Good Luck 'Becks'

It seems David Beckham has signed a 5 year deal from August 2007 to play football for LA Galaxy in America after a glittering career in England and Spain as well as being captain of England’s national team.

He is reportedly being paid 1 million dollars per week for five years.

Click here for details

I say good luck to David. I am not sure anyone is worth that sort of money but David Beckham is more than a footballer – he is a Brand. He has become a smart business man with good advisers.

As I have said many times on my Blog I am a Manchester United fanatic and 'Becks' was one of the ‘boys’ to come through Manchester United’s youth policy under Sir Alex Ferguson in the early 1990’s along with the likes of Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Nicky Butt and many others.

David Beckham has always been a dedicated professional in his chosen profession and stories of his intensive football practice are legendary. He has worked hard to achieve what he has done in football.

The only thing that bugs me slightly is that while David is taking a wage of over 50 million dollars per year people are dying at the rate of 20,000 per day – mainly children – due to poverty.

Sometime I wonder about things but David Beckham does a lot of good work for charities and is at least putting back some of his personal wealth to help those less fortunate than him.

As always I will be fascinated to see comments.

Eureka! - Managers should be judged by OUTCOMES!

Today as a break from work in mid-afternoon, Annie and I decided to go to the gym for a 5k run and a swim. I needed to get away from the PC having spent too many hours in front of the screen.

As I was swimming I thought to myself I would not be able to do this in my previous life as a healthcare manager. I would have to be at the desk. That is what was expected by my bosses and the system I worked in.

As I swam I had one of those ‘Eureka’ moments realising that the best way to be judged about our effectiveness as a manager should be based on OUTCOME rather than any of the following;

• The number of hours we work per day.


• The time of the day we work.


• The number of days we work per week.

I now realise now how crazy those measurement of our effectiveness are.

After 27 months of self employment the penny has suddenly dropped for me. My clients (customers) are only interested in OUTCOMES for their investment in me. They quite rightly have no interest in how many hours I work or when I work those hours. All they are concerned about is that I deliver what I have said I will do for the price we have agreed. It seems they trust me to do the number of hours it takes to do the job on time.

Many managers might suggest what I am saying is only possible because I am independent, freelance and self employed and I work mostly single-handed. I can hear many of my former colleagues muttering, ‘That sort of flexibility is just not possible in a big organisation – we cannot simply allow people to have that freedom of choice about when they work. That is anarchy.’

My answer to that type of statement is simple – Why can we not allow people to be trusted in big organisations because it is simply about trust?

We have to ask the leaders in our organisations WHY they will not allow managers and staff freedom of choice about the hours they work and why we cannot develop payment systems based solely on OUTCOMES.

A few years ago I would probably have thought it was pie in the sky that we can allow people to determine their own hours and allow them to be judged solely on outcomes. Now I would recommend it fully for ANY job with ‘Manager’ in the title.

The only thing that hours per week prove is that the person is at the desk for those hours – it has nothing whatsoever to do with effectiveness of the person.

I am probably in a minority among managers in the UK but who knows – maybe I will be surprised.

You don’t need to shout

Another extract from 'I Wanna Tell You a Story'

‘None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves’ - C.H. Spurgeon, 1834 - 1892

One evening many years ago I was manager on call for my hospital and at around 7 pm the phone rang. It was the switchboard to tell me the fire alarm was going off. I drove to the hospital thinking that as usual this would be another false alarm.

I arrived and was met by a less common situation in that there was a genuine problem. One of the evening cleaners had unfortunately forgotten she had left a pot of water boiling on a hot plate and the water had boiled dry causing the pan to become extremely hot and eventually smoke had begun to emerge thus activating the smoke detectors and setting off the fire alarm. The local fire brigade complete with two engines blue lights flashing and sirens screaming had arrived on the scene to quickly confirm there was no serious damage and all was returning to calm. The poor cleaner was very upset that her oversight had caused such a commotion and I could not help feeling sorry for her. As calm was restored the catering manager who had been called out from home too arrived on the scene. She was a stern woman who, upon surveying the scene and hearing what had happened, proceeded to launch into what I can only describe as a tirade of abuse aimed at the cleaner. The manager accused her of gross inefficiency and stupidity for allowing this incident to happen. Let’s be honest this was not what the cleaner wanted to hear. She was already clearly upset and feeling guilty and then to have this telling off sent her over the edge and she burst into tears. Now we had a situation that was distressing for the few people gathered in the immediate area and caused much embarrassment. The
memory of that incident is still vivid in my head and it taught me many things about managing people.

When people have made a mistake the last thing they need to be reminded of in an aggressive way is that they have made that mistake and thereby made to feel like some immature cretin with no intelligence.

Of course there is clearly a time and a place for a ticking off when merited. As adults, and particularly as managers, with responsibility for managing people, we should surely understand and indeed have empathy with people who make genuine mistakes that do not amount to gross negligence.

I believe that when people have made a mistake they will invariably ‘punish’ themselves enough without the need for some arrogant and uncaring manager to rub salt in the wounds by balling them out in public.

Leadership Lesson

You don’t need to shout – people know when they have made a mistake.

The "Three 'Cs" of Team Selection

One of the most important skills of a leader is the selection of the right people in the team they lead.

In my career as a manager in health care the times I felt most comfortable with my team was when I was allowed the freedom to select the people in my team rather than 'inheriting' people already there. In the NHS it is often not possible to have that 'blank piece of paper' because managers move into jobs where the team is already in place and well established.

I am reading a great book at the moment called Courageous Leadership by Bill Hybels

Bill has been the leader of a team for thirty years and over these years he has come up with - through practical experience of recruiting team members and developing teams - his own his own model called The "Three 'Cs" of Team Selection.

I love Bill's model and recommend it for many reasons not least its simplicity.

Bill says he looks for the following in the order shown when recruiting team members:

Character - integrity, honesty, sincerity, professionalism and values

Competence - can this person actually do the job?

Chemistry - will this person fit in with leader and with team members?

Obviously I have summarised for the sake of brevity but I endorse this method as a rule of thumb for any leader recruiting a team member.

For anyone interested in leadership I also highly recommend Courageous Leadership as a 'must read' for 2007!