Byretorial - Poisonous Tribes!

[The Byre]

Someone (and sadly I have forgotten who it was) took me to one side and said "Have you ever noticed that incompetent and lazy managers tend to hire incompetent and lazy staff? It's almost as if they were spreading some disease and creating some insidious tribe!"

I have thought about that phenomenon since then and came up with the expression
'The Poisonous Tribe'.

A poisonous tribe is a collection of undesirable employees who seek to develop their own tribal goals to the detriment of your company. They may just be incapable to the point of being downright incompetent. But they may also actually seek to subvert the goals of the company and seek to damage and destroy it. Poisonous tribes are parasites, that, if left unchecked, can destroy their host and themselves.

In the eyes of many in management, particularly in the 70s and 80s, the unions were such poisonous tribes. This is particularly true in the US and the UK, where there is no statutory requirement to include trades union representatives on the board or involve them in important managerial decisions, even those affecting their members’ continued employment. In Britain in particular, there is a strong tradition of thinking in terms of ‘us and them’ rather than seeking common goals.

For a long time, British management was so stuck in that 'Us and Them' mindset that they even thought that provoking a strike was a legitimate tool of business, even if that meant harming the business that they were supposed to be managing. The unions were no better and saw their role as only to look out for their members' immediate interests, even at the cost of the health of the company and the very jobs they were seeking to protect.

In the UK, many today still remember The Battle of Wapping, one of the most protracted and bitter in Britain’s industrial history. The picketing was exceptionally violent, with 1,262 arrests and 410 police injuries.

The strike lasted over a year, ending in February 1987 in ignominy for the print unions, near bankruptcy and under threat of court proceedings. News International did not lose a single night of production during the strike and effectively broke the power wielded by print unions over the newspaper industry.

The unions would claim that they are looking after their members' interests, but, by turning that activity into a kind of collective gravy train, in which 18 men were doing the work of just three men, their members lost everything. This is the danger of being a member of a poisonous tribe. It is a foolish parasite, that kills its own host - or in the case of the Battle of Wapping, that causes so much damage, that a whole part of the host has to be amputated.

A very long time ago, being an air stewardess was regarded by many as a glamorous career. Most flights were long haul and travel to far-flung places seemed an exotic thing to do. A stewardess was regarded as being a career for the good looking and sexy. The idea for any young girl starting out as an airline stewardess was to spend some time, jetting around the World and then find the man of her dreams and settle down and raise a family.

At one major European airline, things didn’t work like that. At some time in the sixties, key senior positions within cabin crew management was occupied by lesbian women. By 1990, this same airline had a severe shortage of qualified nurses within its cabin crew (a legal obligation in that country) and a directive went out, to actively recruit nurses and put a stop to the recruiting of non-nurses for the time being.

At exactly this time, a friend of my family, who was a young lesbian woman, applied for a job with this airline as a trainee stewardess. She had heard of the need for nurses and therefore did not expect to be given a position. She was not a nurse, but a pianist and, as far as she knew, airlines do not really need in-flight pianists!

She got the job. She assured me that at no time, did she give so much as a hint of her sexual proclivities and certainly, no questions about her private life, other than hobbies, were asked.
She looked, acted and behaved like any other woman in her late twenties, looking for a job. She did not get the impression that the all-female interview panel was, in some way, overtly lesbian or were looking for lesbian recruits.

It is my guess (and here, a health warning, it really is just a guess!) that the interview panel was unaware of their bias and would not have been able to put their collective fingers on the reason why they felt that our pianist friend was the best candidate.

One sees this development everywhere we look. It is quite hard to find engineering companies in Western Europe and the US that do not have an all-white, all-male senior staff and there are many retail chains, where management is predominantly Jewish. I am not going to make a moral judgment on the rightness or wrongness of having staff come from one social or ethnic corner. But it can be very damaging for business - if key personnel is coming only from one background, then you are excluding good people from other backgrounds. The more you narrow your recruitment pool, the lower the quality of the successful candidates is bound to be. (Unless, of course, you really do believe that certain races, types, religions, etc. are innately superior, in which case, you are probably too dumb to run a successful business anyway!)

Another very good reason to strive towards having staff from every background is to prevent all ideas and motivation from coming from one direction. If staff in a company or a department all have similar backgrounds, then all the ideas, motivations and goals will be just as similar. Fresh ideas will get left at the door.

An all-white retail management may not see or understand the need for some types of ethnic food. Engineers from one type of university may only seek to solve a type of problem one way. Cooks from one school of cooking, may all have the same style.

Diversity of staff is an essential element in the process of innovation.

(Part two below.)

 

[The Byre]

Part two -

But there is one type of poisonous tribe that is the most poisonous tribe of all - and it is the most difficult tribe to spot and even harder to get rid of - the tribe of the lazy and incompetent!

Let me tell you a story -

A very long time ago, I worked for a huge, international company for a very short time as a processing clerk in a local plant employing about 500. The plant made screws, nuts, bolts, knives, forks and spoons and other small hardware goods. Our office was responsible for external mail and all issues involving staffing, except wages and recruitment, which were dealt with elsewhere. All we had to do was to answer all general correspondence, deliver and collect all mail for the plant and keep an admin file on the 500 employees, detailing addresses, pay grades and telephone numbers and any other relevant information. We were called Mail and Document Control, but people just called us Docs.

Docs had a senior clerk, an assistant senior clerk, two clerks and two assistant clerks, of which I was one. We also had a postman who delivered and collected all mail to all the various departments and we had a department manager, that we saw about twice a week, if that. The department had been created to relieve the administrative burden on all the other departments.

In today’s World, you would give all that work to one or two people. We had eight. OK, that was before the advent of computers, so we would have needed a full-time letter writer, but that comes to a staff of three at the very most. I was brought in, because the staff of seven couldn’t cope with all the work.

The only problem was, that I had no idea what I was doing. All the bureaucratic processes within that company remained a clouded mystery to me. Staff got paid the wrong amounts, because we seldom informed the pay office promptly of a change in status. Sometimes, staff who had walked off the job, could not be officially dismissed, because we had managed to lose the address. We were supposed to write the address in pencil on a data card, but all too often that became illegible, smudged, or faded with time. Occasionally, a clerk would begin to effect a change in address, only to get side-tracked by a telephone call or an urgent cup of coffee. The old address had been rubbed out, but no new address entered in, with the letter of notification long since lost.

Pay grades were also entered in pencil and these too were sometimes smudged out. If there had been a change of foreman or department head, we were reduced to asking the person concerned what their pay grade was. I got the impression, that when this happened, staff tended to give themselves promotion!

There was some attempt at tasking, but, because everybody covered for everybody else, no one person was really responsible for just one task, except the postman, who wisely, never let anybody else do his job and never got drawn into covering for anybody else. The mail was delivered and collected perfectly - everything else at Docs was chaos!

After a couple of months of this nonsense, I quit.

I may have wanted to move on, but I look back on this time with great affection. The people were lovely and the atmosphere in the office was fantastic. We spent long hours chatting about politics, love and marriage and anything else that sprang to mind, whilst drinking endless cups of tea and coffee. The rest of the factory had to clock-in and clock-out, but we turned up for work invariably late and even took days off on a fairly ad-hoc basis. If anybody asked where you were, the head clerk told them that you were on an errand somewhere, when in fact, you were in bed with a hangover!

We were lazy and we were incompetent. I was later to realise that an inexperienced young manager, who was certainly grossly incompetent, appointed an incompetent chief clerk. He, in turn, appointed a good friend of his, who was also incompetent. Soon the office rang to the happy laughter of really good friends - but all magnificently incompetent!

There was another department of about the same size for outgoing goods, called Dispatch. Their job was to weigh and count the various packages that left the factory and stick address labels on things. They too were a pretty friendly bunch, but from what I could gather, they were every bit as inefficient as Docs. The head of Dispatch was a friend of our chief clerk and even helped him to get the job. They, like us, did a job that could be done by a staff of three and they, like us, made constant mistakes that cost the firm dearly!

The interesting part was that, because other departments tried to deal with Docs and Dispatch as little as possible, the two departments started working with one another when there was really no need to. Instead of doing their own filing, Dispatch sent us their filing and soon Docs were drawing up summaries of the goods that left the factory. First once a week and then once a month, these summaries were sent to management. It didn’t take long for a whole apparatus of pointless information to be sent from Dispatch to Docs and from there to management and marketing. This was all the more pointless, as marketing kept records of completed sales anyway.

In reality, what was happening, was that two completely incompetent departments were spreading their incompetence throughout the factory. The poisonous tribe was creating work for itself and thereby, recruiting new members!

The Cure

The very obvious question in this discussion of poisonous tribes is not how to identify them, that part is fairly easy, but what to do about such a tribe, now that you have found one.

In nearly every country, the law prevents you from jolly rounds of wholesale sackings and moving people around the company is not always practical and may make things worse, as they may spread the infection.

But there is one aspect of the poisonous tribe that shows its Achilles’s Heel - in every case I have ever experienced, the tribe has been completely and exclusively single-sex. In the factory documents department, we were all guys. That airline I mentioned only employed female cabin crew. The printers at News International were all men. My happy days at 'Docs' was exclusively in the company of lazy and incompetent men. It has been my experience, that such an unproductive group, living in a cosy world of self-interest, dissolves like the snows of last winter when a few capable women are placed in key positions. Similarly, a group of female clerks, whose main preoccupations are Facebook, Twitter, gossip and private telephone calls, find carrying on as before far more difficult, when the person at the next desk is a man.

Study after study has shown us that a mixed-gender and otherwise diverse workplace is more productive, more innovative and suffers fewer cases of absenteeism and illness, compared to single-gender and single ethnic group workplaces. Now you have yet another good reason for gender balance at all levels.

Or as Groucho Marx once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

 

[eteb3]

I hear that diversity improves business decisions so often that I suppose it must be true. And I definitely don't think that businesses should set out to be monocultural or that they should actively discriminate.

But, having people of similar backgrounds can help with trust, which is about being able to predict how someone else will behave in a given situation.

eg, I live in a town with a lot of one particular ethnic group, different from my own, and my best friends are among them. I would never go into business with them though, and I don't suppose they would with me, because we'd be so unsure how the other would respond when the chips are down. Culture matters. So do deep connections: not for string-pulling, but for triangulation on likely future behaviour.

So while there is probably some benefit in diversity, I think there is some benefit in homogeneity, too. The "cure" probably works because the diverse bunch don't trust each other as much as the groupy bunch did.

 

[Lucan Unlordly]

I once worked in sales for one of the national tabloid newspapers where my boss, my bosses boss and the director above her were all women. Where the heads of each sales team were either female, *effeminate or gay.
*probably not the best term but lets say that these guys were not boat rockers.

In meetings, which were more like an episode of Loose Women, nobody spoke out, preferring to accept the reduced bonus scheme, the changed plans, the misdirection.

In short, the people who were promoted into junior management roles were never going to secure the higher positions held by the big three. That's why they leapfrogged more capable folk.

 

[Newchodge]

My first job on leaving school was in the Ministry of Defence. I was the EO in a team of 3 - HEO, EO and CA (clerical assistant). The team administered the contracts for the purcase of engines for 3 types of helicopter. The CA tracked the work on the contracts and, every time something happened he marked the relevant file with the amount spent, reducing the previous total available and producing a new total available. There was a dedicated sheet in the file showing each of these calculations, so it was not hard. Part of my job was to sign off this work, but, unfortunately the man could not add (or subtract). There would be an entry stating
Prev balance 1,054,693.43
Expenditure 617.01
Balance 1,047,582.60

He was a 60 year old man and I was an 18 year old woman, in the 70's. Every time I would take the file back to him ad explain it was wrong and try to help him to see why. He hated me.

I asked the HEO, several times, why I could not just correct the figures, but that was 'not my job'.

Apart from that, no-one was clear what the rest of my job was. The HEO's standard response to my request for work would be, you can do this, but I haven't got time to show you how and it is urgent, so I had better do it. She once had me checking an 18 page contract against the original, in case anything had been changed. It was a photocopy.

I actually lasted 18 months, bored to tears and unhappy, but I was a civil servant and you don't give up that kind of job easily. Both my colleagues were incapable of doing their job, and the team needed probably 1.2 people. Logically you would have merged our team with the other team in the room which handled helicopter airframes. They were also under-occupied and bored.

It taught me a lot, that job.

 

[eteb3]

40 years later and defence procurement is still a showcase for British incompetence. At least we can be confident that some things won't be changing after Brexit.

 

[bodgitt&scarperLTD]

If it wasn't such a serious matter it would be funny.

 

[The Byre]

I actually lasted 18 months, bored to tears and unhappy, but I was a civil servant and you don't give up that kind of job easily. Both my colleagues were incapable of doing their job, and the team needed probably 1.2 people. Logically you would have merged our team with the other team in the room which handled helicopter airframes. They were also under-occupied and bored.

In 2018 the MoD employed some 59,000 staff (57,000 full-time equivalents) almost the same number as were employed by its predecessor the War Office during WW1.

In 2016 the MoD had 56,000 staff and the government set a target of 41,000 by 2020. Estimates state that today it employs some 60,000.

In WW1 the British military machine involved some 6m personnel in uniform and some 3.8m were active at its peak and up to 1m were deployed to active service (i.e. at the front) at any one time. That was one civil servant for roughly every 60 troops active and in uniform.

Today the British military machine involves some 230,000 personnel in uniform inc. reservists, 150,000 are active and just 11,000 are deployed. That is one civil servant for roughly every 2.6 troops active and in uniform.

If it wasn't such a serious matter it would be funny.

Never a truer word said!

 

[Bob Morgan]

A few years back I ran the Estates Department for a large Hospital Trust. One of most difficult projects I have ever dealt with was the complete refurbishment of the A&E Department – While it was in use! Months of planning, and Internal Departmental Moves were necessary before work could start.

The Initial Project Meeting was a clear demonstration of ‘The Significant Few –v– The Trivial Many!’ Indeed the ‘Trivial Many’ had overlooked inviting the A&E Consultant (which I had spotted). I then asked “Do we have a Doctor here?” A single hand went up from one of the Management Team. I then added “ . . . a Medical Doctor?” He smiled, and replied “. . . No, Philosophy!”

 

[The Byre]

The NHS seems to have been infected by a poisonous tribe of 'jobsworths' and pencil-pushers who seek to monitor how often staff wash their hands or take loo-breaks.

It is an absurdity that the NHS spends MORE per person than the German or other European systems but persistently has uniformly poorer results.