Reflections of a RO Practitioner on the Value-added of Managerial and Supervision Work

Speaker A There are a couple of things that converge in my mind when I think broadly about the value of this work and I can go right back to early experiences as a young engineer in construction in outback Australia. When I first came to Australia in the early seventy s and the first experience I had was that getting closer to the workforce as you do in Australia because by comparison with England there's not a distance. I found, first of all, that these people, the people on the ground were extraordinarily inventive and motivated. They were very energetic. In fact, I turned up to my first not smelter silo site silos being built in a program which had been going for some time and asked for the drawings because I was the engineer and they were rolled up in the back of the drawer. They didn't need drawings, they just built the silos. So I had to find out what I could do to add value in those circumstances. It was really a wonderful experience to find that kind of motivation and wonderful innovation in those what we will now call level one people. It's terrible to think of them as some way down at the bottom of an organization. Doesn't seem that way to me. The other experience associated with them was the awful supervision that they received from their frontline supervisors. Now, I'm going back away. Now, in some ways this is funny, but in some ways it's really tragic. One of the supervisors we had was shocking. He would sack people at a moment's notice and I didn't know who was accountable for him because the accountabilities were unclear. But I intervened and tried to get him to stop doing this and he did it over and over again until on one occasion at a remote site by doing this he caused a strike. I wasn't there at the time, but I was called. We've got a strike on such and such a site and the people left the site, they tore off in a cloud of dust down a dirt road to go to the nearest pub and cool their heels for the day. And we retired to wait for the union steward to turn up from Adelaide, which was going to be 8 hours or so. It was a long way, about 500 km from Adelaide. I got to talking to him about his experiences and in particular to try to get him to reflect again on his supervisory style. I hadn't done any ro by then, it was just intuition. I was in my mid twenty s and I said to him pat, you've really got to stop doing this. You've got to give people chances. You've got to tell them if they're doing something that you don't like, tell them what it should be like and demonstrate it and coach them in the role and so on. This would go nowhere near him at all. He would simply say no, that's not my style, chief. I'm going to sack them if they're doing what I don't want them to do. And then he proceeded to give me the benefit of his experiences with people to show me that no matter how hard things got he was going to stick to his guns. Well, it turned out that this fellow had been punished by his subordinates a number of times. On one occasion, he'd had his work boots filled with concrete and neatly floated off. And he was a very tidy fellow and that would have offended him completely to have his boots filled with solid concrete. On another occasion, living in a donga on a camp he got back to his donga and after the day to change his clothes and so on and suddenly the door slammed shut behind him. And on the floor was what appeared to be a stick of jelly knight with a lit fuse. This was a message to Pat don't be cruel to us. And he couldn't climb out the window because the window had bars on it. So he turned to trying to rip the fuse off the stick of jelly and he pulled and pulled this thing. Of course, it was nailed to a piece of broomstick handle wrapped in jelly paper. Terrible thing that happened, really. But I'm reflecting on the nature of supervision here. The last thing that happened to him, and this is the kicker, I suppose, is that he said, why, once down in Wallaroo, I was set upon by three steel fixers with iron bars and they knocked my teeth out. And because he had false he was about 28 false teeth knocked my teeth out and kicked me about. And I said, in a quirky way I thought, I can't go anywhere with this fellow. I said to him, Pat, this supervisory style of yours, doesn't it hurt? And of course, he missed the irony completely. He said, oh, no, Chief. He said, after the first few punches, everything goes black.