Andrew the Arts-based trainer

Not quite what he imagined after four years training to be the next Ian McKellan – but there are worse things than standing on a chair in your socks in a Trust House Forte conference room, encouraging your audience to Discover Their Inner Corporate Clown. Apparently.

With his biggest success a Domestos advert for Taiwan, Andrew took to arts-based training with evangelical fervour. After all, he could talk the back legs off a pantomime horse (he’d had enough experience at the Bedford Corn Exchange). Training, he claims, need never be boring again. Just terribly embarrassing.

Initially the response if encouraging – even to his breathy announcement that this is a safe, non-judgemental environment where risk-taking is encouraged. What is business anyway, his trainees gamefully reason, but a farce or tragedy with frequent opportunities for melodrama?
Andrew is going to take them on a Life-Changing Journey. Whether it’s Re-discovering the Internal Communications Vision or Exploring the Values of Corporate Play, it will Burrow Deep into the Heart of Everyone’s Workplace. Twenty-six customer-care supervisors and middle managers are asked to feel their partner’s life force.

Everything is a story, it seems, and Shakespeare wrote his plays to deal with issues of call centre communication and appraisal interviewing. Who can see Hamlet and not think of the MBA’er faced with the problem of re-branding his plc? Certainly no one except Andrew, which is why he now gets groups to role-play To Be Or Not To Be (Clarifying the Mission Statement), Hamlet and the gravedigger (Dealing With Difficult People in a Customer-Care Situation) and the final banquet scene (Corporate Hospitality: the Way Ahead).

Several hours later some people are considering applying for I’d Do Anything: the rest think about doing a runner but can’t find their shoes. They wonder if anything worse can happen. It can.

Because now Andrew announces that it’s time to explore Living With Corporate Uncertainty – Human Resources has hinted at some serious downsizing – with installations and human tableaux using bubble-wrap, newspaper and toilet rolls. This is the Blue Peter from hell. By the end of the afternoon their facilitator stands victorious amid a three-year-old’s mess fest and people in Marquis de Sade positions. He asks about their new perspectives and someone proudly waves their bubblewrap Mr Blobby.

What the point of the day is nobody knows, but, at least it keeps Andrew out of the community that little bit longer. And anyway there’s no point in screaming – on a traffic island near the M25 no one can hear you scream.

He likes to say ...
‘Hands up who’s in the Zone?’
‘You know you’d like to do a dance drama to Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats’
‘Ask your partner if you can feel her aura.’
‘Please don’t all sit at the back.’

How weird is your boss?

Yes, bosses are power-crazy and quite frankly weird - anyone who thinks that not taking their proper holiday entitlement for fifteen years and who believes reading a book full of exclamation marks about synergy makes them a perfect manager, must be on a different planet. (Has anybody also noticed the way managers compete with each other to have an office that resembles a Travelodge room in which someone has recently died, so devoid are they of the personal and ugly adornments of the rest of us?)

We thought we’d get that one out of the way first. Because we wouldn’t like to be unfair - bosses after all come in a wide range of types. If yours isn’t one of those described below, count yourself lucky and get down on your knees and pray that tomorrow never comes.

(1) ‘Frankly only good at one thing, bless, even if it was just writing an ISO 90 benchmark specification’ boss

We all know them: once an actual human being and competent in their original field but now hopelessly over-promoted. From being a brilliant analyst of mouse urine or deviser of stationery requisition strategies, they’ve been ‘groomed’ for greater things requiring skills they will never possess and in the process may succeed in destroying advanced capitalism. Guess who gets to pick up the pieces?

(2) ‘The empowerer who wants to empower you to have all their nasty jobs as well as your own’ boss.

New Age Nigel or Nigella only have your best interests at heart of course. That’s why they like sending you on courses with poncy titles like ’Emotional Intelligence and the Internal Communications Problem.’ With any luck these will leave you in a state of general mental mushiness so that you won’t mind being facilitated (told what to do) or even consulted with (watched eating a croissant in a focus group). This boss has the best body language in the business and won’t bat an eyelid as they tell you about resource re-balancing (you’re sacked) - they’re not stupid.

(3) ‘The corporate clone who worries about using the wrong colour ring binder’ boss

When the last mission statement was being written, your boss was probably there dotting the I’s and wondering how many times you can say Excellence in a sentence. From performance targets to watering the spider plant everything has a corporate process and procedure and woe betide the employee who isn’t living the brand. Whatever new management plan is being propounded expect corporate clone to be in their first, even if (as is usual) it contradicts everything that went before. Many of us can’t decide if this model is seriously psychotic or very sad but after much careful thought agree that they’re probably both.

(4) ‘The “I’m sorry I’m wearing funny furry clothes and look like a 1978 Dr Who” creative’ boss

Creative bosses with all their Eureka moments and wow factors sound like a whiz to work for; isn’t this your chance to limber up your own lateral thinking and have a wonky haircut to match? In your dreams maybe, but the reality is that your boss will have more important things on their mind than (a) most of the day-to-day work; (b) your career prospects. Nice chance though to see if anybody really cares if you dress up as a six-foot budgie in the office every day.

(5) The ‘you don’t have to do a Darren Brown course to read my mind, but it probably helps’ boss

Mysterious. Enigmatic. Remote. You’re sure that they must know what’s going on; after all they have a glass-panelled office and you live in a chipboard cubicle with a box of last year’s Christmas decorations. It’s just that they might as well be on Alpha Centauri for all they ever communicate to you. All you can do is assume that you’re doing the right thing and hope the Star Fleet gets through eventually.

(6) ‘The lovechild of Atilla the Hun and Lady Macbeth’ boss

The one thing you will say for Mr or Mrs Mean is that at least you know exactly where you’re going with them. Usually to HR to ask for your P.45 at the very earliest opportunity.

Please Scuba In Your Own Think Tank

Gap analysis ... customer offer vision ... paradigm shifts ... thought leadership ... Today a meeting isn’t a meeting without a thick sludge of corporate jargon to separate the high flyers from the rest of us. Love them or loathe them (and most of us do) we can’t escape the growing avalanche of bizarre words and phrases entering the workplace.

Like many people I’ve had a number of careers and found myself the innocent target, and even the occasional purveyor, of management-speak. In book publishing, as it moved from gentlemanly to cutthroat, I sat in meetings where we talked of “vertical integration” and “brandwidth” without batting an eyelid. In further education everyone seemed to be pursuing an elusive “quality.” And, as a local authority manager, I was forever trying to work out who my “stakeholders” were.

For maximum effect, as every successful corporate bullshitter knows, the most effective jargon is abstract, latinate, and comes from the US. Acronyms are excellent for full impenetrability (try Swot, MMM and KVI for starters) while an arbitrary capital letter may even suggest divine origins.

Work has become the new religion and needs its magic phrases for the priesthood to bamboozle us. Ideally, these will be from a lexicon invented by the new faith’s gurus, mainly elderly right-wing Americans who seem to know the Way Ahead. Hence, most of us spend every working hour “pursuing excellence,” “making a difference” or ensuring some “continuous improvement,” while feeling that we must be missing something, given how meaningless these mantras are.

Another tier of jargon seems to emanate from US manager jocks who either borrow their sayings from sports or toilet stalls. Since the 1980s they’ve been making sure we “cover all our bases,” “punch above our weight” and appreciate the need for a “level playing field,” while also advising us not to “piss outside our circle.”

But why do we use so much jargon and should all perpetrators be taken out of the meeting room and quietly shot? Not quite. The next time you sit fuming next to someone who says “win-win situation” 15 times in a credit control catchup, try reflecting on the reasons why we end up speaking in corporate tongues.

One-upmanship must come pretty high up the list — nearly all of us have used the latest piece of jargon to impress a superior or interviewer. But this pales into insignificance beside the seasoned operator who uses constant corporate-speak and lets you know when an existing term has been superseded — “core competencies” are just so 2005. They know that using old jargon is professional suicide.

Equally, getting it right means joining an exclusive club that can help your career. Perhaps this is the real reason why more of us are finding romance with our colleagues (with the boss’s permission of course). Nobody outside our office has a clue what we’re actually talking about.

And then there are times when we use jargon because we can’t remember what we said before it existed. Just what is a “portfolio of skills”? It might only mean making all those unsuccessful career starts sound sexy on your resume, but sometimes it’s easier to go with the flow and just get on with the important business of not being “empowered” (taking on so many extra duties we don’t have time to notice our salary hasn’t gone up).

Some of the jargon tripping you up? You’re not alone. But unfortunately, nobody is prepared to break ranks and admit it. And so, you find yourself locked into using jargon because it would be too embarrassing to ask what zero-sum negotiations really means at this stage. If everyone else in the meeting is talking about being “in the loop” you’re hardly going to interrupt and say: “Hey, I think you mean those who use the same impenetrable jargon, and see themselves as cutting-edge.” We just let our managers carry on speaking to each other in advanced Klingon and hope they don’t notice us doodling.This may possibly leave you, the jargon intolerant person, in a state of some fear and loathing. In which case you may just need to develop a better sense of humor.

Hearing others earnestly talking about “the big picture” and “proactive, not reactive” should ideally lead to a serious fit of the giggles. You could even invent your own jargon and watch the MBAers making straight for their BlackBerries.

Alternatively, you could work in an environment where corporate jargon has yet to spoil the working day. Sand sweeping in Timbuktu anyone?

Don't wake me up, I'm in a meeting ...

What is it about meetings that always brings out the worst in people? If we’re passive, we find they last longer than Murder She Wrote on UK Gold. If we’re dominant with bad listening skills, then it’s just another ego trip with a captive audience sharing one Wagon Wheel between them.

The problem is made worse because most of us think that all meetings are the same. We go in ridiculously unprepared with no idea whether to go into a slight doze or a deep coma. If nothing else, below should give you some ideas to sleep on - preferably in a meeing.

(1) The ‘I’ve been here so long it seems like a second home to me except I don’t normally go for late 80s office furniture’ meeting

A weak chairperson and a few individuals who’ve seen Michael Douglas in Wall Street and can’t wait for red braces to come back are all that’s needed here. Everyone talks at cross-purposes and listening to others is kept to a minimum - just as well considering the number of people in the early stages of rapid eye movement.

Giveaway Phrases:‘Now we’re all here, there’s something else I’d like to say.’‘I think we’re going to need another urgent meeting.’

(2) The ‘let’s get the boring bit out of the way so that we can get down to a tea party’ meeting

In theory this should be one your favourites, especially if a gleaming trolley is temptingly parked in front of everybody with full tea service and lots of comestibles. Unfortunately if you happen to be a woman, there’s every chance that you’ll have to be ‘mother’. Centuries of conditioning mean that male drive flags at the first sign of a steaming pot and fails completely at the merest hint of passing around napkins. Total paralysis sets in with pouring - which is regarded as the next best thing to cross-dressing in front of colleagues.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘So who’s going to be mother?’‘What you need is a good J-Cloth.’

(3) The ‘people I love you all. I want to empower you so that I can delegate all the boring responsibilities on to you’ meeting

Empowerment is a popular buzz word and what an ideal opportunity to thrust the fruits of lazy corporate thinking (sic) into your innocent lap. Basically your facilitator - it sounds friendlier than incompetent manager - will attempt to offload even more dull tasks on to yours truly under the guise that this is somehow liberating your spirit.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘Think of me as your facilitator and friend, not your boss.’‘It’s the only way ahead …’

(4) The ‘if 20 staff go on assertiveness training courses, what do you expect?’ meeting

Assertiveness is a vital skill in today’s business world but few of us can have foreseen what happens when a group of its expert practitioners are forced to make a collective decision in a meeting. As twenty people decide what they want, state it openly, listen carefully and get in touch with their individual needs as the new departmental milk rota is discussed, all you can do is keep quiet and hope no one asks for your opinion.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘No.’‘I think yours is a brilliant idea, but I don’t agree with it.’

(5) The ‘I think this shows what conscientious employees we are by not rushing home’ evening meeting

No one will wish to attend this unless they have been given a mobile phone for partners to continually ring in and ask when they’ll be home. The meeting then has to be temporarily abandoned each time as people mouth to each other that ‘it’s in the dog’ and think they’re being screamingly original.

Giveaway Phrases: ‘There doesn’t seem much point in going home.’‘Can I have half your Polo?’

If it's Tuesday, it must be Slough: the lows and further lows of sales conferences

Days away from the coalface, snug in an all-expenses-paid hotel. It sounds like the ideal break from work. But too many of us have been caught out by the annual sales conference before and won’t be getting too excited.

Of course you do hear of colleagues whisked off to Teneriffe for a long weekend of sun, sea and a little light presentation over the Sangria. But for most of us the destinations are closer to home: usually a hotel in a place where you’d never dream of staying, with traffic islands next to motorways a firm favourite. Yes, Grays Thurrock, Slough and Croydon are all hot spots in the sales conference pantheon.

Essential hotel ingredients include a ‘Conference Special’ package (share a room with an emo fan from Distribution and bring your own UHT milk) with food that was freeze-dried in Taiwan in the Nineties. And this is probably the high point. Although the hotel claims to have extensive bar facilities, a sport complex and Jacuzzi, these are not for the likes of you.

You barely have time to check out how many miniature executive hair gels you can remove from your room, when the punishing schedule whisks you away to your first meeting. Your unconscious can’t understand why you are drawing people with bubble perms on a hotel blotter when you should be flat out in the sauna. Most people in the NormanTebbit Conference Room are either tense (they’ve got to do something) or asleep (they haven’t). Considerately, the hotel management provides Mint Imperials, which enable at least one person (probably you) to have a serious choking fit and wake up the somnolent.

The lights go down and there’s an audible yawn as sales figures appear and company forecasts appear on screen. Your MD then proceeds with the most ecstatic speech you are likely to hear this side of the Mount of Olives. Is this really the company you work for or is there some mistake?The VIPs are now escorted out - on one of any importance stays at a sales conference in Grays Thurrock longer than they can help it - the lights come on and the MD takes his jacket off. Then it begins. Employees are berated for their failings as if personally responsible for the state of the British economy. Reps are informed that if sales don’t improve they’ll be back in Toyotas.

Once this ritual is over a feeling of nausea overtakes you. It isn’t just the effect of having drunk 16 glasses of Perrier, but the thought that it’s your turn next. A sales conference isn’t worth its name if unsuitable introverted members of staff aren’t required to perform in front of everyone. Don’t cheer yourself up by thinking about dinner. In order to promote networking management will sit you between a sanitary engineer and someone who cleans the telephones and make sure there is no escape by banning alcohol.

But do expect exemplary politeness and restraint from colleagues as the evening proceeds. Everyone is so aware of the possible tacky implications of a sales conference on a traffic island in outer London that there must be no errant body language. People walk along the hotel’s corridors as if welded to the walls. Keys are fumbled with at record speed. No one says good night lest they be accused of sexual harassment. All you have to look forward to is a choice between Emmanuelle 38 or Lassie Comes Home on the TV.

At least this close to the M25 no one can hear you scream.

Training Daze

Recent research has turned up the surprising fact that during the working week, one in 20 people may be found in a room with a person called Geoff or Pam, several hundred Magic Markers and an over-heated lap top. Love them or leave them (and many of us would) you can't ignore corporate training courses.

Of course there are probably excellent courses, but few of us seem to get them. What we do get is either a size-disadvantaged room in an 'executive' hotel or a training centre's Portakabin (usually for public sector employees as this makes them feel at home). And there is little point hanging around the hotel foyer examining displays of model vintage cars or John Grisham novels. You can't escape your fate. Geoff and Pam are waiting.

The first rule of training courses is that no-one should be called by their full name. If the course leaders lost their annoying suffixes years ago, why shouldn't you? But there is hardly time for a friendly 'hi!' from our team before the dreaded name badges are produced. Complete strangers are suddenly metamorphosed into chummy sounding Daves, Jans, Mikes and Sues.

Not that this is sufficient. You might be a Dave but what do the rest of the group really know about Dave's psyche? A warm-up exercise is therefore de-riguer. One current favourite is to ask members which vegetable or fruit they would most like to be identified with - and why. Soon unknown junior executives are nervously introducing themselves as Cox's Orange Pippins and beetroots. What years of British rectitude have kept at bay is destroyed in seconds as Cath from Chelmsford reveals she has definite banana tendencies.

All barriers safely down, people sit in a post-embarrassment situation wondering if anything worse can happen. It can and does.

Once Geoff or Pam have explained how to break out of your huddled group at the other side of the room, you are finally ready for business. Your trainer (who may prefer to call themselves a facilitator so that they can't be blamed for what is to happen) will spend some time 'framesetting' ie explaining what comes next. It little matters that you have already been sent course details. Given your new mental age, how can you possibly be expected to remember?And if at this stage you are not also over-provided with felt-tips, sugar paper, Pritt Sticks and other nursery stationery, complain loudly.

Already, of course, some jargon has been introduced and more will follow. Your company or organisation has, after all, paid a considerable sum for you to be present here today. Participants and paymasters may as well feel they are getting something our of it, even if you're not. Most important, however, is that you feel intimidated. Experienced course-goers know to fall asleep during 'framesetting'. Newcomers are in a state of high anexiety, lest they are asked to reveal anything further about their real Desiree potato identity. Old timers know the day has been carefully arranged so that no-one can escape the brain-storming session to come.

Whether you're doing assertiveness training, 'learning to say no in middle management', or finding out how to prioritise tasks, it'll be hard to avoid a brainstorming session. Time stands still as you're encouraged to indulge in an endless stream-of-consciousness. Who would have thought 20 adults could spend six hours on 'Making the Most of Meeting Situations' - and then decide the most important thing is to communicate? The uninitiated might feel flattered initially at the Einsteinian connotations of the exercise but soon come to realise the profound truth of the term 'a pool of ignorance'. That is your brain, that is, up there on the screen. The over-enthusiastic ask if they can possibly keep their sugar paper (the use of two or more Magic Markers is always a dead giveaway). Other people's 'ideas' are collected up for future recycling.

The truly unlucky will be shanghaied into role playing games involving lying on the floor or revealing their dreams. If you find everybody apart from you is wearing shoes accept that you will soon have to stand on a chair and pretend you are a tree.

Recently I took part in a day-long role play that involved groups 'creating their own built environments' using, yes, sugar paper and cardboard and acting out 'silent tableaux' inside them. It was noticeable how we were split down the middle: those of us who didn't mind pretending we were four years old as long as we could sit in our 'houses' and read the Guardian, and those who did a runner. Quite what the point of the exercise was nobody knew but then, as somebody in my group said, at least it kept the facilitator out of the community a bit longer.

Surprisingly it's quite rare for course members to admit publicly to dissatisfaction. One must make do with strained expressions, the merest flicker of dissent. We assume instead that our intransigence is a personal failing. And who wants to admit to being anti-social, incapable of working in groups and lacking in team spirit? For Geoff and Pam the future looks rosy, as more of us have multiple careers and there are even more training courses. There's not a lot we can do about it. Apart from brainstorming our feelings about it on sugar paper.

Because You're Worth It

When did you last read a novel that properly described your real working world? Of course you could say when did you last want to read a novel about the fear, loathing and black comedy of the weekly grind. But when most of us spend too much of our waking (and non-waking) life at the corporate coalface, it’s odd that so few novels ever truly hit the spot.

Of course by ‘real working world’ I think we mean the kind of jobs most of us have that we’d prefer not to talk about outside our cubicle. If you’ve ever sat next to a knowledge manager at a dinner party you’ll know the problem. It’s interesting that when novelists deign to dip their toes into our murky world they always seem to make a bee-line for the glam or semi-glam occupation. Thus we had Bridget Jones as a TV researcher, a recent Marion Keyes heroine was a wedding organiser, while Jenny Turner’s The Brain Storm was set in a broadsheet newspaper office and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End takes place in an ad agency.

It’s interesting that the first two characters are semi-peripatetic (ie don’t have to sit with dribbling colleagues in too many evening meetings) while the others probably have more autonomy than the rest of us. It has to be said that Turner and Ferris would claim to be offering a more serious examination of workplace culture. But while The Brain Storm certainly has its iconic office moments reading Then We Came to the End is quite like being stuck in an office on an endless Tuesday afternoon and thinking for this you had essay crises at university.

Perhaps The Office TV series has just raised the bar so high that no one can possibly come near it. Or perhaps the workplace is just too depressing or complex for most contemporary writers to deal with. It’s also probably the case that many writers just don’t have that kind of ‘hey, I’m going to be spending forty years of my life wondering what a quality circle is in a size-restricted work space surrounded by people who watch Bargain Hunt’ experience of most of us.

It’s hardly surprising then how often writers get things wrong when they dip their toes into our naff world. Tim Lott, for example, referred to ‘typing pools’ in a recent book and we all know these went out with Lucky Strikes. Rachel Cusk’s drippy temp in The Temporary wouldn’t have lasted a minute in a real office. Editors, who’ve probably gone straight from college into the media and publishing, often don’t get it either. An editor at Metro just couldn’t believe such a thing as a learning log existed. As someone who had to fill one in for an entire year to satisfy an obsessive line manager I had to assure her they unfortunately did.

The Great American Novel. The Richard and Judy Novel. Sorry, some of us are still waiting for the Great Have You Stolen My Stapler Novel.