Anyone remember courses?
I went on a few.....
Times change and nowhere more so than at work. Back in the dim and distant past when I wasn’t such a world-weary cynic I used to be allowed to go on courses that weren’t exclusively based on the idea of amassing a few letters after my name. At the time it was thought that these courses would be of benefit for companies and their staff. The hope was we’d be made better managers… or leaders. Or just better.
Of course, firms soon discovered that the revolving door policy for staff, made possible by changes in employment law in the 80’s, cuts both ways. It resulted in the practical death of that most weird phenomenon looking back, staff loyalty. Henceforth staff would ply their skills wherever they were best paid, making these courses much less justifiable for businesses. After all, why spend thousands on a junior manager only for them to disappear to use their new skill somewhere else?
Anyway, I can remember going on three courses, none of which could happen today. They had a huge impact upon me, but perhaps not all in the way intended. They are worthy of discussion for different reasons, but I’ll start this week with the most memorable of the three.
Around 1989-90 the financial sector had reached a peak in terms of money sloshing around and a company called General Portfolio placed a ridiculous advert in the Times for office managers, because they were sinking under the weight of all the new business they were winning. Ridiculous, because they were offering large quantities cash. Basically, they needed digging out of a paperwork morass, and rapidly. The regulator was sniffing around as a result a few instances of possible mis-selling. You know the sort of thing, 90-year-old widows being sold 25-year savings policies, that sort of minor infraction. In fact, unsurprisingly, the wheels fell off the business in fairly short order, consigning many of us to the unemployment queue, but for a couple of years it was a fun place to be…..
Anyway, having hired approximately 20 new managers, they decided to try and bond the group into a team through the medium of a “Leadership Course”. It was residential and run near Wells in Somerset and we all attended for a week (a week!). In preparation we had to answer a questionnaire with a load of odd questions that as far as I could tell had nothing whatsoever to do with leadership. For example, “You are faced with a choice of two routes off a mountain. One is to abseil down a rock face, the other is to descend via a pothole. Which would you choose?”
I didn’t give that one too much thought. I hate enclosed spaces but don’t mind heights so I ticked abseiling.
Anyway, the course started, the food was good and not all of the team were idiots so it was a congenial affair. We did the usual stupid exercises involving raft making and orienteering….. But on the Wednesday afternoon the tightly controlled weeks’ activity list showed a blank.
We assembled after lunch and the course leader appeared, smiling slightly malevolently.
“You remember the pre-course survey with all of the strange questions in? Remember the abseiling/potholing question? Well, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. You are going to undertake that activity this afternoon….”
This sounded like fun.
“…..except we are going to mix it up. Those people who said potholing will do the abseiling and vice versa”
This, most decidedly, did not.
Can you imagine this happening today? The risk assessments alone would take a year, the waivers that would need to be signed, the legal actions that would ensue following the “bullying” to make people do the task. Even at that time, it was fair to say the news was met with a sort of collective nervous gulp.
An hour later I found myself with eight others standing on a hillside near Wookey Hole. Nearby was a shepherd’s hut. The rain was falling steadily as we trudged up towards it. Our leader for the exercise was a large young chap with the sort of well-upholstered build that in those days might have been termed, well, fat.
“I’ll be leading this and it will be fun” he started, sounding like this was not open for debate. “If you think you can’t get through a gap don’t forget - if you can’t see me it means I’ve already gone through it. The route we are taking is the one we in the local potholing club do for our Christmas morning challenge. We do the whole thing – there and back in under 30 minutes so it’s really easy. Don’t worry”
The man was clearly in the grip of a psychotic episode.
We entered the shepherd’s hut. It was devoid of sheep. In fact it contained nothing. Then I noticed a sort of misshapen manhole in the floor. The lid was taken off and I peered in. About eighteen inches below was a solid sheet of rock.
“OK, the way in is to lie on the ground and then slide yourself between the cover and the rock. Go in feet first and on your back. After about 20 feet the passage curves downwards with a four- or five-foot drop at the end”.
And so began two of the most, let’s call them “mentally challenging” hours of my life.
The urge to start screaming and crying started at that point and was never too far away.
Memorable low points were ….
- The first time I realised that the passage I was crawling along face down, was so narrow I couldn’t actually lift my head up enough to see forward.
- Standing at the top of a 30 waterfall and discovering that the route was downwards through said waterfall using a small, unfixed metal rope ladder with 6-inch rungs.
- In another narrow passage realising that the person in front of me in the crawling queue had panicked and frozen, meaning I in turn could go neither forward nor backward.
At the bottom we stood in a cavern looking at the stalactites and stalagmites illuminated by head torches, trying not to dwell on the fact that we were a few hundred feet below the fields. It was a gymnasium-sized area, filled with the sound of running water.
“Well done everybody, shall we go back now? Oh, and don’t forget, it’s uphill this time”
Another bad moment. For the first time it hit me that so far we had been working with gravity. Now we’d be climbing. Being a ruffty-tuffty bloke of course I smiled at the female members of the group as they began to appreciate the enormity of the latest task in this torture. I was however far from sanguine at the prospect myself. If nothing else there was huge opportunity for massive loss of face. I’d managed to get myself significantly out of shape in the few years before the course and I was already completely knackered….
The nadir came at the waterfall. Climbing up using an unsecured swaying ladder under a torrent of very cold water was not fun at all. It took me several attempts to get more than a rung or two up, but finally something approaching a technique came to me and I inched my way to the point where I could pull myself onto the ledge at the top.
Interestingly while the rock was, well, rock hard, it wasn’t jagged. Water had smoothed the surfaces. Finally, after about two hours underground, the light from the manhole appeared and we were pulled out one-by-one.
Even now, thirty plus years later I can remember the overwhelming sense of relief as I climbed out and the feeling of my limbs shaking from the effort of the preceding hours as I stood in the shepherd’s hut. The sky remained grey and the rain still fell steadily, but the view was unsurpassable as far as I was concerned.
Of course, I would never have done the exercise if there wasn’t a compulsion, arising mainly from peer pressure. That was a real factor, maybe because of the fact that we were all still keen to impress our new masters. In fact, not a single person had refused to undertake their allotted activity. I do remember though that at least one person had tears in their eyes just before we started.
Me, I hated every minute of it, bar the sight of the sky when we emerged at the end of the ordeal. And yet…. I can honestly say that in retrospect I got a huge kick from having done it at all. I learned that sometimes the fear of something can be much worse than the reality. Which thought came in unexpectedly useful 18 months later when I, along with a significant number if the other managers on the course, was made redundant…
So, looking back, I am truly grateful for being forced to do that afternoon’s exercise. It pushed me to the limit physically and most definitely mentally. Plus, it created a memory that will remain with me forever.
But what, you might ask, did it have to do with leadership or teamwork?
Not a bloody thing that I could see.