Tendering, TUPE and staff motivation

For not for profit organisations the commitment of their staff to the cause has always been important.  In the best cases this commitment results in powerful added value from staff going the extra mile, and this can show especially in the way they work with service users.  The downside of this is when that commitment causes mutual dependency with the service user.

Well motivated staff is something that every organisation searches for.  In the Supporting People world services and staff now regularly change organisations as slices of business are lost or won, or organisations merge and consolidate to cope with the competitive landscape.

This makes managing the distress caused by change important – organisations can expend enormous effort on TUPE or mergers.  The distress that any change causes is part of that, but I think it is made considerably worse for not for profit organisations as staff are there to make a difference to a cause, not just to earn a wage.  The psychological contract includes some measure of security and commitment to them and the service users from the organisation, which is harder to demonstrate when the organisation keeps changing.

In addition, the staff TUPE transfers result in everyone having to learn a new set of relationships and behaviours, which is both positive and negative.  Positive because it prevents the “rust out” frequently found in the sector, but negative because of the cost in time, training, relationship building and period of sub-optimal performance as staff and organisation learn about each other.

Being positive

Happy new year!

The standard new year’s resolutions can be quite negative – lose weight, stop smoking, drink less – and lead to negative self image.  So choose something positive.  Mine is “go dancing once a week”.

And just for a moment, apply this to leadership, or Supporting People services.  Start from need and deficiency (supporting people) or competency based assessments at the end of the year (“here’s where your weaknesses are, lets try and do better, eh”)?  Reinforce poor self image?  Lead on to feelings of hopelessness and perhaps mild depression?  Create dependency?  Create confirmation bias?

So happy new year, be all you can, and let those you lead or support dream, and tell them, “yes you can!”

Combining ideas, theory and bias?

Combination is an idea used by Nonaka and Takeuchi to help understand knowledge creation – basically throw different ideas from as diverse domains or people as possible together and you get new knowledge.  This idea’s also useful in creative problem solving.

I think this is also useful when considering management theory, as it may help make sense of complex situations by combining management theories, taking appropriate elements different models and combining or letting them play off each other, even when there is contradiction or paradox.

However, I’m also mindful of  bias in how we select ideas (vivid and available ideas and memories get more attention, we favour information that shows us favourably, the confirmation bias where we take a first position then seek information that agrees and screen out that which does not).  How is the combination approach is affected by this?

It may create knowledge and ideas, but those are untested until you put them into practice and see what works.  The confirmation bias would make this difficult, but practically speaking we can construct a working theory without exhaustive academic trials and testing. The key may be awareness of own bias and thinking, and to constantly hold up new ideas for criticism.

Harder than it might sound! The approach will definately fail if suitable evidence is not sought and analysed.  However, I also suspect that, while this might be a way to produce fads, the implementation of any idea or model is going to be as crucial as its “objective” soundness. This assumes there can be any objectively right model or theory anyway (which I don’t think there can be) – so the usefulness of a theory might relate to how easy it is to implement, how easy it is to understand and use, and if it leads to successful outcomes or at least learning. Hmmmm…..