A Passion for Management - Caring about your people

There was a rather wonderful post by the blond canadian expressing her passion for teaching.

In some ways our teachers are the most important professionals of all for they teach our young. The influence of a good teacher can be measured down the generations.

As a manager, I have always had a passion for my people. This holds whether I like them or not. Mainly I have. But regardless, I have always measured part of my success by how well my people do.

Today I attended some code of conduct and ethics training. It was a useful course because it illustrated various elements and problems about the organisation in which I am presently doing some project work. But when I looked at most of the sample problems - several former staff are in jail for corruption - I felt that I was looking at the outcomes of management problems.

Caring for your people does not mean being soft on them. Any professional organisation must demand standards. But it does mean being close to what they do. And if you do this, you will normally spot emerging problems in advance. Better, you have a chance to help your people achieve their own potential.

This always works to mutual advantage. Staff work better while they are with you. Then. when they leave, they retain a soft spot for you that can work to your advantage in the future.

Law, Life Style and Legal Salaries in Australia

Marsha Jacobs in the Australian Financial Review (3 August) alerted me to the fact that Mahlab Recruitment had released its Australian annual legal salary survey. The material that follows is drawn from Marsha's article. You can find the full survey here. It is free, but you will need to register.

In an earlier post I referred to a report suggesting that Australian graduate starting salaries had been declining in real terms with a median starting salary for law graduates of $42,000. I also commented that there appeared to be a growing reluctance among professional services firms to employ raw graduates, targeting instead those with some experience. This was beginning to create a chicken and egg problem.

The Mahlab survey found that salary bands rose by nearly 5 per cent nationally over the last year. High performers received salary increases of more than 20 per cent as well as bonuses. This represented the largest increase in seven years.

Average salary increases were highest in Perth (up 9 per cent) because of the mining boom. Then came Sydney (+6.4 per cent), Melbourne (+5.3 per cent), with Brisbane lagging (+4.7 per cent).

Average salaries for corporate lawyers with five years experience ranged from $125,000 in Perth and Brisbane, $128.000 in Melbourne, $150,000 in Sydney.

Average salaries in the top-tier firms for those with five years experience were noticeably lower: $96,000 in Brisbane, $110,000 in Perth, $120,000 in Melbourne and $125,000 in Sydney.

Partner salaries rose by an average of nearly 11 per cent over the last year. Here the range in the average in top-tier firms was $795,000 Brisbane, $805,000 Perth, $1,028,500 Melbourne and $1,084,000 Sydney. However, partners were having to work harder to earn their money.

In this context, the report suggests that you need to have a minimum practice of $2 million to make partner in a top-tier firm, $1.2 to million in a mid-tier firm, $700,000 to $900,000 in a small firm.

Attrition rates among young lawyers continued to be high. Many of those leaving firms were going in-house or overseas where Australian trained lawyers remained in demand. UK was still the number one international destination, although New York was increasing in importance.

Despite record level partner recruitment, the trend among younger lawyers against the partner option continued to increase. The proportion of young lawyers interested in partnerships is now 42 per cent, down almost 14 per cent from the previous year.

Work/life balance was cited as the single most important factor in increasing job satisfaction.

There is a real issue here that I see in my own daughters (ages 17 and 19) and their friends. They are prepared to work hard, certainly they are interested in money, but they are simply not ambitious in career terms in the way that I was. Life is more than work and success.

Encouraging Passion

In my last post I spoke of the power of passion. Can a firm create passion? I do not think so, because passion is an individual thing. Most people simply want to do a good job, balancing work with other commitments. However, firms can certainly create an environment that will encourage passion to flower.

Yesterday a colleague and I were going through the results of a number of staff workshops. Like many such workshops, there were sheets of short staff responses. As we looked at them, I was struck by a number of common threads.

The first was the need for improved communication.

Staff felt that they were not given the information they needed to do their jobs properly. They also wanted more information about the organisation itself.

The second linked theme was the need for management improvement.

Whereas management focused on the need for staff to do things to improve staff performance, staff focused on the things that management needed to do to allow them to improve performance. These included clearer instructions, again better information, the need to give staff more authority.

The third theme was trust. Staff felt that management should place greater trust in staff to do things right. Staff also wanted to be able to trust management to protect them, to treat them fairly.

Today we live in a system intense world. We have a tendency to believe that if there is an actual or perceived problem then we need a new system to deal with it. Yet if you look at the three themes above, they are really matters of attitude and skills. Simply changing systems will have little effect.

I should note that this is not a badly managed office. But even in this case there is substantial scope for improvement.

All three themes are central, too, to the creation of passion. If you want to encourage passion, then action to improve management, communication and trust is not a bad place to start.

Wednesday Forum - Depression and the Professional

I still have two part completed posts to complete the depression series. They will be behind this post in time order. But I did not want to hold up discussion.

The purpose of this forum is to provide an opportunity for you to talk about your own experiences with depression. Or about your experiences with firms and their responses to depressions. Or about your experiences in managing depression.

I do not care about the approach. It is up to you. My aim remains to stimulate discussion.

Postscript:

I have finally completed all the posts in the depression series. I am now going to update all the previous posts by adding a full list of the posts at the bottom. Now done.

Given this, you may care to read the whole series in order starting with the first post in the common management problems series on dealing with poor performers.

Posts in this Series

Precursor posts:

• 18 March Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• 6 April Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers 2

The Depression series:

• 25 April Managing Depression - a problem for individuals and firms
• 28 April Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 1: IT vs law
• 1 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 2: case study - Free at Last
• 4 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden
• 7 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's Case
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

This post wraps up my arguments about the problem of depression within professional services.

The initial building blocks for the series were two posts (one, two) in my common management problems series discussing the best way of dealing with poor performers. I have treated these as building block posts because my experience suggests that at firm level depression is often dealt with as a performance problem and then mismanaged at that level.

In those posts I suggested, among other things, that it was best to deal with performance problems early before they had time to build. I also emphasised the need to clearly identify the real problem needing to be addressed. The two case studies included in the depression series show breaches of both principles.

I began the depression series on 25 April with a post reporting on the results of an Australian survey suggesting that depression was worst among professionals and students. That is, these groups had higher incidences of depressions than other groups in Australian societies.

I also noted that depression problems appeared to be worst among patent attorneys and lawyers. I suggested that depression was a problem for both individuals and firms.

In the following post I compared law and IT.

In this post I began using the subtitle "Values, Culture and Depression." I did so because firm values and culture affect the treatment of depression in a management environment and in so doing affect the depressed individual.

The reason I chose to compare law and IT is that the individual performance environment in law as compared to the more collectivist managed environment in IT does, in my view, contribute to the higher incidence of depression in law. Somewhat similar arguments can be applied across the professions.

In my next post I took Free at Last as a depression case study. I find that examples help me understand issues. I hope that this is true for you too.

Free at Last's story is in part a story of management failures. But it is also a story with a positive personal ending.

I then diverted slightly with a brief note on the story of John Brogden, a leading NSW politician. Politics is another profession marked by depression problems. As with Free at Last, John's story shows that there is hope at the end of the depression tunnel.

In the next post I extended John's story. Here I spoke of my own brush with depression. I also tried to lay down a few simple management guidelines for dealing with the problem.

I then turned in Jan's case to another case study. Here we can see again how poor management practice contributed to individual problems to the ultimate cost of the firm itself.

In this series I have tried to write from both an individual and personal viewpoint as well as from a management perspective. I hope that readers gain some value.

Posts in this Series

Precursor posts:

• 18 March Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• 6 April Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers 2

The Depression series:

• 25 April Managing Depression - a problem for individuals and firms
• 28 April Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 1: IT vs law
• 1 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 2: case study - Free at Last
• 4 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden
• 7 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's Case
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

Professional Services - Value, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's case

This post in my series on depression and professional services firm takes a second case study drawn from the Junior Lawyers Union blog. For the sake of discussion, let's call her Jan.

Again, I am not in a position to talk about the facts. My focus is on the firm management issues taking the story as a given.

Jan's story starts well:

I spent two years in legal practice, after being 'head hunted' from my previous job. The first 18 months or so were fine - I exceeded my budget, enjoyed the work, and got along well with everyone. One of the partners told my husband I was the best graduate they had recruited in years.

Then things started to go wrong:

I suffered a sporting injury and had to have some time off work. This was right at the start of the financial year, so I started behind the eight-ball. At first, the partners seemed understanding. After a while, however, it became clear that I was expected to make up the billable hours I had missed. I worked my backside off, and started to catch up.

This short quote raises a number of interesting management issues.

Many firms set their billable hours targets without making any allowance for sick days. This may be fair enough. However, problems can arise where the time targets are sufficiently aggressive that the individual in question cannot easily make up the lost time, leading to stress. The firm is better off in these cases adjusting the time target.

The quote also suggests that that there may be a communication and management problem within the firm in that the billable hours expectation only became clear "after a while."

Jan, already under stress, now experiences a personality conflict.

Then my supervising partner began to have some personal problems, and she took out her anger on everyone who worked for her. I became increasingly stressed and felt like I couldn't do anything right. I became very depressed and began to lose interest in my work. My billable hours dropped even further

Regardless of the actual facts of the case, both Jan and the firm clearly have major problems. All firms face difficulties in handling partner level management problems. However, it is the responsibility of the managing partner to sort them. At staff level, the fact that Jan was in trouble must have been clearly evident, but was still not being dealt with.

Jan goes on:

I confided in another partner. He seemed to be sympathetic, and told me 'everyone knows' Partner X is a bully. He said if he had his way, he would sack her. Behind my back, however, he (later) told a Workcover investigator that he didn't want anyone who was depressed working at his firm, and that everyone likes Partner X, and that I must have misunderstood him.

I am sure that Jan's confidence made the other partner uncomfortable. That partner may also, giving him/her the benefit of the doubt, have been trying to be sympathetic. But the partner's response and subsequent failure to act would cost the firm.

Things continued to deteriorate.

Eventually, I was 'counselled' a couple of times about my steadily decreasing billable hours. The managing partner told me he didn't think the targets were that hard to meet, and that they had made a lot of allowances for me. I started to envy people with 'simple' jobs like the checkout operators at the supermarket. A few weeks later, I made a mistake while nearly at breaking point, and they had the excuse they needed to sack me.

Again we can see continuing management problems within the firm and in particular a continuing failure to properly identify and address Jan's problems. The costs to both Jan and the firm were high:

12 months later, and I am still on 3 different anti-depressants. I see a psychiatrist regularly and I have survived a suicide attempt. I still think about killing myself almost daily. I feel like a complete failure. On the bright side, however, I stood up for myself and put in a Workcover claim, which has recently settled in my favour. I have recently obtained another job which I really enjoy. The pay is crap, but there are no billable units, and I can go home at 4:30 every afternoon.

I said at the outset of this post that I could not comment on the facts. We only have Jan's side of the story. But the evidence does suggest a comprehensive management failure in that the application of standard people management practices would have sorted the problem long before the mutually disastrous end point finally reached.

Posts in this Series

Precursor posts:

• 18 March Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• 6 April Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers 2

The Depression series:

• 25 April Managing Depression - a problem for individuals and firms
• 28 April Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 1: IT vs law
• 1 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 2: case study - Free at Last
• 4 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden
• 7 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's Case
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

Professional Services - Value, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines

In my last brief post in his series I referred to the case of John Brogden, the former opposition leader in the NSW State Parliament. It was a very brief and somewhat cryptic post because I was on my way to Queensland. I said that I would amplify it later.

At least in Australia, politics like law appears to be a depression prone profession.

In the Brogden case, John said something stupid, the media came down on him like hounds in a feeding frenzy, he resigned as leader then attempted to kill himself. I commented in passing at the time in a post on my personal blog, Why are we so hard on our politicians - and ourselves. My focus then was on what the whole thing was doing to our political process. However, there are some broader issues.

In this post I have repeated the painting I carried in the first Brogden post. I drew this from Neil's blog, but do not know the painter. I have repeated it because it so accurately captures a point that I want to make. Before going on, those who would like to find out more about John's views on depression can find the interview transcript here.

As we saw in the case study on Free at Last, people's first reaction to someone suffering from depression is to tell them to pull their socks up, to buck up, to do better. Now look at the painting.

The subject sits alone. The tones are sepia, sombre, washed of colour. He sits next to what appear to be disembodied ears - people do not listen.

To suffer from depression is to be alone, lost in a sombre world. John Bunyan's novel Pilgrim's Progress speaks of the Slough of Despond. Bunyan meant it a little differently, but slough of despond has come to capture the position of those suffering from the black dog.

We know that people can come through depression.

The former Victorian Premier Geoff Kennett went through depression to become leader of Beyond Blue, Australia's leading anti-depression initiative. He spends much of his time helping people, something that would have seemed inconceivable to those opposed to his very rough and tumble style of politics.

Now John Brogden, too, seems to be coming through with the announcement that he has become patron of the telephone counselling service Lifeline NSW.

Lifeline was founded in 1963 by the late Reverend Dr Sir Alan Walker after he received a call from a distressed man who three days later took his own life. Determined not to let loneliness, isolation or anxiety be the cause of other deaths, Sir Alan launched a crisis line, which operated out of the Methodist Central Mission in Sydney.

Today, somewhere in Australia, there is a new call to Lifeline every minute and an average of over 450,000 calls are answered each year.

While we know that there can be an end to the slough of despond, this can seem inconceivable to the person suffering from depression.

Last year my own wheels came off.

At the worst point, I found it impossible to handle other than the most routine things. Making anything other than the most minor decisions was impossible. I felt completely alone, liable to break into tears. I was the person sitting on the shore.

Much of this I was able to conceal in a day to day sense. My experience has been that people suffering from depression often do not want to talk about it, are unable even to handle the conversation.

This makes them hard to help. It also means that things can get so bad that dire consequences can result, consequences that can come as a surprise to others because the problem has been concealed.

In my own case, and perhaps oddly, blogging itself proved to be the way out because at the time of greatest self doubt it showed me that I could still measure up in professional terms, made me feel that I could still contribute, gave me a sense of progress at a time when so many other things seemed to have gone wrong. Writing became its own catharsis.

I do not pretend that things are yet perfect. I am again fully functional in a professional sense, but still find it very hard to act, to make decisions, on strictly personal matters. But I can again think of a future.

If we link all this back to ways to handle depression in a work context, the core focus of this series, there are I think a couple of guidelines that can help guide management responses.

Guideline one is to reduce the pressure on the person, recognising that one symptom of depression is a reduced ability to cope.

Guideline two is to find ways of building self-esteem, something that is much harder to do.

Depression strikes at the heart of self-worth. That is why it is so destructive.

If we look at suicide among young rural males in Australia, a group with above average suicide rates, we can see a complex brought about by stress, drought, reduced opportunities, even the absence of potential mates because of the limited number of young women in some country areas. All this translates into lower self-esteem.

I do not have an answer as to the best way of increasing self-esteem. This has to be judged in the context of the individual case. However, my experience has been that even the act of caring in a sensitive way can help because it shows the person that they are valued.

Guideline three is to recognise that depression is a health problem, one that may require specialist help. You cannot address the performance problems that may be created by depression without addressing the underlying cause.

All this is not easy, I know. No firm can be expected to carry a sick worker indefinitely. However, this brings me to my final guideline.

Whatever action you take as a manager needs to be done in a fair, equitable, open and caring way.

Posts in this Series

Precursor posts:

• 18 March Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• 6 April Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers 2

The Depression series:

• 25 April Managing Depression - a problem for individuals and firms
• 28 April Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 1: IT vs law
• 1 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 2: case study - Free at Last
• 4 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden
• 7 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's Case
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

Professional Services - Value, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden

Very briefly because I am about to leave for Queensland.

JOHN BROGDEN: I understand what it’s like to be in such a dark place that taking your own life is the only way out and I understand how hard it is to come back from that. How, people saying to you, ‘Don’t worry it’ll all get better,’ actually sounds like an insult. It actually sounds as if your intelligence and emotions are being insulted because from where you are at that time it is impossible to imagine how you might come back…

For the benefit of my international readers, John Brogden was the leader of the opposition in the NSW Parliament.

I met him in Armidale at the Drummond College Drummond oration and dinner soon after he became leader. Later he resigned as leader and then attempted to commit suicide. We then learned that he had been suffering from depression.

My thanks to Neil (Ninglun) for his plus for this series and for the material on which this post is based.

A little later

Having posted, I realised that this post was going to be far too cryptic for someone seeing it for the first time without the background of previous posts. I will add a little more on my return from Queensland.

Posts in this Series

Precursor posts:

• 18 March Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• 6 April Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers 2

The Depression series:

• 25 April Managing Depression - a problem for individuals and firms
• 28 April Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 1: IT vs law
• 1 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 2: case study - Free at Last
• 4 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 3: John Brogden
• 7 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 4: Guidelines
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 5: Jan's Case
• 16 May Professional Services - Values, Culture and Depression 6: Wrap Up

Praise from Martin Hoffman for the Common Management Problem Series

I am grateful to Martin Hoffman for his compliments on my Common Management Problems series . This series takes me time because I want it to be simple and useful, drawing from my own experience. With Martin's approval, I am running his email to me as a post with my own comments.

Thanks for your series on Common Management Problems. I have a lot of ideas in my head about improving processes etc. Once I think I've got the solution, I will tell people. And move on to the next idea. And that's where I sometimes used to run into problems (and sometimes still do) because, as you point out, something that's obvious and clear to me, may not be as obvious and clear to the people I work with.

I think that Martin has caught something very real here. I think that any enthusiastic manager is prone to this fault. Certainly I am. Martin goes on:

But what I do now is to try and find "champions" who are quicker to understand and who I can trust to relay the message and repeat it and work with everybody else. In the beginning I tried to singlehandedly convince everyone in the organizations. Now I am trying to adhere to what I call my "Avalanche principle". I just try to push the right people, and usually it spreads. It doesn't always work. But when it does, the great thing is that those "champions" all feel like they have a stake in it, so they are very driven. And I get to think of the next thing sooner...

I think that Martin is spot on the money here. I think that we as managers have to create the climate, but when it comes to pushing things through we have to have our champions. Martin continues.

The other interesting observation here is that job level doesn't always matter. Sometimes it pays to inspire the very junior people and they will spread the message upwards.

Hallelujah brother! But its even better than that. Inspire the juniors and they will impose the message on difficult senior staff. Better still, they are usually the group with the best new ideas. Martin continues:

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I really enjoy this particular series on your blog. I hope you will continue with it.

Thank you, Martin. I will.

Creation and use of Case Studies - Training 1

In the last post I provided a general introduction to the creation and use of case studies. This and the the following post look in detail at the development and use of case studies for training purposes.

The material is directed at both training professionals and other professionals who may wish to use their material for training purposes or who hire trainers.

The material assumes that you have already looked in at least broad terms at the questions posed in the previous section.

Case Writing Questions

The preparation of the case study starts with the questions to be answered. The case may already exist as a general case study, in which case it is being modified for training purposes, or it may be prepared specifically for training purposes.

The writer of the case study should answer the following questions. This person can be either the ‘expert’ who has all the information required at their fingertips, or a researcher who collects and drafts the case document. The questions are drawn from John Boehrer (1998).

1. What is the hard, unifying question?

2. What information do we need to address it?

3. What can I ask users to analyse? decide?

4. What decision process does the case give the reader to focus upon?

5. What questions can I ask about it?

6. What detailed narrative does the reader need to focus on it the important issues?

7. What information needs to be developed?

8. What will make the story work as a case? What conflict does it present?

9. What will make the case livelier? What quotes or details? What will make the case more personal?

10. What will enable readers to identify with the actors and get into the case?

11. How do the actors themselves perceive the situation? Can they be quoted?

12. What factors/constraints do the case actors perceive to be impinging upon them?

13. Who else is involved? What is their perspective/outlook?

14. What development/structure would be useful?

15. What might different parts of the case focus upon?

16. What is the link between the specific decision focus and a larger question?

17. What is the issue context?

18. What special problem does writing/revising the case pose? Information? Access?

Case Structure

Having answered these questions, we can move to the preparation/modification of material. A basic structure here is set out below.

1. Case Introduction

• Title: identifies the content
• Context: specifies the overall concept conveyed in the case study: (answer to: What does the case demonstrate?)
• Objective: How this case relates to learner/learner situation. (answer to: Why is it important?)
• Learner Outcome(s): what the learner knows (is able to do) as a result of interacting with the case-study: (answer to: What will I learn from this example?) These outcomes will relate back to the Q&A incorporated into the case.
• Definitions/Background expectations: Are there any expectations regarding previous knowledge? Does student have to have access to specific resources? (Briefly highlight keywords and recall prior knowledge that case reader needs to grasp concepts contained in the case.)
• Invitation to continue: nudge to move on, collect thoughts, and get into it!

2. Case Contents

Case Study— a comprehensive example of the concepts one wishes to convey. Often the case incorporates materials that describe or simulate the example. In using a case study, we are moving from the concrete and specific to generalised abstract concepts and principles.

1. Start with a statement of the situation. Like all good stories, it will have a beginning, a middle and an end. It is generally in narrative form.
2. Introduce any characters, objects, or organisations of importance, give them a ‘human face’ with feelings and emotions.
3. Spell out crucial relationships between the elements.
4. Incorporate a series of alternating questions and answers in discussion/story form. The questions are asked by one character/organisation, and answered by another character/organisation, by either word or deed. (The process of asking and answering the questions must stimulate the reader/learner to engage with past experience/knowledge and apply this knowledge to this example/case).
5. If the reader is unlikely to have this knowledge then the concepts the person will need are generally referred to in some way as part of the resources of the case. (e.g. The research assistant consulted the copyright act section …. to ascertain…)

3. Case Summary

1. Generalise /Relate directly to learners:
   · What will they get/have they gained by examining this case study?
   · What was significant about this case study?
2. The final summary may be represented in a different format:
   · job aid, such as a checklist (Do you want the client to reproduce this/ have a handout?)
   · graphic (diagram, chart, table, illustration, and cartoon)
   · Q & A linked to the information provided in the case content

4. Potential Resources

• Conventional business documents (reports, specifications, instruction manuals, memos, letters)
• Blueprints & drawings
• Spreadsheets of numerical data
• Charts & graphs
• Video or audio interviews

Note on Copyright

The case study material is drawn from an Ndarala Group Guide prepared for the use of member professionals and clients. It is copyright Ndarala but may be copied with due acknowledgment.

Previous Posts

• Creation and Use of Case Studies - Introduction

Common Management Problems - the isolation of being boss

I thought that it might be of interest if I shared with you from time to time some of the problems I have experienced as a manager.

Australia has what the Australian historian John Hirst has called a democracy of manners. Differences of wealth, authority and power do exist in the country and have widened in recent years. But our language and attitude are egalitarian, democratic and somewhat cynical. This flows through into the nature of relationships within organisations.

I grew up in this world. It influenced my attitudes and approaches when I first became a manager in the Commonwealth Public Service. Among other things, it meant that I identified with and was close to my staff, an approach that got very good management results. Then suddenly I was promoted again and met a problem that took me a while to even recognise.

The Australian Public Service was then broken into four divisions:

• the first division made up of the heads of Departments and senior statutory office holders - a small group - was at the top.
• then came the second division, a smallish (several hundred) group of senior managers across the Service from branch head to deputy secretary level.
• followed by the third division, the main administrative/clerical division
• and then the fourth division, all the support staff.

To put all this in terms that may be more familiar, the first division was equivalent to managing partners, the second division to partners in general, the third division covers all professional staff, the fourth division paras and support staff.

At the time of the promotion I referred to I was a Chief Finance Officer (Director) in the Commonwealth Treasury in charge of a section with nine staff. I had acted as branch head for extended periods, but I was still seen in terms of my third division role. In addition, Treasury was a relatively open non-hierarchical Department in part because of the number of well educated, ambitious and highly intelligent junior staff.

I was then promoted to the Department of Industry and Commerce as its senior economist in charge of the Economic Analysis Branch. I was now a senior officer in a much more hierarchical department with three sections and seventeen staff. I had also also inherited a branch under pressure with serious internal problems that needed to be fixed.

I had made special transition arrangements and had been receiving copies of the pinks, all branch correspondence, for a month before I formally took over. I had also met all the staff at lunch and had spoken on a regular basis to the acting branch head. So I had a fair understanding of the nature of the work and indeed was already carrying out some of the duties at the time I moved across.

Then I hit a wall on arrival. I knew that there were problems, but I wanted to make my own mind up about them. And indeed I am very glad I did because the problems were not quite as they had been presented to me. But initially I found it impossible to get the information I needed to make judgments. There seemed to be some form of barrier.

I had not changed. I was still applying the management approaches that had worked so well in Treasury. So was was the difficulty? It may sound dumb, but it took a little while to work out that I was now being treated as a senior boss, that I had moved from being one of us to one of them. As a consequence, people were now filtering what they told me.

I know that this problem is not unique. I also know that most managers are aware of it, although my experience has also been that a surprising number do not recognise its full extent. I have seen too many CEOs in particular who think that they know what is going on, that they do get good information, when the opposite is clearly the case.

The first thing that I had to accept in my new role was that the problem was real and was not going to go away. It made perfect sense for my staff to treat me with a degree of caution because I was simply too important to them to do otherwise. Importantly, I was now wearing a wider range of hats so had direct responsibility for enforcing policy in a way that had not applied in the past.

I also had to accept that it was going to take time to build trust. Trust did not mean, to use an old Australian phase, being one of the boys, boys in this case including both sexes. Rather, it meant treating people consistently and fairly, protecting confidences, recognising achievement and providing top cover. We used the term top cover to recognise my continuing role in protecting my people, in ensuring that they had the operational freedom they needed to do their job.

I will write on the top cover issue in more detail later because I believe that this is an absolutely critical condition for the creation of high performing teams.

Given that the communications problem was real and that it was going to take time to build trust, I still had an immediate need to find out what was wrong in the branch, what to do about it. Here I did two things:

1. I focused on understanding work flows. What was being done, who was doing it, how was it being done, at what standard? I must emphasis that this did not mean micro-management, itself a major problem in professional services. I saw my role in setting quality standards and then letting people get on with it. As I gained understanding I was able to identify a few immediate problems that I could act on that would help people, thus building trust.
2. I also got out of my office a fair bit, just talking to people, while also encouraging a range of branch activities. Some of this was informal and social, just stopping by people's desks to ask them something, follow up something. I also tried to find ways of working with as many people as possible, trying to help them on particular tasks.

In combination, this started to give me a feel for the the real scope of branch activities, of the strengths and weaknesses of individuals, of the real problem areas. I was also able to triangulate, to look at a person or an issue using several different information sources.

People's perceptions are always imperfect.

Two of my people were perceived by the Department as non-performers. I formed a different view.

One in a fast response, high pressure area was being so badly crippled by tension induced migraine headaches as to render him a non-performer. Yet when I talked to him I found his deep knowledge of the Australian economy and of economic statistics invaluable. He also had a female staff member who I felt was being under-rated, who had considerable potential.

In this case, and with his full agreement, we restructured section operations so that the female staff member and I worked on the fast response stuff, mainly daily economic briefings to the minister, while he focused on longer term issues. His migraines eased, the standard of our economic advice improved, while the female staff member seized the opportunity, in so doing moving onto a faster promotion path.

The second case involved a deputy section head who was perceived as non-performing in large part because he could not work the required hours. When I looked at this case I found that he had a non-performing section head who spent a lot of time on a private business interests and that he was in fact trying to carry the section. I also found that he was a single father with four children, creating enormous problems for him in trying to balance work and family. There was simply no way he could be on call in the way the Department was trying to demand.

In this case I facilitated the exit of the section head. I say facilitated because the section head and I agreed that he should go on immediate leave without without pay to do other things. A little later he resigned.

In doing so I found that the Department was well aware of the performance problem. I spoke to the section head in the morning and then prepared the necessary request. The required Departmental and Public Service Board approvals came through in just two hours, with the section head on leave that afternoon. When I commented on this, I was told that it had been just too difficult to handle previously!

I now restructured the section, making the deputy section head acting section head. With his cooperation I also restructured the work to give him greater time flexibility to meet family needs with other staff providing back-up when he was not there. He was later confirmed in the section head position.

None of this would have been possible if I had not spent the time required to overcome the communication barrier created by my role as boss.