spend more time doing it. The more you do the more widespread will be your legacy of good practice in groundsmanship or greenkeeping.
On the days when you take someone to a higher level, or stop someone doing something wrong or dangerous, you are ‘changing’ the future for that person. Indeed, it might be said that you are changing the future - one person at a time.
Mentoring
Let’s move on now to mentoring. Speaking personally, I can only coach people in my areas of experience and expertise, e.g. management skills, negotiating skills, presentation skills etc. However, over the years, I seem to have acquired more and more ‘mentoring’ clients, i.e. people working in the turfcare sector who want the magic of one-to-one learning sessions as well as, or instead of, the classroom experience.
I am usually a mentor to groundsmen, greenkeepers, club managers, stadium managers etc., because I cannot really coach them to perform their individual calling. I am not on the premises, like you might be, to coach them, to run behind them or sit alongside the individual who wants to cut the grass better, sell more memberships or inspire a group of disgruntled people at a meeting.
What you and I can do, in the mentoring role, is listen carefully to the individual’s concerns, and then bring a lot of good experience into play in a discussion about a problem that is really vexing an
benefits. One guy freely admitted he would need to earn £550 per week in take home pay (£700 gross) just to maintain the standard of living he currently enjoys courtesy of the benefits he receives. Have we all gone stark staring bonkers to pay these sort of payments that encourage people not to work? So, here come the cuts but, with the benefits bill running out of control, where is there room to cut? We all know that local authorities have certain legal requirements, pensions for former employees, housing the homeless, looking after the aged, poor, child protection and social services etc. and these cannot, and should not, be cut - except where blatant inefficiencies can be rooted out. However, this means that the cuts will be concentrated on discretionary spending, which will disappear as the first thing to lop off. I have been on site for several local authorities recently and, without exception, the grounds managers are looking at widespread redundancies amongst the ground staff, and they are also looking to cut higher up backroom staff.
I find it rather sad that many of the parks staff, who have worked so hard to return their charges to their former glory, will now lose their jobs as the parks are deprived of the funds needed to maintain
individual or his/her employer.
Problems and work situations I have helped people tackle successfully, through mentoring, include career issues at junior and senior levels; dealing with demanding people, performance issues at junior and senior levels, and a wide range of other thorny management questions.
How is this done? Typically, the mentoring I do is face-to-face at a convenient location, or on the telephone (in an emergency). I increasingly mentor on-line with e-mail messages going back and forth.
Results
Results seem to have all been positive to date. This is, in no small part, down to the honesty and realism that comes from a one-to-one session. For example, an irritated Golf Course Manager at a top club, seeking a substantial pay rise immediately, became more realistic, following our telephone mentoring session he was able to quickly secure an close to the amount he was after - with the increase spread over three years.
In recent times, I spent a day mentoring a public school Head Groundsman who had reading and writing difficulties of his own. He confided that he would never attend conventional management training courses because of the (continuing) pain and embarrassment he had suffered since his school days. However, one to one mentoring sessions, that involved a lot of walking around his sports pitches and talking about his job, helped him to transform his
them.
Unfortunately, the next few years look very black for all of us who work for local authorities in areas such as leisure facility provision and maintenance, that are almost entirely funded by discretionary spending
Once finished with cutting, the only alternative is to raise yet more tax - VAT up to 20% will further stoke fuel price inflation that is already running at 25% year on year.
It would seem that the business rate is also to be used to plug some of the gap in the local authority budgets. The latest rate revaluation - the third in three years at my workshop - now includes charges for the number of car parking spaces available at the workplace, and the extra fittings, fixtures and/or systems that I have paid to install in the unit. I work out of a rented farm building
surrounded by at least two acres of concrete hard standing. Should I declare this area as available parking space or just the three spaces immediately adjacent to my unit? Of course, the farmer pays zero for having all this available parking space, simply because agriculture has exemptions from almost all planning and rating legislation.
How British Industry PLC is to drag itself out of the recession when every investment that improves the workplace,
performance, and his employer now recommends mentoring wholeheartedly.
Again, in recent times, an outgoing Turfcare Manager sent his replacement (his deputy) for a series of half day mentoring sessions. After each session, workplace goals were set for the coming week and the individual would then report on his results at our next half day session. The outgoing fellow was able to monitor results, which exceeded everyone’s expectations and, by using the quieter half days, disruption to normal working was minimised.
So, if you are looking to add even more satisfaction to your role, then think about mentoring as a way to boost the performance and confidence of your people. It is cost-effective use of your time, and you can customise it to the needs of the individual and the requirements of your employer.
Good luck with changing the future - one person at a time. In the second part of this article, I will look at how you can change the future by making presentations to people - yes you, speaking in public, standing up and speaking up!
Frank Newberry has been helping people in the turfcare sector to get better results for over twenty years. If you are interested in doing some coaching or mentoring and, if you think it might help to speak to someone, you can contact Frank by e-mail or by telephone via the contact tab of his personal website which is
www.franknewberry.com
in my case up rated electrical and compressed air supply, attracts extra business rates, I do not know. I do know that business rate payers have no votes, are seen as cash rich, are easy targets and can do nothing but furnish the relevant information - penalty £100 just for being late with the return - and pay whatever is demanded. I now pay more rates for my workshop than I do for my house, yet I have to dispose of my own business waste and I am actually present on site for less than 100 days per year.
It is not only the local authority that is on the make. I, like many hundreds of others, have a radio in my workshop. Last week I received a demand that I pay a performing arts licence fee, one month in advance, because I was playing music in my workshop that could be heard by my employees. It appears that my workshop is now classified as a public space, despite being over a kilometre from the nearest public road, in the heart of a privately owned farm and privately rented for the sole use of Terrain Aeration Services, my privately owned company! How this was determined when I was the only person in my unit and I own the only radio, I do not know. So, now I have removed the radio from my workshop and, instead, I simply leave my vehicle radio playing loudly with the window open! Only in Great Britain!
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