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The Rt. Hon. Patricia HewittCouncil for Excellence in Management and Leadership Report |
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| Thank you Anthony. My enormous thanks to you and your colleagues for all of the work that you put into producing this terrific report together with all of these other subsidiary reports – I can't promise to read them all! – but they have all contributed to giving us increased confidence in your recommendations.
This has also been a really good example of joined up working in Government between DTI and DfES. I'm sure Estelle will join me in thanking all of the officials from our two departments in working so closely together on this really important issue. British leaders and managers can be, and often are, truly outstanding. Some of the best in the world. Innovative, creative, visionary and inspirational. But, as the report shows, there's just not enough of them. And although, as Anthony said, it can be difficult to put a precise figure on it, we know there are roughly 4 million managerial jobs in the UK, and we need 140,000 new managers every year. So we don't have enough managers - and we're not creating enough new ones. And there are still bad examples of management as well. To illustrate this, I was talking recently to a major clothing retailer, who is approached every week by hundreds of British manufacturers wanting to work for him. He met one of these manufacturers and explained that what he really needs is very fast turn-around of short runs - to cope with a highly competitive fashion market. The manufacturer explained that his standard delivery times were so many weeks. The retailer asked whether he couldn't put on extra shifts to cope with peak demand, and enquired how many part-time workers he had. The manufacturer said he thought that, out of about 400 workers, only about 4 were part-time. Couldn't he employ more, asked the retailer. 'If I started doing that,' said the manufacturer, 'everyone would want to do it!' So there was a manufacturer not meeting the needs of a potential customer - a customer he badly wanted business from - and not meeting the needs of his employees either. It certainly made me wonder how long he'd stay in business. We know this matters enormously. Our managers and leaders are at the forefront of our attempts to drive up British productivity. In the face of increasing international and competitive pressures. The recent Sunday Times awards for the 100 Best Companies to work for showed some excellent examples of companies with really brilliant management and leadership. Many household names appeared on this list – Asda as the winners, Microsoft and Richer Sounds. And to give these awards more value, all of these companies are measure by their own employees to have outstanding management and leadership. And when we checked the performance of these companies against the FT 100, we found they significantly outperformed, time and time again. So management and leadership is good for staff and for the bottom line. Bad management has terrible effects – on the workplace and on society – sexual discrimination, bullying, racism – these are all things we really need to tackle. And 37.5% of SMEs close within first three years. Sometimes this can just be bad luck; sometimes it can be because a larger company has not paid it's bills on time; but sometimes it can be because of a lack of leadership within the company and inadequate management. These closures have economic and social consequences. And these failures create waste – wasted effort and loss of money. We need to do far more to improve management and leadership skills. We need to raise awareness – to create as many good managers and leaders as we can. To point to some of the things we are doing at the moment. The Fit for the Future Campaign, that we fund with the CBI, looks at supply chain issues and raises standards through a wide range of best practice tools and techniques. And some great work is being done by the TUC through the Partnership Institute. And although Business Links does sometimes have some difficulty reaching the whole of the small business community, they are very successfully running the "Connect" programme - raising awareness of key leadership issues through "real life" interactive documentary case studies. The SBS also offer a Benchmark Index – giving businesses the chance to compare their leadership performance against others, by sector or by region. And benchmarking can be a great way of getting people to raise their standards. Sometimes people get a nasty shock! And we are also working hard to promote support for women in business – another issue quite rightly flagged up in the CEML report - through flexible work arrangements but also by providing support (for instance from Business Link) for women entrepreneurs. UK start-ups would rise by 50% if the start up rate amongst women matched that of men. So our message is that much has been done. But there's still much to do. Your report is really useful Anthony. Thank you again for all of your work. As you know, we can't give you a complete response today. We need to await the PIU's next report and the Spending Round. But where we're quite clear is that we'll continue our joint efforts between our two Departments, working more effectively with our associated bodies. We must now make sure that we build upon your report, turning it into actions – to deliverables that we all want to see within our businesses and the public sector. |
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Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt
(the following are available from the archive) |
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