Anders Hanson

As spotted on the door of a closed shop in Sheffield’s Orchard Square Shopping Centre:

We have bad news and good news.

Unfortunately due to redevelopment this shop has had to close.

The good news is that we are proud to announce the opening of our new store in Stratford-upon-Avon

Well that’s a relief then. There was me worrying about how I was going to find a Dutch pancake now that their shop in Sheffield had closed. It’s only a 220 mile round trip to get to their new store.

Some years ago I spent three days on a training course with an American management guru - Kevin Freiberg. Like most people who worked at the company who sent us on the course, I was sceptical. The people in the company who had heard him before and asked him to visit us were the sort of managers who were relentlessly positive to the point where people winced everytime they came in to the room. And because he was American everyone inevitably assumed that he was suddenly going to have us all saying ‘have a nice day’, ‘missing you already’ or making us wear Mickey Mouse ears for work. We were all wrong of course. Kevin Freiberg turned out to be one of the most inspiring and enthusing speakers I have ever heard. He had a vision and a passionate way of speaking that beats most politicians I have ever heard speak. It wasn’t his charisma, turn of phrase or the style of his speaking - although he is a powerful speaker, it was the content. He had things to say that made sense to me and made me believe he was right. But the biggest thing that I couldn’t get out of my head, and my managers would probably be appalled if they knew I was bringing it all down to politics, was that the whole way that he seemed to be articulating what the Liberal Democrats were about. Take this quote for example:

It takes GUTS to come down from the Ivory Tower and talk to people in a human voice that’s intimate, inviting and authentic. It takes GUTS to blow up the old rules and free smart people from dumb processes that limit their potential. It takes GUTS to lead with love and trust rather than manage by abstract authority and fear.

That is actually the introduction to Kevin and Jackie Freiberg’s book Guts, but it could easily sum up what the Liberal Democrats are about too. There’s lots more where that came from:

Ownership is a state of mind. It’s a fundamental way of looking at the world and approaching the work we do. Ownership is about giving ourselves and others the freedom to act. It’s about removing the fears that cause lack of initiative.

These are just two quotes I have taken from their website just to prove a point, but there was a lot more of it on their training course, and even more of it in their book Nuts, which I have read since and was incredibly inspiring.

The reason I mention this now though is because there seems to be a pattern emerging at the moment. More and more people are talking about management in this way. Basically about giving people at the front line the power to make decisions themselves. The first time I heard it was from Kevin Freiberg, but it keeps getting repeated everywhere I look at the moment.

The latest one was in yesterday’s Yorkshire Post, where they talked about the BBC TV programme “Can Gerry Robinson Fix The NHS? One Year On”. This was a programme that I didn’t see, but the article about it gave a good impression of what it was about. And what was the big thing that came out of Gerry Robinson’s visit to Rotherham General Hospital?

Gerry was right in the respect that staff on the shopfloor have a lot of good ideas but often find it difficult to put them into practice. RISE allows staff to take time out of their working environment so they can review how they do their jobs…We are not saying we have found a way to solve every problem on every ward, in the NHS there is no such thing as one size fits all. However, the important thing is that the staff feel they own the system and that it’s flexible enough to change.

This is something that Kevin Freiberg talks about - basically giving the frontline the power to take decisions without fearing that if they stuff it up they will be in trouble. Because a lot of the time, they can (if given the chance to look at it) see more than anyone where things can be improved.

So the big question is, if this is the ‘big idea’ in management, why aren’t people realising that the Liberal Democrats had it all along. If senior managers believe in it, (although I imagine much of the management world has a long way to go to put it in to practice), it shows how much Liberal Democrat ideas are the ones that work. The Liberal Democrats always talk about giving power back to real people so they can make their own decisions about their communities, just as I used in the example above. Take this part of the party’s constitution:

We aim to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity. We believe that the role of the state is to enable all citizens to attain these ideals, to contribute fully to their communities and to take part in the decisions which affect their lives.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the Liberal Democrats have often been ahead of the game. But the thing that strikes me is how more and more people are coming around to the party’s ideas. Not just in terms of stealing policy, but even in terms of what the party’s principles are.