Hospital chief exec gets reward for failure..

<rant mode on>
Vast generalisations seem to be abounding on this thread - should we also assume all people who work at non-management levels are all lazy work-shy idlers, who have to be chivvied into doing even the simplest of tasks?

Well I wouldn't think that, but it is amazing how all someone has to say is "management" and the tar and the brush comes out.

I have worked my way up the ladder, and could now be regarded as "senior management", and the buck stops with me, even if any my colleagues in my teams screw up - that is why I get paid the bucks.

Having said that, we need to remember we are only hearing one side of the story - perhaps (I doubt it, but don't know) she had been trying to get extra funding, but was refused by the local trust, realised she couldn't do the job she and the hospitals were supposed to do, so she opted for redundancy - I've seen it happen (not in a hospital, but in a large company, where the senior managers got so sick of cuts and budget reductions and increased workload that over half opted for redundancy the next time the opportunity arose).

I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, but let's just not smear all managers, please.
<rant mode off>

Managers sit around all day and do dos all - I must be carp at it, because I seem to do dos all 50 hour per week

[BBKing]

I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, but let's just not smear all managers, please.

To be quite clear, what I'm getting at is the management culture that you only have to have the right person at the top and things work*, which is actually a faith (in that there's no explanation of how it's supposed to work or how you check it's working, because to do either of those displays lack of faith). I also see this as part of the way the NHS has been treated over the last ten years, which seems to be based on a view that increasing the number of managers and the amount spent on them automatically increases the quality of the service, which is also a faith-based position. In the real world, it just costs more and leads to bizarre outcomes, because what actually matters in the real world is the structure of incentives and rewards that emerges, which no one ever actually assesses until it's too late.

As you say, it could be that if she goes to law about it, she might have a good case that her decisions were perfectly sound when taken in the context of what her employers were expecting of her in running the trust. However, if that is the case, and they led to increased deaths from the hospital being dirty, surely she bears some blame along with the DoH? If you were faced with a management decision to save lives or please Patricia Hewitt, what would you do?

* as in ghastly programmes like 'The Apprentice' and 'Dragon's Den', which encourage this form of faith. Ironically Alan Sugar is singularly immune to the faith-based management approach, which I suspect is where the show's tension comes from, as it gives him ample scope for applying the cluebat of reality. This makes excellent TV.

I agree with your post - I find the Dragons Den and The Apprentice show the worst form of confrontational aggressive management style, which has no place in the modern workplace.

To answer your question re save lives or please Patricia Hewitt, I fortunately have never been in that position, but you can guess my approach from my last permanent job - I spent three years re-organising an IT department, making it fit for purpose and able to deliver to the business (whilst ensuring my teams got the required training and appropriate salaries etc for the job) when we got a new board, who decided to cut costs in the "support" areas because their great ideas didn't produce the profit they had promised the City. We were told to reduce costs by 30% (which we did by basically beating up the suppliers) but were told "no, we wanted you to reduce the support staff by 30%, and it's not for discussion").

We did this (with an extremely heavy heart and a lot of sleepless nights, but consoled ourselves with the thought we were keeping 70% of the jobs, big whoopee!). I spent the next year dashing up and down the country, fire-fighting problems caused by lack of staff (which we had forecast would happen, and lo and behold, they did), and then, because their super strategy for increasing sales hadn't worked, more staff cuts were required.

I volunteered to be one of the cuttees, rather than the cutters - managers are here to help the company succeed by helping their teams to do the jobs well; if we are not allowed to do that, we should go somewhere else that will let us.

I was so disillusioned with the Senior Management role that I have been contracting for a year while I decide what to do.

I think the point of the above "sharing" was to point out there are always two sides to a story.