I've been away on holiday for a week. I felt great.
Now I don't feel so great.
What has changed?
I'm back at work that's what.
So two images for you to start with.
1. A fly hitting it's self repeatedly against a window pane to get out.
2. A small village in Wales.
What connects these two images. I'm waiting. No? OK I'll tell you.
The first is how I see myself trying to get out of this role I'm in. My strategy so far, to hurl myself at the window of HR in HE repeatedly in the hope of smashing through has singularly failed to get me any positive results. I'm still here, still bored, still ignored.
If you are a newcomer to a village in Wales it will take you a very, very long time before the other local residents stop referring to you as the newcomers.
You can do several things as a fly to escape, and I'm not including being swatted by the weekend paper at this point. However I do seem to vaguely remember that no one has ever trained a fly to do anything, though what a trained fly might usefully do escapes me at the moment. Still the fly might buzz around at random until it finds an alternative to the solid air it seems to have encountered and fly off to a new source of rotting food to land on and eat, it can rest for a while think up a new strategy (buzz, buzz buzz, buzz?) then start on the head banging thing again or it can die and be found feet up in the air on the carpet. I like to think that my career is the solid wall rather than the carpet of death and that I'm slightly cleverer than a fly and can come up with an escape plan. A veritable tunnel of escape. I'm working on that although all I can, figuratively, find to dig with is a wooden spoon and try and break through the reinforced concrete.
HE is not an easy place to work. I went and asked for feedback for my CV today, for a job I failed to even get an interview for. I am calm, deep breaths, stay calm. The feed back was 'you are being too subtle in your approach'. Subtle? So what was meant was to knife and fork the CV. If they ask for evidence of a competency then type the competency and evidence it - a sort of glorified list and don't be so bleedin' stupid and even think of trying to categorise the evidence under grouped headings. Too subtle. 'Makes the reviewer of the CV a little irritated' I'm told. Poor dears. Well I accept that piece of advice - if that's how they want it then so be it. However there was no answer to the 'but I got an interview from that style CV just a few weeks ago.' I'm still not convinced that there is a 'CV' - depends on the person on the day. Got to play the game. I think the game is like a very early version of football as they seem to be playing with my head today.
I think the important thing is to listen. However it seems glaringly obvious that HE is not a meritocracy as an institution, more of a waiting game and lots of background politicking. 'We don't like brash and pushy' I was told. Or putting people who are 'not one of us' in positions of management either.
And that sequeways me neatly to, it does there's no point in complaining, to the village in Wales. To stop being a newcomer there you have to live in the village for a mere 60 years. Then and only then will you be accepted as 'one of us.' And you can refer to other newcomers as 'the newcomers.'
So what have we learned today about progressing in HE?
It's not a meritocracy.
You have to be patient, very, very patient.
You have to not stand out, be pushy or brash.
If you are not one of us you are one of them. If you are one of them you can't become one of us.
I'm not one of them - so is that it then?
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Speaka da lingo?
You have to understand the rules. You have to know there are rules to understand. You have to speak the language.
Organisations have ways of speaking, a language that shows you are 'one of them' or an outsider. This language has rules but, of course, they are not written down. You learn them, slowly, through repetition and habit until, one day, you find that you are now part of the tribe, accepted in to the group. Then they show you where the coffee is kept and a short cut to the toilets that you never knew about plus a great wheeze to park for free. And you can then talk in the secret language about the outsiders.
How long this assimilation takes depends on the size, scale and psychotic nature of the organisation. If you were to live in a Welsh village, for example, it would take over 60 years for the locals to stop calling you 'the newcomer.' So it depends. I've been in my current role for 18 months and still appear to be speaking in Ferengi.
Why is this important? It's important so that you are not bundled into a large wicker man and set alight for one. It's also important in that you haven't got a hope in hell in making any progress through an organisation's hierarchy if you speak the equivalent of Vulcan and it's a case of speak to the hand every time you open your mouth. And it's useful knowing that short cut to the toilet.
Let me give you an example. Let me give you several until I run out of them or get bored.
A senior IT manager, with an exclusive private sector background, is being interviewed by a Higher Education establishment. He gives a blinding presentation, he understands the problems, demonstrates how he would overcome the issues facing the HE college and evidences his competencies to do the job. He seeks feedback afterwards. 'Brilliant' he is told 'Except none of the academics on the recruitment panel had a clue what you were talking about.' Had he been talking about arcane IT architecture, about mysterious electronic components or long term strategies involving nascent technology? Nope, he'd been talking about churn, profit, bottom line, ROI and the normal (now there's judgmental for you, 'normal') business concepts that are taken for granted in the private sector. Academics are not used to such ideas - they are spenders of funds, not profit motivated, they are interested in the purity of research and peer recognition, not ROCE. The mistake the IT manager made was to monetize the issues and not talk in their language. No doubt if he had this would have included such words as paradigm, interventions, pedagogical and how can I spend my discretionary fund on a trip to the States?
Example 2 (because my quest is to make your world substantially better and brighten up your day) involves an HE administrator who wished to move to the private sector. He too made the penetrating presentation to the employer of his dreams but was met with the 'but you are a spender of funds, not a profit taker, you employ more and more people and do not seek operational efficiencies, you believe in organisational transparency and therefore get bogged down in multi-layered meetings. Plus you have so many holidays and we don't like that.' He had to turn it around so that it showed performance against budget, output in terms of graduates per head employed and quality of employment and so on.' All in the presentation. Same facts different spin.
Example 3 (this is a good one because I made the mistake). I presented a way of saving £500,000 annually to a public sector employer. I made the presentation in terms of efficiencies, productivity, outputs, reduction in heads, ROI and used lots of statistics to back up my assessment. I did this in an objective, dispassionate way. I thought I did well, achieving the objectives set of me. Until...I ran into the biggest flak storm of my business life because I hadn't understood the language. The language of the organisation was based on care of its employees, viewing the staff in a very patriarchal way. That's not meant to be demeaning because that's the way they worked. If I had presented the same facts in a way that focused on the staff, the improvements for them, the way they could redeploy them into other more productive positions I'd have been in a much stronger position. And been able to walk when I left the meeting. As it happened I felt battered and bruised and severely worked over at the end. Mind you the outcome was still the same - they accepted my findings. Well to be accurate they accepted someone else's findings that were based exactly on mine. After that public attack they couldn't really accept mine straight away could they? Bastards.
So what can we learn from this? Good question. I've learnt that to make progress you have to present yourself in a way that can be recognised. I'm taking advice where I work now because I feel like a fly just bumping up against a window when it comes to getting interviews and being offered promotion. My CV, which worked very well for me in the private sector and got me interviews and good jobs, is being assessed for HE speak. At the moment it's full of objectives and quantitative outcomes e.g. I did this and 100% improvement was seen in 1 hour, I kicked serious ass and the customer was delighted. This is how the outplacement company told me to present my self as brand EOTP. I fully expect to have to say that 'I can now hold strokey beard meetings that last six days where no decision is made without referring it to sub committees and that lots of chocolate biscuits are eaten.' Or am I wrong? I'm reasonably confident that my aggressive CV is scaring the doodads of HR resulting in an early paper-shift rejection. Though I suppose I might just be crap. No I'm not, they just do not recognise my wonderfullness yet but they will do. Or I'll leave. So there.
There is one other thing. Sexism. Everywhere I've applied so far is staffed entirely by women and the successful candidate is always a woman. Coincidence? That's for another blog.
Organisations have ways of speaking, a language that shows you are 'one of them' or an outsider. This language has rules but, of course, they are not written down. You learn them, slowly, through repetition and habit until, one day, you find that you are now part of the tribe, accepted in to the group. Then they show you where the coffee is kept and a short cut to the toilets that you never knew about plus a great wheeze to park for free. And you can then talk in the secret language about the outsiders.
How long this assimilation takes depends on the size, scale and psychotic nature of the organisation. If you were to live in a Welsh village, for example, it would take over 60 years for the locals to stop calling you 'the newcomer.' So it depends. I've been in my current role for 18 months and still appear to be speaking in Ferengi.
Why is this important? It's important so that you are not bundled into a large wicker man and set alight for one. It's also important in that you haven't got a hope in hell in making any progress through an organisation's hierarchy if you speak the equivalent of Vulcan and it's a case of speak to the hand every time you open your mouth. And it's useful knowing that short cut to the toilet.
Let me give you an example. Let me give you several until I run out of them or get bored.
A senior IT manager, with an exclusive private sector background, is being interviewed by a Higher Education establishment. He gives a blinding presentation, he understands the problems, demonstrates how he would overcome the issues facing the HE college and evidences his competencies to do the job. He seeks feedback afterwards. 'Brilliant' he is told 'Except none of the academics on the recruitment panel had a clue what you were talking about.' Had he been talking about arcane IT architecture, about mysterious electronic components or long term strategies involving nascent technology? Nope, he'd been talking about churn, profit, bottom line, ROI and the normal (now there's judgmental for you, 'normal') business concepts that are taken for granted in the private sector. Academics are not used to such ideas - they are spenders of funds, not profit motivated, they are interested in the purity of research and peer recognition, not ROCE. The mistake the IT manager made was to monetize the issues and not talk in their language. No doubt if he had this would have included such words as paradigm, interventions, pedagogical and how can I spend my discretionary fund on a trip to the States?
Example 2 (because my quest is to make your world substantially better and brighten up your day) involves an HE administrator who wished to move to the private sector. He too made the penetrating presentation to the employer of his dreams but was met with the 'but you are a spender of funds, not a profit taker, you employ more and more people and do not seek operational efficiencies, you believe in organisational transparency and therefore get bogged down in multi-layered meetings. Plus you have so many holidays and we don't like that.' He had to turn it around so that it showed performance against budget, output in terms of graduates per head employed and quality of employment and so on.' All in the presentation. Same facts different spin.
Example 3 (this is a good one because I made the mistake). I presented a way of saving £500,000 annually to a public sector employer. I made the presentation in terms of efficiencies, productivity, outputs, reduction in heads, ROI and used lots of statistics to back up my assessment. I did this in an objective, dispassionate way. I thought I did well, achieving the objectives set of me. Until...I ran into the biggest flak storm of my business life because I hadn't understood the language. The language of the organisation was based on care of its employees, viewing the staff in a very patriarchal way. That's not meant to be demeaning because that's the way they worked. If I had presented the same facts in a way that focused on the staff, the improvements for them, the way they could redeploy them into other more productive positions I'd have been in a much stronger position. And been able to walk when I left the meeting. As it happened I felt battered and bruised and severely worked over at the end. Mind you the outcome was still the same - they accepted my findings. Well to be accurate they accepted someone else's findings that were based exactly on mine. After that public attack they couldn't really accept mine straight away could they? Bastards.
So what can we learn from this? Good question. I've learnt that to make progress you have to present yourself in a way that can be recognised. I'm taking advice where I work now because I feel like a fly just bumping up against a window when it comes to getting interviews and being offered promotion. My CV, which worked very well for me in the private sector and got me interviews and good jobs, is being assessed for HE speak. At the moment it's full of objectives and quantitative outcomes e.g. I did this and 100% improvement was seen in 1 hour, I kicked serious ass and the customer was delighted. This is how the outplacement company told me to present my self as brand EOTP. I fully expect to have to say that 'I can now hold strokey beard meetings that last six days where no decision is made without referring it to sub committees and that lots of chocolate biscuits are eaten.' Or am I wrong? I'm reasonably confident that my aggressive CV is scaring the doodads of HR resulting in an early paper-shift rejection. Though I suppose I might just be crap. No I'm not, they just do not recognise my wonderfullness yet but they will do. Or I'll leave. So there.
There is one other thing. Sexism. Everywhere I've applied so far is staffed entirely by women and the successful candidate is always a woman. Coincidence? That's for another blog.
Monday, August 6, 2012
At the public expense
Higher Education. The public sector. Expenses
This is a different land, they do things differently here.
When I worked in the private sector (oh happy days, can I please come back I've sat in the naughty chair for long enough now) I claimed expenses. No problems, I claimed each month and, providing I was prompt with my submission at the beginning of the month, would usually be paid by the end of the same month. Sometimes I would have to wait 8 weeks if I missed the submission date so I had to be willing to effectively subsidise the value of the total amount for that time but, as the expense values were generous, I was making quite a lot of money on legitimate claims. At one point I had a float from my company of £500 to cover this regular outstanding value but I put it in the building society and earned some interest as I put all my expenses on one credit card (on which I also earned Airmiles). I was usually paid back before I had to pay my credit card bill. I did this for so long that I came to believe that this was how the world worked.
Then I began work for the public sector. I'm in HE now but for two years worked in another part of the public sector. Here's an example of how it's different. Some employees would often have to travel to London by rail, possibly once a month. The cost was about £35 return including tube fares depending on the time of day they travelled. Rather than pay for the ticket themselves at the station they would order them from a travel agent employed by the organisation beforehand who would charge £12 for the booking fee. In other words upping the cost by about 35%. I was amazed. 'Why' I asked 'do you not pay at the station, claim back the expenses and save the organisation huge sums of necessary expense?'
They were equally astonished at my naive question.' 'But we'd have to pay out our own money to do that and we would be poor and the children would starve and not have shoes for their feet.' 'But it's on a credit card and you'd be paid back before you have to pay out.' I countered. But they were adamant, they were not going to pay out their money to save the organisation money even though they never actually had to pay out their money. I put my wacky idea of abandoning the travel agent and their booking fees, except for exceptionally large amounts, in the suggestion box. I'm now on a witness protection scheme in the USA. Oddly that idea ended up in the round file. In about 30 secs after submission
And now for HE.
Here's some examples of how our money is spent.;
A professor two weeks ago; 'I had £2000 left in my budget at the end of the year so I went to a conference in Hawaii. Not to give a paper but because I thought it would be nice to go there.'
A lecturer; 'I was not allowed to travel 1st class by train to London, even though on a special saver fare it was 50% less than the usual 2nd class fare, because policy says we cannot travel 1st class.'
'I had to claim mileage for a 30 mile round trip to a town 6 miles away because we have to use the AA web site to determine mileage and that's how far it said it was. The finance department told me this is what I had to claim.'
'We get charged a £15 booking fee. I've just bought a £12 return fare rail ticket that cost an additional £15.It happens all the time.'
We have three free Christmas lunches year, a departmental one, a section one and funding from the University for a further one.
And so it goes.
I thank all of you not in the public sector for your great generosity and public spirited nature. I need a coffee after all this typing. Oh didn't I say - that's free too. And the bicuits.
This is a different land, they do things differently here.
When I worked in the private sector (oh happy days, can I please come back I've sat in the naughty chair for long enough now) I claimed expenses. No problems, I claimed each month and, providing I was prompt with my submission at the beginning of the month, would usually be paid by the end of the same month. Sometimes I would have to wait 8 weeks if I missed the submission date so I had to be willing to effectively subsidise the value of the total amount for that time but, as the expense values were generous, I was making quite a lot of money on legitimate claims. At one point I had a float from my company of £500 to cover this regular outstanding value but I put it in the building society and earned some interest as I put all my expenses on one credit card (on which I also earned Airmiles). I was usually paid back before I had to pay my credit card bill. I did this for so long that I came to believe that this was how the world worked.
Then I began work for the public sector. I'm in HE now but for two years worked in another part of the public sector. Here's an example of how it's different. Some employees would often have to travel to London by rail, possibly once a month. The cost was about £35 return including tube fares depending on the time of day they travelled. Rather than pay for the ticket themselves at the station they would order them from a travel agent employed by the organisation beforehand who would charge £12 for the booking fee. In other words upping the cost by about 35%. I was amazed. 'Why' I asked 'do you not pay at the station, claim back the expenses and save the organisation huge sums of necessary expense?'
They were equally astonished at my naive question.' 'But we'd have to pay out our own money to do that and we would be poor and the children would starve and not have shoes for their feet.' 'But it's on a credit card and you'd be paid back before you have to pay out.' I countered. But they were adamant, they were not going to pay out their money to save the organisation money even though they never actually had to pay out their money. I put my wacky idea of abandoning the travel agent and their booking fees, except for exceptionally large amounts, in the suggestion box. I'm now on a witness protection scheme in the USA. Oddly that idea ended up in the round file. In about 30 secs after submission
And now for HE.
Here's some examples of how our money is spent.;
A professor two weeks ago; 'I had £2000 left in my budget at the end of the year so I went to a conference in Hawaii. Not to give a paper but because I thought it would be nice to go there.'
A lecturer; 'I was not allowed to travel 1st class by train to London, even though on a special saver fare it was 50% less than the usual 2nd class fare, because policy says we cannot travel 1st class.'
'I had to claim mileage for a 30 mile round trip to a town 6 miles away because we have to use the AA web site to determine mileage and that's how far it said it was. The finance department told me this is what I had to claim.'
'We get charged a £15 booking fee. I've just bought a £12 return fare rail ticket that cost an additional £15.It happens all the time.'
We have three free Christmas lunches year, a departmental one, a section one and funding from the University for a further one.
And so it goes.
I thank all of you not in the public sector for your great generosity and public spirited nature. I need a coffee after all this typing. Oh didn't I say - that's free too. And the bicuits.
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