Wincobank tales - closure

What’s the hardest thing you can do once you’ve created something?

Let it go.

After the success of the community centre, I was promoted to Personnel Manager for the city-wide project incorporating ten sites. I took readily to the role and relished every moment but there was trouble ahead. The project balanced precariously on the taciturn knife-edge of Government funding and each year we discovered whether funding would be continued or withdrawn. One year, our luck ran out and we were given notice of our final year’s money and our brief to hand over all centres and services to local volunteers.

In theory, this was a desirable outcome to give the resources to the local people but in reality, we, the creators, felt a loss and they, the inheritors, felt dumped on and didn’t really want the responsibility of managing community centres.

Practically, the task of dismantling the project involved considerable strategic and logistic thought. The scheme’s 160 employees were mostly on temporary contracts ending at different times, so each week, the company roster shrank and the remaining staff were spread thinner and thinner across the city.

Additionally, all portable property, from vehicles to filing cabinets, had to be disposed of and other schemes, given a longer stay of execution, delighted in a frenzy of asset stripping. It felt like being eaten alive.

As the Personnel Manager, one of my final duties was to issue redundancy notices to the remaining staff on permanent contracts. This included me and I must be one of the few people to literally have sacked themselves.

As they say, ‘Last one out, turn out the lights.’ I did just that. Like the Captain of a sinking ship, I turned out the lights of the now empty building, locked the door and posted the keys through the letter box for the building owners to collect. The closure was complete.

Learning points?

Letting go is hard
Closure is painful
Difficult situations help to develop resourcefulness
People don’t always want autonomy and responsibility
Remember to turn out the light when you leave a room

Wincobank tales - Summer of love

After seven or eight months, the gang of 20 workers had formed into some kind of cohesive unit and we’d attracted a regular clientele of club goers from 4 to 80 years old. In fact, many of them hung around the centre for most of the day for want of something to do - the kids that is!

Ahead, lay our greatest challenge so far; to organise a six week long summer play scheme packed full of interesting activities to keep the estate’s younger community out of trouble and out of jail. As a team, we put our heads together to brainstorm ideas - along with the bizarre, ambitious and virtually illegal; one idea was to create an activity for the children of the youth club to participate in the design of the scheme themselves.

Sometimes, I had to be party pooper and say that an idea just wasn’t practical, safe or affordable but after a month of planning and reworking, we finally had a programme. Not only did we have a programme but one that, although a compromise, had a part of everybody in it and the commitment of all.

Each activity was drastically over-subscribed and as I arrived at the centre each morning, an ominous, ever increasing herd of children waited by the door. I have to tell you, I broke many rules by taking more children than our youth worker to child ratio permitted, as well as children younger than we should have. But the reality was that many of the kids were tufted out in the morning with younger siblings in tow with instructions not to return until the pubs closed.

In order to keep track of the ‘herd’ we rubber stamped them, firstly as a joke but then they queued up eagerly begging, ‘Mr, will you stamp my ‘ed?’ It’s hard to refuse such a heartfelt plea. Despite this precaution, we still ‘lost’ one temporarily on a trip to the city centre ice rink. I was pretty shaken up and mightily relieved when I called at his parents’ house to discovered he’d walked the five miles home on his own - said he was bored; the cheek!

The scheme was an overwhelming success for the children, the community and the workers. It was a magic summer when everything fell into place and all the planets and everything that was good, briefly lined up beautifully before moving on, out of sight, never to be seen again.

And what can be learnt from this bedtime story?

Involve people
Give them ownership
Set some parameters
Clear a space for something beautiful to happen

Sweet dreams Wincobank!

A bit of Bob to see you to sleep.

Wincobank tales - how not to delegate

Ok, so I’d built this little team from Pirates and renegades and I felt kind of protective towards them. After all, they didn’t have much experience and needed nurturing.

The Community Centre was open a lot of hours for all the different activities including evenings and some weekends. I found myself there many days from 8.00 in the morning through to 10.00 at night.

One day, I took a day off to do some decorating at home. I told the staff, ‘I won’t be in but here’s my number, call me if you have a problem.’

No sooner had I got up the ladder than the phone started ringing.

‘The light bulb in the toilet’s broken.’

‘Well, can’t you replace it?’

You’ve got the key to the petty cash.

‘Well can’t you get enough money between you to buy one light bulb; I’ll repay you tomorrow.’

‘Hm, I’ll ask around.’

This was the first of many such calls throughout the day and in the end, I got very little decorating done.

I reflected; why are they so lacking in initiative? They can’t seem to do anything without me telling them.

Do you know the answer? I do now.

Here's someone who knows better.

Wincobank coaching tales

Twenty six years ago, I got a job as a Community Centre Manager in Wincobank, Sheffield, in the north of England. The ‘centre’ was in fact a church building with part being renovated for community use.



The area of Wincobank was a council housing estate perched high up on Wincobank Hill overlooking the Don Valley which, in better days, had been the power house of the industrial revolution and home to the perpetually burning furnaces producing Sheffield Steel. The 70’s and 80’s had brought severe industrial decline, the factories closed and the majority of the inhabitants of the area were unemployed. This was chronicled in the movie, The Full Monty.



It was a tough, working class area with a high crime rate, although some of the aggression and frustration was channelled into the St. Patrick’s Boy’s Boxing Club, where the trainer Brendan Ingle raised the likes of Bomber Graham and Prince Nazeem.




I was dropped into this slate grey landscape totally green with the brief to hire twenty people from the ranks of the long-term unemployed and develop a range of community services from youth groups to old people’s lunch clubs, taking on all the roles from recruitment, accountant, team leader and bingo caller.

At the time, the Thatcher Government had a scheme to discourage the unemployed from lying in bed and threatened to remove their benefits unless they participated in one of the state subsidised community projects. From this reluctant band of press-ganged conscripts, I had to form some kind of workable team.

I got my first taste of recruitment and selection and learnt the hard way that someone who interviews well doesn’t always deliver on the job. I also learnt that because many of these people had never worked, they simply didn’t know what was expected or how to behave. It wasn’t so much that they were deliberately recalcitrant, although some were, more that you couldn’t assume that they knew where the boundaries of expectation were.

Working with the unemployed was a fantastically useful experience and as a new manager, I had to learn everything from scratch, making many mistakes along the way. The first lesson was making expectations clear, that was particularly true regarding seeing a job through to end - clearing up after a youth club, washing up after a lunch. Along with this, creating a sense of responsibility to colleagues so that nobody went home until the job was done.

Learning points:

Set clear expectations - don’t make assumptions about what people think is expected
Encourage commitment to colleagues

Here’s a brief clip from the trailer to The Full Monty; a wonderfully warm, human story about a group of redundant Sheffield miners who form a strip group. If you look carefully, you can see Wincobank Hill in the background - really!

See the Person not the Label

How would you label yourself? Are you a Yuppie, Dinky, a punk or a hippy? Have you ever tested your IQ, emotional intelligence or fundamental interpersonal relations orientation? Is it a fair reflection of who are? Do you identify with the label? Does it still fit when you go home?

I've worked with a number of well known brands of psychometric test and even some of the originators - I've been identified as an ENTP in Myers-Briggs and a Plant in Belbin - do you know me better now?

Let me state it simply - I don't buy into the labelling thing; I don't find it helpful and you won't find it incorporated into my coaching courses. I realise this view will exclude me from some work opportunities, particularly with HR Departments who have their own industry in testing.

That's why I'm interested in speed coaching; no labelling, no judging, no forming intricate theories about personality that need to be assessed, analysed, fedback, reviewed, implemented then reviewed again - wow, how much time you save when you don't do all that stuff!

No, simply deal with people straight, be honest, consistent, fair and work on situational issues - don't try to be an amateur psychologist and attach pseudo-intellectual labels to people.

Probably the only people who think there's any sense in my approach are Managers - but what do they know?

Of course, if there are any HR and development people who share my view, I'd love to hear from you!

Human touch

It seems strange to me that the words Human Resources and humanist are not always viewed as synonymous. As a consultant, inexperienced managers often approached me on training courses to seek advice on managing staff. Of course, I tried to oblige but I also asked,

‘Have you spoken to anyone from HR about it?’

‘You must be joking,’ came the incredulous reply, ‘they’re the last people I’d talk to!’

The reason for this, it transpired was about a lack of trust but furthermore many added that HR were only interested in adherence to systems and did not want to get involved in ‘personal matters.’

When I started teaching English in Poland, a school phoned me to ask how a lesson with a new student had gone.

‘Oh, very well,’ I said, ‘we got on really well; he’s a little self-conscious and over critical but open minded and enthusiastic.’

‘I don’t want to know what he’s like,’ was the indignant reply, ‘just tell me his level!’

Having worked for a few schools, it came as something of a shock to see what a production line business it can be. In some cases, it’s just a matter of processing people along a conveyor belt which runs from B1 to B2 and so on. This is perhaps reinforced by the HR’s department to establish measurable outcomes and return on investment for their training budget.

It seems that in the desire to quantify and measure it is easy to confuse people with materials on a building site. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to measure progress but whether it’s HR or teaching, management or coaching, we need to remember that people are holistic, complex animals and never lose contact with the human touch.

Managing conflict scary guy style

As the season of goodwill comes towards us, it's a good time to think about being kind to other people and managing and reducing conflict whether it's in the playground or the workplace.

After all, the world is a dangerous place and there are a lot of scary people out there; people like The Scary Guy, my new buddy on Linkedin.

Just remember, don't judge the book by the cover; what's on the outside, doesn't always represent what's on the inside.

And the scariest challenge of all?

To love one's fellow man - like this: