House of whingers
John Weeks, an American business consultant, is impressed by the culture of complaint in British banks Some people, most of them British and many of them bankers, seem to find it odd that an American scholar would come over to study a British retail bank. It is understood that people might travel the world to visit German auto manufacturers or Japanese consumer electronics firms or French cosmetics companies in the hope of distilling their best practice into bestselling business books bought by, well, by British bankers. But to spend a year observing a British high-street bank? 'What are you studying them for?' I was asked at passport control upon arrival at Heathrow — and I have been asked the same question countless times since by my British friends and colleagues.
The notion that the high-street banks might be full of hardworking, talented people doing a thankless but necessary job in ingenious ways, from which other organisations might have a lot to learn, seems faintly absurd, I guess — particularly in a country where it is universally believed that when the banks post poor profits it is a sign of how badly they are run, and when they post high profits it is a sign of how badly they are ripping us off. Yet these venerable institutions stride a global stage with increasing confidence and, my findings suggest, they have much to teach the rest of us about the importance of a set of skills that, while not uniquely British nor unique to banking, are exceedingly well developed here, I am speaking, of course, about the core skills of cynicism and complaint.
The beneficial and therapeutic effects of negativity on corporate culture and morale are conspicuous by their absence in popular management self-help manuals. Reading the profiles of the companies held up in business books as role models, you would be excused for thinking their employees never complained about anything, that the only criticism voiced was constructive, that there was no moaning, no gratuitous whining or recreational whingcing. This blandly onesided view may be a reflection of the fact that although management theory is becoming gradually more international, it still reflects its dominant American heritage — a stereotypical appetite for earnestness, optimism and the power of positive thinking.
This is unfortunate, because American ideas about corporate vision and company pride seem less likely to inspire than to embarrass British employees who have grown up in a culture that tends to equate cynicism with sophistication and negativity with thoughtfulness.
The bank I studied, for example, was busy rolling out its carefully packaged (and always capitalised) Vision: To become First Choice for customers, investors, and staff'. On Wednesday mornings, all branches in the bank opened late, at 9:30, so that managers and staff could convene without the worry of customer interference to watch the latest video bringing them up to speed on how far they had come in Progressing the Vision. The videos were routinely derided by management and staff alike. Any feelings of pride or gratitude in seeing their CEO expound his Vision or hearing BBC newsreader Michael Buerk announce improvements to the bank's systems were either absent or unspoken. Instead, mannerisms were mocked, clothing criticised, errors highlighted, managerial claims loudly disbelieved and executive waffle snorted at. Those managers who chose to read the accompanying briefing notes verbatim rather than use them as guidelines often had a hard time doing so with a straight face. I sat through many of these sessions, and managers regularly prefaced the meetings with apologies for the material, and typically joined in the good-natured fun that followed.
The lesson here is that these meetings do serve a bonding function. They bring the people of an office or branch together in a traditional way practised by the English since the Hundred Years' War: by busying 'giddy minds with foreign quarrels', as Shakespeare had Henry IV put it. The common enemy in this case is not France, or even a competitor, but the bank itself. Each Wednesday morning, and countless other times throughout the week, local loyalties are strengthened through shared affirmation of gentle contempt for the bank. To complain about the bank is to display affinity with it. Bank people complain about the bank in the same way that British people complain about the weather: incessantly and with good humour. Small jokes at the bank's expense are conversational icebreakers. They draw people together with their allusion to shared experience. They put people at ease with one another through the comforting routine of their recital.
Thus, everyone — from the CEO himself to the most junior clerk — joins in a chorus of complaint that the bank is too bureaucratic, too rules-driven, not customerfocused enough, not entrepreneurial enough, too inflexible, too prone to navelgazing, too centralised. And, it is added, too negative. As with gripes about the weather, these little jibes about the bank prompt quick agreement, but they do not by themselves signal a desire for change any more than the greeting 'How are you?' signals a desire for a medical update.
As I learnt through personal experience, you have to know the bank well and be considered a part of it to be able to complain about it and get away with it. The bank is like a family in this sense and inspires loyalty: I may complain about my mother but don't you dare say a thing against her. With every new group in the bank that I observed, I had to earn anew my derogation privileges. The power of complaint and gently negative humour to strengthen social bonds is considerable, but it cannot produce them where they don't exist. Feeling free to carp about our surroundings is a sign of our comfort. When those complaints are general — aimed at the weather, for example, or its corporate equivalent, the organisational culture — they build a warm feeling of solidarity. Managers who are too stiff or too stoical or too stuck to the party line to join in such complaint will find it harder to build trust and loyalty with their people.
Lest you misunderstand me, or the bank, as advocating a new form of MBWA — not management by walking around but management by whining a lot — let me be quick to note that there is such a thing as too much complaint and there is such a thing as destructive complaint. Complaint often builds local loyalties only at the expense of the broader collective or of excluded groups. What's more, as group
Previous page
