Tuesday, 25 October 2022 – Out With the New and In With the Old
Our current team graduate has come to the end of her six-month cycle with the Economic Development Team and will be moving on to spend six months with another service before she decides in what council service she would eventually like to work. I learned of her rotating out in our senior officer team meeting on Monday the 3rd to which only she, I and our Policy Officer attended. Our Head of Service, who arranged these meetings, didn’t attend. He didn’t give a reason or apologies, so we were left there chatting idly when she told us. “We must arrange leaving drinks” our Policy Officer said, which we never did, but, a few days later, our Lead for the Employment Advice Team, with whom our Graduate worked most closely, did. She sent a calendar invite to the whole team to meet in a pub after work for a “Leaving do” on Tuesday 1 November.
Up until then, our Lead didn’t know the Graduate was leaving either. Our Head of Service forgot to tell anyone. I’m not exactly sure why, but this is a definite faux pas; it is just part of corporate culture to tell the team when a member is leaving it. We all felt a bit bad for the Graduate, not that I think she cared much herself because she seems to be a combination of a lot cleverer than the average council officer and, so, a bit above it all, and too young and inexperienced in corporate culture to realise how much of a social indiscretion this actually is. But, nonetheless, she seemed happy, as most people would, that her team was giving her this recognition and respect. After all, she seemed to do a good job on the Employment Advice Team managing the European-funded contract. But it was clear to me it did not put our Head of Service in a good light with our Policy Officer and Employment Adviser Lead. I don’t know what they think because they didn’t, and wouldn’t, explicitly say, but I sense they think he is disorganised, a bit inconsiderate as he is a bit too wrapped up in himself and, therefore, removed from his team, rather than being malicious or consciously neglectful of his responsibility to people management. Seemingly just to highlight this character flaw, today he sent out a cheery calendar invite to “ED Team Drinks” after work on 1 November, exactly clashing with the Lead’s invite (to which he is included and is already in his calendar and, therefore, his invite clashes with the Lead’s invite in his calendar too). It read:
“Hi All,
“It’s been a while since we all got together, so a meet up is overdue! This will also give us a chance to give [the Graduate] a nice send-off.
“Also, [the new Assistant Director] starts with H&F that week, [sic] I don’t know if he will be able to join us but will send him an invite too.
“Best Regards,
“[Head of Employment and Skills]”
“Best regards”? Reading a letter from Arnold Rimmer’s mother out loud to him, Dave Lister reads, “I hope this epistle finds you adequately healthy to discharge your duties. You know, maybe I shouldn’t be reading this deeply personal stuff.”
Everyone in the team knows that signing off an email with “Best regards” is probably written into his automatic signature in Outlook and he is not deliberately trying to be this removed from his staff, but then why have it at all in your signature if everyone knows you don’t mean it one way or another? It is the indifference in these messages, coupled with the lack of any deliberateness to be friendly, engaging and inspiring when managing people, that makes his team feel so mah about him.
So, if he
doesn’t care that much about his team and having any relationships, or even
interactions, with us, why bother sending the invite for the leaving do when it
has already been done, in his calendar, and clear to him that it is in his
calendar because exactly matching the existing time is not a coincidence? The reason is this is a chance to suck up to
the new Assistant Director. As
coincidence would have it, the Graduate’s leaving do is on the same day
the new AD starts. As coarse and base as
this career tactic seems, up is where our HoS pays most attention and
obeisance. He knows that looking down to
his team who deliver his service for which he is Head is not going to get him
anywhere, it’s to the end of garnering attention and favour from his superiors
where he must give most consideration to the wording in his epistles to them
including, I’m sure, excruciating detail being paid to the best way to sign off
an email.
And this (ridiculous levels of trying to impress one’s directors) is a common understanding among senior council officers. Our Policy Officer has been writing and compiling an “Induction Paper” for the AD to help him understand the new service for which he will be responsible, entitled “Economic Development Activities in Hammersmith and Fulham – An Overview”. In it are different sections to which we should contribute our own parts on what we do, what has been achieved and challenges we continue to face, and I wrote the section on S106 and Social Value. Our Policy Officer wrote about our Economic Development Policy, “The Industrial Strategy”, for which he has been responsible. In it he wrote:
“…we have attracted over £3.2 billion of investment into the borough, positioning us on the world stage for technology development.”
Have we? Wow! That is quite an achievement he is taking credit for there. How he knows the financial value of investment into what is an area of London made up of arbitrary boundaries created in 1965 that make up one of 33 London boroughs situated in the middle of what has been one of the three financially richest city states in the world for at least the past 35 years (along with New York and Tokyo), and how he has credited this to his work on the Industrial Strategy, is not explained in this briefing. But it is well known that if you have the chance to highlight your achievements, whether you have them or not, you take it. Directors are that stupid.
Still, the medal for the most outrageous claims of achievement must go to councils’ Business Rates teams’ customers. A shop in Enfield claims to be “The best off licence in Enfield.” Like with the achievements of the Industrial Strategy, how they came to this conclusion is not explained. An Indian restaurant, also in Enfield, claims to be the best takeaway in “the Middlesex”. Not the best Indian takeaway, but the best takeaway! I feel that there is a gap in the market for an entrepreneurial consultant to offer to sense-check new owners’ shop names before they open and, in this case, explain to the restauranteur exactly how big Middlesex actually is. And that counties don’t require the definite article. A Chinese restaurant called Dynasty long had the monopoly on takeaways in a residential area of Ponders End in the London Borough of Enfield before a kebab shop opened on the same road a few years ago. To capture some of Dynasty’s share of the market, they went with the name Dallas Kebabs. On the shop sign is a picture of a horse being ridden by a cowboy just above the familiar symbol for doner kebab. Not a good look. Other boroughs have similar problems. A pizza restaurant that does deliveries in Finsbury Park in the London Borough of Hackney is called Speedo Pizzas. Someone should tell them that’s not what they think it means. Millennium Dome convenience shop opened in 2000 in Whetstone in the London Borough of Barnet and was obviously trying to gain unearned, and rather random, notoriety from the zeitgeist, but Pearl Harbor Chinese restaurant in Southampton just raises too many questions about what they were thinking to go into here.
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” Liz Truss quoted the Roman statesman, Seneca, in her leaving speech today to explain her motivation for her achievements “in all my time as prime minister” (50 days). One of her achievements, she claimed in her speech, was mourning the passing of the Queen. It is as if she was claiming the Queen had waited until Truss had taken office before she chose to die so as Boris Johnson wasn’t in power to make a mockery of the occasion. Truss did do a passable speech announcing the death of the monarch, but only by her own low standards of speaking. Her other achievement in office was tanking the economy. She didn’t have much else to go on in her speech in such a short tenure but the whole point of the exercise of office is not so much to achieve anything but to claim to have achieved things. The reality is Seneca was wrong. Assuming things are simple; it’s just that no-one has given it a crack, is just wrong-headed. Truss’s trust in the school textbook notion of the Laffer Curve turned out to be an overly simplistic depiction of the economy and the financial markets are far more difficult to manage than Seneca gave them credit just because Truss dared.
Looking him up on LinkedIn (it’s not stalking if they
publish their CV on the Internet for all to see, honestly), our soon-to-be new
AD is currently the “Assistant Director – Employment, Skills and Adult Learning
at London Borough of Hackney”. He has
been in Hackney’s Employment and Skills Team for eleven years, of which Head of
Employment and Skills three years and eight months and then promoted to AD in
which he has been in post for the past two years and two months. Hackney’s S106 Employment and Skills Service is
made up of a team of officers varyingly responsible for jobs, work placements,
apprenticeships, Employment and Skills Plans and monitoring and
enforcement. At H&F, the S106 team
consists of half of me. By contrast to the
other half of me, Social Value in Hackney is based on a Social Enterprise Place
team.
As well as losing its AD, Hackney happens to currently be recruiting a new Head of Employment, Skills and Adult Learning, the role he progressed from in 2019, advertised as paying £102,246 pa. This is more than the c£85k an AD is paid in LBHF. It makes one wonder how badly he must have Trussed up the service in Hackney to be ousted and forced to adopt such an extreme pay cut and far smaller service. But Hammersmith and Fulham decided employing his old ways, no matter how disastrous the outcomes, was better than bringing in someone who wasn’t already an AD or Head of Service with another local or regional authority or Government department, but from the private sector with a fresh culture, new ideas and understanding of how businesses and employers operate and how they determine where to invest. But we wouldn’t want anyone new showing up those already in post and who doesn’t understand the omerta.
In the meantime, what the mechanics of our Head of Service’s attempt to suck up to someone who doesn’t even start for another week is is confusing me, but I wouldn’t like to question his methods because these people are better practised at it than I am.
Comments
Post a Comment