September 2010

I was not always a model employee. Even during a period of considerable success in my previous career, when I’d transformed a department to deliver huge gains in productivity, morale and motivation, I could sometimes find myself in the naughty corner.

The most notable incidence came when during one coffee break, my colleagues and I came up with the idea of launching an ‘employee rag’.

Our rationale was that the ‘rag’, which we named ‘Allegedly’, would raise morale and money for charity. It would create development opportunities for staff as they learnt editing and writing skills, and the involvement of both management (like myself) and more junior staff, would encourage teamwork and team pride.

That was the positive side of the motivation coin. The less positive was that we were feeling a bit rebellious as a result of a new heavy handed management approach from Head Office, following a change in our MD, who’d never visited our Yorkshire offices (and never did to my knowledge).

I volunteered to get the project off the ground and, as you’ve probably guessed, the whole thing blew up in my face. ‘Allegedly’ proved a little risqué for the new MD who, apparently, was particularly offended by a letter purportedly from him to our agony aunt, which simply read: “Nobody loves me”.

Both I and my MD probably learnt a lot from this experience. I learnt quite a lot about disciplinary procedures from the receiving end, but I also learnt important lessons about evaluating ideas, risk management, networking, power and politics.

The lessons I learnt about power and politics were clarified and brought home to me when I read the new modules Clare Forrest has written for Trainers’ Library. Power and politics can be uncomfortable concepts, but I wish I’d had the opportunity to learn about them through these brilliant new modules when I was a young manager.

My MD would have benefited from them too: His response to the publication of ‘Allegedly’ not only created a black market for the magazine (with copies allegedly changing hands for ten times their face value in London), it also directly led to me being elected to the bank’s first international staff council and consequently to a huge increase in my own power and influence.