A Coded Message

Sports club? Society? You know what – it really doesn’t matter.

It’s an old chestnut. An ongoing debate in some institutions. And something that occupies far too much time for people who work in student activity departments.

You could be fooled into thinking that what is a sports club and what is a society is the single most important question in activities today. But it’s actually a bluff, a smokescreen. You can come up with lots of contradictory ways of defining who fits in what bracket but at the end of the day we all know what it’s really about. It’s what it’s always about – money.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but I would make the sweeping generalisation that in the majority of unions there are separate pots of funding for sports clubs and societies. And that furthermore the sports club pot is bigger. The reason that people want to be classified as sports clubs is because they’ll have a chance to access more cash. The reason people want to keep certain groups as societies is so that they don’t dilute the pot and mean that their club will end up getting less money.

Throw an AU structure into the equation and you’ve got an added complication.

The issue for me that often Sports club or society is the wrong question or at least, the wrong way of looking at the situation. The decisions over definitions are made to make life easier for staff and sabbaticals, not necessarily to make life better for the students taking part in those groups.

So, what should we actually be talking about? Well, it’s probably many different things.

Firstly, there needs to be an assessment of what groups actually need in terms of support (both cash and staffing) – not what they can currently access. If you have an expensive group, it’s expensive regardless of whether you would call it a club or society. Necessity should be your steer, not any name bias or feeling about the importance of one versus the other.

Secondly, combine your funding pots. Not only that – make societies have a say on sports club funding and vice versa. Most of the major misunderstandings that come out around funding are because one side doesn’t understand the others position. £4000 might look like a lot of money to give a group (and it is) but when it’s only actually 10% of their yearly turnover it’s a different picture. 

Thirdly, get people to be realistic. Do you really need £4000? Sure it would be great to have a big sack of cash to spend on whatever you want, but do you actually need that to run the group? If you can run quite happily on £250 then that’s actually all that you need. By the same token, if a group is taking tons of grant cash and should be putting in more money of their own, make that happen. Remind people that Union grants are only a subsidy on their activities and not the main source of funding. 

Fourthly, resign yourself to the fact that not everything will fall nice and easily into one category. At Leeds we had ten different categories for groups and there was still times when a group was one thing one day and something else the next: General Interest society Pool entering BUCS competitions being a good example. How can you change the system that you have in place so that it has the flexibility to deal with reality – not how you would like things to be.

And finally, remember that the majority of students don’t care as they’ll call it what they want anyway. The important thing is that no matter what they call it, they have a fun time doing it and get the most they can out of it. 

Hopefully, not burdened by the politics of naming.

Stop Protesting and Start Collecting

Dr Rowan Williams thinks they’re wrong. Samantha Morton thinks they’re wrong. More than 50 MPs think they are wrong. The thing is – they’re not.

It might be hard to hear but the BBC is right in this issue. They need to maintain journalistic distance. But they’re damned if they do and they damned if they don’t. If they don’t, the current hurricane of abuse comes their way. If they do show the commercial, they will be accused of political bias and further complaints will no doubt flood through their door. Sky News know this as well, which is why they’re not going to broadcast it.

The time has come to stop wasting time by protesting about the BBC and to concentrate on what is actually important. If a fraction of the energy that is being put into attacking the BBC was used to collect money for the DEC, the charities involved would be miles ahead of where they are now. So I ask everyone who is boycotting and balloting and organising on facebook to attack the Beeb to stop, put their hands in their pockets and donate. And then start fundraising yourselves. If you really care so much about this issue, they are a million ways to get off your arse and do something productive. I’m not going to be happy until there’s at least as many fundraising events on facebook as there are members of groups against the BBC.

Update: There’s a cracking article from Emily Bell at the Guardian on this

Atheism makes you uncomfortable? Well, tough.

I think Ariane Sherine knew that once they started the atheist bus campaign there would be people who wouldn’t like it. And I’m sure they probably would have expected the associated hypocracy that has come along with some of the complaints that people have made. I mean, its not like religious belief and hypocracy are two concepts that have never met each other before. But the direction of some of the complaints really, to borrow a phrase, beggers belief.

Third Sector today reports that fours MPs have signed an early day motion to call for the removal of the bus ads – Original story is here.

I have no doubt that being a practising Muslim or Christian means that it is potentially hurtful when your views are challenged. But the idea that it makes you embarrassed and uncomfortable to sit on a bus where this is an advert on the side is probably going a bit far. Firstly, if you are a believer of any faith it would be nice to think that your views are so solidly held that one statement will not totally affect your confidence and belief. You should have the strength of mind and the presence of character to be able to challenge this statement – not through asking for its removal but through intelligent debate. Its not like the forums aren’t out there – news sites and blogs are buzzing with this stuff.

Secondly, and more flippantly, there are far more embarrassing adverts that appear on the side of buses. I came to work on a bus that had an advert for the film Sex Drive on the side. Its not a massive step to think of it as a bus full of perverts driving off to commit some sordid activities.

Oh, that’s right. It is. Because actually as people we have the ability to separate a message on public transport from the people contained inside it and not tar them with that brush, nor seek to believe that they embody that advert. 

Saying that God maybe doesn’t exist is not religiously offensive. It’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold and to promote. 

To my mind, the atheist bus campaign is no different to adverts for the Alpha course or to adverts promoting religion that scream from the outside of churches and synagogues. What if I don’t believe in God and I see these adverts? I am allowed to be offended, complain of being uncomfortable and embarrassed?

I could be but I’m not. And the reason that I’m not is that I believe in the right of those people who do believe to freely express themselves. I might disagree. Strongly. But I would never attempt to stop the dialogue. 

So far so humdrum and normal, but it was the section at the very bottom of the page that really made me smile. Apparently the campaign group Christian Voice previously complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the adverts should be removed because, get this, “the slogan could not be substantiated”. Pot, kettle? Because the existence of God has been so thoroughly well proven in the last 2000 years right? 

You might disagree with it and you might not like it but going out of your way to ban it is oppression of faith (or the lack of if you want to get into a philosophical debate about it). And that has historically worked out well hasn’t it? So, stop complaining and start putting the contrary view. The article at Third Sector also talks about another early day motion to run a campaign on buses saying, “But What If There Is?”. I love the idea that you could end up with an ongoing circular debate which there can be no active conclusion to running in public through the media of transport. 

Or at least no conclusion until He comes and smites us all for being so bloody stupid….

Rags should fund Action groups

If Student Unions are serious about making a positive impact on the local communities in which they are involved, they must have volunteering projects that are based around actual community need. 

This sounds like a blindingly obvious statement doesn’t it? Why then do we run projects on the basis of tradition? Why do we struggle to get children for certain projects? If the need was there, the kids would be there. Right??

Its strange but sometimes the most obvious thing is right in front of you and you’re not already doing it. To wit: Rag groups should be actively raising money and donating it to their local student community action groups. That way, the local community would feel the full benefit of students working on their behalf.

Whilst this sounds obvious, how many Rag groups actually do this right now? I know here at Leeds that our Rag group has supported occasional projects in a very ad hoc kind of a way. There’s no ongoing commitment to that form of fundraising – although there are yearly projects that run that support certain overseas charities.

I’m not saying that Rag groups shouldn’t raise money for national or international charities – there should be a balance. Their giving strategy should outline how they will split their fundraising efforts to ensure that all areas receive a goodly slice of the pie and are not forgotten when people do fundraising. Because we mustn’t forget that there is an educational benefit from people fundraising. If they’re doing it properly they will often learn more about the charity they are associating themselves with, take an active interest in them and continue to align themselves with that charity for a time to come.

Placing this emphasis back on our local groups that involve students working hard to make a difference to the people in their local community we can engender more of a spirit of community cohesion. And a brighter future for everyone. Amen.

It’s not about being right. It’s about doing the right thing.

It’s one of the most challenging things to do as a manager – accept that your idea might not be the best one in the room. 

People often think that once they are in a position of authority, it is their responsibility to come up with all of the solutions to everyone’s problems. Not only that, but also their solutions will be the best solution that anyone can think of. Managers see it as being their duty to troubleshoot, removing barriers for their colleagues and answering the questions that stop them from performing to their optimum level.

It takes a large amount of humility (and no little ego control) to accept that yours is not the best solution and that someone else in your team has the better idea. It’s a challenge that I struggle with on a regular basis. Because I think we all have a part of ourselves that wants to be seen as providing the solution. For certain managers, I think its more than this – its a sense that if they aren’t coming up with the solution, well, what the hell are they doing then?

The answer is of course they are facilitating the solution. They are providing the environment (often just the space in someone’s working calendar) for the solution or new idea to be produced. And providing some solutions that get shot down are a helpful and necessary part of this process.

For example, I used to work with someone who would come to me with a problem and then after I’d suggested something they could do, they would counter back with a different, more perfect solution. It used to frustrated and irritate me. I used to think “If you know the answer, why are you bothering to ask me?” Until I realised that she actually needed the conversation to articulate her solution. She knew what she had to do but needed both the chance to explain her plan and the confirmation that it was the best way forward.

So don’t feel you need to be the ultimate problem solver or ideas person. And don’t feel bad when your idea gets trampled underfoot. Accept that answers are going to come from other people and that they are going to have better ideas than yourself. It’s a fact of life and the natural product of working within a team. Enjoy it.

2008 or 1997

The speculation, whilst fantastic, is building a hype that it will be almost impossible to live up to. Should Obama win tonight (and I really hope to God he does), the world will not change overnight. Things will still be 90% the same. There are changes that will take place – if you’re black, you’ll have someone in the world’s top job, the king of the universe, a true role model and figure head that can raise the aspirations of those who might previously have felt a sense of supression. If you’re a left-wing thinker, you’ll be praying for a change in direction and you’ll get it. If you’re an American, you’ll have a sense of expectation that your current low sense of self-esteem will be lifted as a new dawn, er dawns, over the US of States. If he wins, I’m sure we’ll see the defeated candidate concede with grace and humility. McCain will tell his party to go away and refocus. Bush will echo those sentiment. Obama? Well, Obama will no doubt be pictured walking through the streets, shaking the hands of delighted citizens and promising a change to society.

Hmm, reminds me of something.

I don’t want to sound bitter before the fact. I think that an Obama victory would be a great thing for both the world and America. Particularly in that order. But I want everyone to have a sense of perspective and not start with low expectations, but realistic ones.

In the last few years, as Brits we’ve looked back on the Blair years with an unjustified sense of disappointment. Yes, there have been things that have been terrible – I don’t have to name them. But because of our expectations, because of our overwhelming sense that he was something new and wonderful that was going to change the world, our ability to judge his success and failure has been totally screwed.

Obama is going to change the world in some ways. And in other ways he won’t. He’ll still have to wrestle the political structures that exist in his own country and internationally. He’ll still have to operate within the boundaries of Americana – in that, his political outlook, like all politicians, to a great extent will be driven by the feelings and beliefs of the people of that country. And regardless of what he or anyone else thinks, he won’t be able to click his fingers and solve Israel/Palestine, stop his country’s dependency on oil or be able to remove his troops from the Middle East by the end of the week.

Let’s be excited but reasonable. Let’s be demanding but honest. And finally, let’s not set him up to fail. Because the current weight of expectation is far too much for anyone to bear.

Oh, and if McCain wins, it’s probably time to think about ethnic cleansing the bible belt.

(This last line is clearly just a joke. Please don’t get upset….)

Brand and Ross – The cure for your recession blues

So two comedy muppets make some silly phone calls and the whole world loses its senses.

Or so it would seem to the untrained eye. But look past what’s going on here and you’ll see that this is actually a very clever tactic to stop the general public from committing mass suicide over the impending economic doom. All we need is some weekly celebrity outrage for everyone to take their mind off the fact that their house is now worth tuppence and before you know it, two years will have passed and it will be economic boom-time once more. Huzzah.

Here’s some of my suggestions for potential outrages that we can all get stupidly, overblownly upset about over the next few weeks:

Richard Madeley farts live on air into the face of a child with a poorly hand.

Sir Trevor MacDonald wops his cock out on News at Ten, banging it on the desk in time with the gongs.

Whilst on Countryfile, John Craven pats a sheep on the arse before turning to the camera and winking.

BBC’s Children in Need falls into disrepair when a human alphabet accidentially spells the words, “Get off your fat backsides and do something constructive you lazy bunch of worthless cunts” instead of the intended “We love you Pudsey” 

Simon Cowell stands up whilst one of the acts on X-Factor does another fucking godawful cover of something fucking godawful, turns to the camera mouthing the words “I’m so so sorry” and then machine guns Louis Walsh, Dannii Minogue and that one from Girls Aloud before turning the gun on himself, blasting his head across the crowd as his neck explodes in a firework of spurting bloodguts. 

Feel free to add your own atrocities below.

Tribal Business School

More from the CMI convention. And I was in a session by Jo Owen where he was talking about his discoveries in researching his book, Tribal Business School. There’s a lickle video where he explains what its all about:

http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1527.html

The way he described it to us was that there are Five Pillars:

1. The Art of Unfair Competition

Tribes survive and thrive because they get fool-proof advantages – they don’t have a bare-knuckle fist fight with a lion to kill it, they shoot it from a distance with a poisoned arrow when its unaware that it is under attack. Jo says that we need to think about how we apply this to our businesses. What are our foolproof advantages? Do we even have any? If not, how do we get them? There is a line of thinking that might say as a Students’ Union in many ways our foolproof advantages are that we have more opportunities than other businesses to impress our customers. In Student Activities, we tend to be the sole provider of activities and therefore new friendship groups – and if we’re not the only people doing that activity, we’re actually the easiest for people to discover. Because we are right on their doorsteps. In a way, the laziness of our students could be considered an unfair advantage to anyone who doesn’t have the ease of access that we have – if they have to search very hard for something, they are unlikely to bother.

An interesting point Jo brought up with this was the idea of picking the right battles. You might not be able to win all of your battles, but don’t make that worse by picking ones that you definitely aren’t going to win. Be pragmatic, sensible. I think of conflict I’ve had in the past, whether inter-departmental, between our office and a student group, or even at home with my girlfriend and I think about the wasted energy and the potential damage to reputation that has occurred unnecessarily. 

2. The Secrets of Leadership

And the main secret seems to be that the perfect leader doesn’t exist. Some of the terms used to describe the perfect leader are in polar opposition to each other. The perfect leader would implode under the weight of the contradictions. But what was noticed was that “perfect” leadership changed dependent on the situation and that at each level of leadership, the expectation of the followers (and of the leader themselves) was different. 

This didn’t feel like it was massively new news – I’ve read and practiced situational leadership so I’m already a convert to the idea of doing different things to be the best in any particular situation. But it was interesting seeing it expressed in a different context. It was also interesting when he said that followers look for 3 key things when they look to their role model leader: Courage, Contribution and Responsibility. That’s interesting because those are three concepts that can be readily applied to the workplace environment. I can think of times when I’ve seen colleagues show great courage (and also when I’ve seen them be incredibly cowardly) and how I’ve felt about them because of that. Contributing to the overall success of a project is vital, often in terms of simply making the thing happen, but it also shows the people you work with that you are not afraid to muck in to create success and that you are not asking them to do something you wouldn’t be willing to do. 

Responsibility is something which I have a major issue about. I look around and I see a culture of blame shifting, a culture where people are afraid to admit to their mistakes. When at work I tell my team – I don’t mind people making mistakes, because with the best will in the world mistakes will happen. What I want you to do is say, yes that was my mistake, and this is how I solve it. A major problem that we have in Student Activities at Leeds is where the committee members of our groups won’t own up to the mistakes they’ve made, sometimes outright lying when the evidence is right in front of them. The problem is that by trying to protect themselves, they create a blame culture and affect people’s perception of them. I think this has a clear link to Jo’s next point…

3. The Respect Agenda

In tribal societies, the emphasis is on the community. These people live and die together. Therefore, there has to be a respect for the community – the individual cannot survive without it. There is a stark comparison to be drawn with Students’ Unions here – the community as a whole supports the activities of the smaller groupings by drinking in the bars and buying things from our shops. Collectivism is at the heart of our model – this isn’t rock science. But the next bit was more like it.

In talking to a tribal leader, Jo was told that before you can respect your peers and your community, you have to respect yourself. This is particularly true if you are the leader. Now think about a society demanding funding from a Union. What is at the bottom of this request? Many would argue that there is no problem with self-respect as they often have a very high opinion of their own importance and how good their are. But does it come from deserving this because they are good or is it something else? I suspect that the main reason societies get demanding about money is because of fear. They fear that they won’t be able to run their activities, that their events won’t be very good, that their members will vote with their feet, and that as the organiser, they will look bad. However, if they are comfortable with what they provide, if they know that it really is a high quality product, they don’t have to worry about the money as people will pay the price. We’re seeing this more and more at Leeds – insecurity is removed not by providing shedloads of cash as a buffer, but through groups understanding their worth, and the worth of other groups. They look outwards at the effect they have on each other now. This is a stella leap from where we used to be. And its due to the fact that they don’t have to talk a big game any more, their activities back them up. The output backs them up.

4. The Search for Fit

The essence of survival and success is perfectly adapting to your environment. The search for excellence is an exercise in futility – stop trying to be like someone else and find out what works for your environment.

I want to take those words and tattoo them onto the foreheads of everyone who works in Students’ Unions. We talk about sharing best practice to not reinvent the wheel. What we mean is, I can’t be bothered to think of an idea, your’s works so gimme that. Every time you put something on a mailbase, take the principle and adapt it to fit your area, don’t just ape it or change the logos. To fit your environment you need to understand your environment. Get out and hear what your students are saying. Create a vision for your area and work to that. We do things differently here and people say “oh well, that’s because you’re Leeds and you can afford to”. So we can. But what can you do with your resources? What are your natural advantages? Work to them and stop thinking you’re in my shadow!

5. Change or Die

I don’t think I need to explain this one. At least I hope I don’t. We’re on a road and the only direction is forward. Don’t change for change’s sake, but keep yourself current, appropriate, interesting. Adapt to your challenges and change for the better. There’s an exercise about future thinking where you think about what it was like 10 years ago compared to now and then project what 10 years in the future will be like. Its actually pretty impossible. Here’s a list of things that didn’t exist or weren’t so ubiquitous in 1998:

iPod, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Sky+, Zoo & Nuts magazine, Pear Cider, etc, etc, etc.

Things that are everyday parts of your life (or maybe just my life) weren’t in existence. Now think about your union. What are you still doing that you did 10 years ago? How has that changed? Has it changed? If not, why not? 

Overall, Jo Owen presented a number of interesting conclusions, conclusions that can be readily adapted and implemented in a Union environment. That is, if you’re willing to take up that challenge.

Club & Society Sustainability

I went to the Chartered Management’s Annual Convention down in Birmingham last week and jolly good it was as well too. I’ve realised that the thing I like about conferences these days is that they often give you an opportunity to look at your own work from a distant, removed point of view. You might not necessarily learn any new skills but you always come away with a new idea or a new way of approaching a particular subject.

The opening speaker was from a company called Johnson Matthey – they work mainly with precious metal and using them as catalysts in chemical processes. So far, so ho hum. But it was less his background and more the concepts he was talking about that interested me. The subject of his talk was Sustainability and how as a principle it should be embedded into the planning and operations of any business. He outlined that it wasn’t simply an additional initiative outside of the day to day running of any business that could be tossed away when, like now, economic times were not so great. Instead, he stated that sustainability, if used as a key process, could lead to more efficiency and cost savings. Therefore, there was never actually a better time to focus on it.

It got me thinking – for a club or society, what does sustainability look like? Its funny because we have an award in our annual award ceremony but I don’t know if we’ve ever bottomed out exactly what we mean. Is it from an environmental point of view? Or looking simply from the direction of ongoing financial stability? Furthermore, its not a concept that we raise at any point with our committee volunteers – it doesn’t form any part of either the initial induction or the mid-term review meeting. We seem to be therefore expecting that our volunteers both understand what the concept means and that they can take this concept and from it form initiatives that affect the way their activity runs improving it for the future.

It seems to me that before we can get volunteer buy-in, we need to make sure they understand what we are saying. And I think the way that we make them understand what we are talking about is to give them clear examples of what a sustainability initiative or goal looks like. The speaker gave a couple of good examples: “Achieve zero waste to landfill” & “Halve the key resources we consume (per unit of output)”. Whilst these are clear in a commercial environment, how would this translate to the football club?

Sport is a clear area where sustainability needs to be considered but is probably furthest from people’s thinking. We calculated that last year we produced 3.1 tonnes of CO2 from the volume of travelling that our sports teams did getting to their various fixtures. We’ve tried to reduce the amount of travelling we do, the number and size of the vehicles we use, and where possible we try to put teams together in buses. We’re not doing this because we are concerned about the amount of environmental damage we are doing – its purely a cost-saving exercise. In the end, we could only reduce it to a certain level so we chose to offset our production by donating to a tree planting project. I’d like to think we’ll also be looking to use hybrid and electric vehicles when more come onto the market in the coming years.

But we are only one institution who plays sport in the UK. BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) is the governing body that covers over x institutions who take part in sport. Some of them are smaller than us in terms of their programmes, some are larger. It would be unfair to simply take our carbon total and multiple it by the number of institutions as this might over state the amount of CO2 produced by competitive sport at University level. Some interesting stats you can find though are if you search for “sustainability” on the BUCS website, it yields one result – a link to a HEFCE event on wellbeing which is running in Newcastle at the start of next year. A similar search for “environment” yields more results (40), but none of these articles refer to any kind of policy about sustainability considerations – instead the search software is simply finding the world out of context in other articles or, in 12 instances, in job adverts.

I’m not stating this to pick on BUCS or try to embarrass them – mainly because I doubt they read this blog, but also because if they did I suspect not many of them would actually give a toss. And that to me is the major problem. How do you engage someone in this debate when they don’t see it as being an important consideration of their work?

There’s a step that we can take and a step that they can take. We need to brief our committees about this and get them to understand the importance of it. As the man at the conference said, “Long term the resources are going to become more scarce and therefore, more expensive”. We need to provide them with opportunities to think about how they current run their activities and how they can do it in a more sustainable way in the future. Another quote from the man, “As soon as cost-saving was called sustainability, the team had six times as many ideas.” There has to be a way to translate this into a language that makes sense for our committee volunteers.

But we also need big groups like BUCS to take a stand and start to lead this agenda. I know its going to be difficult because it doesn’t seem particularly sexy – but this is an organisation where people will volunteer to set fixtures and change league structures. Surely amongst the mechanics there’s someone with an interest in sustainability issues and how this relates to sport.

The more people who are talking about this, the more our students are likely to pick up on it and make the changes that they need to make to their groups.