I’ve never been impressed by the giants who turn up at conferences and tell us how they achieved their medal, or record and then feel empowered to touch my life and tell me how to organise my miserable, underachieving existence.
Good luck to them. I love their stories of success. The big moments. I am full of praise and admiration but they are not me, not like me and never, will I be like them.
For me, there’s a disconnect. I find it hard to get excited about sports people who are paid, in some cases a small fortune, to win.
That said… the excitement was off-the-scale. The tension unbearable. What a night…
… we were gathered around a tiny telly. A flickering black and white picture. It was 1966…
‘They think it’s all over’ said Kenneth Wolstenholme … ‘it is now!’
We’d won the football World Cup.
Now, here’s the thing… it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t win it again and again. We were the greatest footballing nation in the world.
Our skills, resilience (although at that time I don’t think the word resilience had been invented), our manager’s perspicacity (not a word normally associated with the working-class game of footie) would dominate for a generation.
I just expected we would go on winning.
Expectations. I have learned; expectation is the mother of all disappointment.
Expectations take people and organisations for granted. Do that and you’re on a slippery slope. It’s a basic management error.
BoJo’s kamikaze policy, is to let the virus rip, creating a ‘hybrid immunity’.
The point is, he ‘expects’ the NHS to cope with the consequences of, some predict, 100,000 Covid cases a day and ‘expects’ the consequences on services, waiting-lists, staff, hosptials, primary care, long-term impact, costs and the hopes and expectations of people, their lives and livelihoods, will somehow be muddled through.
Opening coffee shops and night-clubs is going to come with a very expensive price tag. Cancer lists are, already, being cancelled.
Mandating people to wear masks on public transport looks, to me, like it comes for free. Creating a free-for-all on the tube? We'll never know the cost and BoJo won’t want anyone to count it.
Expectations… be careful how you mess with them. Your expectations can be very different to mine.
In the House of Commons and at the session with the Select Committee chairs, on Wednesday, I expected BoJo to have some answer.
Alas, he dodged questions on what to expect; the forecast of deaths and hospital admissions. He is a poor leader. I didn’t expect much else but I did expect the MPs to find their collective cajones and press him.
Managing expectations? Five things.
1 Reality. Face it. Tell people where it’s at… if hospital admissions and extending waiting times are BoJo’s ‘price worth paying’, to get people back to work, it's bonkers but he must say so and argue his case.
Running way from reality creates rumours, feeds speculation and undermines confidence.
2 Communicate… as always, the foundation of good management. Crystallise the message and use four steps to make it stick;
Say it,
spell it out,
say it again
and then remind people what you’ve told them.
3 Explain… what the future looks like. Prepare people.
The NHS can’t do every thing. It can’t get stuck into waiting lists if it is full of covid patients stuck in hospital beds and staff are stuck at home, self isolating.
Tell people; once this hiatus is out of the way there will be a national, emergency-drive on reducing waiting lists, spell out how it will be done and what to expect.
4 Create buy-in. Share the vision, gain trust, be authentic and honest… we can’t expect BoJo to manage any of that.
5 Fall out. Prepare for the consequences; if people will face problems, in some way, be honest and tell them how they’ll be supported.
In this case it means NHS staff, families and people caught up in the nightmare of being ‘pinged’ by T&T.
Can BoJo manage any of this? Alas, I don’t think we can expect that.
Have the best weekend you can and as for that game…
