Military Leadership

It is Armed Forces Day on the 24^th June and many people’s thoughts turn to our military community. I don’t dwell on the past but at this time of the year I do think a little bit more about my own military service. I left the Royal Navy 4 years ago and since then have been lucky enough to be working for Delt Shared Services as their Chief Projects Officer. Delt’s staple diet is the provision of IT managed services to Plymouth City Council, Devon NHS Integrated Care Board, Devon NHS Partnership Trust, and Transforming Futures Multi Academy Trust. We also provide a range of other services such as soft and hard facilities management, print & mail, procurement, finance, payroll and pensions, and, of course, project management. To deliver this wide range of shared services we need staff with various skills, including leadership.

A key skill of being a successful military operator is leadership. In my head, leadership is not a title or a job description it is a state of mind. The young sailor planning their part of ship maintenance, the chef conjuring up another amazing meal for 200 (and there are many other examples) and then working with their team to deliver are just as important leadership roles as the Commanding Officer of a ship, a squadron or a regiment. Young people serving in our military are exposed to leadership and leading from day 1 of their time in uniform.

As an Armed Forces Covenant signatory Delt is proud to support our military community. We hire veterans and use their leadership skills in our business. As we go through our annual performance management reviews, we select staff to attend one of our leadership training courses. In April this year our leadership training culminated with a graduation ceremony at Devonport Hall. Nine staff members completed the course, 4 of them were ex-military and covered all 3 Services. On that day I was immensely proud of all our brilliant Delt staff. Everyone delivered excellent presentations summing up their own personal leadership journey. There were some amazing leadership lessons, a great deal of emotional intelligence displayed and a few tears! It was especially rewarding to see 4 ex Royal Navy, Royal Airforce and Army men and women show how the experience they gained in the military and the lessons they learned during training and on operations allowed them to operate with confidence in a different environment.

Thank you from Delt to all our Armed Forces for your amazing work, and a special shout out to all the veterans working at Delt for your contribution to our success.

Gary Pettitt, Chief Projects Officer

Send Three and Four Pence…

Proper and effective communications is often cited as fundamental to success. So how do we ensure we hit the target when it comes to efficient project communications? How can we avoid the message, send reinforcements we are going to advance, being received as, send three and four pence we are going to a dance!?

An effective project leader needs to be a good communicator and like leadership the way we deliver our message needs to work for the situation we find ourselves in. We also need to think carefully about our desired outcome, our audience, the methods of communication that are available to us and the timing of our messaging. I once found myself being asked to send a letter rather than an email!! My instinct was to push back, but that was a battle I couldn’t win. Best to accept that this person required information to be communicated in a particular way. I conformed and reaped the rewards with a relationship that delivered results. You need to adapt to your customers’ needs, a telephone call, an MS Teams / Zoom / Google Meet… call (camera off or on?) or do they prefer an email or a DM? They might even want you to come to their office and meet in person! Understanding the how of communications is an important step to effective dialogue.

What about the when? You are on the train merrily chugging down the track for your weekend away and the train slows to a halt unexpectedly. To start with you are fine, after all your risk analysis showed that only 89% of UK trains arrive on time (made up statistic!) so your mitigation measure is to arrive 30 mins before you really need to. All good. Naturally you want to know what has happened, something has changed so your plan needs updating. Five, 10, 15 minutes pass and no announcement, you start getting agitated. You need input, your plan needs updating. An early acknowledgement of the delay and commitment to update soon would have sufficed. The timing of customer communications needs careful consideration and experience can be a factor. It is, however, just as simple as asking. Talk to your customer, what do they need / want to know and when. What events need an immediate call? Most importantly don’t leave anyone you work with in the dark, if you haven’t been in contact with your customer for a couple of weeks then you ought to do that now.

I wouldn’t advocate style over substance but the way you package your customer communications will serve as an important indicator to your professional persona. The situation will largely dictate your style, a dynamic young AI start-up will arguably need a different style from a global ‘blue chip’ behemoth. Judge the situation, your audience, the output you desire and craft your message carefully using an appropriate style. And at the risk of being branded a pedant, or even worse having this blog returned to me with all the spelling and grammar errors highlighted, getting spelling and grammar correct and eradicating typing errors is important. The Amstrad PCW 9512 that I had in the late 80’s had a fabulous spelling and grammar checker, so there are no excuses!

Given the considerable reduction in face-to-face meetings there is one aspect of communication style that is now increasingly important and that is how we say things. Google tells me that 10% of conflict is due to a difference of opinion and 90% is due to delivery and tone of voice. Example (stern voice), ‘I need you to get the PID for the Network project sorted today, no excuses just get it done!’ or (calm soothing voice), ‘we need to have a chat about the Network project PID, it needs to be done today. I know you are busy so let’s talk about how we can prioritise your work to give you the best chance of finishing today.’

In summary, communicate with your customers never leave them in the dark, even saying that nothing has changed is valuable. In doing so you need to consider the situation you are in, the desired output, what you need to say, when to say it and how you will deliver the message. Remember the well-worn, but still relevant, George Bernard Shaw quote, ‘the single biggest issue with communications is the illusion that it has taken place’ So always check understanding, you need reinforcements not 3 and 4 pence!

Gary Pettitt, Chief Projects Officer

Questions vs Answers

In case you don’t know about Alex the parrot, let me introduce you to him.  Alex is/was (unfortunately he is no longer with us) considered one of the most articulate animals to interact with humans.  Alex developed a considerable vocabulary and was, amongst other things, able to answer questions about the name and colour of objects.  This is pretty impressive, but perhaps not out of the ordinary given there are monkeys, dogs, seals and other mammals that have similarly mastered language skills.  What makes Alex more interesting is that he was the first known animal that formed his own question.

Once he had mastered the primary colours, he was shown his reflection in a mirror and asked what colour he was.  That’s quite a breakthrough, no longer is he showing willingness to “talk” for a food reward, this was a parrot wanting to use language to enquire and learn more.

The point is that one of the key attributes of the best staff is their interest in development and learning.  In other words they are ceaselessly asking questions.  Alex stands out amongst all the other talking animals in that he wanted to use his language skills to understand what the name of his colour was.   (Makes you wonder if he wasn’t a bit disappointed to be grey given the wide pallet of colours that other parrots enjoy?).

Since the arrival of AI chat bots – with Chat GPT that wrote a previous blog for us – the end game appears in sight for those of us who thought that we were employed on the basis of being able to answer questions.  Whilst at times we are expected to know the answers to do our jobs, the arrival of software with the power to understand natural language questions and provide uniquely crafted and increasingly better responses is going to reduce the premium given to roles requiring expertise or analysis.  One of the vital skills in a post AI chat bot world has to be knowing what the right questions to ask are.  This like any other skill, is one that requires practise.  Making time to consciously reflect on the situation we find ourselves in and find the right questions to ask in order to resolve problems or exploit opportunities will be what we need in a modern workforce.   Anyone with these skills might also be the more interesting people to share time with too!  So, returning to the issue posed by the headline on this article and asking whether which is better: questions or answers, I would contend that whilst we can’t ignore the power of knowing the answer, in the long term those who understand the power of asking a question will be more successful.

If you don’t believe me about Alex you can find out more about him here: https://www.bl.uk/the-language-of-birds/articles/alex-the-african-grey-parrot

Peter Honeywell, Non-Executive Director

There’s No I In Team

The challenge of the unknown, being asked to develop a new service line, or take over an area of the business that I have had previous exposure to is always an exciting but scary journey. 

I have been privileged in my professional career to be given the opportunities to develop new services, new customers, and new people. Of late this has been focussed specifically on developing new services to new and existing customers.  Whilst daunting, it’s not something we at Delt shy away from, as we have a collective passion to deliver successful outcomes for our customers and partner organisations. 

Our latest venture has been the introduction and integration of Estates Management Services, and now a year in I’m confident to say that there has been a successful transition of the services and significant improvements to our customers. Who, in turn, have a better environment for their service users. Is it easy? No! But with the right mindset, risk appetite and positive can-do attitude we have steered the turbulent waters of turning a service around. 

We have always had a great track record of helping our staff to grow beyond their existing roles, and supported them as their personal aspirations are realised. It’s only one small step to take those personal aspirations and use these to define and drive service improvement, be this at a senior strategic level, or on the ground teams. By selling the vision, of the future service outcomes, and then supporting the whole team on the journey we can grow from the services seeded by customers. Those customers who want to see improvements but have completing priorities with their own primary service needs, to freeing already performing teams to be the best they can. 

For me, personally, this summer has been emotionally challenging as I was given the opportunity to take a team from one of our education customers and improve the delivery of the service, ultimately to improve the learning experience of some of our communities most vulnerable and challenged pupils. The areas requiring attention were so diverse it was difficult to know where to start, but having those challenging conversations with our customers allowed us to identify the areas which were causing them the greatest challenges and, at least, provided areas of focus.  

Collectively we developed a plan of action which was shared, and then we simply started at the beginning and worked though the defined tasks, overcoming obstacles as we went. Being able to clearly lead at times and knowing when to step back and let others take the helm helped to form bonds and gave aspiring leaders the opportunity to shine. Providing ongoing communication was key to successful delivery. From co-ordinating contractors, feeding back to stakeholders and sharing the success with the internal teams. It’s been a long time since I have done physical work but even that was required, on occasion, to support and build the team, walking a mile in their shoes gave me a valuable insight into their challenges and how I can help to overcome those with them. 

Ultimately, we made a promise to our customers, and we delivered on that promise, at the same time forming new relationships and strengthening existing bonds. Whilst exhausting, it has been one of the most rewarding summers that I have had in any workplace. 

Damean Miller, Chief Services Officer