Today we feature a post by Suzy Dale, on the subject of ‘Workplace stress.’

Suzy is a highly effective Business Psychologist, and Owner of a new business psychology consultancy, Dale & Associates.  For more than 15 years Suzy worked as an Occupational Psychologist for Civil Service departments.  During this time she supported leaders by devising and implementing coaching and mentoring schemes, and providing evidence-based advice relating to employee engagement, stress and absenteeism and cultural change management. 

You can follow Suzy on Twitter. 

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There’s been a plethora of commentary about workplace stress recently, mainly as a result of the CIPD and Simplyhealth survey which showed that stress is now the top cause of sickness absence in theUK.  This has been on the horizon for some time, and now with the compounding influence of rising living costs, wage freezes and fears over job security, it’s hit the number one spot. 

The ideal of course for organisations is that staff are happy, healthy and here (ie in the workplace!),

The financial cost to the nation as a result of stress-related sickness absence runs into billions of pounds a year according to HSE.  However, I believe that behind this figure lies three hidden truths.

Has the BBC been leant on to bolster some public campaign against social fraud?  You might think so considering the prime time viewing given to Saints and Scroungers and Panorama over the last few months. Chuck in an amnesty for UK tax payers with Swiss off-shore assets, and all that’s missing is the same for domestic taxpayers. What a script for a national anti-fraud programme in keeping the ‘chancers’ under control; if only it were so well organised in reality!

Actually it’s doubtful the Broadcaster has been coerced, as for most of us it’s highly topical news at the moment, as we hate the idea of someone else ‘getting away with it!  We quite enjoy being voyeurs into the world of the bad guy, particularly when it’s blatantly obvious who the bad guy is.

Council Houses : Cheats and Victims
Panorama, BBC1,  Wednesday May 4^th
Investigator Richard Bilton

This was one of those programmes that caught the attention as we’re in the midst of recession and some of the largest public expenditure reductions in living memory. Some of the numbers quoted deserve repeating, 5M people on council housing wait lists nationally. 40% plus of the London Borough of Lambeth’s housing is from Registered Social Landlords. 50,000 homes nationally are lost to tenancy fraud each year according to the Audit Commission, which was counterbalanced by a pair of obviously conscientious investigators who were able to recover 28 properties in a year, which we would conclude was a drop in the ocean compared to what appears to be going on in reality. What makes it worse is that some individuals have been getting away with fraud for many years under the watchful eyes of the local authority and housing associations.

We have evolved intellectually to grasp the universe and understand the biosphere within which we live, yet we remain collectively in need of strong social structure and hierarchy. In western society we can be individually part of multiple hierarchies at the same time; work, friends, religion and family, occupying different status in each. Psychologists propose that this need for hierarchy is to do with individuals’ confidence, strength, skill, problem solving, risk-taking, and vision–survival strategies. Yet such structure has both advantage and disadvantage.

Accepting the benefits that leadership brings in organising our work and lives, is why we have been able to put people into space, and can now foresee life spans of 150 years. Charles Handy set the scene for organisation culture and how ultimately that shapes business leaders attitudes and behaviour, and how in turn, organisation culture is shaped by those leaders.

Then what ultimately makes a leader, nature or nurture?  Where do our leaders get their empathy from so we choose to follow them, as leadership is hard to force acceptance of without aggressive behaviours.

Then what of talent and talent management? Assuming our business leaders have a talent for leadership, then what is the pixie dust that keeps us happy and prepared to go along with them. Is it simply engendering a feeling of security, fulfilling aspirations and self-fulfilment; or something much more complex? Possibly it’s the confidence that being part of a successful tribe brings, which is down to leadership. Yet when walking in the sunlight that forms a leader’s shadow, there is self-denial too! We suppress the reality that no one is perfect and close our eyes to things happening to other people in the workplace, ‘it always happens to someone else not me!’

In the fall-out from the UK’s banking crisis we saw that many of the top notch leaders were in practice rather lacklustre, with a few clearly not up to the job.  Our leaders fed our desires and influenced us to never question so that self interest could prevail.

So if we have talented leaders, what does talent mean for them, and can we manage talent it to reduce the darker aspects of leadership behaviour?

On LinkedIn there has been a discussion running for over eight months on “How would you best describe ”Talent” in one word?”, started by Michael Mann[1].

 

For fun I got the machine out and copied every entry that had been made over those eight months, just to get an insight into how the rest of the world thinks of Talent not just me.

These details are approximate and valid on April 7^th at 07:30 Central European Time (how the web world has made us more precise in some respects!).

In a marathon commentary, 148 people made 1,568 distinct comments, which in taking out links, names, references to external web sites, adverts and junk, amounted to 11,031 proper words filling 2,405 lines. Approximately one third were paragraph structured comments rather than single words or phrases.  With this amount of genuine and open comment we can say its representative of how people think about talent.

In profile the results split into single words as per the question and text commentary. Apart from less then ten entries that challenged comments, all entries were expressing positive emotional sentiments.  Everyone was walking in the light, optimistic, inquisitive and motivated; from every walk of business from Human Resources to Organisation Development and operations. A very broad church of backgrounds.

Yet in overall terms there were just four references to honesty and integrity as talents. Clearly pessimism was not us!  Perhaps for this reason when fraud, exploitation, bullying and such occurs, it surprises us; yet we rarely design into our organisation development and leadership processes more than feather-light mechanisms to anticipate the darker side of leadership. We seem taken aback when it happens and continues to remain part, admittedly a small part, of many organisations lives.

So is there a talent for fraud? Yes, though thankfully on the margins of leadership, where a few individuals are smart enough to trade on the edges of propriety and impropriety for personal advantage. Yet it continues to amaze that some individuals[2] seem also suicidal in their actions. For example, Raymond Levine a Canadian Federal MP allegedly defrauded Parliament for relatively tiny sums of money and chopping down a few trees at his home. In the context of the risk he took in doing so, before getting caught.

For leaders in the western world, extreme self-centrism is constrained by the colleagues around them; unless those around them become implicit co-conspirators. So why do OD and LD specialists fail in their duty to shareholders and proprietors in protecting their businesses? Could it be that they’re bosses feel like turkeys voting for Christmas, and object to having their latitude for exploitation reigned in, even if they never pursue it. More likely it’s that no senior leader likes to admit fraud happened on his or her watch, so it’s suppressed in organisation thinking. The commercial trade off between intensifying supervision costs and reputation risk, remains the key decision for an executive when handling fraud or theft.

Yet this remains a critical factor in the survival of western commerce where mis-direction and personal exploitation, as seen in the banking and finance sectors, has become as damaging to owner value as any solo fraud. Those mixed messages from politicians and some senior leaders have to change, as staff on the way up take their cue from those already at the top. Simply there is a real risk it will just get worse, not better.

Over the course of my career I’ve seen frauds and malpractice grow in scale from the petty embezzlement of pensions funds such as happened with Maxwell, via reinsurance fallings at Lloyds of London, to the virtual collapse of the international banking system. This last disaster happening because of attitudes, mostly in the UK and USA, as collective global leaders of the finance sector, that spread across the world. That London survived the crisis on the back of the British economy when compared to New York which was backed by a continent, is testament to the underlying drive of the British people. There will be a next time, its inevitable in the coming decade, lets hope it’s reigned-in and not finally catastrophic.

Internationally, we have reached a critical point in the development of shared economic activity. Simply layering on more supervision and governance, no matter how well intended by governments or joined up, is no substitute for personal moderation and effective whistle-blowing, followed by zero-tolerance action from within the workplace.

Kenneth Tombs.

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[1] http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=98001&item=25745647&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-cn

[2] Raymond Lavigne was found guilty of fraud and breach of trust. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2011/04/08/17926211.html

Recent economic experience has seen us drift into some very dodgy and gray areas of business. Nothing absolutely illegal but walking that fine line between moral and immoral.

Since commerce commenced, Caveat Emptor has been the watchword, buyer beware. To compensate to an extent, in the UK and Europe there’s been a growth in legislation that moderates the behaviour of those purveying goods and services. From loans sharks to credit cards, via property, to local authorities and Government, all are now regulated to stop extreme or unreasonable behaviours towards individuals. The UK Unfair Contract Terms legislation was a good step in that direction in the 1970’s, to constrain the impact of contractual small-print. When looking to the United States the emphasis remains firmly in favour of the vendor, regardless of how cavalier or predatory they may have been. Hire Purchase was at one time a common form of buying high value consumer items, the contracts stating that for any missed payment the company could repossess the goods. So having made 35 of 36 payments without difficulty, if the last payment was a few days late, the HP company would often send in the bailiffs to take possession and the customer lost all their payments and title to the goods.  Thankfully, those practices were eventually stopped by legislation in the UK.

On occasions you find a topic catches you by the side-door rather than head on. I had one of those recently when my Signal colleagues forwarded to me a blog by Richard Exell from the Touchstone site on benefit fraud and error[1].

Richard gives a reasonably balanced view of the subject in pointing out ‘when is fraud not entirely a fraud; when it’s an error!’ He also reminds us that the media and politicians tend to go for the emotional big numbers and gloss over the detail.

Today we feature a blog post by Kenneth Tombs. Ken has over 35 years industry and business experience. His research work at the Commercial Law Unit of Queen Mary University in London, set the scene for the development of international best practices and guidance on legally admissible electronic documents. Sector experience includes  central and local government, finance and banking, pension and insurance, industrial and utilities.

For many years Ken was a Law Society recognised expert witness, taking part in a number of major fraud and criminal cases. He has lectured at various conferences on information control and governance, in Europe and America, including the Information Systems Audit and Control conferences. Between 1989 and 2007 he was an external advisor to the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the Treasury, undertaking the independent review of the Government’s OGCGateway™ peer review programme.

Along with other projects Ken is now the Course Director for Signal’s Counter Fraud course.

We’re delighted to welcome our second guest blogger to the pages of Signal Business Consulting, to talk about Veterans who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

Lieutenant Colonel Trevor Philpott OBE RM (Retired)

 

I joined the Royal Marines in November 1963 as a Junior Marine and was subsequently awarded a General List Commission in September 1965. I served in numerous operational, training and staff appointments in the UK, mainland Europe, at sea and the Far East.  

 

We are delighted today to welcome our first guest blog author to Signal, to talk about the Government’s decisions around the Strategic Defence and Security Review and more specifically the decommissioning of HMS Ark Royal and the Sea Harrier squadron.

Rear Admiral Iain Henderson joined the Royal Navy in 1965 as a Seaman Officer. He qualified as an helicopter pilot in 1971 and as a fighter pilot in 1975. He was second in command of HMS Plymouth during the Falklands conflict. He went on to serve as Commanding Officer of both HMS Ariadne and HMS Charybdis.

His last sea going command was the type 22 frigate HMS London when she was flagship of the RN during the 1991 Gulf War. For this service he was awarded the CBE.

Shore based appointments followed, including command of RNAS Yeovilton, Portsmouth naval base and Flag Officer Naval Aviation (FONA).

His final appointment was as Air Officer Commanding No.3 group RAF and Flag Officer Maritime Aviation.

In 2006 Iain was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire.