The Sweeps story

The Sweeps Story

In February 2004 I was living on the West Coast of Scotland having recently published the book, “Breaking the Mould”.

The book is an amalgam of stories written about what had happened in the Oil Exploration Business when, instead of being told what to do by their bosses, the drilling crews were allowed to think for themselves about the solutions to their own problems.

The solutions they produced were consistently astonishing and for the most part were ideas they’d had in their heads for years.

The individuals in the drilling crews all had the experience and inventive natures to produce these innovative solutions but the way they were treated by their managers prevented them from displaying the discretionary effort that would have brought these ideas to their attention.

As a result of the publication of the book I was prevailed upon to help an acquaintance with a particular problem he had with his business in Glasgow.

The company was a family run firm of chimney sweeps. They ran six teams of sweeps throughout the West Coast of Scotland each with its own van and set of chimney cleaning and maintenance equipment.

One of their major contracts was with the local authority in Glasgow who managed an increasingly ageing stock of tenement houses.
These were four or five storey terraced houses with apartment accommodation on each floor.

The houses were built mainly in the latter half of the nineteenth century and comprised a large proportion of the housing stock of the city.
A hundred years later and they were starting to be cleared to make way for the newer housing required by a different generation.

Whole streets were torn down before the city realised they were in danger of losing these iconic buildings for ever.
Preservation orders were put on the remaining tenements and the city started to take serious care of them to allow current tenants to continue to live in them while bringing them to a standard suitable for twentieth century living.

When built the only source of heating in these tenements was a coal fire in each room.
Depending on the size of the apartment this could mean up to seven or eight fireplaces and there might be four apartments on each floor.
The result was a massively complex chimney system.

In the twentieth century this system had largely been replaced by gas, electric or oil heating so most of the fireplaces were blocked up.
A significant number remained in use and, after a hundred years of sweeping, those chimneys had begun to show their age, some being blocked by collapses and others allowing communication in a way that allowed smoke to penetrate into apartments that did not have active fireplaces.

The job of the chimney sweep, in addition to sweeping, incorporated the location and repair of the structural failures that were increasingly affecting these older tenement houses.

When the contract was first awarded it was clear that they would have to do something different in order to identify and isolate the many problems.
Fortunately technology provided a solution in the shape of a video camera system that could be lowered down the chimney and steered around the flue until the collapse or communication was located.

When it worked, the system worked well allowing leaking chimneys to be sealed and function restored.
Unfortunately the cameras were expensive and did not seem to last very long before the crews were asking for replacements.

The owner of the company, in a chance conversation, discovered that the reason the cameras did not last very long was that the crews treated them in exactly the same way they treated the rest of their equipment. As soon as they were finished they put the camera back in its box then threw the box into the back of their van with the rest of their sand, cement and brushes.

By the time I met the owner of this company he was at his wits end.
He had asked his crews to take care of the cameras, he had told them to look after them, he had threatened to take the replacement cost out of their wages, nothing had made any difference.
They still broke the cameras.

The owner of the company had read the book “Breaking the Mould,” and, more in hope than expectation, asked if I could help him.

The problem was pretty straight forward so I agreed.
I recognised immediately the same lack of care and absence of discretionary effort that typified the behaviour of the exploration drillers who had been subject to the Command and Control behaviour of their managers.

I sat with the crews and instead of telling them what I thought the solution was, asked them what they thought the problem was, and if they could come up with their own solutions.

In the first meeting the crews explained to me that the real problem was not their handling of the cameras but the flimsy box that was supplied with it, something they had never shared with the owner of the company.
Having established their perception of the problem the crews then began to get involved in the creation of the solution and in no time their sketches of a suitable strong box were being circulated until a consensus was reached about the design of the box and the brackets that would allow it to be secured to the floor of the van under the passenger seat where it would be additionally protected from other equipment being thrown in through the back doors.

The company owner then, for the price of a few square metres of steel plate gave the crews the materials they needed to construct the strong boxes that put an abrupt end to the breakages.

I was never asked back to that company but the owner told me later that he had understood the difference between allowing the crews to care about the problem and him telling the crews what he thought was the solution.

He told me that he had continued these meetings with his crews and delighted in sharing with me other stories of his crew’s successes.
One of these was the jockey wheel on the trailers that the vans would tow when extra equipment was required.
There were four identical trailers in the yard and on any day at least one of them would be out on a job.

The problem was that the retractable jockey wheels that allowed the trailers to be brought to the van by hand before hitching, were frequently bent and much time had to be spent trying to straighten them before they could be used to take the weight of the trailer.
He told me how the crews had brought up the problem in their meeting and admitted that the cause was their own failure to secure the wheel properly in the raised position before they drove off in the van.
The wheel would drop as the van drove along and was bent when it hit the road at speed.

Far from being an excuse to apportion blame the owner told me how the crews had then started to think of how they could avoid this happening.
It took two weeks before one of the younger lads suggested that instead of a retractable wheel, which could always fall down and become damaged, they cut the jockey wheel off entirely and replaced it with a fixed height wheel.
His suggestion was that although this meant extra work for them because the fixed height wheel would have to be dismounted entirely before the van could drive off, if it was impossible to drive off with the Jockey wheel mounted, it was also impossible for it to fall down and get bent.

I congratulated him that he had been able to allow his crews to start thinking again, then he told me about something odd he had noticed.

In the past he had always told his crews about the importance of the public appearance of their brand and that they should take more care of their vans.

He had never, in the past, noticed any lasting effect when he said this and despaired of his words having any effect at all.
But now he saw his crews staying behind at the end of the week, taking the time to wash their vans.
That had never happened before.

I suggested that perhaps by involving the crews in the control of their own working environment he may have allowed them to start to care about what they were doing, and perhaps the evidence of their growing sense of pride in their jobs might be being reflected in their growing sense of pride in the way their vans looked.

How To Survive The Recession, Then Fail The Recovery - The British Airways Story.

"How To Survive The Recession, Then Fail The Recovery"
“The British Airways Story”.
Last year BA reported a sharp rise of operating profit to £883 million, which in view of the rising fuel price and their falling market share, seemed to be bucking the downward global trend.
This year they reported a loss of £401 million.
Somewhere between the two reality probably lies, but when has reality ever paid out a performance bonus? And when have the published numbers ever reflected what is actually happening to a business?

A spokesman for BA, Mr Willie Walsh, said last month: “The combination of unprecedented oil prices, economic slowdown and weaker consumer confidence has led to substantially lower first quarter profits." “But,” He said ”British Airways is well prepared and has adapted its plans in the event of further economic uncertainty.”

These reported performance figures for BA and their smooth denial of concern reminded me of the last time BA management hit the news.

It was several years ago and Rod Eddington, the then chairman of British Airways, was responding on TV to concerns about the profitability of British Airways.
He was having a moan about how the budget airlines were cutting into his market share, but he was still being quite bullish about it. He told the interviewer how, in the last three years, he had cut the operating costs of British Airways by 5% and that although the competition was tough they fully expected to maintain their market share.

What he didn’t say was that in the past three years, to make that 5% saving, he had made redundant 16,000 members of his workforce.

He must have had some idea of the consequences of those redundancies for the remaining workforce. How did he think they felt about it?

Did he think they still felt good about working for British Airways?
Did he think they still felt their jobs were secure?
Did he think they felt proud of what had happened.

At the time Rod Eddington seemed supremely unconcerned by any of the consequence of his actions other than the ability to boast about the financial savings he thought he had made.

The men and women who worked for BA had. in the main been in their dream jobs. Pilots, who as schoolboys had pictured themselves wearing Raybans while they lounged around in the cockpits of big jets.
Cabin crew who used to dream of all the exotic destinations they would go to.
Baggage handlers and support staff who at the time could use BA to nip over to Paris for the weekend for the price of a cup of strong coffee.

And then, by making 16,000 redundancies, Rod Eddington had at a stroke completely changed the way that the remaining BA employees felt about what they did.

He had changed their attitudes and behaviours from those of a proud group of motivated people, dedicated to the service of their customers, to a bunch of disillusioned job hunters.
By making these redundancies British Airways changed the behaviour of their whole workforce from a powerful group of people who were proud of what they did, to an apathetic, untrusting workforce who were only interested in where they could send their next CV.

In the latest twist in the saga of the failure of BA we read of the appeal from the current management for the workforce of BA to give the company one months work without pay to try to save the company.

Since the days of Rod Eddington, management at BA have completely lost the loyalty of their staff by the way that they have behaved towards them, creating a morally bankrupt organisation, Make no mistake, this moral bankruptcy was caused by BA management.
Now we see the current management attempting to cash a cheque against the BA account that they themselves have already emptied.

Is this BA management completely misreading the way that the workforce feel about the company they work for? Or is this a cynical manoeuvre by management to deflect the blame for the failure of the company?

It is possible that the company will fail without these individual contributions from the workforce.
The workforce must be aware that it is just as likely that the company will fail even after they have put themselves into personal debt to try to keep it afloat, the only difference being that when the company fails, even after the workforce have given their time for free, the workforce will be in an even worse position to support their families.
Either way, management have already broken the trust of the workforce and since none of the management team seem to have offered to work for nothing it seems even less likely that any of the workforce will be persuaded to stick their necks out.

Do BA management truly believe that the workforce, working for nothing, will save them or are they working a spin, which when the company goes to the wall will enable them to say
“It was not our fault, We were let down by the workforce who would not support us.”

In this ongoing crisis we have to be very careful about what we do to survive and how that changes the way that our remaining workforce feel about they are asked to do.

Ride roughshod over the workforce during the recession because you can, and like BA you will have a very hard time continuing to trade even when the rest of the world has resumed doing business, Or, take care of your people when they most need it and they will take care of you when you need it.

We can’t have it both ways.

What goes around comes around.


Peter A Hunter
Author – Breaking the Mould
www.breakingthemould.co.uk

Breaking the Mould - Chapter One

Breaking the Mould - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Meeting Señor Schmidt

I was a performance coach working for a company of Management Consultants based in Aberdeen, Scotland, and had just finished four months working on a semi submersible drilling platform on the very edge of the continental shelf in the North Atlantic to the West of Shetland.

I was filling in for a colleague who had started the project twelve months before but had been forced to leave when another company made him an offer he couldn't refuse, more money.
The original contract was not to be renewed so my job was to be a billed bum on a seat for the last two trips while the project wound down.

The winter had been severe in that part of the Atlantic where severe was the normal description for the weather in summer. It had been a difficult trip so I wasn't too upset when I was able to board the helicopter for the last time and wave goodbye to the rig.

Home at the beginning of December, I put my feet up and waited for news of the next project, hoping all the time that nobody would have any emergencies until after Hogmanay.
There is still something special about the West Coast of Scotland at New Year that cannot be bought or bottled, although there are a number of distilleries that get very close.

I received a call in the first week of January from my office in Aberdeen and after a very rapid run through the New Year's greetings I was asked if I wanted to go back to Venezuela.
I had been to Venezuela several times before but was curious to learn a little more about the project before I committed myself.
This time the job was for a drilling contractor.

I would be working a new oil field in the centre of the country away from the traditional fields in the west. The client was a partnership between a French Oil Company and the National Oil Corporation of Venezuela.The country manager for the drilling contractor had six drilling rigs in the country. Five were in the west and had been on hire for many years. The sixth had arrived in the country six months ago specifically to work the new field.The rig was drilling wells which went down to around a thousand feet then turned horizontally to drill along the thin oil bearing sand layer. The oil was thick and heavy and flowed very slowly. To create the production levels required the rig would drill up to twenty-four wells in each location, moving the rig about fifteen metres between each well.
When the wells were completed the production would all be brought together at the surface in a single large manifold.

At a business review shortly after Christmas the South American partners had told the drilling contractor, rather unsympathetically, that if they did not achieve a radical change in their performance then they could pack the rig up and ship it back to where they had come from.

The country manager had not been expecting this reaction and for a while was at a loss, he had been doing his best and did not know what he could do to improve.
He remembered hearing of the work that I had done in Europe in similar situations and although for this size of operation I was going to be expensive, he was growing very short of cards to play.

My job was to go to Venezuela and turn around the performance of the rig.
That phone call was the first of two. Did I want to go?
The second call a week later was to tell me where to get my tickets.
I was lucky that I had to pack in a hurry because in retrospect, if I had considered everything that I didn't know about the project, where I was going, what I was going to do, where I was going to stay, what I was going to eat, I would never have been able to lift my bags for all the contingencies for which I would have packed. As it was, the only extra item I packed was a mosquito net.
The altitude of the site and the lack of standing water meant that I never heard a single mosquito in the four months I was there, but it was still a comfort to have as I travelled out for the first time.

The country manager who met me in the capital, Caracas, was an Austrian emigré called Gunter and was the man who had control of all the rigs in the country. I was taken initially to the company offices in Maracaibo where the nature of their problem was explained to me.
In short the rig was on a warning from the client, who was quite capable of forcing them to pack up and remove it from the country. There was no deadline at the moment but in South America that simply meant that it could happen tomorrow. The meeting was relaxed but there was an image in my mind of the drilling company tied to the table with a Damoclean sword coming closer to the jugular with every swing.

Gunter had done his research and in me he knew what he was getting. He was aware of the necessarily long term nature of my work and was reluctant to press too hard for promises of short term savings which he knew would be just that, promises. However Gunter still needed something to take away from the meeting to justify the extra expenditure to his bosses in Europe.

I was very aware of the politics and asked Gunter what he was looking for. "What would really impress him?" Gunter's answer was "An improvement in casing running times."Running casing was the last operation the drilling team carried out before the rig was skidded across the site - with hydraulic rams - to the next well.

After the well had been drilled the casing would be run all the way to the bottom and cemented in place to stop the drilled hole from collapsing.

When the rig left the site another smaller rig would arrive and prepare the well for oil production. Without the casing in place the hole would very likely collapse making it unlikely that the production tubing would be able to get to the bottom.

The casing was run into the hole in nine metre lengths. The actual time that it took to run the casing was not a large percentage of the total time on the well, but there was some pressure to run it as quickly as possible to minimise the amount of time that the formation was open without the protection that the casing gave it. If the hole did collapse before the casing was in place the consequences were serious. The casing already run would have to be pulled back to the surface and the drilling bit run again to clean out the collapsed section.

Gunter told me that the fastest the rig had ever managed to run casing was sixteen joints per hour. They would be impressed if the rig managed twenty joints per hour, a twenty five percent improvement. I pushed a little harder. What would really knock his socks off? What was the best performance ever? Gunter paused and looked towards Duncan his deputy,They conferred quietly for a second then Duncan spoke up and said that he thought the best ever, to his knowledge, was twenty five joints per hour. He thought that one of his other rigs had once achieved twenty five joints per hour in Europe but that you could hardly use something which had happened once years ago in a different country as a target.

Assuring him that I was not setting targets for anyone, but was just curious to learn what was the best, I could tell I had gone too far. Gunter and Duncan were no longer taking me seriously so I wrote down "Twenty five joints per hour," then closed my notebook and asked if there was anything else I needed to know or they wanted to tell me.

I flew back to Caracas the same afternoon and the following day was on my way to El Tigre, a town about two hundred kilometres north of the Rio Orinoco in the centre of Venezuela.

I was accompanied by Duncan, the deputy country manager, whose job was to introduce me to the rig manager, a naturalised Venezuelan called Willie Schmidt.

We met Señor Schmidt in his office in El Tigre where he rose to his impressive height of six feet four and took my outstretched hand with a dignified restraint. From what Duncan was saying it was obvious that Señor Schmidt had never heard of the process of "Breaking the Mould" and would have thought the image of a management consultant working on an oil rig rather humorous, if it had been happening to someone else.

Clearly he was not amused that it was happening to him. Duncan sensed the resistance too and felt that he had to get me off on the right foot by selling the idea of what I was going to do for Señor Schmidt.

As the human race matures each subsequent generation seems to develop a greater resistance to salesmen. Watching Duncan, even with the authority of his position as deputy country manager, I could feel Señor Schmidt's defences rising higher and higher. His expressionless face eloquently said that if Duncan were not his boss he would not even be in the same room with me.

I was trying to figure out what I could do to limit the damage that Duncan was doing. The more defensive Señor Schmidt became, the more work it would take for me to get him back on board later.

At that moment we were interrupted by Santa ("Saint" in English), Señor Schmidt's secretary, who had an urgent call from the rig. Señor Schmidt was torn between answering the call and continuing to listen to his boss. While he clearly wanted to embrace the former he felt obliged to do the latter. He was not going to be happy so I took the opportunity of suggesting that Duncan and I should go and find a cup of coffee while Señor Schmidt talked to the rig in peace. Duncan looked askance but said nothing.

We followed Santa who showed us to the kitchen then left us alone. I started to pour the coffee but could feel Duncan's impatience behind my back. I took my time with the coffee and when I was finished I turned slowly to offer Duncan the first cup. Keeping my eyes down and focusing on the cup, I turned back to pick my own cup up from the table, waiting for Duncan to speak. I turned slowly back to Duncan, bringing the cup up to my lips as I turned. He was going mad but held his peace until I couldn't keep a straight face any more. I smiled at Duncan who started smiling too, an automatic reaction, but he was still puzzled about what was amusing me.

I thought it was time to put Duncan out of his misery so I asked him what his job was. He replied that he was the "deputy country manager". I asked again, what was his job. "What do you do from day to day?" I said. Duncan thought a bit longer then he broke out into a real grin and said, "What you are really trying to say is that I am not very good as a salesman."" Exactly" I said, "You've got it in one."

Duncan smiled then stopped and looked a little troubled. He asked me, "Where do we go from here? Willie is not very happy about what he is being asked to do. How will we manage that situation?""Don't worry," I said, "I think you'll find that that is my job".

I suggested a beer so we finished our coffees and set about winkling Señor Schmidt out of his office and down to the restaurant of his choice. He went home first and collected his wife, a charming Venezuelan whose calming influence probably went a long way towards making sure that we were up early and fit for business the next day.

Duncan had to catch the early flight back to Caracas and was feeling a little nervous that we had not spoken a word about business since coffee the previous afternoon, so I assured him that the ball was rolling and I would see him again in three weeks when I came back from the rig.

Señor Schmidt was quiet on the way out to the airport and after seeing Duncan off drove back to the centre of El Tigre. He turned left at the traffic lights instead of going straight on, and as easy as that, we were on our way to the jungle.

I thought about how the trip had gone so far. The most important man at this moment was Señor Schmidt and he was not happy. He was the man who was responsible for the performance of the rig, and his behaviour and the things he said affected the way that the crews performed on the rig.

Unless Señor Schmidt changed his approach and what he said to the crews, whatever happened while I was on the rig would stop the minute I left because Señor Schmidt's behaviour would drive performance right back to where it had been before I arrived.

My first challenge was to be able to talk to him.

That might be difficult.I had been sent to the rig without the people on it knowing anything about me or what I did. My time had been bought and paid for by the country manager without any reference to the rig.

This sent a message to Señor Schmidt that was loud and clear. "We are sending you this man to help because you are failing." For Schmidt it was like a physical slap in the face. He had been doing the best that he could and now they were sending him someone who had never been on a rig before to help. It was insulting."

How could someone who had never been on one of these rigs before manage it better than he who had been working these rigs for nearly ten years?"

He did not say anything but it was clear from his manner that he had received the message.I knew that I had some work to do with Señor Schmidt.

From previous experience I knew that trying to sell an idea to someone in Señor Schmidt's position was the wrong thing to do.

As he said himself, he had been doing his best and to suggest that someone like me, a consultant with no experience of working on a land rig could do any better was insulting.

I knew that Señor Schmidt would not consider changing the way he behaved unless he could see value in making a change. This meant that I had to make the change first and then when he asked me how the change had happened, he would listen to what I had to say.

I knew how to be patient.

Peter A Hunterwww.breakingthemould.co.uk and at www.hunter-consultants.co.uk.

posted by Peter A Hunter at 10:51 AM 0 comments