The team would eventually realise that to be supported and directed by someone who was interested in them as a person and cared about their ability to do a good job made a greater positive difference than someone who could technically do the job better than them.

In my opinion, people management skills are entirely transferable and good people managers should be able to move from industry to industry with relative ease.  I know of several excellent people managers that, whilst they have their specialist technical areas, would be more than capable of motivating any team and ensuring they did a good job every day.

I agree that training for all managers is critical.  However, much of the training I attended in my years as a manager was focussed on removing my personality and strangling my ability to speak naturally to anyone.  If I was your manager and I said to you “your outburst in the office today was unacceptable, unprofessional and did not demonstrate the kind of standards and behaviour we expect in our organisation” I wonder how you would feel?  If , however, as your manager I said to you “I hate to see you so upset; come and have a coffee with me and we’ll sort this out together“, I wonder how differently you might respond?

If the government is going to act on this NICE guidance then my recommendation would be that they provide national funding for training managers to be compassionate and caring alongside and in harmony with their professional responsibilities.  If that happens I will end up being a very wealthy Management Trainer.  Here’s hoping.

You can read the full guidance report from NICE by following this link: http://guidance.nice.org.uk/PH22/Guidance/pdf/English

Posted in: Business Coaching,Management Training,Motivation
Tags: