The Resilient Manager by Adrian Furnham

Author:Adrian Furnham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

L. PAPER TRAIL CULTURE

Anyone who has to face, in any capacity, a work tribunal (or, indeed, a Commons Select Committee) soon begins to become very conscious of the value of the paper trail. And yes, it is still called that – in the electronic age of the paperless office, we need paper trails.

What is meant by a paper trail is essentially sequential evidence. Evidence on paper or email that appraisals were held, warnings were given, statements were made. Lawyers have learnt how to have a field day humiliating the senior manager or emotional employee whose only ‘data’ or evidence is the memory of some (traumatic) event. The ‘my word against yours’ philosophy soon looks pretty pathetic.

People learn, often after some costly (in every sense) experience, to ‘take and keep’ notes. All those who give advice, deal with the public or manage others learn to do this. Teachers and doctors, managers and coaches, indeed practically anybody who deals with the public (who sometimes treat complaining as a new, rewarding Olympic sport) need to learn to gather evidence.

Failure to do so, as BBC editors have found, can mean that a ‘10-second conversation during lunch’ will return to haunt you many months later.

The evidence needs to be detailed. In fact, some organizations provide ‘record sheets’ to help keep professional records of all the salient details of a meeting: date and time, others present, agreements entered into. Some even require that these are signed.

Don’t all meetings begin with a request that the minutes of the last meeting are agreed? It’s so common and tedious that little or no attention is paid to this ritual. As a consequence, highly savvy managers learn to subtly doctor the really important bits lest they arise in a later hearing. Did not everybody agree that the minutes were an accurate record of what was said? As a bit of fun, try challenging the minutes at your next meeting and see all the confusion that follows.

But some organizations have turned paper trailing into an art form. The cover your backside, put it in print, document all events culture has to be seen to be experienced. Dare one suggest that it is found much more in the public, as opposed to the private, sector? Imagine a Silicon Valley Group of entrepreneurs, inventors and boffins keeping records of all the meetings they go to. Indeed, by contrast, imagine the number of meetings that civil servants attend that are not extremely heavy on paper trails.

Is it possible to characterize people, and the organizations in which they work, as being at one extreme paper-trail-obsessive and at the other paper-trail-phobic? The obsessives are record-keeping documenters who aim to capture and record everything that is done, said, proposed, and delivered by others. They are Hansardists, archivists, documenters of events. Indeed, many are so busy taking notes, they seem to have little time for anything else. It can take as long to write up the minutes of a meeting than to run it in the first place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.