Monday, January 26, 2009

Serve somebody


People in Boardrooms sometimes forget the fact that they serve the organisation. Without the organisation we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

The director was keen to show me around. There were the ecologically friendly offices and factories, slogans about excellence peppering the walls and recently won quality standards in reception.

He was confident and self assured about the business. Why shouldn’t he be?
After all he had worked there for twenty years and so had most of the other five directors. And yes of course everyone had appraisals, how else would they have achieved the ‘people’ quality standard on the wall. How indeed?

“Everyone has appraisals” I was told, except that is, the directors. None of them had ever had any kind of appraisal, let alone an externally facilitated 360 degree appraisal.

That is why I had been invited in. They were intrigued by the concept. Intrigued and frightened. The company employs 300 people in a remote and rural location; there are not too many jobs around these parts. Especially for directors.

That is why I won’t be invited back.

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Sunday, January 11, 2009

The umbilical cord

It is extraordinary how many of us are still attached to parental dictats long after they have ceased to have any value. And now after all your family members and mine have split up again to return to their lives after Christmas, how much stuff is left unresolved?

I remember a family wedding twenty years ago. I was recently divorced and my mother had decided to put my ex wife on the top table accompanied by my two daughters aged seven and five. My table was near the exit to the marquee.

It was quite a long day and sometime in the afternoon I realised the need to get back to Hereford where I had a date that evening. I walked up to the top table and bent down to advise my mother and she hissed, “Don’t be so silly Timothy, we haven’t even had the speeches yet! You sit down”

I turned round and walked out of the marquee and in that split second I knew that I had, after 40 years, cut the umbilical cord forever.

I work with a lot of family businesses and there are many people out there, some well over the age of forty, that still have some work to do in this area. Only when the cut is made do people really find themselves, to have the independence to do, think and behave in an authentic manner. Authenticity is key to business success.

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