Author Archives: Andy

Linking pay and performance…why this is not a good idea!

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Inspired by a news release from the Department for Education last week with the very clever title “More freedom on Teachers’ Pay”, I thought that I’d put “pen to paper” and write to the Secretary of State for Education, Mr Michael Gove, to express my concern over this change.

A teacher and pupil

Image courtesy of Paul Gooddy / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I thought that you might be interested to hear my thoughts on why relating teachers’ pay to their performance is unlikely to see their performance improve.

The first question to ask is about whether teachers are likely to react positively to this change.  Do teachers, or anybody else for that matter, actually rate their own performance accurately?  If people over-rate their own performance, and we all do, then we’re likely to be disappointed by other people’s view of our performance.  Research in the US in the 1970s, showed that 90% of teachers rated their performance above average and more than two-thirds of them put themselves in the upper quartile of performance.  This is not a good start…

Secondly, what is it that motivated people to teach?  Is it money?  Research part-funded by the Department for Education, and published in 2004, looked into what attracted people to train to become teachers.  Top ten reasons were:

  • Helping young people to learn
  • Working with children or young people
  • Being inspired by a good teacher
  • Giving something back to the community
  • The challenging nature of the job
  • Long holidays
  • Staying involved with a subject specialism
  • Job security
  • Wanting to teach pupils better than in own experience
  • Professional status of teaching

What’s missing from this list?  MONEY!!

So, do you still expect a group of people that are not motivated by money, and that will consistently over-rate their own performance, to react well to performance related pay?

There’s one final nail in the coffin for relating pay rises to performance, and that is assessment of performance by another human being.  As a human being, I can’t help being biassed, no matter how hard I try.  We humans are programmed to remember the bad things that happen, to protect ourselves from those events in the future.  We happen to like some people more than others; we can’t help that, it’s just the way we are.  We humans generally remember more recent events better than those from a year ago.  So, adding up these factors, if, as your manager, I don’t really like you and your performance last week wasn’t up to your usual standard, I am more likely to rate your performance lower, despite the great work that you did at the beginning of the year.

I assume that you’ve worked out that I’m not a fan of performance-related pay!

What would improve the performance of teachers?  Look at what motivated them, and create more time and space for them to do that.  Looking at the top two in the list above, I’d find them more time to work with the children to help them to learn.  Try removing some of the activities that reduce their contact time with their pupils; that would have a positive impact!

I’ve been busy…

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It would appear that I’ve been so busy over the last year, that I’ve forgotten to keep the blog up-to-date. Well, I’m back now, and will endeavour to keep posting my thoughts on leadership over the coming months.

If you’re interested to see what I’ve been up to, visit my website www.andywrightltd.co.uk, otherwise stick around for my thoughts on the latest announcement by the Department for Education on their plans to introduce performance-related pay for teachers…

Inspired by a fellow blogger

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I’m sure that many of you have already heard of Kevin Burns (http://burnsattitude.wordpress.com/) and if you haven’t go and have a look at his blog, I’m sure that you’ll find his weekly videos interesting!  Kevin’s videos talk a lot about the role of managers, but the more of them that you see, the more that you’ll come to realise that he’s not talking about managers, but he is talking about leaders and leadership.

A few weeks ago, he spoke about managers being visible, being actively involved in the activities of the teams that they manage.  He came up with a phrase which struck a chord with me:  we’re managers not ‘meetingers’.   The last word made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing personally for the last few weeks.  Have I made time to be with my team, or have I been a meetinger.  With great sadness, I have to report that I’ve been heading towards being a meetinger!

What can I do?

The answer is simple, or it sounds simple enough!  For each meeting that was in my calendar in the week following the ‘meetinger’ revelation, I asked myself two questions:

  • What will I contribute to the meeting?
  • What would happen if I didn’t attend the meeting?
The answer to these questions, particularly the last one helped me to free up more than 50% of my time that week.  If I was asked to attend a meeting where I was merely going to be supplied with information, I sought alternative ways to obtain the information: much of it was available electronically as PowerPoint files or minutes!  I can read!!

What did I do with the newly-found time?  I spent it with my team, understanding the challenges that they face, and helping them by removing some of the simple barriers for their activities that week.

…and next week?

Next week, I’ll be doing the same again!

Meetings culture

The organisation that I work for knows that the number of meetings that it holds is a problem, yet it still faces the challenge that individuals ‘like to be seen’ in meetings; it is their opportunity to raise their profile.  What this results in is the reduction in capability of such an organisation to deliver.  The staff are too busy with meetings to find time to carry out their actions that they agree to in meetings!  A vicious circle that needs to be broken.  Time for some Leadership!

There are simple steps that can be taken to break out of this pattern, but the leaders have to lead, particularly in the meetings that need to take place.  One of the most obvious causes of unproductive meetings is a lack of purpose or lack of focus.  There’s nothing worse than a meeting that is poorly chaired.

I’ll leave you with a simple suggestion about holding better meetings:

As a leader, try having an independent chair or facilitator in your next meeting.  That will provide more structure to the meeting, and allow you to contribute as a participant, rather than chair, secretary and participant!

Confusing management with leadership

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I am not someone who is motivated by grand job titles, so it confused me somewhat when a part of a company that I worked for changed the job title of some of its supervisors from “Team Leader” to “Team Manager”.  I suspected that the decision was made by someone who thought that being a “Manager” sounded more important than being a “Leader”.  I can already find myself disagreeing with this point-of-view.  At that point in my career, I don’t think I understood the difference as I do now, but one of the Senior Leaders in the part of the business that I worked in didn’t follow the trend.

What is a Manager?

There are numerous ways in which you can describe the role of a manager.  Managers carry out things like

  • performance management
  • work allocation
  • reward decision-making
  • hiring and firing
  • delivery of the corporate messages

Although this is not a comprehensive list of duties, what you will see is a list of activities that impact their staff.  The manager in such a situation is expected to be the vehicle through which the company interacts with its staff.

What is a Leader?

This might be a more difficult question to answer, but here’s a few ideas about what leaders might do:

  • coach others to achieve their best performance
  • be an expert, can lead from the workplace
  • can share workload, ensuring that everyone plays to their strengths
  • can interpret corporate messages, delivering meaning

You might think that I’m suggesting that managers can’t be leaders, by choosing different styles of words for the two categories, and maybe I am!

The real differences between leaders and managers

What really separates leaders from managers is simple:

Managers have to push their staff into delivering whereas people will follow leaders and deliver more!

A simple statement may start you thinking about how you are working today.  Are you a leader or a manager?  I’m sure there are merits in both camps, but I have worked for people managers as well as leaders, and I have a strong preference for leaders.  If I think back over my career, I see only a few leaders who got the best out of me; these people created space and opportunities for me to grow as a person, as well as to be able to deliver value to the business.

If you’re an aspiring leader, feel free to comment on this post!

Coaching – some personal reflections

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I managed to go to Trent Bridge over the weekend to watch Nottinghamshire Outlaws play Somerset Sabres in a 40 over cricket competition.  I saw Marcus Trescothick, the Somerset captain, running all over the field, having a quiet word with his players between deliveries and between overs.  As I was sitting there, I started to compare this to the pitchside “coaching” that is given during the weekend’s football matches.  I know that the two sports are different, but the players in both sports are all human beings.

What would it be like if a football coach came to coach your team at work?

I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be acceptable for the coach at work to shout across the office directing their frustration and anger at your team.  I can only imagine one outcome of “coaching” in that style having one impact: low morale, high staff turnover.

Outside of work, I am lucky enough to coach youth rugby and cricket, and have been trained by both the RFU and ECB in how to coach.  I’ve also participated in work-related coaching education, and both types focus on the same thing; observation.  I was never coached to shout from the touchline or boundary!

I do see this behaviour from the touchline, and it never seems to have a positive impact!

The good coach watches and listens!

In the work-related coaching sessions, I’ve been shown several different frameworks for coaching, some goal-based, some based on changing behaviours.  Whatever the case, there’s always one common theme around listening.  Listening with your ears and with your eyes.  I won’t repeat some attempted statistical assessment of the impact of body-language, vs the words that you hear, just suffice to say that, as a coach, you need to look as well as listening.  As an aside, it is just as important to take note of paralinguistic cues, as well as the words that are used.

As a sports coach, my training takes on more of the observational angle.  Watch the players carefully, to make sure that the technical parts of their game are right.  As a cricket coach, I remember being coached to be a coach.  Rather than classroom style teaching, we were encouraged to explore what our role should be in a very interactive setting.  We had all of the technical information on video and in books, and we could learn that ourselves, but what really mattered was how we coached!

Coaching at work

So, if the coach at work can’t behave like a Premier League manager on the touchline on a Saturday afternoon, what should they do?

In general, if you’re coaching someone to achieve something that they want to do, you should not try to solve their problem for them:

  • Help them to understand where they want to get to – Ask questions about their target
  • Help them to understand how close to their target they are right now – It is good to understand whether the target is realistic, or whether setting themselves milestones is a good strategy
  • Help them to explore the possible routes to their target – there’s more than one way to “skin a cat”!
  • Help them to commit themselves on a path to reach their target – how are they going to keep on track?

What you’ll note in all of these steps, is that the coach is there to help, not to do!

The coach is there to listen, to reflect and to ask the questions that might help you to understand yourself better; you will have to commit to your goal, and then you have to do the work too!