Culture change in Lambeth?

 

Here's yet another extract from my memoirs, which you can purchase for next to nothing at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history.

This concerns changes made to Lambeth council’s Human Resources function, during which I led the trade unions in adopting Napoleon’s dictum not to interrupt one's adversary when they are making a mistake;

"If anyone were to be foolish enough to read these pages in the hope of gaining some insight into how to change the culture of a dysfunctional local authority they are set to be disappointed. However I can offer quite a few pointers to what not to do - and among the many things I have seen fail over a long period in Lambeth, the appointment of a “Director of Culture Change” would certainly make the list.

After her disastrous appearance at the one and only, first and last, Staff Conference at the Royal Festival Hall in 2001 Chief Executive Faith Boardman had - I think - genuinely set out to change the dysfunctional, confrontational (and institutionally racist) culture of the organisation of which she found herself at the head.

I never understood why bringing together the quite distinct functions of Human Resources and Public Relations and putting them both under a new Director of Culture Change was supposed to help with this endeavour, but I made a point of always being agnostic in principle about senior management restructures over my years in Lambeth.

In my experience if senior managers think that the UNISON Branch Secretary is overly interested in what they are responsible for, who they are or what they are doing, it only makes them think more of themselves, which is rarely good either for the organisation or the development of their character. There are only a handful of people who really believe that the structure of the senior management of a local authority makes any difference whatsoever to either the workforce or the community - and those are the handful of people who populate that structure (plus a few of the Councillors who think their role is to be part of the senior management).

As I have already observed, once Labour lost control of the Council, the Chief Executive had political support for a change of personnel at the top of the Human Resources function, and a new Head of Human Resources was brought in in August 2002. The arrival of the new Head of HR coincided with a major restructure of the function, intended to make deep cuts and significant savings and, for some reason, in one of those dramatic failures in people management at which Lambeth has occasionally excelled, there was no office or telephone waiting for the new Head of HR on her arrival.

The existing structure of the Human Resources function had evolved through the enterprising empire building of the previous Head of HR and, whilst he might have been able to manage to deliver the savings which the Chief Executive was looking for, the new management structure which she had implemented clearly wasn’t. The Director of Culture Change left in May 2003 without being replaced, and the Head of HR was also gone, after a period of absence, by the autumn of that year. An indicator of the complete mess that the management of the Council was once more in was that when the Head of Employee Relations left, early in 2003, to follow the former Head of HR to the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, no more senior manager turned up at his leaving “do” - so, as Secretary of the Joint Trade Unions, I thanked an old adversary for his years of service to the borough."