I first bought the book in hardback - then found I was enjoying it so much I went and bought the Kindle edition too!  It's a fascinating case study with much wider application.

The key to the whole book is to identify where value is created in your organisation.  Do you do it, in your office, thinking great "strategic" thoughts, or is the strategy more of a foundation on which value can be built?

Nayar identifies the part of HIS organisation that creates value - the people who work for the customers.

With the right support, Nayar believes, these people can create much more value for customers, which means the customers will create the business success that the organisation wants.

This book is more than the exposition of a theory.

Nayar became CEO of a $700million turnover 30,000 staff professional services company in 2005, and he describes the journey he and the company traveled, from a company that was being left behind by its peers, to a multi-billion turnover (Turnover for the most recent 3 months was $1billion) 80,000 staff company with 21% growth year on year.

This brave CEO rethinks the very basis of 19 and 20C business management.

He explains that in a knowledge economy, knowledge is power, so each level of management jealously guards his or her knowledge because it appears to be the sole reason they hold that management position. Then he asks the question "What if you share your information with the front-line staff, the people who create value? What if the whole company, all of the support functions, the office of the chief executive, are dedicated to supporting the front line to produce the highest quality, best, and most effective experience for your customers? What if you (as Chief Executive) refuse to pretend that you have all the answers, and instead insist that people come up with the solutions themselves?".  He reasons that 80,000 heads are better than one. They know the customers better, they know the technology better, they know their own passions better. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Nayar has transformed HCL Technologies. The numbers speak for themselves (4X increase in turnover and 2.6X increase in employees in 5 years is impressive in anyone's organisation, even more so in the crises of the last few years). But the reputation that HCL Technologies holds has also transformed, both as an employer and as a supplier.

This is a book everyone should read. It's relevant to industry, to commerce, to public sector, to charities and voluntary sector. Even if you don't do everything that Nayar suggests, you'll pick up plenty of ideas to focus on value creation.

The Responsibility Deal is about our responsibility to each other and society. It is a shame that such a noble sentiment has been hijacked to describe an attempted deal between the manufacturers and promoters of alcoholic drinks (who want consumers to drink as much as possible) and health promotion groups (who want consumers to drink a great deal less), and it is no surprise that the talks broke down given their limited remit.

Where does the Fukushima nuclear power plant come into this?

Well that is the true responsibility deal. The whole area has been devastated, people are missing, and most people are being kept outside an exclusion zone. Yet a brave crew has stayed inside the nuclear power plant to try to keep it safe. They probably want to find out what's happened to their families. They probably are the same shift that was working on the day of the tsunami, who are still working round the clock without relief. The situation they now face is outside the plans laid down so they have to be creative. But they stay there.

That's real courage. That's real responsibility to society.

I'm not in anything like such a difficult situation. I can go home at night and check my family are safe, I can eat and sleep and I'm not in fear of my life.

So what do I contribute to the Big Society of UK?

I, we, commit to our work which is aligning the priorities and objectives of individual organisations to the needs of society and the people as a whole.

We commit to doing our work well, helping organisations and individuals to influence the direction that Big Society takes by showing what they have achieved and how this makes a difference.

We commit to demonstrating, using the Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework and appropriate reporting, that people and organisations are worth the investment that society makes in them (or alternatively, that they need to change), and to making a difference. It might not be in fear of our lives, but it is still a commitment and a responsibility.

At last there is clear blue water between the UK political parties in the run up to the General Election - over taxation.
And the parties are acting true to traditional form - Labour wants to raise taxes, and Conservatives want to lower them.
But the picture isn't quite so straightforward.  The Tax selected, National Insurance, is actually a tax on the poor, taxing those on low and middle income at a higher rate than those on high income.
National Insurance is a sort-of 'hidden' tax.  It doesn't appear on any headline rate, so successive governments, in my memory beginning with Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) but probably since a long time before, have kept income tax low whilst taking the money out of yours and my pay packets through National Insurance.  It has now reached a phenomenal 23.8% (higher than the average tax rate which is made up of 20%, 40% and 50% tax rates with a tax-free allowance for the lowest paid).  The trick is, that over half of NI is paid directly by the employer to the treasury and doesn't appear on my pay slip, so although it is part of my cost of employment, I don't see enough to get upset.  I do see the 11% I pay, just not the 12.8% my employer pays.
Labour plans to raise National Insurance still further, though I'm not clear whether this is by 2% overall (1% on Employers and 1% on Employees) or only 1%. Either way, it is enormous.  But it is much worse than this - National Insurance represents a tax on the poor because above a certain income (£844/week ~ £42,000/year) the employee rate goes down to 1%.  This means that the total tax take from payroll (ie Income tax, National Insurance by employee, National Insurance by Employer) is:

Earnings/year
% Income Tax
% NI
Total Tax
Earnings in Euro
Earnings in USD

 £             4,696.00
0%
0%
0%
€ 5,307.12
$7,147.62

 £          12,000.00
9%
13%
23%
€ 13,561.64
$18,264.78

 £          18,000.00
13%
17%
30%
€ 20,342.45
$27,397.18

 £          24,500.00
15%
19%
33%
€ 27,688.34
$37,290.60

 £          50,000.00
22%
20%
43%
€ 56,506.82
$76,103.27

 £          75,000.00
28%
18%
46%
€ 84,760.22
$114,154.90

 £        120,000.00
34%
16%
50%
€ 135,616.36
$182,647.85

 £        200,000.00
39%
15%
54%
€ 226,027.27
$304,413.08 

 
National Insurance actually starts to go DOWN as a % of the total after £50,000 earnings per year, and total taxation hardly rises as a % above this level.

Can we have a little more honesty from politicians please?

The relationship between employer and employee is at its most strained at the moment, as people try to carve out security for themselves and companies consider who they cannot afford to keep on payroll.

And yet, this is also a time when many organisations need engagement from their staff. It is unlikely that the CEO has all the answers to deal with this challenge, but very likely that the front-line staff have - answers to cost reduction, to improving customer satisfaction, innovations which customers are asking for. Why would they share those ideas freely? Do they even know they have these answers?

 

Getting staff commitment - why do you want to do that?

At its simplest, people cost money. They cost money to recruit, to retain, and they cost money when they don’t have enough work to do so they are marking time, eg between those bursts of activity that come around regularly.

But people also deliver. In public services such as health, all care is given by people. Yes sure there are medicines and technologies that help, but someone greets the patient and either inspires or depresses them, which makes all the difference to patient experience and their chances of recovery. People deliver change and innovation, without which companies get left behind in this competitive environment - they make things happen, they even achieve the impossible sometimes. Self-motivated, committed staff make all the difference.

There are degrees of engagement.

At the basic level, staff can be sufficiently “engaged” to do what they are paid to do. To turn up at 9, not let too many things get neglected, and not go home too early. I’m sure we can all think of colleagues or former colleagues who didn’t even manage this.

What about getting people so inspired that they contribute more? This isn’t a new idea - Konosuke Matsushita (founder of the Panasonic company) designed his company around autonomy and the contribution it could make, and was rewarded with employees bringing their commitment to excellence and to innovation.

Semco in Brazil (see book review of Ricardo Semler's book Maverick) demonstrated the same thing in 1980s - the young chief executive knew that he didn’t have all of the answers, and readily turned decision-making and even decisions over the salaries of the executives, over to the staff. They voted for competitive salaries for their managers, as long as the managers were effective. This was no beauty parade - everyone voted not just those reporting directly to the manager.

Perhaps the greatest success has been achieved by Vineet Nayar at HCLT (HCL Technologies).

Nayar joined HCLT as CEO in 2005 when the $700million technology company was clearly falling behind its competitors. He embarked on a process, to understand what was wrong by asking employees and customers, and to find out how to solve it, similarly by asking. Nayar didn’t work with the customer every day - how could he, as one individual amongst (then) 30,000, make a difference?

His employees delivered innovation, quality, customer satisfaction and delight, repeat business, new customers. The company continues to grow with over 80,000 employees and Quarterly revenue > $1billion.

 

What do people want in return?

 

Most people want to do a good job. They want to feel they have made a contribution. Of course there are people who have lost their inspiration, but these people have typically had it taken out of them in the workplace.

A comment at one of my workshops which has stuck in my mind was from a senior NHS nurse. She started with “now I remember why I joined the NHS”.

Nurses are committed to their caring vocation. Many are suspicious of attempts to measure their work, to count their patient. It wastes time on paperwork that should be spent with patients, and it gives “managers” permission to take the humanity out of care.

But she continued: “for the last 15 years, I’ve been turning up at 8am, seeing a bunch of sick people, and going home at 4pm. I knew the clinical job so I didn’t really need to think about it. But with the measurements and reporting that you’ve introduced, I can tell my grandchildren ‘I did a good job this week’ ”. Before, they resisted any attempts at change as “know-nothing management trying to save money”. Now, they examine their changing environment and make the changes necessary to be at their most effective as a team delivering health.

The Social Return Company (TSRC)

Our mission in life is to inspire people to enjoy and to be enthusiastic about the work they do.

We do this by using the tools of benefits management - measuring and reporting to show what is effective and what isn’t, so people at the front line can make the right decisions about how to be most effective in their day to day work. It’s just as applicable in industry and manufacturing, just as applicable in professional services, as it is in healthcare.

You can see case studies all over this web site. We can help to engage employees and other stakeholders with Social Audits, evaluation and reporting of Corporate Responsibility (Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR) and Triple Bottom Line design, measurement and reporting, and we can direct focus onto your direct commercial success or revenue building/ cost cutting/ value add (Intellectual Property pipeline).

What advantages does TSRC offer?

TSRC is an independent consultancy. We can engage with your employees and other stakeholders as an outsider, to understand their concerns and complaints, and we can engage with your senior management to understand the value of using the talents and contributions on your doorstep.

We will use Benefits management techniques such as Benefits Map and Results Chain to link everything you do to your strategic objectives, especially highlighting what makes a positive contribution. We then help you to design common-sense and inspiring measures and measurement, and a reporting process that keeps everyone’s focus. People will measure if they want to know what the measurements show (ie if they care - which they do when the measures mean something to them).

We will help you to engage with your talent, and help you to design recognition and reward programmes that really work. It’s worth adding at this point that “more money” rarely delivers the desired result - it changes the culture from “we want to make a difference together” to one of “I’ll do just enough to get my bonus and everyone else can whistle”.

What is the difference between Competence, and Competency?

The idea of 'competencies' vs 'competences' took hold in 1980s (Management Today Apr 2010 p69): a core COMPETENCY is a particular attribute required by someone's job, such as IT skills, industry know-how, or customer service (the output)

whereas a COMPETENCE (defined by Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) is the minimum standard demonstrated by performance outputs, rather than individual traits.

HR departments measure both, in particular to determine how well an individual meets the requirements of their job (how far the competences go towards fulfilling the competencies), and of course identifying candidates for promotion.  Perhaps the easiest way to look at it is a Competency is what is required for the job, and a competence is what you have.

The problem is that such paper competence offers little insurance against real-world incompetence.  All of us probably know someone who performs well on paper, shines at interview, yet appears hopelessly incompetent in the real world.  Sir Alan Sugar hit the nail on the head when he described one of the front runners as "will do extremely well in a corporate environment and rise through the ranks, but i want people who can create a profit"

 

Promoted to the level of their incompetence! How common is this? Actually, it's quite a natural process. Someone who has been competent in a role often finds themselves promoted. There will come a point, unless they are conscious, continuous learners, where they will end up in a role for which they aren't competent, and labour laws and the way management work mean that once promoted someone can't be demoted again.

Perhaps the answer is to promote anyone and everyone "for a trial period" (of say, 12 months) and then re-appraise.  But this needs to apply at all levels even executive board level and Chief Executive, and it needs to be an accepted part of the culture and enshrined in labour law before we can do it.

 

What do you think?

Before planning new projects, the National Governance Group needed to know what was currently happening. Reconfiguration in NHS meant that a lot of corporate memory had moved on or left, but I managed to identify 700+ projects and interview 41 stakeholders to identify both the current state of New Ways of Working and the support which would offer most value.
The baseline report and its conclusions were accepted and the examples, new and existing roles and workforce innovation tools are now being collated for sharing.

At Ask! restaurant in Durham, where we went on Saturday night with friends, the toilets are more discreet than most.
There are individual cubicles: perfect for  capacity planning. This means that, if you think that women will require more cubicles than men, you can allocate more cubicles to women. And they have done exactly this, four allocated women versus two allocated to men.
The reason Why?
There may be lots of reasons why they've decided to provide individual cubicles instead of restrooms; studying toilets is not my favourite activity. But it reminded me how important it is to match your resources (your capacity) to meet your demand.
Too much capacity for the actual demand: the service costs too much, and resources are diverted from some other vital service. If you are a commercial entity, your profitability will suffer. If you are a service for public good, you find yourself unable to provide some other service needed by the community.
Too little capacity: queues develop. Again, if you are commercial, you may lose customers; if you're a service for public good, you may be fined or severely criticised.
A dark art
But capacity planning is something of a dark art. In just about every situation I have worked for public good, the numbers have been relatively small; numbers on the list for surgery (12 lists but effectively 12 queues because it’s difficult to transfer patients between lists on the day); numbers of calls coming in somewhere between 1 and 30 of 45 per hour (reform of urgent care services in London) for example; 2.5 full-time equivalent GPs in the GP practice;.
It only takes one member of staff either way
Getting the planning wrong by one member of staff either way can have a dramatic impact on effectiveness. I've used a Poisson binomial distribution which dramatically demonstrates the benefits of scale; I've used Excel spreadsheets, and I've used the care planning system (CPS) designed by Simon Dodd. When the numbers from different systems converge, you probably have the right answer.
The Commissioner Provider split.
For providers, the benefits are obvious: the surplus of income earners costs allows investment in new ways of doing things, and better service in other areas.
But why is this relevant to the commissioner? We've noticed over the last few years the provider hospitals have an uncanny ability to work round demand management; wherever the commission has put their focus, activity booms in another place. It isn't clear why this is happening, but with payments to acute trusts rising faster than the increase in income to commissioners, and commissioners' income coming to a standstill, it matters! It's the same in social care; the providers have a lot more independence, a lot more autonomy, but the tensions to match supply to demand may be even more acute; and the commissioner can often help.
Second-guessing your provider, and understanding how they work, is important. And now, with the new contracts being written (2010/11 templates now available from the DH website) is the time to look more closely.
It's the right time to take action
We all recognise that resources are limited. We do the best we can with what we have. I believe I can help with the scientific approach, based on my experience in all of these areas. Please feel free to contact me.
 

I've never seen any direct link between IQ and riches, and I'm sure we can all name people who dropped out of school and still made it in business (Sir Alan Sugar? Richard Branson?) 

But there is a view about intelligence, which seems to correlate with worldly success. Charles Gardner proposed Multiple Intelligences in 1983, originally seven, and variously eight or nine at present.

INTELLIGENCE		What it means
Logistical-mathematical	these two are typically the ones measured by the traditional "IQ" test	engineers (but see spatial intelligence below), mathematicians, anybody who deals in numbers or follows processes. Many people use this intelligence to work according to a protocol, for instance in a factory or call centre.
Linguistic		Able to communicate in words, especially in your own language. This could almost be seen as a "basic" skill or intelligence
Spatial	aware of the relationship between things, and patterns. People strong in this intelligence might find themselves successful as an architect, or use their skills for spotting patterns (criminal detective, quality inspector). A great many people with professional qualifications have this intelligence to gain their professional qualification
Musical	doesn't just apply to singing or playing a musical instrument, also applies to having a clear understanding, or sense of rhythm. Singers, actors, people who speak many languages, journalists (because language rhythm and tonality makes writing pleasant to read, or unpleasant).  Authors like JK Rowling
Bodily-kinaesthetic	a keen sense of movement, and the ability to train one's responses so they are like reflexes. Sports people like David Beckham will certainly be strong in this intelligence
Interpersonal	sensitivity to others moods and feelings and motivations. Ability to work as part of a group, to lead. Some have suggested that these people are extrovert, but although some extroverts are sensitive and empathic, other extroverts are just loud.  People with this intelligence to a high degree find that they are best rewarded as salespeople, politicians, Presidents of USA, etc.  Note the banking bosses may be able to do maths, but only the people people get to be boss
Intrapersonal	Able to understand and control your own moods and emotions.  The supreme example of this is the Dalai Lama, and if there is one characteristic of these people it would be happiness.  On the scale of income or wealth, they have everything they want, ever.

(Daniel Goldman’s descriptions of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence approach a totally different issue.  Note that there is no direct evidence to support Multiple Intelligences, but educationalists have found it extremely practical. Gardner has come up with another couple of intelligences since this list of seven: naturalistic, and existential. They aren't relevant to this discussion and most people ignore these other two).

You have all of them, developed to different amounts (except savants on the autistic spectrum, who may exhibit one intelligence to an exceptional level at the expense of the others). But you will tend to gain the rewards of your most rewarding intelligence – if you are brilliant at music and also at people, your most rewarding intelligence is your interpersonal one, so you may have music as a hobby but will tend to spend most of your time doing people stuff.

What is the point of this discussion?

  These "intelligences" (or abilities or traits, to quote Gardner's critics) can be trained. As you can see from the salaries benefits, it is worth improving (in a rounded way).

Perhaps most importantly, you can get a team that has all of the intelligences by bringing together different people to bring different skills and intelligences to the team – if you know what to look for.

People tend to gather "people like themselves" around them, which means you usually end up with a team with only one skill. You want a rounded out team, so that it can see all sides of the problem and deliver the best solution.  For example a GP surgery needs People People (the doctors, nurses and Receptionists) to face the local population, but it also needs people who are good with numbers to make sure the finances work and staff get paid on time, and it needs managers to plan ahead.  You often find that the GP Partners have quite high IntraPersonal intelligence, they are at peace with themselves and this peace permeates the whole GP practice making it a nice place to work.  If you don’t have this, there’s often high staff turnover and unhappy patients.

Action

Before you rush off and work out everyone’s Multiple Intelligences, think for a bit.  What are you trying to achieve, and what do you need to do in order to achieve this?  It may be worth calling in a consultant from Minney.org to help you through this process.

Department of Health produced a poster designed to show all of the ways of making efficiencies in line with the Gershon reviews.
It never really took off, but none-the-less I contributed the workforce aspects from Changing Workforce Programme

The SfH Career Framework team are building a database of roles and people so that staff and potential recruits can understand
what their local role or title is equivalent to
what they need to do in order to progress to the next career level
what career paths others have followed
what the opportunities are with their skill set
and so that organisations and workforce planners can
understand the different local titles used and how they relate to competence, experience and autonomy
have access to a range of standard job descriptions and person specifications, to greatly simplify recruitment and appraisal
and developing and planning teams to deliver care
In order to achieve this efficiently, the team developed standardised questions that would allow a role to be assigned to a Career Framework level in each of 8 dimensions of the role.
I developed a tool to capture this information and combine it into a database, which allowed rapid capture of over 400 roles so that the Career Framework level, competencies and Job Descriptions could be compared across professional groups and points of commonality and difference recorded.
I reported on the success of this development and on the results, which make interesting reading

The differences between practice for the same task performed in different hospital trusts is striking. Healthcare scientists decided to examine this issue in more detail, and my part was to use competences to determine what were the minimum competences required to perform a particular step on a science pathway (in this case, Pathology Laboratories), the minimum level of scientist with these competences, and compare this with actual staff performing the task in different Trusts.
The results are fascinating: staff profiles vary between core hours and extended hours in those Trusts which run extended hours labs, and between teaching, large and community hospitals providing lab services (big, medium and small labs).
In some cases a significantly better qualified and experienced person performs a task than the minimum needed; in most cases this is justified because the experienced person is required for some stages and using another person would duplicate headcount, or because a senior person is needed during extended hours; in a few pathways there may be opportunities to make significant cost savings through more appropriate team profiling.
The full report (in which my contribution plays a small part) can be downloaded from the Skills for Health web site, on page http://www.skillsforhealth.org.uk/page/career-frameworks/pathology-profiling-project

Wouldn't it be nice to do what the US Government does, and condemn someone to death because they do something you don't like (New Charges Filed Against WikiLeaks Suspect)

However, US Government and the military are the laughing stock of any thinking person - how was this information leaked in the first place?  Thinking people are concerned that nobody is being hauled over the coals for the security policy (or lack of it) in the first place, nor for making sure that US government information is even moderately secure.

Everything is Top Secret

At the root of it, this is the problem.

Private First Class Manning was authorised (as an intelligence officer) to see Top Secret information.  Not restricted to just Iraq.  Not restricted to just military.  Just Top Secret.  And since just about everything the government does is classified as Top Secret (so the voters can't find out about it), that means that the sheer volume of "stuff" classified as Top Secret makes it very difficult to keep tabs and impose any sort of order.

But nothing is protected

What's your IT policy?  Do you have protection in place, so your company secrets can't be copied off onto a flash drive or CD?  Do you have your confidential documents as web pages, so they can't be downloaded en masse, but only read one at a time?

US Government doesn't.  Bradley managed to bulk copy 250,000 documents (you don't do that, one document at a time!) onto a CD-ROM and nobody knew he'd done it without going back to the logs.  He was then able to mail the CD to Wikileaks with no restriction.

So what has this to do with me?

You and I can't (usually) jail someone or condemn them to death for leaking confidential information.

But we can get everyone committed to each other, a bit like Edward III did when he created the "Modern Round Table" at the end of the 11th Century.  We can get people to understand the consequences, not to themselves (Private Manning probably knew the risk he was running) but (far more important to most people) the impact to friends and colleagues of their actions.  If you don't share the organisation's ideals, can you adopt them?  And if not, can you be detected? 

Actually, we may look back on this incident and thank Private Manning for sparking off the demands for democracy across the whole Arab world - but that's another story.

It takes Benefits Management

When we all pull together, we can move mountains.

People might not share the ideals when they join a company, and selection processes that put this as top priority may end up recruiting only the talentless.  But they can commit to the ideals as they settle in to the organisation, provided you know what you are doing and make an effort to help them.  That's what Benefits Management is really about.

Benefits Management isn't just about new projects and initiatives.  It's about aligning people, inspiring people to want to achieve the same outcomes, getting people to work together.

It applies just as much to your security policy, your remuneration and reward policy, to your expenses policy, to your recruitment and reward scheme as it does to the new projects and initiatives.

Don't leave it to chance and to the heavy (and expensive) hand of the law.  Take the opportunity and talk to us about how you can use Benefits Management to transform your organisation, from petty office politics and people running in different directions, to an inspired team of people proud to work for the organisation and proud to support the customer base.

I went to a benefits workshop on implementing a new IT service within a big organisation. We looked at the features of the solution offered, and were asked to identify benefits for each stakeholder. Over 4 hours we brainstormed, and focussed, and documented, and planned how to measure.
Then it struck me – this is all the wrong way around! Granted, I usually examine benefits in front-line (health and care) environments not in back office functions, but many of the enablers are back office.
Nobody at the event asked “didn’t we already know why we wanted this, before we designed it?”. Instead of starting with the need and creating the solution to solve it, we appear to take the solution as the fixed item and look for ways to justify it after the event. If we knew why it was wanted, the benefits design, planning, management and realisation would be simple: does it do what we want it to do?
Lightbulb moment
[BENEFITS PROFILE]
So start with the need. What is the problem that needs solving (insufficient resources to meet demand, waiting lists too long, costs too high, demand for different services, administration ineffective, people’s safety privacy and respect threatened)? What is the whole of the solution that IT is only a part? What about the IT solution proposed (or mandated) actually solves the original problem, in conjunction with other (workforce, service transformation, facilities change) components?
Build a benefits profile around this. IT solutions can’t deliver benefits in isolation, and nor can most of the other components of the solution. The solution is in response to a need, so the benefit is resolving the need. Monitor progress towards resolving the need, and you have your benefits realisation. Measure something specific to the IT project, and you run the risk of becoming divorced from the whole solution and benefits not realised.

(also known as Bring your child's teacher to work day)

I've just spent two days at the New Types of Worker conference in Glasgow "Excellent Out Of Adversity". The keynote speakers were excellent – in fact everyone was excellent!

The Health and Care Sector Skills Councils had invited the head of one of the other sector skills councils: Jack Matthews of the Improve Food & Drink Skills Council. Not only was he very passionate, not only was he very funny, but he made a lot of very important points, entirely relevant to the enormous combined workforce in health and social care (over 2 million).

Jack shared with us that the Food & Drink industry has an image problem. Schoolchildren just don't want to come and work in the sector, they don't want to "work in a canning factory". Gone are the days when young adults would look starry eyed towards careers in Nestlé, Mars, Kellogg's; the Food & Drink sector is seen in a very different light at the moment.

That’s funny – another keynote speaker pointed out that schoolchildren didn't want to work in social care – it was no longer seen as a profession providing the care of people who desperately needed it, now the job was seen as emptying bedpans.  Same job (if anything, even more professional, and certainly better paid relative to other work), but the perceptions have changed.

I suppose the starting point is to work out where these low perceptions come from. Unfortunately, the finger of blame seems to point towards schools and school teachers(!) Children and young adults are brought up with the idea that many of these jobs are somehow less than they appeared to previous generations. Dads and Mums still work in their careers proudly, and many sectors remain so specialised that the children's parents will stay in one sector for life. But schools that used to churn out eager members of society ready to be molded to one or other industrial or commercial sector, now turn out adolescents who want a big salary for only doing the interesting bits, and prepared to stay at home rather than take on a job with unfulfilling parts. Whatever is going on, it needs to be put right.

At one time, companies wanted to give children an early taste of what their industry consisted of, and invited them in to see what was going on. It gave a parent the chance to introduce their children to the reality of the day-to-day work so vital for Britain's success. Perhaps because the "job for life" doesn't exist any more, this has become less common. And with parents working longer and longer hours and spending less and less time with children at those formative times when they think about study options and future careers, teachers become the main arbiters of children's attitudes.  The teaching environment is very different (children tend to need controlling – employees tend to need empowering, and so on) and the sad reality is that schools and universities fail to turn out people suitable for commerce, for industry, and for public sector and third sector jobs (as predicted by Lyotard 1984). So perhaps we now need teachers with experience of the attitudes, of the pride, and of the hurly-burly and ups and downs of the kinds of jobs that their pupils will find usually themselves in.

How many companies are ready to invite teachers at local schools into the organisation for a week or a month, to shape these attitudes? How many proud parents, instead of taking their child to work, would take their child's teacher to work? Is this the answer, or am I unnecessarily maligning teachers and schools?

Success in business, and outside the workplace, frequently depends on the nature of the relationship. And the nature of that relationship is entirely within the control of – YOU.

 

Cialdini describes six weapons of influence, of which three relate directly to the relationship between people:

• (2) commitment and consistency
• (4) liking
• (5) authority, typically also expressed as competence [1]

these are important to your success: nobody can do it on their own, we succeed when we can persuade/encourage others to join with us, whether through leadership, coercion, or some other form of persuasion. We "infect" others with our enthusiasm, to work together as a team, else we become part of someone else's plan. If you tend to work on your own, or with an organisation from your last autonomous, then they are just as important to help you get your point of view across, to negotiate well, to win the argument. Unless you are entirely self-sufficient, and on an island [2]then you will always affect or be affected by the people around you.

 

So why even discuss this?

The key to consistency (one of the three weapons of influence which relates to the relationship between people) is in being pretty well. Extraordinary leaders have made some of their success on being unpredictable, but let's be frank, it doesn't work for the ordinary person in the street. Being consistent, being predictable, fitting the mould – this is what makes people comfortable with you, this not only makes you trustworthy, but it can also help people to like you (other key weapon).

Consistency, fitting the stereotype, will raise people's perception of your competence, and often your authority.>

The difficulty is that in a wonderful egalitarian society, we have different stereotypes of men and women.

 

Stereotypes: men and women.

Men are expected to be:

• In authority, driving, strong, team players, logical in their thinking and speech, directing

Women:

• supportive, defending of their team, caring, nurturing, passionate

woe betide the person who crosses the gender divide.

[2]then you will always affect or be affected by the people around you.

Of course the same applies between the races, between ages, between people of different sexual orientation (if this is even within the workplace), and it is a challenge – it's difficult to have true equality, when people have preconceived ideas of what they expect, and punish those that do not comply with the proper stereotype. Alysia Morga picks up on this in her blog "Why Women Should Flirt at Work"[3]