|
As this is my first face-to-face with you all I
want to tell you something about myself,
something about my management and leadership
philosophy, and something about where my
emphasis will be in the next twelve months.
Firstly, who am I and where am I coming from?
Like many of you I am an immigrant to NZ. I was
born in India of a British father and a
Portuguese mother from the colony of Goa on the
west coast of South India. I am a fourth
generation India born Brit. I came out to NZ as
a 15 year-old, and when we landed off the old
Wanganella in Wellington harbour, I thought we
had reached Paradise. I have not found any
reason in the last 50 years to change that
opinion!!
I finished my schooling in Wellington before
going to Canterbury University, to study Pure
and Applied Maths paid for by the NZ Army - my
chosen profession. I subsequently served almost
30 years in the Army, and served in such places
as Malaysia and Borneo, Vietnam and the Lebanon.
I am a graduate of the Australian Army Staff
College, and I also headed the Directing Staff
at the RNZAF Command & Staff College.
I have also taught at the NZ Administrative
Staff College. I resigned from the Army early in
order to set up a management consultancy firm,
which specialised in the installation of Total
Quality Management systems in government
departments, banks and insurance companies.
The organisations we worked in included, Tower
Corp, Prudential Insurance, Broadcasting
Communications Ltd (the microwave distribution
arm of TVNZ), the Corrections Dept, the Maori
Land Court, ACC, and NZ Post. My consulting work
has taken me all over NZ, Australia and the
Pacific.
On the sporting front, I have played Slazenger
Cup Tennis for my Province, represented NZ once
in soccer, represented the NZ Army in soccer and
badminton, played in the World badminton
championships in Malaysia, have been a single
handicapper in golf, and I am now a passionate
follower of petanque.
With that sort of background you would not be
surprised that I place a lot of emphasis on
loyalty, teamwork, organisation and discipline
in my management style. I am very impressed with
the amount of work, and the standard of work
that has been done in PNZ on an absolute
shoestring of a budget and with the minimum of
human resources - all of it voluntary.
It says much for the dedication and sheer hard
work and commitment of a very few volunteers
that PNZ has achieved what it has done over the
last few years. We must all be aware that these
willing workers are volunteers, that they are
here because they want to be here, and that
there are not too many who are willing to take
their place.
How these volunteers are treated, and what they
themselves get out of the organisation will
determine how far PNZ goes in the years ahead.
So here is my first
articulation of my management philosophy to
every member of our organisation - from the
elite international representatives, to our club
players.
I will place total trust in all of the
volunteers who are involved with me in the
management of PNZ. Whether these volunteers are
in the current Executive, or are the selectors,
the coaches, the tournament organisers, the
managers of teams or any other official of the
PNZ, I will protect them as my only resources
against all comers.
These are my team, and to get at them, their
critics will have to take me out first. I want
you all to be quite clear about what I am saying
here. I will look after and encourage all of our
PNZ officials to do the best job they can, and I
will support them in the decisions they make.
Please take this message back to your regions
and make sure everyone in petanque world in NZ
knows how I feel in this matter.
Now we all know that mistakes will be made in
PNZ. But there will now be a change in how we
handle mistakes and the conflicts, which grow
out of mistakes. When a mistake occurs we are
not going to go looking for someone to blame. We
are not going to call on volunteers to resign.
We are going to look for what went wrong with
the system, what went wrong with the processes,
whether the procedures need changing.
If the processes or procedures need changing we
will change them, but we are not going to look
for blame, we are going to look to learn and not
do the same thing again. If a volunteer official
of the PNZ resigns because of personal attacks
on their integrity, or manner of doing
something, I will regard that resignation as a
failure on my part, because I have failed to
establish a focus on the processes being used,
and have allowed one of my officials to take the
blame instead of focussing on the failures of
the process.
Sometimes, we will have to make some decisions
that are unpopular with some individuals. We
will try very hard to make them with as much
objectivity as possible, and we will make them
collectively. This will particularly apply in
areas such as selection of teams, because I do
not want a continuation of the negativity that
has been evident in the whole area of team
selection in the recent past.
All of our voluntary officials - whether in the
PNZ Executive, or the wider petanque community
at regional and club level - deserve all the
support we can give them. What they do not need
is to waste time on defending themselves against
personal attacks when either the system, or
their leaders let them down.
We must start to nurture our volunteer officials
much more than we have done in the past. I have
already spoken about protecting our volunteers
from personal abuse, and I want to address one
other aspect relating to valuing these people.
When our sport was young and establishing
itself, all of us have been used to travelling
and administering our sport largely from our own
pockets. Individuals have provided their own
travel and accommodation when on PNZ business.
We must now start to reimburse our PNZ officials
for their travel, accommodation and other
reasonable expenses incurred on PNZ business,
and I have asked Brian Smith to include these
costs in the budget.
We may have to start small - particularly with
an expanded Executive - but I believe we will
lose our volunteers if we do not start to
address this issue this year. Our volunteers
must feel valued by PNZ, and one way of doing
this is to make sure that PNZ makes a reasonable
effort to compensate them for their efforts. As
a start to this process, and to give the lead in
where my emphasis will lie, I will personally
not be making any trips overseas at PNZ expense
until all PNZ volunteers have a reasonable
recompense for their travel etc on our behalf
here in NZ.
My second statement
of my management philosophy has to do with the
structure of the PNZ.
As it currently stands, the constitution calls
for a Council consisting of five elected
regional representatives, which sets the
governance of the sport in NZ, and an Executive,
which currently consists of a CEO, Secretary and
a Treasurer, who are selected by the Council, or
its representatives. This Executive team of
three part-time volunteers is supposed to
implement all the strategic decisions made by
the Council - including the strategic plan. I
have to tell you that even in the Horowhenua
Petanque Club, which I come from, there are more
people implementing the club's annual plan than
PNZ has got implementing it's strategic plan!
Then, somewhere out there - outside any
executive responsibility or direct control - we
have a grouping of volunteers who are
responsible for such core matters as umpiring,
coaching, selection, training, tournament
organising, funding and sponsorship.
I say "core matters" because this is the very
lifeblood of our sport, matters such as
umpiring, coaching and training, selection;
funding and sponsorship, tournaments etc are
what we are about. And yet the people
responsible for managing these functions on a
daily basis are not in the management team, have
no executive authority, and can make no
decisions within their portfolio of
responsibility without referral back to a
3-person Executive.
I would ask you to seriously consider this
situation, and recognise that it is no wonder
that a number of dedicated and passionate
volunteers in our sport have felt
disenfranchised by this structure, and have
withdrawn their services over the last two to
three years.
Any institution, which has a structure, which
demands that a team of three part-time people
manages and administers that organisation,
deserves all the problems it can get!!
An Executive of three people, which has to be
CEO, Secretary, Administrator, Treasurer, Fund
Raiser and Sponsor Coordinator, Selector, Coach,
Trainer, Umpire, Tournament Director, Overseas
Representative, and any other critical function
in the organisation, is making decisions in a
vacuum. Too much decision-making and power are
vested in too few people, and this Executive's
decisions must be subjective and isolated from
its wider community-of-interest.
Apart from this aspect of the structure, this
Executive will inevitably be accused of
favouritism and cronyism in its dealings. The
trio will themselves feel isolated and embattled
and will develop a "We" and "They" attitude.
As a final observation on this matter of the
structure, the current structure where all
day-to-day power is vested in a three-person
executive is bad organisational psychology. The
recurring theme of many of the conversations I
have had with many members of the PNZ throughout
the country is that they have a sense of being
disenfranchised in their own organisation. They
feel powerless to affect any issue, because all
power is seen to be in the hands of a few (the
executive), who are not even in power because of
a democratic process, and cannot be held
accountable.
This perception is not the executive's fault,
and can once again be sheeted home to the
structure, but it is nevertheless real and we
have to do something about it, if we are to
develop a more dynamic organisation which
attracts volunteers to take on some of the roles
I have envisaged in the suggested structure,
which I will discuss with you later.
I hasten to add that this is nobody's fault. The
organisation has drifted into its present
structure over time, and the people working in
this structure have been doing the best they can
to make this structure work. It is always the
structure, and its associated systems and
processes, which are the cause of most of an
organisation's current ills.
I am therefore going to establish a larger
Executive, and I am going to delegate my
executive authority to the members of this
larger Executive team within their management
portfolios. We will to develop a limited annual
plan that suits our volunteer resource base. I
say a limited annual plan because the strategic
plan developed some time ago for PNZ would be
difficult to achieve in some of the large
multi-national corporates I have consulted to in
the past, and the Council would be paying me a
substantial six figure salary to deliver results
from this strategic plan!!
PNZ simply does not have the resources to get
that ambitious. What we can do is develop a
5-year rolling plan, with the first year set in
concrete, with simple objectives, which are
achievable and measurable. We can then negotiate
these objectives with an expanded Executive team
with agreed timelines and quality measures, and
then establish a reporting system which tells us
all how we are moving to achieve these limited
objectives.
My job in this process will be to manage the
team - not to do all the work. My major job will
be to remove the roadblocks to the individual
manager's successful achievement of his/her
goals, to coordinate the team's efforts, to
liaise with outside agencies such as SPARC, our
sponsors, grant agencies, and to represent the
organisation to other agencies such as other
national bodies and the international
associations.
I will leave the matter of the current structure
of the Council and the Executive for the time
being, except to say that, in my experience, the
structure is too top heavy for an organisation
like ours. A good test of this structure's
relevance to the sport of petanque in NZ would
be to establish what measurable, practical
things the collective Council has achieved in
the last 12 months, and to consider whether the
objective of ensuring regional representation
and influence on the progress of our sport could
not be better achieved by a simpler and flatter
structure. I will be talking about the current
structure in more detail in our meeting after
this AGM.
So, where will my
emphasis be placed in the next 12 months?
I want to tell the entire petanque world out
there that the management of this organisation
is not a spectator sport. If you have spent any
time looking at the so-called NZ Petanque Club
blog site you will see that some people have a
lot to say about various officials, and the
administration of our sport, and the complaints
outnumber the accolades by about three to one.
Well, that is fine, and it is a free country,
but it would really do a lot more good for the
sport, which they profess to be worried about,
if these same people came forward, volunteered
their services and helped fix the things they
believe to be wrong.
So, I will say this to
those who frequent the blog and all those
members who feel unhappy about some aspect of
PNZ: "Come in, the water is fine, fix the
problems you believe exist from inside the
organisation". It is much easier to join us than
to try and fix the problems from outside. You
will not fix any of the real or imagined
problems in the sport from the anonymity of a
blog site in cyberspace.
By all means, get it off your chest on the blog,
but then do it the Kiwi way.
I will not respond
to any postings on this blog site, but I will
respond very positively to all signed
communications sent to me personally. If you
want to remain anonymous, do not expect an
answer from me, and your communication will end
up in the trashcan, before I read it!!
I believe PNZ is now ready to move forward into
a more structured management style. The
achievements of the past have been truly
amazing, considering the resources we have had.
There has been much emphasis on the selection of
teams for international tournaments and the
sending away of international teams. This is
understandable given the origins of the PNZ
organisation.
Whilst we will continue to chose our
representative teams, and sponsor their
attendance at overseas tournaments, I believe it
is now time for us to start to look more closely
at our domestic scene. PNZ has something like
1400 members in over 40 clubs in NZ.
Every year we send away less than a handful of
our top players amongst these 1400 players, and
yet if you look at the effort made by PNZ to get
these elite athletes into the world petanque
scene it is out of all proportion to the effort
put into establishing such essentials as a
nationwide coaching and training structure, or
ensuring that we have enough umpires to
officiate at our tournaments, or of
standardising our tournament processes etc.
There has been an enormous amount of energy and
conflict surrounding the selection of teams for
international tournaments. I have sat down with
a few selected officials and we have designed a
selection process, which is simple and
transparent. We have a series of filters in the
process, which will ensure that the appropriate
team members come to the top.
I believe it will be many years before our sport
can pay elite athletes to travel and compete
overseas. This means that there are a
diminishing number of players who are willing to
spend a minimum of $5000 to represent their
sport at a European venue. Players may do this
once (or even twice) in a playing career, but
then make themselves unavailable for selection.
I believe we have now reached the end of the
heady days when our top players could afford to
send themselves to a World Championship in
Europe or Asia over and over again. And yet we
spend far too much time and energy doing what I
call, the "DRUNKEN WALK", - that is, trying to
satisfy every squeaky wheel, who believes that
they have been disadvantaged by the selection
process.
We have made some mistakes in the selection
process in the past, and PNZ has acknowledged
this. These mistakes may have been genuine
errors of judgement, or they may have been
self-motivated, or they may have been the result
of too few people wearing too many hats. I am
not interested in starting my tenure as CEO with
an old-fashioned witch-hunt on these matters.
Far too much time has been spent on this topic
and it is time to move on.
I want the PNZ executive to focus on delivering
some benefits to the over 1400 players
affiliated to our organisation, rather than
focussing on the handful of players selected for
the overseas tournaments.
We must now get much more formal and focussed on
the coaching, training and encouraging of our
domestic scene - particularly our young players
- if we are to produce the world class
competitors of the future, and take our sport
from a game to a full blown national sport in
NZ. This approach to the domestic market also
makes good business sense. We need to become a
worthwhile marketing tool for a much larger
sponsor market; we need to prove to
organisations like SPARC that we are serious
about developing our sport for a larger number
of NZ members to enjoy.
We need to appeal to a larger number of people
to join our clubs and establish new clubs, and
we need to make sure that our PR machine is
improved - and has targets that it needs to
achieve to get our sport out into the public
arena. We also must develop a sport that appeals
to younger people. We will be taking some
lessons in this area from some of the clubs in
the South Island, which have been taking the
sport to our youth areas much better than we
have done in the North.
So, this is who I am and what I will be standing
for in the immediate future. My focus will be on
creating an infrastructure to cover all the
critical areas of our domestic scene. My focus
will be unashamedly domestic, and my focus will
be on the development of a team of volunteers in
the PNZ executive.
I will look after these volunteer officials, and
I will ensure that they are protected from
criticism by establishing processes and
procedures, which they will work within. When
the inevitable goes wrong we will seek to find
the cause of the problem in the processes and
procedures of PNZ, and we will not look for
blame and censure in our officials.
We will shortly meet as an expanded executive
team and develop and publish a simple,
achievable annual plan, and then move on from
there.
Thank you for your attention. I hope you will
take these simple messages back to your regions.
Bryan Wells |
