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Internal? External? Or something different altogether?

16th May 2012
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May 16 – Heavens, it’s Wednesday and too much of the week has passed already for me to ever get all I hoped to done.

You can have all the scheduling tools on earth, but when, as happened this morning, a major client contact manager wanted two hours of time to work through his logic for presenting our contract renewal without going out to re-tender then you drop tools and give him all the time he needs.

This has not meant other issues have gone away. The replacement for the departed member of my management team is a pre-occupation. AM, East and I have spent a lot of time considering internal candidates and whether we only want to advertise that way, or whether we want to go externally. It’s not that we have no internal candidates, but equally we have none who stand out who we think might take the job. The best person, by far, would need to relocate and we can’t imagine he will. Of the rest, well, none of us are sure. Which then leads to us thinking we might reorganize and create more, smaller teams with a range of leaders reporting to East. The trouble is, some customers always want to talk to him (or me).

So that’s one agenda item.

Another is the pay review and the suggestion I noted last week that we’re discriminatory. This one we’re happy we are OK on. AM and I really can’t see a challenge but we’re seeing those who expressed concern tomorrow. The absolutely last thing you want to do in such cases is to suggest you’re not taking the issue seriously. So we’ll be in A1 listening mode first – which is key to success, and then we’ll present. But I seriously think that will not stick.

Which just leaves me with a management reorganisation to fret about.

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Replies (3)

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By alistair_king
17th May 2012 06:07

Interesting idea

I like the small teams idea - that leaves you less reliant on the presence of individual staff members and less vulnerable to individual misbehaviour.

How will you make sure that teams are sufficently empowered to gain customer respect whilst keeping the transparency in reporting team activities to management. Also will you be mentoring teams to ensure they develop in a healthy manner?

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By Mike Truman
17th May 2012 13:19

Past history

Thinking about the pay issue, is there an argument based on past pay for these roles if and when they were both held by men? For example, could it be argued that the roles are comparable with those of you when you were FD, and Ops at the same time? What were your comparative salaries?

And I have obviously been reading this blog for FAR too long...

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By neiltonks
17th May 2012 13:57

Relocation

You say you "can't imagine" that your best internal candidate will relocate, but have you actually asked him about this? It would be a shame if you recruited externally and then found that this individual would have been prepared to relocate.

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