Nothing to do with work

But important to me. In 1985 my life changed in so many ways. Now, what? 24 years later, I’m doing something I realize I’ve been waiting for since then. I’m in the cinema, about to see Watchmen.

Happy Birthday Charles

Next Thursday is the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. We’ve been working, though our Growing Roots project, with RBG Kew, who in turn have received funding from the Wellcome Trust, and have produced some really good looking resources to encourage children explore wildlife and plants. Today my colleague Anita sent out a link to the resources.

As she says “Our fab ‘Growing Roots’ project officer in the South East is working in partnership with RBG Kew and has spent the last few months putting her blood, sweat and tears into them…Utilise these downloadable resources for family events, pick up and go activities for half terms or embrace for Wild Child activities…The webpages have only just gone live in the last few hours…

 

http://www.kew.org/thinking-walks/

 

Back at work

I had a lot of time left at the end of my leave year, so I’ve been out of the office for what seems like ages. Not posting either. Back now. Happy New Year to you all.

It was a close run thing, but the Trust’s poll for Green Father Christmas or Red Santa Clause was won by the Greenites our green FC at Standen was very well recieved, so I think we’ll be kitting out more of the region’s Father Christmases with green togs for next year.

Today, apart from doing a bit of administration for my team’s Personal Development Reviews,  I’m also looking at: our final brief for a pilot of updated tills; commenting on a partnership idea between one of our properties and a local mental health charity; trying to fix a meeting with Go Ape, t talk about the possibilities of future partnerships.

I’ve also had a look at a prototype site our central web-team have created, which shows how we might share user generated content, to create a far more personal and interactive interpretation of some of our places. It’s a bit clunky in this early stage, and uses the blog aesthetic, which somehow isn’t yet working for me in this context, but I’ll watch with interest as it develops.

Countryside day

Today I’m with wardens and countryside staff from across the region. We’re looking at the two future challenges facing the Trust in the countryside. The first is engagement: we’re a organisation that was started to preserve “green living rooms”, yet people know is better for our houses and pay for entry properties than for the thousands of acres of coast and countryside that we manage for free public access. Of course, as our regional director told us earlier today, part of the blame for this lies with our own marketing, which focuses on pay for entry, to make the money that we can spend on preserving the outdoors.

The second challenge is reducing our environmental footprint. Right now I’m listening to our head of environmental practices talking about how we must adapt our own way of doing things to support our core aim, of preserving the environment. Could we, for example become an oil-free organisation? Many of our countryside buildings are so remote that they are heated with oil held in tanks. If we don’t maintain those tanks properly and one of them leaks, it cancost us as much as £50,000 to clear up the environmental damage.

The two challenges converge in the expected increased demand on the land, for housing, food and energy production as well as, as usual, transport. Is this an opportunity for the NT to raise their profile with the public as protectors of the outdoors?

Of course it’s not just what we can say it’s what we can do. We’re trying to reduce the water we use, by capturing rainwater and replacing toilets with ones that use less, for example. We are installing biomass heating at Uppark and Scotney and controlling the amount if energy we use and the waste we produce. We could be better at interpreting these projects and others.

It’s interesting. We’re listening now to a representative from South East Wood Fuels, he’s shouing us that wood as a fuel costs up to 2,9p per kW/hr, Cetus 3.5p for gas, or 5.5p for oil. So there’s a real business case for going green. It’s also low carbon, locally sourced, and engaging. It could also offer a more sustainable, secure supply. In fact, SEWF ltd are making such a good case, I’m inclined to take the idea back to the school where I’m a governor.

On to water, and it’s interesting to think that as the largest private landowner in the UK we own huge chunks of land that are catchment areas for local water supplies. We are also a small water supplier, in that 900 private water supplies serve our tenants and some of our properties. How do we reconcile our responsibility to produce whole food on our farmland with our responsibility not to pollute the water supply with, for example, slurry from dairy farming spread on our tenant farmer’s field? On top of that our work impacts on flood defence, yet government policies don’t make it easy for us to work wholisticly around these issues.

These two resources, energy from wood and water, suggest there a real opportunity to improve the perception of our countryside as not just a leisure resouce but also a vital part of everyone’s supply chain.

After lunch we’re looking at the other end, waste. There’s a lot we can do about reducing the the waste we produce, as an organisation, but the burning issue for many properties is flytipping. A representative from Kent police talks about his role. Only one other police force nationally has a role like his, dealing with environmental crime. Flytipping is considered anti-social behavior now, which brings it into the police remit, where once it was policy that the police should not involve themselves in environmental crime. What’s particularly interesting is that when Kent police consulted on local priorities, the public put litter and flytipping at number two, and dig fouling at number three, both of which are problems for the NT too.

Flytipping is big business, people are paid to take rubbish away, but can save money on the commercial costs if waste disposal. In fact, if you pay someone to take your rubbish away, and they are not a registered waste carrier, then YOU can be prosecuted.

Waste it seems has more negative messages than positive ones which which to engage our supporters, but it’s not something we should ignore.

At the end of the day, we had questions from the floor, challenging the organisation on choosing the greenest equipment and vehicles to use, the issue of visitors having to resort to cars to travel to our properties, and community engagement taking resource away from the “actual work”.

The day raised many questions, I wonder just how many answers there are?

Leadership skills

I’ve been getting my head around how I should be developing my skills in this new role. I’ve come to the realisation that there’s a fundamental difference between this role and all the other manangement roles I’ve had in the past. The difference is this: in all my previous roles, however many people they have been about managing, there has always been an element of producing something with my technical skills. I’m trained as a designer, so many roles involved managing people and designing something. I used to run a team of costumed interpreters, so then my role was managing the team and being out in public in costume (and managing the finance and IT, which are also technical outputs). In my previous job, I was managing a diverse team but also offering a technical output of volunteer management and universal access advice.

This role though has no (obvious) technical output. It’s product is a well managed team, who in turn produce the technical outputs. Obviously the better I understand the technical aspects of their roles, the better I can manage them. So part of my learning from this secondment is about understanding what they do, to a level that I can speak for them, and champion their point of view, for example, in meetings where they are not present.

But the bigger challenge is improving what I do myself, and with no technical output, that means improving my leadership skills. Luckily for me, there’s a new guide to doing exactly this that our HR department have put together, and I’m working through that at the moment.

The guide makes a distinction between the competancies required for management on one hand, and leadership on the other. What I find pleasantly surprising is that I score myself reasonably well on Leadership, and other feedback from my team and my peers supports this. Yes, there are leadership competancies I could develop further: though I consider myself to be quite innovative, for example, I’ve limited myself thus far to my own area, and not taken a more organisational view. I could also improve my networking to maintain and build support for my team’s work, and I could be better at identifying upcoming challenges.

But I’m more disappointed in the score I give myself for the management competancies. I score pretty badly, not just for my new role, but also for the role I was doing before, in planning and communicating the plan. Interestingly this is confirmed in feedback from colleagues. Last year, I had a free Ashridge Inventory of Management Skills consultation, in a pilot project for the Creative and Cultural Sector Skills Agency. It that I scored lower than I’d expected in “defines, reviews and communicates needs” and “develops and implements operational plans”. Also some of the feedback from that included “a more defined regular system of team meeting and reporting, to enable us as a team to know each other’s priorities”; ” a more defined approach to managing projects and reporting on them”; “keeping focussed and getting to the key point”. So planning, and communicating the plan is the area I must work hardest on developing during my placement.