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You can find my reply to statements made about our Blog Here. -Tom.

 

Bryan Wells: Statement to the PNZ Council and Executive Meeting, 24 & 25 February 2007

 

(Text courtesy of PNZ website).

 

As this is my first face-to-face with you all I want to tell you something about myself, something about my management and leadership philosophy, and something about where my emphasis will be in the next twelve months.

 

Firstly, who am I and where am I coming from?

Like many of you I am an immigrant to NZ. I was born in India of a British father and a Portuguese mother from the colony of Goa on the west coast of South India. I am a fourth generation India born Brit. I came out to NZ as a 15 year-old, and when we landed off the old Wanganella in Wellington harbour, I thought we had reached Paradise. I have not found any reason in the last 50 years to change that opinion!!

I finished my schooling in Wellington before going to Canterbury University, to study Pure and Applied Maths paid for by the NZ Army - my chosen profession. I subsequently served almost 30 years in the Army, and served in such places as Malaysia and Borneo, Vietnam and the Lebanon. I am a graduate of the Australian Army Staff College, and I also headed the Directing Staff at the RNZAF Command & Staff College.

I have also taught at the NZ Administrative Staff College. I resigned from the Army early in order to set up a management consultancy firm, which specialised in the installation of Total Quality Management systems in government departments, banks and insurance companies.

The organisations we worked in included, Tower Corp, Prudential Insurance, Broadcasting Communications Ltd (the microwave distribution arm of TVNZ), the Corrections Dept, the Maori Land Court, ACC, and NZ Post. My consulting work has taken me all over NZ, Australia and the Pacific.

On the sporting front, I have played Slazenger Cup Tennis for my Province, represented NZ once in soccer, represented the NZ Army in soccer and badminton, played in the World badminton championships in Malaysia, have been a single handicapper in golf, and I am now a passionate follower of petanque.

With that sort of background you would not be surprised that I place a lot of emphasis on loyalty, teamwork, organisation and discipline in my management style. I am very impressed with the amount of work, and the standard of work that has been done in PNZ on an absolute shoestring of a budget and with the minimum of human resources - all of it voluntary.

It says much for the dedication and sheer hard work and commitment of a very few volunteers that PNZ has achieved what it has done over the last few years. We must all be aware that these willing workers are volunteers, that they are here because they want to be here, and that there are not too many who are willing to take their place.

How these volunteers are treated, and what they themselves get out of the organisation will determine how far PNZ goes in the years ahead.

So here is my first articulation of my management philosophy to every member of our organisation - from the elite international representatives, to our club players.

I will place total trust in all of the volunteers who are involved with me in the management of PNZ. Whether these volunteers are in the current Executive, or are the selectors, the coaches, the tournament organisers, the managers of teams or any other official of the PNZ, I will protect them as my only resources against all comers.

These are my team, and to get at them, their critics will have to take me out first. I want you all to be quite clear about what I am saying here. I will look after and encourage all of our PNZ officials to do the best job they can, and I will support them in the decisions they make. Please take this message back to your regions and make sure everyone in petanque world in NZ knows how I feel in this matter.

Now we all know that mistakes will be made in PNZ. But there will now be a change in how we handle mistakes and the conflicts, which grow out of mistakes. When a mistake occurs we are not going to go looking for someone to blame. We are not going to call on volunteers to resign. We are going to look for what went wrong with the system, what went wrong with the processes, whether the procedures need changing.

If the processes or procedures need changing we will change them, but we are not going to look for blame, we are going to look to learn and not do the same thing again. If a volunteer official of the PNZ resigns because of personal attacks on their integrity, or manner of doing something, I will regard that resignation as a failure on my part, because I have failed to establish a focus on the processes being used, and have allowed one of my officials to take the blame instead of focussing on the failures of the process.

Sometimes, we will have to make some decisions that are unpopular with some individuals. We will try very hard to make them with as much objectivity as possible, and we will make them collectively. This will particularly apply in areas such as selection of teams, because I do not want a continuation of the negativity that has been evident in the whole area of team selection in the recent past.

All of our voluntary officials - whether in the PNZ Executive, or the wider petanque community at regional and club level - deserve all the support we can give them. What they do not need is to waste time on defending themselves against personal attacks when either the system, or their leaders let them down.

We must start to nurture our volunteer officials much more than we have done in the past. I have already spoken about protecting our volunteers from personal abuse, and I want to address one other aspect relating to valuing these people.

When our sport was young and establishing itself, all of us have been used to travelling and administering our sport largely from our own pockets. Individuals have provided their own travel and accommodation when on PNZ business. We must now start to reimburse our PNZ officials for their travel, accommodation and other reasonable expenses incurred on PNZ business, and I have asked Brian Smith to include these costs in the budget.

We may have to start small - particularly with an expanded Executive - but I believe we will lose our volunteers if we do not start to address this issue this year. Our volunteers must feel valued by PNZ, and one way of doing this is to make sure that PNZ makes a reasonable effort to compensate them for their efforts. As a start to this process, and to give the lead in where my emphasis will lie, I will personally not be making any trips overseas at PNZ expense until all PNZ volunteers have a reasonable recompense for their travel etc on our behalf here in NZ.

 

My second statement of my management philosophy has to do with the structure of the PNZ.

As it currently stands, the constitution calls for a Council consisting of five elected regional representatives, which sets the governance of the sport in NZ, and an Executive, which currently consists of a CEO, Secretary and a Treasurer, who are selected by the Council, or its representatives. This Executive team of three part-time volunteers is supposed to implement all the strategic decisions made by the Council - including the strategic plan. I have to tell you that even in the Horowhenua Petanque Club, which I come from, there are more people implementing the club's annual plan than PNZ has got implementing it's strategic plan!

Then, somewhere out there - outside any executive responsibility or direct control - we have a grouping of volunteers who are responsible for such core matters as umpiring, coaching, selection, training, tournament organising, funding and sponsorship.

I say "core matters" because this is the very lifeblood of our sport, matters such as umpiring, coaching and training, selection; funding and sponsorship, tournaments etc are what we are about. And yet the people responsible for managing these functions on a daily basis are not in the management team, have no executive authority, and can make no decisions within their portfolio of responsibility without referral back to a 3-person Executive.

I would ask you to seriously consider this situation, and recognise that it is no wonder that a number of dedicated and passionate volunteers in our sport have felt disenfranchised by this structure, and have withdrawn their services over the last two to three years.

Any institution, which has a structure, which demands that a team of three part-time people manages and administers that organisation, deserves all the problems it can get!!

An Executive of three people, which has to be CEO, Secretary, Administrator, Treasurer, Fund Raiser and Sponsor Coordinator, Selector, Coach, Trainer, Umpire, Tournament Director, Overseas Representative, and any other critical function in the organisation, is making decisions in a vacuum. Too much decision-making and power are vested in too few people, and this Executive's decisions must be subjective and isolated from its wider community-of-interest.

Apart from this aspect of the structure, this Executive will inevitably be accused of favouritism and cronyism in its dealings. The trio will themselves feel isolated and embattled and will develop a "We" and "They" attitude.

As a final observation on this matter of the structure, the current structure where all day-to-day power is vested in a three-person executive is bad organisational psychology. The recurring theme of many of the conversations I have had with many members of the PNZ throughout the country is that they have a sense of being disenfranchised in their own organisation. They feel powerless to affect any issue, because all power is seen to be in the hands of a few (the executive), who are not even in power because of a democratic process, and cannot be held accountable.

This perception is not the executive's fault, and can once again be sheeted home to the structure, but it is nevertheless real and we have to do something about it, if we are to develop a more dynamic organisation which attracts volunteers to take on some of the roles I have envisaged in the suggested structure, which I will discuss with you later.

I hasten to add that this is nobody's fault. The organisation has drifted into its present structure over time, and the people working in this structure have been doing the best they can to make this structure work. It is always the structure, and its associated systems and processes, which are the cause of most of an organisation's current ills.

I am therefore going to establish a larger Executive, and I am going to delegate my executive authority to the members of this larger Executive team within their management portfolios. We will to develop a limited annual plan that suits our volunteer resource base. I say a limited annual plan because the strategic plan developed some time ago for PNZ would be difficult to achieve in some of the large multi-national corporates I have consulted to in the past, and the Council would be paying me a substantial six figure salary to deliver results from this strategic plan!!

PNZ simply does not have the resources to get that ambitious. What we can do is develop a 5-year rolling plan, with the first year set in concrete, with simple objectives, which are achievable and measurable. We can then negotiate these objectives with an expanded Executive team with agreed timelines and quality measures, and then establish a reporting system which tells us all how we are moving to achieve these limited objectives.

My job in this process will be to manage the team - not to do all the work. My major job will be to remove the roadblocks to the individual manager's successful achievement of his/her goals, to coordinate the team's efforts, to liaise with outside agencies such as SPARC, our sponsors, grant agencies, and to represent the organisation to other agencies such as other national bodies and the international associations.

I will leave the matter of the current structure of the Council and the Executive for the time being, except to say that, in my experience, the structure is too top heavy for an organisation like ours. A good test of this structure's relevance to the sport of petanque in NZ would be to establish what measurable, practical things the collective Council has achieved in the last 12 months, and to consider whether the objective of ensuring regional representation and influence on the progress of our sport could not be better achieved by a simpler and flatter structure. I will be talking about the current structure in more detail in our meeting after this AGM.

 

So, where will my emphasis be placed in the next 12 months?

I want to tell the entire petanque world out there that the management of this organisation is not a spectator sport. If you have spent any time looking at the so-called NZ Petanque Club blog site you will see that some people have a lot to say about various officials, and the administration of our sport, and the complaints outnumber the accolades by about three to one. Well, that is fine, and it is a free country, but it would really do a lot more good for the sport, which they profess to be worried about, if these same people came forward, volunteered their services and helped fix the things they believe to be wrong.

So, I will say this to those who frequent the blog and all those members who feel unhappy about some aspect of PNZ: "Come in, the water is fine, fix the problems you believe exist from inside the organisation". It is much easier to join us than to try and fix the problems from outside. You will not fix any of the real or imagined problems in the sport from the anonymity of a blog site in cyberspace. By all means, get it off your chest on the blog, but then do it the Kiwi way.

I will not respond to any postings on this blog site, but I will respond very positively to all signed communications sent to me personally. If you want to remain anonymous, do not expect an answer from me, and your communication will end up in the trashcan, before I read it!!

I believe PNZ is now ready to move forward into a more structured management style. The achievements of the past have been truly amazing, considering the resources we have had. There has been much emphasis on the selection of teams for international tournaments and the sending away of international teams. This is understandable given the origins of the PNZ organisation.

Whilst we will continue to chose our representative teams, and sponsor their attendance at overseas tournaments, I believe it is now time for us to start to look more closely at our domestic scene. PNZ has something like 1400 members in over 40 clubs in NZ.

Every year we send away less than a handful of our top players amongst these 1400 players, and yet if you look at the effort made by PNZ to get these elite athletes into the world petanque scene it is out of all proportion to the effort put into establishing such essentials as a nationwide coaching and training structure, or ensuring that we have enough umpires to officiate at our tournaments, or of standardising our tournament processes etc.

There has been an enormous amount of energy and conflict surrounding the selection of teams for international tournaments. I have sat down with a few selected officials and we have designed a selection process, which is simple and transparent. We have a series of filters in the process, which will ensure that the appropriate team members come to the top.

I believe it will be many years before our sport can pay elite athletes to travel and compete overseas. This means that there are a diminishing number of players who are willing to spend a minimum of $5000 to represent their sport at a European venue. Players may do this once (or even twice) in a playing career, but then make themselves unavailable for selection.

I believe we have now reached the end of the heady days when our top players could afford to send themselves to a World Championship in Europe or Asia over and over again. And yet we spend far too much time and energy doing what I call, the "DRUNKEN WALK", - that is, trying to satisfy every squeaky wheel, who believes that they have been disadvantaged by the selection process.

We have made some mistakes in the selection process in the past, and PNZ has acknowledged this. These mistakes may have been genuine errors of judgement, or they may have been self-motivated, or they may have been the result of too few people wearing too many hats. I am not interested in starting my tenure as CEO with an old-fashioned witch-hunt on these matters. Far too much time has been spent on this topic and it is time to move on.

I want the PNZ executive to focus on delivering some benefits to the over 1400 players affiliated to our organisation, rather than focussing on the handful of players selected for the overseas tournaments.

We must now get much more formal and focussed on the coaching, training and encouraging of our domestic scene - particularly our young players - if we are to produce the world class competitors of the future, and take our sport from a game to a full blown national sport in NZ. This approach to the domestic market also makes good business sense. We need to become a worthwhile marketing tool for a much larger sponsor market; we need to prove to organisations like SPARC that we are serious about developing our sport for a larger number of NZ members to enjoy.

We need to appeal to a larger number of people to join our clubs and establish new clubs, and we need to make sure that our PR machine is improved - and has targets that it needs to achieve to get our sport out into the public arena. We also must develop a sport that appeals to younger people. We will be taking some lessons in this area from some of the clubs in the South Island, which have been taking the sport to our youth areas much better than we have done in the North.

So, this is who I am and what I will be standing for in the immediate future. My focus will be on creating an infrastructure to cover all the critical areas of our domestic scene. My focus will be unashamedly domestic, and my focus will be on the development of a team of volunteers in the PNZ executive.

I will look after these volunteer officials, and I will ensure that they are protected from criticism by establishing processes and procedures, which they will work within. When the inevitable goes wrong we will seek to find the cause of the problem in the processes and procedures of PNZ, and we will not look for blame and censure in our officials.

We will shortly meet as an expanded executive team and develop and publish a simple, achievable annual plan, and then move on from there.

Thank you for your attention. I hope you will take these simple messages back to your regions.

Bryan Wells

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(Text courtesy of PNZ website).

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You can find my reply to statements made about our Blog Here. -Tom.