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The
Peabody Trust - Creating a TEAM
“It becomes quite clear that, for
many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as
singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest
of
their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.”(Peter
Senge, 'The Fifth Discipline, The Art & Practice of the Learning
Organisation') PURPOSE
They have exciting and innovative approaches
to the purposes. Interviews
What makes the Community Regeneration team such a great team? Well, they excel in several areas. Firstly, their performance is outstanding. Their internal growth in this type of industry has been rapid. They maintain consistently innovative approaches to problems. There is also their ability to raise and manage funding, their customer focus, their culture of open communication, their practice of 'inclusion' - everybody participates - the way they practice empowerment, their clear and crisp communication of objectives, their clear cut values - and their willingness to live by them and defend them. It is an impressive list. Often, people who are naturally gifted at something do not quite know how they produce the results that they do, and it takes a while to find the exact sequences and steps. The findings prompted a second interview, some months later, with Maura Santos herself, to better understand the personality that created the team in such a positive way. Whilst there were many discoveries about the nature of the team, one that stands out is the degree of openness in the way the team interacts and communicates. There is a fierce pride in the team itself and a genuine sense of belonging. Empowerment is practiced to the full. Diversity of thinking is positively encouraged. The team has evolved a process for managing the expression of diverse opinion to take it beyond 'argument' - and the creativity that comes from 'opposing' views is captured and utilized for forward progress The team's core values support this and other
processes. And what are the team's top values (in order of importance)?
Were these Maura's values?
"Well, I had a very clear career progression. From archaeologist,
to secretary, to Director of Peabody - actually, I was never an
archaeologist. I certainly wanted to be one, but my mother said,
'Get the Evening Chronicle'.
It was Thursday night and all the jobs were
in the Evening Chronicle. She said, 'If you can find one job for
an archaeologist in there, you can stay on in school. If you don't,
you become a secretary.' It was the North of England in the late
1950s. I became a secretary. It was good advice, I've never been
out of work since. We found out they were bunking off college. They preferred our training. So that's how the whole training operation of MARI started and went from a small start to a £26million turnover, just before I left, with about 40 centres throughout the United Kingdom. How did you get to be director
of MARI from secretary? Well, after Pitman's Igot a job as a
junior secretary and eventually went on to be a senior secretary.
In the middle, I married an American sailor, which seemed the most
logical thing to do at the time, and we went to live in America
and had 3 children. Unfortunately he died quite young of cancer.
So I went home to mum. My husband knew for some time that I was
going to have to support the family, so he sent me on a computer
programming course while we were in America. 'The future is in these
here computers, babe', he'd say. And I'd say, 'Rubbish, those things
will never catch on'. They were so huge. I got a job in Tampa, Florida,
working for a computer organisation but when I came back to England
I found that it wasn't quite the time for women with aspirations
to work in computing. So I went back to being a secretary. I went
to college too, but it was being a secretary where I first really
encountered leadership issues. Apart from the secretaries being badly paid, the
cleaner apparently didn't clean their area. The girls had to clean
it themselves. In fact she said 'They want us to come in on Friday,
we won't do any typing and we're supposed to clean the attic.' And
she said, 'Get us out of that one.' My management style subsequently has always been
to manage through humour. If people are happy and comfortable they
tend to say things through banter that they wouldn't normally want
to say. They'll say something with a laugh - yet they are getting
it across to you. Whereas if the atmosphere is very serious, people
won't tell you everything.People don't find it easy to criticise
you, to say something's wrong. If you put a bit of humour into it,
then it will come out. And you really need to know these things
as a manager or a leader, or you won't be able to put things right.
Prior to that I was in sales for a while. I was with an organisation that sold office equipment. They weren't computers in those days, they were called word processors. Great big machines, with a big 8" disk. I found I was very good at sales. I made a substantial amount of money. But it wasn't really what I wanted to do, and shortly after that, a tragedy happened. I lost my eldest son in an accident. He was 15 at the time. That's what made me stand back and think. It was then that I decided I wanted to do something that would help young people. It seemed to give things meaning, and it was a way to go on somehow. The first job at MARI was setting up a training course for young people. And it was for kids who were hanging around the street corner, not grammar school boys or college people. It was for kids who would normally have gone into apprenticeship.But there were no apprenticeships anymore and I thought 'I can really do some good'. That's the way my career, as it is now, really started. I suppose that's how I ended up here, at Peabody. What gave you your foundation for innovation? Around that time, there was a lot of money available for innovative things. We used to get together and brain storm to come up with exciting project ideas. And then someone would go off and write a bid and we'd get the money. It was only then we'd think 'Oh god, how do we actually do this?'' We came up with some really exciting things like using distance learning for the severely disabled. One of our biggest wins was a lady who was so severely disabled that she could only move an eyelid. She'd had a stroke and she'd been unable to communicate with the outside world because of it. Her mother-in-law had rigged up a weird device for her. It was a clock with letters on it and she'd switch a pointer round to the letters and when the woman saw a letter she wanted she'd blink an eye and continue to do that until she had spelled out a word. And that's how she communicated.One of my staff discovered her and said 'hey, we can rig up a computer she can use'. We did. We got a result. The woman is now a journalist, she's out of hospital, she's living in her own bungalow - with carers - and she can move more than the one muscle. She can sit up in a wheelchair and get around. When you do something like that - my god, it gives you such a boost, it really does! We also set up quite an innovative programme for its time - training for redundant shipyard workers. We set them up as a computer bureau in Sunderland, servicing the London market. It was just before the recession. People couldn't get good secretaries and computer bureaux cost a fortune. We offered an overnight service to the London market using the latest technology. Very cheap and very good quality and we employed the redundant shipyard workers to do it. So you had great big, hairy forklift- truck drivers, crane drivers, and welders, all sitting there typing away at letters for London organisations. From the North East to London We got invited down to Rotherhithe by someone from the LDDC who'd been up to see what we were doing in the North East and was very impressed. They challenged us to do the same thing in London, which we did. It was a programme that genuinely got young people out of inner city areas, gave them a skill and got them a career job. Quite a number of them went on to open their own businesses. I often see one of my former students driving around where I live. He lives in a much bigger house than I do and occasionally he waves from the Mercedes. Then you arrived at Peabody and started building your team. Yes, when I arrived I found I had actually inherited one team member. He was from another department., who had been taken on to try to kick-start the work. He wasn't suitable and wasn't willing to work with me. Unfortunately, I had to make him redundant. When you look at what we're doing with building a team, I believe in a certain style of management and that style is nurturing and supportive. But as well as that you have to be prepared to be ruthless. If you see someone who's going to destroy what you've got there, you have to do something about it. And that was the situation. It was very difficult, but it had to be done. It ruined my reputation as a sweet, loveable Geordie granny! But it all worked out and we have about 70 people here now in less than 4 years. Some of those are freelancers and temporary or part time people, but it's built up enormously and we've gone from a £300,000 turnover to nearly £6million. Peabody puts in nearly a £million and the rest comes from a mix of government funding, mainstream funding, European funding and some private, corporate sponsorship - BT, Deutsche Bank for example.You have to go out and get it every year, of course. Originally it was me, but as we've grown, my management team works with me on business development. Each of us has bid writing skills and for a major bid we'll work together as a team. For small pots of money locally, local managers are the best placed to know the agencies. My remit was to get people out of poverty. You get people out of poverty by getting them a decent job that pays. But to do that you have to use empowerment and capacity building - and I know these are words that are very much bandied about at the moment - but we're here for the purpose of helping people to help themselves. We're not doing things to people. We're showing them the way and we're giving them the tools to do something themselves. If we ever step back from our programmes, the people themselves will still continue them. We're getting local people involved in decision making and we're getting them to volunteer. In our St Peters project we've trained local people to set up their own groups, to find the funding for their groups, and to manage that funding. So if we went under a ten tonne truck collectively tomorrow, those organisations would still continue. The Digital Learning Ring The main thrust of our work is through the Digital Learning Ring. We'll have 10 community based learning centres at the end of next year. We've also set up learning centres in our Threshold community centres and we're part of UK OnLine. We should have 23 facilities across London by the end of 2002. All connected by telecoms where people can go in and learn. We deliver programmes on education, vocational training and employment support.
It's also about the way we do things. As I've
said, we're not going out and doing things to people. We’re
kick starting things. Giving people in poor communities our combined
skills, so they can use them to help their own communities. It is
empowerment in the truest sense and so your own team has to work
like that, within itself. Then when you pass on responsibilities these
things replicate themselves - they grow. We can come out with Of course when you get the big wins it's icing
on the cake. When Employment Services came up with the first New
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Well
known and well thought 
