Positive Ripples

I’m feeling rather proud of myself. A little exercise I wrote for Trainers’ Library several years ago has been endorsed by Show Racism the Red Card, the charity that uses professional footballers to educate against racism.


The exercise in question is The Witches of Glum. The charity considers it to be such a powerful tool for illustrating how deeply rooted stereotypes can be, and the dangers of making assumptions, that it’s to be included in a resource pack being put together for educational establishments around the UK. I’m thrilled that something I really enjoyed writing might be helping to make a difference.


I have to be honest though. This isn’t the result of some grand scheme. I never imagined Witches of Glum would become one of the most popular and widely used exercises in Trainers’ Library when I wrote it. I didn’t even appreciate, when I’d first written it, how much discussion and learning it could provoke.


Sometimes, training can seem a fairly unrewarding role, particularly if you’re dealing with behaviours that are slow to change and/or you’re not on site to see what happens after you’ve finished delivering your training.


It’s worth remembering then that the actions we take every day as trainers (and as non-trainers) are like pebbles thrown into a still pond. We never really know how far the ripples we create will travel.


Sometimes the extent of our influence is surprising. I had another sharp reminder of this a while back when I bumped into someone who had attended a Creative Thinking course I ran for volunteers a few years before. He told me how that training course had inspired him to launch a community music shop, which sells instruments and music and, perhaps more importantly, is widely involved in supporting and encouraging the local music scene. Core Music in Hexham provides rehearsal space, music lessons and even recording facilities, and all profits are reinvested in the local community, providing music based services to those who can’t afford to pay for them.


I’m sure many of you have similar stories about the ripples you’ve generated from your own training interventions, and if so, I’d love to hear them.


Of course not all the ripples we generate will be positive. I’m sure we’ve all had situations where we wish we’d handled a situation better. But just recognising them and learning from them are part of that ripple effect too.


Now, I’m going to go before I tie myself up in mental knots.


For more information about the great work Show Racism the Red Card is doing, visit their website at www.srtrc.org. And for Core Music, www.coremusic.co.uk.

Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com

Who do I think I am?

My blog has now been given its own link on the Trainers’ Library website. It’s something to do with one of our objectives for 2010,  which is to get our Google ratings higher. Apparently, dynamic content, like a blog, is a really useful tool for increasing your rankings. So there you have it; a truly practical tip in a blog.


So, how do I feel about this extension of my strange mutterings to the wider world? To be frank, I was neither flattered, nor thrilled when the idea was mooted. And, when I first saw my blog on the website, I felt vulnerable. I worried about the impression it would give. I imagined you all muttering into your teas things like: “Who does he think he is – really?” “Talk about ego – he thinks he’s Peter Honey now” (or some such authority). I was even less impressed when I saw that photographs had been added, “to break the page up a bit”.


My reaction is interesting isn’t it? And probably a little bit English too: This concern about ‘overstepping the mark’, this feeling of vulnerability, and dislike of being too much in the limelight. They’re feelings that many of us experience: The first time we’re asked to give a presentation to a group of managers perhaps, or the first time we walk into a room of people as their manager.


And, I’m reminded of a piece of advice a member of my team was given when she expressed many of the same fears after she became team supervisor. The advice she was given (not by me) was to dress one level higher than her role. It’s advice that seems a bit reminiscent of the 1980s - the days of Dynasty and Dallas; when shoulder pads were so large you wondered how women were able to navigate through doorways. But for this individual it worked. Dressing up a bit gave her greater confidence, made her feel more ‘in the role’ and more fitted to it.


And it reminds me too of growing up in a village pub. From a young age, I helped out behind the bar, washing glasses and such, and at the age of 18 I began a lengthy, albeit part- time, career serving beers. The weird thing was that behind the bar I was extrovert, confident and in control. When it came to socialising on the other side however, I reverted to a shy, nervous boy.


Maybe, there is something to be said for role-play after all; maybe role-play is something we do until the role becomes comfortable. In which case I’ll continue playing at being a professional writer, and imagine I’m a sort of cross between Stephen Fry and Robert Peston, and just hope you’ll humour me during my journey of discovery and development.

Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com

Running Towards or Running Away?

This month’s blog comes from a rather cramped spare room at my parents, where we’re currently squatting whilst we look for a new home. The experience of selling our home of the last two years got me thinking about motivation.


I believe there are essentially only two forms of motivation. We can be motivated to run towards something - a goal - or away from something - a fear or discomfort. Sometimes, they co-exist.


When we launched ourselves into this latest mini-adventure, we had a clear goal – we were planning to spend a couple of years living and experiencing life in France, working, as we do now, from home, with one week in six spent in the offices in Alston. The goal was exciting, and enticing. I imagined spending my weekends riding through the sun flecked forests of Normandy, drinking wine on the terrace in the evenings, walking with my white German Shepherd to the local Boulangerie each morning to buy some bread, taking lunch in the local town square – you get the picture.


For a combination of reasons, we’re probably going to hold off our move to France for a little longer, and we realised this a few weeks before we sold our house. So, what motivated us to continue with the sale? Well, mostly, a desire to escape the howling 80-mile an hour winds and non-stop rain that have launched themselves at our hilltop farm almost, it seems, without pause for the last two years. (In fairness, we had been warned before we left the relative comforts of Alston that things were a bit dire at this end of the Wear Valley but thought we were hardier than we ultimately proved to be!).


So, here we see the two forms of motivation co-existing – running towards something positive and running away from something negative.


I suspect that in the current climate, a lot of the second form of motivation is being used in organisations around the world. And that can be useful if we want people to react quickly – we’re basically tapping in to the same drive and energy that would lead them to run from a fire, or, in the case of Indiana Jones, a rolling boulder. But what happens when they sense they’re out of danger? They stop.


So, here’s my thought (finally, I hear you scream): If you want your people to deliver long-term planning, and a sustained high-level performance; in other words if you want to keep them motivated for the long term, you’re more likely to achieve that if you give people something positive to run towards – as long as it’s somewhere they truly want to be.

Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com

Dennis the Menace

When I was a child, my parents employed a friend, a qualified builder, to do some work on their roof. Unfortunately, it only came to light that the friend in question had no insurance after he’d set fire to the house. That was an awkward situation for everyone! Thirty years later, I still remember the builder’s adapted name: Dennis the Menace.

The story came to mind last night as I was considering the difficulties of managing friends.

Perhaps shaped by my parents’ experience, I’ve always been obsessive about distinguishing between personal and professional relationships. It’s not impossible for someone to fall into both categories but where they do, you’ll both need to clearly understand the distinction and how it will be applied. Even then, problems can still arise if both parties aren’t able to compartmentalise their relationship or don’t have a sufficiently developed emotional intelligence.

The blurring of personal and professional relationships at work is never so apparent or confusing as when people move from being one of the team to managing that team. It’s often the most difficult career transition we’ll ever be asked to make. It’s a transition that can strain friendships or previously successful working relationships to breaking point.

Here’s a question that illustrates the difficulty:

Daphne has been a member of a team for two years and within that team of ten, there are three people (Gwenda, Marjorie and Derek) with whom she’s very good friends. Not only does she socialise with them regularly, she’s included them as friends on Facebook. Other members of the team are listed as friends of Marjorie and Derek but not as friends of Daphne. Now that Daphne has been promoted and is responsible for managing the team, what should she do? Does anything need to change?

Facebook provides a modern and interesting illustration of just how tricky this change can be. For myself, I’ve made a rule that I don’t include people who work directly for me on my Facebook list of friends (though most ex-employees are on there). Whilst I enjoy socialising with the team, I think we all need some private space away from the boss.

When people are promoted from team member to team manager they will, hopefully, get lots of training. Typically they’ll learn about communication, dealing with performance issues, setting objectives, running appraisals etc. Perhaps though, we also need to ensure we’re preparing them for the more human dimensions of the change they are faced with. It’s probably not possible to provide hard and fast rules but perhaps we do need to ask questions like the one above in order to raise awareness and help individuals plan for the most difficult change of all.

Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com