All change seats when the music stops
Created | Updated Apr 21, 2003
All in all its been an eventful 6 months and I thought today would be a good day to take stock. Where to start? Well the beginning is the usual place but exactly where the beginning is, is all rather beyond me so I’ll begin in the middle. Last summer my job was reorganised, restructured, reengineered, all euphemisms for generally mucked about. I work for the NHS and we have just undergone the biggest reorganisation of health care since 1745, some of us still remember the reorganisation of 1745 and talk of it often.
Within my small bit of the health service not a single Director survived the exercise which was called Shifting the Balance of Power or as we fondly refer to it as the Summer of the Long Knives. I fortunately sit below that tier of management and am one of only two people in my organisation that lived to tell the tale. It was a strange time with feelings of insecurity, elation at being promoted but also pangs of guilt. Not that I’d done or omitted to do anything that should have made me feel that way but watching others being squeezed out of the door was very uncomfortable. Oh I’ve read all the management books that explain how employees feel when something like this happens, even lectured others on the very subject but it’s very different when it happens to you. Rather like knowing that if you stick your hand in a candle flame it will hurt and the pain caused by actually having it done to you.
It started when my then Chief executive failed to get his own job back in the reorganisation, most had expected him to be appointed. I didn’t. He was and remains a thoroughly nice chap but I had noticed sideways glances over the meeting tables when he spoke about his grand design for the future. Looks not dissimilar to relatives gathered round a terminal patients bed as he tells of his plans for the summer. Then there were the whispered conversations, which ended as he walked into a room. He was to all intents a dead man walking.
The day that it was announced he had been replaced was funereal and conversations were those more commonly heard at a wake. “He was a good man and respected by all who worked for him …” or “ I don’t know how will we manage without him?”. The ones who got on with him least were those who made the greatest fuss at the “injustice of it all…”.
Bob took it all with good grace, though his complexion greyed as he tried to understand what had gone so terribly wrong. He had to continue until the new chief exec was in post and the toll on him was visible for all to see, meetings were held where he was unable to make decisions. “I can agree in principle but of course Frances will need to ratify my decision” How the words must have stuck in his throat, Frances of all people. She had little experience of how to run a Trust and now was about to take his job. His job!
Bob cleared his desk after a week, no confirmed reappointment, just left. His leaving do was a mixture of forced laughter and bon hommie.
Frances started a week later, I was called into her office to discuss my new role and I arrived wondering if I had a new role or was to be the next out of the door. The conversation was friendly enough, jovial even. After 15 minutes I decided I quite liked this new boss, she was bright, very bright. Her eyes sparked with passion as she talked of her vision for primary care, for the new organisation and for change. I sat spellbound and as each second ticked by knew Bob hadn’t stood a chance. It was in those first few moments I decided I had to make a choice, she knew it and so did I. Was I for her or against her, there was no middle ground. I left the interview feeling very disloyal, torn between what would be and what had been.
But, I had survived, I was even promoted and got to write my own job description but it was an “interesting” time
Within my small bit of the health service not a single Director survived the exercise which was called Shifting the Balance of Power or as we fondly refer to it as the Summer of the Long Knives. I fortunately sit below that tier of management and am one of only two people in my organisation that lived to tell the tale. It was a strange time with feelings of insecurity, elation at being promoted but also pangs of guilt. Not that I’d done or omitted to do anything that should have made me feel that way but watching others being squeezed out of the door was very uncomfortable. Oh I’ve read all the management books that explain how employees feel when something like this happens, even lectured others on the very subject but it’s very different when it happens to you. Rather like knowing that if you stick your hand in a candle flame it will hurt and the pain caused by actually having it done to you.
It started when my then Chief executive failed to get his own job back in the reorganisation, most had expected him to be appointed. I didn’t. He was and remains a thoroughly nice chap but I had noticed sideways glances over the meeting tables when he spoke about his grand design for the future. Looks not dissimilar to relatives gathered round a terminal patients bed as he tells of his plans for the summer. Then there were the whispered conversations, which ended as he walked into a room. He was to all intents a dead man walking.
The day that it was announced he had been replaced was funereal and conversations were those more commonly heard at a wake. “He was a good man and respected by all who worked for him …” or “ I don’t know how will we manage without him?”. The ones who got on with him least were those who made the greatest fuss at the “injustice of it all…”.
Bob took it all with good grace, though his complexion greyed as he tried to understand what had gone so terribly wrong. He had to continue until the new chief exec was in post and the toll on him was visible for all to see, meetings were held where he was unable to make decisions. “I can agree in principle but of course Frances will need to ratify my decision” How the words must have stuck in his throat, Frances of all people. She had little experience of how to run a Trust and now was about to take his job. His job!
Bob cleared his desk after a week, no confirmed reappointment, just left. His leaving do was a mixture of forced laughter and bon hommie.
Frances started a week later, I was called into her office to discuss my new role and I arrived wondering if I had a new role or was to be the next out of the door. The conversation was friendly enough, jovial even. After 15 minutes I decided I quite liked this new boss, she was bright, very bright. Her eyes sparked with passion as she talked of her vision for primary care, for the new organisation and for change. I sat spellbound and as each second ticked by knew Bob hadn’t stood a chance. It was in those first few moments I decided I had to make a choice, she knew it and so did I. Was I for her or against her, there was no middle ground. I left the interview feeling very disloyal, torn between what would be and what had been.
But, I had survived, I was even promoted and got to write my own job description but it was an “interesting” time
