Weeknote: 2 to 5 April 2024
An undocumented feature of my long-term weeknote habit is that every now and then WordPress related posts reminds me of another week in the dim distant past when I was rambling about the same stuff. 5 years ago this week I was in the midst of a corporate reorganisation, the consequences of which I’m still dealing with as a manager today.
What did I enjoy?
A new colleague who has joined our team dropped by my desk and we ended up chatting for ages about our priorities in Digital Urgent & Emergency Care, and her previous roles in the NHS. I could see straight away that she is going to bring a lot to our team.
Recording a short video to encourage my colleagues to take part in a pulse survey we’re running to understand the everyday experience of working in our part of the new NHS England. Good or bad, it’s really important that we hear what people have to say.
Meanwhile my objectives for the new financial year are becoming clearer, and I had some good conversations about how we’re going to deliver our priorities for patients and frontline staff within constrained circumstances over the next 12 months. I’m looking forward to sharing my thinking about this more widely in a couple of forums next week.
What was hard?
Constantly being on catch up. For the first 2 days back, my laptop refused to recognise British Summer Time, meaning that my calendar was always an hour behind. Eventually a helpful IT support colleague took remote control and reset it manually using his special privileges.
My team’s ability to deliver our work remained impaired by the financial year end cliff edge that I mentioned last week. I checked in daily and saw some progress in resolving the issue, but it is painfully slow. Dealing with this situation meant I made less progress than I wanted to on some other things that have been on my to-do list all week.
In trying to untangle how we have got here, I had a difficult conversation with people from one of our support functions. It ended better than it started, with an agreement to address one of the root causes I had identifed.
What do I need to take care of?
A reader of these weeknotes got in touch and was critical of the way I had written about some other teams in a note a couple of weeks ago. They have a point: I must try harder not to personalise these things, which are ultimately due to broken systems, not bad people. Everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
In my hate-the-game-not-the-player reverie, I chanced upon this very timely reminder: Role ambiguity as an antecedent to workplace bullying: Hostile work climate and supportive leadership as intermediate factors.
The authors found empirically that “role ambiguity is a long-term predictor of subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours in the workplace.” The stress of not being clear on who does what, or how people and teams are expected to work together, creates a hostile work climate that can last for many months after the initial trigger. (Did I mention that some of my team have been permanently in some form of re-org or flux since April 2019?) The good, but also daunting news, is that supportive leadership can go some way to mitigating this risk. As leaders of people going through slow motion restructures, we can help our colleagues avoid the worst consequences, but we have our work cut out.
PS — No public weeknotes from me for a few weeks now due to the pre-election period which starts next week, ahead of the local elections on May 2. Make good choices.
Originally published at http://blog.mattedgar.com on April 5, 2024.
