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!
