Leading from the Middle

Caption: My Salem Shoe Repair Shop

While I have never been to a Timpson store - there are 2000 of these diversified repair shops in the UK - I am on their weekly e-mailing list. Back in 2017 I blogged about their unique approach to screening job applicants: Recruiting the Best. It appears below, recast.
Timpson, a family owned business, offers a diversity of services in each store, from shoe repair to dry cleaning to locksmithing to watch repair.
Recently, I was looking for a shoe repair shop in Salem, Oregon. My location is 5000 miles (or 8000 kilometers) from England so there was no going to a Timpson.
I did locate a shop (depicted) within walking distance, High Street Shoe Repair.
It's tiny, and one enters through a narrow door into a narrow space (picture a deep walk in closet). George, the cobbler - a tall thin bespectacled man - comes from the back and greets me.
I hand over the shoes and he examines them and nods, "Yes, I can repair these."
Looking around, I tell him I admire the compactness and the tidiness of his store.
Then, for some reason, I ask him if he has heard of Timpson in the UK.
To my surprise, he had and knew more than I did about the company!
He referred me to a 2010 book: Upside down management : a common sense guide to better business by John Timpson.
And George told me that another Timpson, James, used to write a column on business and leadership for The (London) Sunday Times which led to another book The Happy Index: Lessons in Upside-Down Management.
Apart from the innovative approach in centralizing all consumer repair services, Timpson offers a different way to treat employees: Their Upside Down Management style means that the people one meets in the store run the business, everyone else (in the corporation) is there to help them do their job.
As my 2017 blog noted, Timpson pays great attention to whom they hire. They avoid "drongos". That's Australian slang for someone "who may not be completely useless, may even be intelligent, but is nevertheless a fool and not to be taken seriously."
Timpson states that "if you don't deal with drongos you will affect performance and find your team more difficult to manage. Drongos rarely improve. Help them find their happiness elsewhere as soon as possible."
I would say drongos are akin to jerks in the USA and to dickheads, another bit of dead on Aussie slang.

My 2017 column follows:


Caption: Little Miss Brainy: Talking a pig out of a tree.

A BBC article, Happy Hiring, describes a technique one company uses to recruit staff. Timpson is the featured company. It sums up each recruit by applying the Mr. Men/Little Ms. characters (e.g. Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Chatterbox, Mr. Clever) to the interviewee.
Suzanne Bearne, the BBC writer, told me that each of the Timpson recruiters/managers has a page of Mr. Men characters in front of them, and they circle which one (or possibly several) the applicant is like.
I suspect I was drawn to this since I use kid books to help my students identify types of followers. Simplistic! you might mutter. Could be, but using kid books has proven to be a helpful way for students to learn more about themselves and their work colleagues.
The BBC article brought Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher to mind.
When asked how he finds the right people for his airline, he replied, "Hire attitude, train for skills."
In my profession, we mostly did just the opposite. We hired for skills and gave attitude/personality a pass except in the most egregious cases of jerkitude.
I agree with Mr. Kelleher, you cannot train for attitude, you cannot train for compassion, and you cannot train for emotional intelligence. Asking for an attitude adjustment is akin to P.G. Wodehouse's story of a nervous after-dinner speaker being yelled at to speak louder. Shortly after, another voice pipes up, "And funnier!"
If you excuse a weak attitude/personality at the interview then you will have a full time job repairing poor hiring decisions.
Worse, if after the hire you avoid the drongo, you will soon have a miasmic pool of legacy employees (drongos) dedicated to undermining every change initiative and improvement, and chasing off your star employee, your Mr. Good, the kind of person that courteously "will always open a door for you".
I have long thought that the person that makes the feckless decision to hire a Mr. Grumpy or a Mr. Fussy or a Little Miss Splendid should be counseled not to do it again. Better, he or she should be assigned the constructive disciplining of that variety of drongo.
Mr. Men characters are not exactly The Myers-Briggs Types (MBTI)! Nor are they like any other of the swarm of personality tests, all promising to separate winners from losers.
But, the testing industry should take notice. Results at Timpson seem mighty good: an innovative organization, strong return on investment, and considerable freedom for each worker.
I have taken the MBTI more than once; but I can never recall my score, an obviouls personality flaw!
One friend who swears by the MBTI can recite the long list of characteristics for each type and knows who to mix with whom on task forces.
Another friend was able to score the type his boss wanted him to be. In other words, he gamed the test.
In any case, the MBTI lumbers on under the HR aegis. I suspect using the Mr. Men/Ms.Little characters may be quicker and more effective in identifying the people you want to work with.


Caption: Mr. Fussy dusting flowers.

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STEAL THIS BOOK, if you can: As Andrew Lang has it
And in the lion or the frog---
In all the life of moor and fen,
In ass and peacock, stork and log,
(Aesop) read similitudes of men.?
:

And, for examples of effective workplace collaboration:

Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.
Copyright all text John Lubans 2017 & 2024

 

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