Modern Management And Leadership: People, Places And Organisations

By Jon Bright

From building a team to managing for the long-term, those that are successful in organisations will have one thing in common, the ability to lead and manage.

With the advance of technology and new developments in working practices, much has changed in business over recent years, but one essential truth remains – the importance of leadership and management. Drawing on evidence and experience, Jon Bright brings together helpful and practical suggestions to improve how we lead and manage people, organisations and places.

Whether beginning the long slog up the corporate ladder in local government, the civil service or the not-for-profit sector – or trying to navigate your way in smaller, more fluid and agile organisations, the book covers most aspects of leadership and management. It is for those managing people for the first time and old hands who have got a bit lost. It’s also for people who find themselves in senior leadership roles but have the insight to know they need to further develop their confidence, insights and skills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915643940

Jon Bright

Until 2014, Jon was a senior civil servant in the UK Government. Posts included Director of Homelessness and Housing Support, Regional Director of the Government Office for the South West, and senior positions in the Government’s Neighbourhood Renewal and Social Exclusion Units. He was also seconded to Birmingham City Council as Director of Policy. Before joining the Civil Service, he led two national organisations focused on crime reduction and urban safety. Since leaving the Civil Service, he has been CEO of two charities in Oxfordshire, Community First and Citizens Advice. Earlier in his career, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to study in the USA and is the author of two other books. He now contributes to training programmes for overseas civil servants and undertakes occasional consultancy and writing projects.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Build a Great Team

"Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off it and the right people in the right seats" advises Jim Collins in his 2001 book Good to Great (1).

The first chapter is about building high-performing teams.* Building or refreshing a team is the first job many leaders coming into a new role will undertake. Their success will depend on how well they do it.

Although Jim Collins’s quote has an attractive simplicity, ‘getting the right people on the bus’ is often difficult to bring about. Few people coming into leadership or senior management positions have the scope to move people around unless they are very senior or are setting up a new unit to do something special. The organisation will not let them.

In those situations where a team or organisation has failed badly, become corrupt or lost the confidence of the board or the public, a new leader will be expected to take decisive action quickly. This may involve removing some employees. However, in most cases, an incoming leader’s role will be to take over an existing team or organisation that may be functioning adequately but perhaps requires improvement.

So, any reshaping should be carried out fairly, carefully, and sensitively.

Of course, it can be done ruthlessly (for devotees of the TV series Succession: see Season 2, Episode 2, where Kendall comes into a large building, convenes a meeting, and sacks everyone). However, that’s not a great way to proceed if you hold to the ‘life is short, be kind’ principle as your guide to management. Or if you want people to come and work for you – and stay.

When arriving in a new role, it’s worth sitting down with someone whose judgement you respect to think it all through. What does your new team need to achieve and how well has it been doing? Does it have any skills gaps? Is there anyone who really doesn’t fit because they aren’t competent or can’t / won’t work within a team? What scope is there for appointing new staff?

Leaders often think that creating a successful management team involves finding a set of individuals like them, with a similar set of qualifications and experience. The academic Meredith Belbin’s great insight is to show that this is often not the best way to go (2). No individual can combine all the qualities required and if you appoint a team of people with similar strengths, you not only risk ‘groupthink’ but may miss out on some of the key qualities needed for success.

Belbin’s approach is well known. He identifies nine team roles. Three are social: Resource Investigator, Team Worker, and Co-ordinator; another three are thinking roles: Plant, Monitor/Evaluator and Specialist, and the final three are action or task roles: Shaper, Implementer and Completer Finisher. His argument – backed up with a great deal of evidence – is that many teams would benefit from being structured in this way.

Belbin’s nine team types are a useful starting point for building a new team. Its value is that it provides a framework for a process that is often rushed and based on guess work and subjective judgement. The key questions to ask are these: What are the team’s objectives? What skills and capabilities does it need to achieve them? Do you know if it has them? If it doesn’t, what else is required?

His approach is not meant to be followed slavishly. It is less important for teams that oversee standard processes that require little innovation or modification. A new tech start-up, for example, will require a different team composition than a local authority social care team. Not every team needs all nine roles, and in small teams that do, individuals may take on two or more.

Belbin’s thoughts are useful when a team is operating in areas of rapid change; where there is complexity, competition and the need for innovation, quick decision-making and action; and where effective delivery is vital. In such circumstances, having a team composed of talented individuals with these complementary skills can make the difference between success and failure.

There are other similar classifications to Belbin’s, but his is the best known and has enjoyed support and longevity.

Recruiting and building or re-shaping teams takes time, a clear vision and good people skills on the part of the leader. It’s nearly always best done when a new leader/manager arrives, when change is often anticipated and before people settle down. Don’t waste this opportunity.

Selecting staff

So, you know what you need and can appoint some new staff. How do you select them and build a rounded team committed to a set of objectives? What are the most effective staff selection and team building processes that have been shown to work best? Getting it wrong can be so costly and wasteful and can cause a big hit on team morale. In terms of staff selection, you need a clear process.

Analyse the job – be clear about what you want the postholder to do, how they fit your team, what you want them to achieve and, broadly, the sort of person you are looking for. Don’t rush this. Consult and take advice as necessary.

Prepare a job description/personnel specification – most selection panels prepare personnel specifications with lists of essential and desirable characteristics against which candidates are then assessed. When drafting these, try not to over-specify and build in a degree of flexibility so you have the option to bring in younger, perhaps more diverse candidates who have potential.

Advertise widely including on social media – sell the role. Staff recruitment is a two-way street. Good candidates are assessing you as an employer. Never forget that. Treat applicants courteously and be responsive to their requests for information. Make a good impression before you meet them. Why should they want to join your organisation if they’ve options?

Always think about diversity. Those involved in staff selection need to take account of diversity (see next chapter) and ensure they do not fall into the trap of routinely appointing people like them (3).

Decide how you are going to assess candidates for these skills.

You can use several methods:

−  assessments of their career history and past achievements.

−  structured interviews with one or more panels. Use experienced selectors when you can – recruitment is a skill.

−  presentation and writing exercises – you need to know they can do this, so you don’t have to do it for them.

−  psychometric testing to reveal strengths and weaknesses. Note: many argue these tests are most effective when used with other methods, such as interviews. This is because the results can be difficult to interpret (4).

−  cognitive assessment and aptitude testing can help with roles where specific abilities are essential.

−  assessment centres utilise all the above plus role play, ‘working in a team’ exercises and problem solving.

A further comment on assessment centres. A 2007 survey found many who use these centres value them although they can be expensive. However, a 2017 article questioned whether they were as effective as they once were (5). If you are thinking of using them, look at up-to-date evidence of their effectiveness.

Good HR staff will guide managers through the approaches that genuinely add value and are affordable.

What does all this mean in practice? It means the structured interview is usually the key to staff selection, but it should draw on some of the other methods listed above to bring in useful additional evidence that can help final decision-making.

A further note on interviews. Research shows that unstructured interviews do not provide the best results in selecting the candidate that is right for the job (6). Unstructured interviews tend not to use any set questions. Instead, the interviewer asks open-ended questions based on a specific topic and will try to let the interview flow like a natural conversation.

Structured interviews involve asking specific questions designed to test the candidates’ skills, knowledge, and experience against the requirements in the job description and personnel specification. They are up to twice as effective as unstructured interviews at predicting job performance.

Take your time (within reason). When in doubt, don’t hire and keep looking. I’ll say that again. When in doubt, don’t hire and keep looking.

If you can, appoint people who are as competent and committed as you are or more so. Of all the qualities you may be assessing, it is emotional intelligence that is most closely associated with success for management roles, though not necessarily for technical ones (7).

When appointed, try to build roles that play to your employees’ strengths and find ways of managing any weaknesses. Not all organisations can be flexible enough to allow this ‘job crafting’ as it’s known (8) but if you can, build a team where all the members are in roles which are a good fit.

You now have your team. How do you equip them for the job ahead and build a high-performing team?

Creating high-performing teams

You have a mix of staff you’ve inherited and perhaps some you’ve appointed. You are starting to understand their strengths and weaknesses. The next task is to help them become a high-performing team where the individuals respect each other, work well together and have shared as well as individual objectives.

McKinsey and Company, the international management consultancy, note that "high performing teams typically share four key attributes: a meaningful mission, the right people, the necessary resources, and an empowering environment. Most postmortems on failed projects find the team was missing one or more of these necessary conditions" (9). Leaders will often need to engage in some heavy lifting to create a successful team. They will need to:

Agree on team objectives and individual targets: The key point about a team is that it coheres around a set of goals and objectives. These will reflect organisational priorities. Cascading responsibility for meeting team goals and objectives into a precise set of individual targets is usually the first step. But target setting can be fraught with problems. If the leader or manager has some choice over targets, this process needs careful consideration.

I deal with this topic fully in Chapter 7. In this section, I’ll briefly set out some guidelines:

−  think carefully about targets, the actions needed to achieve them and the indicators you will use to measure that achievement. Don’t have too many.

−  use analysts or researchers to help you think this through. They have a more precise understanding of cause and effect than most of us and understand measurement difficulties.

−  develop targets in partnership with the staff responsible for meeting them. The result will be targets that are realistic, and staff will feel motivated by the process.

−  carefully consider the data that is needed to assess whether targets are being met, how this will be collected and how you will avoid creating unnecessary administration for frontline staff.

−  review targets regularly and amend or scrap them if they are having unintended consequences.

If done well, target-setting can mobilise staff and help create a shared vision of what they are all there to achieve.

Be obsessive about results: When the objectives and targets have been agreed upon, the leader/manager and the team members need to have a sound grip on the performance statistics and understand performance trends.

Again, analysts can help managers and employees understand the statistics and prepare visually compelling graphics that set out the numbers and trends clearly. Everyone in the team needs to understand their role in strengthening performance.

But it’s not just about the statistics. A high-performing team will need to decide what actions must be taken if performance slips. This means developing a granular understanding of the delivery process and being able to assess where precisely problems may lie. They can then take prompt action to address them.

Once it’s clear what the problem is and what needs to be done to correct it, action should be taken until performance starts to catch up. If it doesn’t, check whether enough of the action is being taken (the ‘dosage’) or whether the reasons for underperformance have been diagnosed wrongly.

A high-performing team will be absolutely on top of this. Impact, reputation, and funding may depend on it.

Organise team building events: Many authors advocate structured awaydays with sessions to discuss objectives and the strategies to achieve them. Often, external consultants are brought into challenge, analyse team functioning and help the group cohere.

Such events can be very useful if they are well planned, set the direction of travel, unite everyone around a shared mission, address issues people are interested in and help them build knowledge and understanding. They may include site visits to see real-world examples of success. These can be powerful ways of building common purpose, changing perspectives and raising aspirations.

Team events are less helpful if there is too much unstructured discussion and ‘navel gazing’ – especially when post-it notes are involved – or are held too often.

They can be combined with more frequent, shorter meetings to discuss more immediate issues, celebrate successes and engage the staff (see Chapter 5).

But you can do too much formal team building, particularly in large organisations where staff may be brought together by department, group, directorate, divisional or team leaders. It’s important to gauge how much is enough, usually by asking the staff.

Strengthen and nurture team culture: In fact, teams are developed more through the everyday experience of their members than formal team building events. And it falls to the leader here to set the tone. Here are a few examples of how a leader builds a successful team culture.

I’ve already made the point about focusing on people’s strengths – where you can – and finding ways of managing their weaknesses. For example, don’t make good and busy managers complete financial spreadsheets without specialist help if they find it too difficult, time-consuming, stressful and unspeakably tedious. Let them spend their time on managing the people and problems they’ve been trained to manage and help them do it even better. Find some other way of completing the finance spreadsheets. If they are OK with spreadsheets, that’s fine too.

Keep meetings short and purposeful. Start them on time. Don’t have too many. Make them fun (up to a point). Involve everyone. Don’t dominate. Delegate and trust people. Invest in training. Take risks. It’s OK to make mistakes (but not all the time).

Be decisive and take control when you must. Set boundaries. Deal with conflict, problems and underperformance promptly, sensitively and fairly.

Inspire. Delegate. Encourage. Tell people when they’ve done well. Give credit. Celebrate. Find the right tone and be sincere. Avoid corporate guff.

Respect individual differences. This is so important. Teams need to be ‘broad churches’. But at the same time, members must be team players and respect their colleagues.

Where you can, cut out pointless bureaucracy and ask how to make people’s working lives easier. Then, if possible, do what they’ve asked.

Celebrate success together and acknowledge individuals. This was