'Once upon a time there was a Council rowing team.The Council and a company from the private sector agreed to hold a race. Each boat would contain eight men.Both teams worked really hard to get into the best shape. On the day of the race, despite both teams being in a similar condition, the private company team won by one mile.The mood in the Council team was really close to freezing point. The top management decided to win the race next year. So they established a committee of analysts, mostly internal but with representation from each service, the stakeholders and a member…oh, and some guy who knew something about rowing (he’d been on a boating lake when at school). Their remit was to observe the situation, do a risk analysis (ensuring each risk was marked red, amber or green) and recommend an appropriate solution.After several weeks of detailed analysis, the committee found that the private company team had seven rowers and only one captain.…and the Council team had 7 captains and only one rower.Facing such a critical scenario, the management showed unexpected wisdom: they hired a consultancy to restructure the Council team.After several months the consultants came to the conclusion that there were too many captains and too few rowers in the Council team. A solution was proposed based on this analysis: the structure of the Council team had to change. With immediate effect, there would be only four captains in the team led by two Directors and a new Head. Besides that, they suggested that the Council improve the rower’s working environment, ensure his work/life balance was OK and offer a reward and recognition scheme to incentivise high performance and maximise impactfulnessisation. There was to be a 5-day workshop for the rower.The next year, the private company team won by two miles.The Council management dismissed the rower from the team (following a long and drawn out competency and capability procedure, followed by a voluntary severance package) on the grounds of his unsatisfactory performance.…but a bonus was paid to the management team for strong leadership and the motivation that the team had showed during the preparation phase.The consultancy prepared a new analysis which showed that the strategy was good, the motivation was O.K, but the tool used was sub-standard and had to be improved.
