A Midland Odyssey - Part Thirteen - Leadership Challenge

It is a couple of years since I last posted a blog about my time working for Midland Bank/HSBC, and if I am to write any more of them, I probably need to do so quite soon, before my memory fails me, so here is one on what I can remember of an unsurprisingly mundane management course that spawned a couple of memorable and rewarding voluntary exercises. As you’ll see, some of the details are a bit sketchy.

 

I have written before that over the years the courses that the bank ran changed from focusing on the technical aspects of particular roles - whether that was cashiering, or foreign work, or anything else - to dealing with soft skills like leadership and managing people. The course I’m featuring here was called Leadership Challenge, and to go with the day’s activities, there was something extra that followed and required working as part of a small team in planning and delivering a project.

 

It is quite scary to think that the Leadership Challenge was now nearly a decade ago, which is why some of my memories of it may be somewhat vague and lacking in detail! For starters I cannot remember whether this was a bank-wide course, UK bank specific, or simply just for Payments Department, where I was working in 2011. My suspicion is that it was the last of these.

 

What I do remember is that there was a day of activities at the bank’s sports ground in Beckenham that featured the normal round of events that are a cross between role playing exercises and parlour games. Frankly I always had a hard time with these sorts of events, I really struggled to take them seriously, and – and this may be because I take things too literally at times – found them difficult to relate to the real world. The main memories I have of the day were learning from the office of an outage on the system for which I was, in part, responsible. Gary Cook, my colleague with whom I worked on that system was with me on the course, meaning that a hefty percentage of the team were out of the office. One of my few memories of the activities was some exercise in which we had to spot objects that were scattered in trees and bushes; quite what the purpose of that was I cannot recall.

 

HSBC's sports ground at Beckenham

As part of the course we were placed in groups of six people, and after the day’s events each group was asked to put together a proposal to work with a local or national charity to raise funds for them, or contribute in some other way. At the time – and I really hope that this is still the case – the bank allowed staff time off to contribute to charitable events, not something many people were aware of, hence the fact that I cannot recall anyone ever doing so other than in connection with the Leadership Challenge.

 

Our group’s initial meetings after the day of the course concluded that we did not want to just do some fund raising, especially since another group had become involved with the highly popular armed forces charity, Help for Heroes. Founded in 2007, Help for Heroes raised over £40 million in its first three years of work. We decided instead to volunteer our time to a charity local to where we worked in Southwark.

 

After a false start or two, we identified Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST), an environmental and volunteering charity to work with. Set up in 2000, BOST aims to improve people’s health and wellbeing by making where they live and work greener and more beautiful, protecting, preserving and enhancing parks, gardens and other amenities in London SE1 and surrounding areas. [1]

 

The idea was that in partnership with BOST, we would decide on some tasks that we could undertake, and that the bank would give us a day off to do the work. But first we were supposed to prepare a presentation for management of what we would do. In part, and in terms of the course we had been on, this was probably supposed to be as important as the end result, providing an example of how we could work together (and we were by no means a group who worked together on a day-to-day basis) to devise and create a project and presentation. Although we worked on doing this, we never did get to deliver our presentation. We did however, follow through with our proposal and work with BOST, on not one, but two projects, which was more worthwhile than any presentation.

 

Our first project, which took place in June 2011, was on Waterloo Millennium Green, and involved clearing debris, weeds and other detritus from the pond and water feature there. My colleagues Paul Land, Anna Martyr, Gary Cook, Solidea Cocciatelli, and I [2] spent a whole day removing rubbish and weeds, and clearing away the overgrown vegetation from the pond, which had been drained in advance. It was hard work, and at one point, when I removed the two pairs of gloves I was wearing (one pair latex, one pair fabric), I had to pour away about half a pint of sweat from each, but it was very rewarding and at the end of it, the pond looked a lot better. A few weeks later I took a stroll over there to see what it looked like after it had been refilled, and very pleasant it was too. Sadly, I don’t have any photos of it before or immediately after.

Waterloo, Millenium Green 

 

The following year, in 2012 (I think it was February as it was during the school half-term holiday), the same group of us contacted BOST again and found a voluntary job, working for a day at a school in Southwark (again, I cannot remember which one, although I’m pretty sure it was in Redcross Way, so it was either St Joseph's R C Primary School, or The Cathedral School of St Saviour & St Mary Overy - I really ought to have written this sooner after the event!). This time our task involved installing raised flower beds for the children’s vegetable garden. Hard work again, but no less rewarding.

 

What other groups did – apart from those who raised money for Help for Heroes – I cannot say, and how many ever delivered their presentations I don’t know either, although my recollection is that the presentations were an idea that petered out somewhat.

 

Of all the courses I ever went on, the Leadership Challenge event was right up there with the most tedious, average and predictable (frankly it was a waste of a day out of the office), but I would not have passed up the opportunity to crawl around in a pond on Waterloo Green, pulling up weeds and putting empty beer cans in black plastic sacks, nor the chance to build some raised flower beds on a cold winter’s day, so there were compensations. I just wish I could remember it all better.

 

[1] https://www.bost.org.uk/about-1

[2] I am sure there was a sixth person, but for the life of me I cannot remember who it was! If it was you dear reader, all I can do is apologise!