I became involved in management very early in my working life and have retained this interest throughout my life, not least as a management consultant.
The first book I read about management, Peter Drucker’s The practice of management (1955), had a profound effect on me, in part because he saw a manager as serving those for whom he was responsible, an idea with which I was familiar as a Christian (Mk 10:42–45). Over the years, I became aware of how many of those who pretended to understand how to manage people actually understood very little about how to get the best out of people.
This initial understanding of the nature of good management was reinforced by my increasing interest in gender issues and the realisation that much management ‘theory’ was, as a colleague said, all about ‘massaging male egos’ and nothing to do with enabling people to gain any pleasure out of what they were doing, let alone achieve anything at work.
During the 1990s, after I had become a management consultant, I encountered various writers who reinforced what I had grown to appreciate as the features of good management and introduced me to some more with which I was not acquainted. Theories of management documents my journey of understanding.
Among these were W. Edwards Deming and Ricardo Semler but Geert Hofstede was also very useful in helping me to understand the cultural context and the ‘appreciative systems’ which inhibit acceptance in England of ideas from abroad, in particular those that suggest that women may on the whole be slightly better managers than men. Of course, one reason for this is that most English male managers do not see themselves, as Jesus did, as serving those for whom they are responsible.
The 21st century has seen a shift in focus. Jim Collins’ Good to great (2001) shows that the most successful managers are, among other things, humble people who work for the organisation and not for themselves, accept responsibility and face brutal facts while Rita McGrath has argued that we are in the era of empathy, an argument well-supported in the Lancaster University Lecture Leaders for the future.
Discipline, capability and grievance
In the early 1990s I became involved in supporting people in employment disputes after reading Bullying at work (Adams, 1992), watching the series Making advances introduced by Emma Freud and broadcast on the BBC in 1993 and undertaking courses on supporting professionals in these sorts of situations.
Since then I have supported both victims and perpetrators, undertaken investigations on behalf of organisations, presented a case myself and managed the procedure. Though I have found these situations very stressful because they usually involve a relationship breakdown, I continue to support people because I know how stressful they can be for those involved.
In Guidance on disciplinary, capability and grievance procedures I have tried to summarise clearly and coherently what I have learnt over the past thirty years but I would welcome a note of any errors which readers may find and any clarification which readers may find useful.