T5 - a perspective

Well, it hasn't taken long for consultancies and experts to start drawing the conclusion that the goings on at Terminal 5 were caused by staff being not sufficiently 'engaged' in the changes.

It's easy to stand and make judgments from the sidelines, isn't it? I spent years as an in-house person before moving into consultancy, and these days I spend a lot of my time writing and speaking about good practice. I have to say, it's a heck of a lot easier to talk about it than it is to be in the middle of it trying to make it work. Much as I prefer training and coaching to doing pure IC work now, I still do it so that I keep getting brought down to earth with a bump and don't end up making lofty statements whilst having the distinct advantage that I never have to get my own hands dirty.

Back when I was in-house, I remember getting really fed up with a consultant who stood up at an event and lambasted my company for not actively pursuing 'living the brand'-type work whilst we were going through bankruptcy. "Who will be the companies who thrive when they come through these downturns?" this person said smugly. "The ones who, despite everything, keep on with their brand work, or the ones who say now isn't the time and batten down the hatches?" Maybe s/he would have liked to try talking about brand values to thousands of employees who were worried we hadn't even got enough money to pay their wages that month, or debating whether to try and jump ship now rather than later, in case we ended up going belly up and not being able to make redundancy payments down the line.

Then there's that old chestnut 'it's all down to engagement'. Obviously. It's the answer to all business ills. Let's forget about the baggage handling system collapsing and causing massive operational disruption - actually, it's all down to leaders not sufficiently engaging their teams.

It's a handy word, engagement. Everything used to be down to 'culture'. Now we can lob 'engagement' into the mix, too.  It's dangerous thinking, and it's why some leaders end up thinking communication/engagement is the answer to everything. CEO's got a massive payrise whilst everyone else has their pay frozen and - surprise - everyone's fed up? Nothing to do with the pay issue - it's all down to rubbish communication, so we're the ones to fix it.

I know people from both BA and BAA who are extremely capable communication professionals. I like and respect them, and I go to them for case studies because I know they do good work. I hope that if there do happen to be comms-related things to be learned from the T5 goings on, maybe at some stage they'll be able to talk about it. Although I have my doubts, because we don't exactly make it easy for people to talk about learning points, difficulties or mistakes. The last person I know that did it at a comms event ended up all over the national media because some kind soul took his comments to a journalist. 

What's my point? I guess it's, let's not jump to over-simplistic conclusions from the sidelines. Coupled with a bit of wishful thinking that we could create an environment for people to talk easily about mistakes when they do happen. That's where the real learning is - but I doubt we'll all be queuing up to talk about them on a conference stand any time soon ...

Sue   

Comments

[Indy]

Boringly I largely just agree.

The things that I noticed in the T5 situation were:

1) BA copped a lot of flak and BAA largely skated by without as much criticism. Why? Perhaps because BAA's only actual paying customer is BA. However, many of the problems I encounter when flying seem to start with BAA. Politically, I think BAA is something we should all be making more noise about.

2) Perhaps because I used to be responsible for rolling out systems, to me this wasn't an "engagement/communications failure" so much as "total project management idiocy" aka "failure to test before going massively, publicly, live."

3) The one communications aspect I did pick up and blogged about was the way top management (including communicators) all just hid!

This suggested to me:

a) A lack of crisis management communication planning. (The lack of generic crisis planning was all too evident as well.)

b) The lack of courage to stand up and take the flak from senior types can't have done much for the morale of people on the ground.