In January 1996 I had no job, and I didn't want a job. I had no real idea what I was going to do next, but I didn't plan to return to full-time work in the City. I vaguely thought about looking for part-time local work using my financial skills, but I wasn't in rush to look for it. I planned to spend some time just being with my son and then look for a job when I felt ready.
One morning, I woke up to realise that my husband was still there beside me. Normally he would have got up and gone to work by then, so thinking he had overslept I woke him up. "You're late for work!" I said.
He rolled over and looked at me. "There's something I haven't told you," he said. "I'm not going to work".
Working at a junior level in a female-dominated environment, he had for months been experiencing what amounted to bullying and sexual harassment, which had gradually destroyed his confidence, wrecked his productivity and driven him into the same black hole as I had been in. He had also been affected by my depression. He finally went to the doctor with physical symptoms of stress, and the doctor signed him off sick. He never returned to that job. Later that year he took medical retirement on grounds of stress. He was then unemployed for the next three and a half years.
My world collapsed. My dream of being able to stop for a while and spend time with my son while he was young abruptly ended. I knew I had to find another job, and it needed to be secure: I could not risk the insecurity of contract work any more, because our finances would depend on my income.
The anger I felt towards my husband for abandoning his job stayed with me for the rest of our time together. Eventually it destroyed our marriage: we separated in 2001 and divorced in 2004. I could not forgive him for forcing me to support the family when I had barely recovered from severe depression myself. I could not forget that although I had had bouts of severe stress throughout my working life, I had never given up work: I had always made myself carry on. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I couldn't see why he couldn't pick himself up off the floor as I had always done: if he didn't want to return to that job, that was fine, but he should just look for another one. After all, that is what I would now have to do.
And I did. I put my CV together, sent it out into the marketplace and soon secured a job as a senior project manager in Operations at SBC Warburg. I started the new job in April 1996. I didn't like SBC Warburg's office - the dark slate atrium of the building oppressed me, reminding me far too much of the black hole of depression, and the working environment itself was cramped and drab. But I thought I had secured a job that would meet my needs. I had specified when I took the job that I would not be able to do long hours or overseas travel, and I believed they had agreed. How wrong I was.
What they meant by "long hours" wasn't what I meant. "Long hours" to them meant 10 hours or more a day, whereas I meant over 7 hours a day. Everyone was routinely doing 8-9 hours a day: "long hours", by my standards, was normal hours to them. And the ban on overseas travel they took to mean months away, whereas I meant anything longer than a few days. We were at cross purposes from the start.
Included in my "previous experience", on my CV, was the work I had done in my brief stint at Credit Lyonnais - moving a trading book from one country to another. This was exactly what SBC Warburg wanted for their latest project. To minimise the political risk arising from the imminent return of Hong Kong to China, SBC Warburg decided to move their main Far Eastern trading books from Hong Kong to London. Henceforth, although they would have offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, all trades would be booked through London.
The problem was that the Hong Kong and Singapore offices had been outposts of S.G. Warburg, taken over by SBC not long before. They were still using S.G. Warburg systems and procedures. In contrast, the London trading and settlement systems were SBC systems. The two architectures were fundamentally different and in many ways incompatible. Moving the book was going to involve huge systems changes. The SBC Board - made up largely of people with trading and banking backgrounds, with little understanding of settlement processes and a jaundiced view of compliance and audit - could not believe the project would take 9 months to complete. Three weeks was more what they had in mind, and they simply would not accept the timescale suggested by project management from both IT and Operations. They eventually agreed to 6 months.
By the time I arrived the project had been named and had a high-level scope and plan. The project was originally named Icarus, until someone pointed out that Icarus had actually failed because he over-extended himself (he flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and he drowned in the Hellespont) - not a good omen. The project was hastily renamed Daedalus. But with hindsight, Icarus was a better name. 6 months was nowhere near enough, even with project staff working silly hours. Three days after I arrived, I attended a meeting at which the IT project manager presented his plan. I still remember his opening remarks:
"To achieve the deadline set by the board", he said, "we have removed the luxury of user testing".
IT had indeed produced a project plan that filled up the entire 6 months with development and system testing. They really thought that we would go live with major systems changes that had not been subjected to rigorous user testing, and they resented me for objecting to their plan on the grounds that it was unrealistic. I don't recall saying "that will never work" when I looked at their plan, but I was so horrified by it that it is entirely possible that I did say that. Anyway, rumour spread that I had been very critical of the IT project management. By the end of the week I was persona non grata in the IT department, and the IT project manager had set out on a personal mission to undermine me. His method was not to confront me directly, or speak to my line management. No, his approach was more subtle. He complained to his management that I was "disrupting the project". His complaint went all the way up to senior management and back down the cascade to my line manager. To his credit, David blocked the complaint at that point and it never reached me: I did not find out about this until after I left SBC Warburg. But the message got around nevertheless. Frances was "difficult to work with".
Nor was that the IT project manager the only person producing unrealistic plans. I was the London Operations project manager, and I had a counterpart in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Operations project manager was not a professional project manager and did not really know how to plan a project. His plans excluded all sorts of things that he hadn't thought of yet and were constantly changing as more things hit his head. He took no notice of resource constraints or critical dependencies, and had utterly unrealistic views of how long it would take staff in other departments to do their tasks. I tried to improve the standard of his plans, but my attempts were poorly received: he did not appreciate my "meddling".
Shortly after the start of the project, I was sent to the Far East for three weeks. I was to spend two weeks in Hong Kong and one week in Tokyo. This was despite the fact that I had joined the company with an explicit agreement that long overseas trips were out of the question. To SBC Warburg, three weeks wasn't "long". But to my 16-month old son, and to me, it was unbearably long. I did not want to go.
But I went, of course. And to start with it seemed to go well, apart from being left kicking my heels outside the door while senior Operations staff from London and Hong Kong had their own project meeting. I thought this was odd and was quite cross at being treated in what I thought was a rather inconsiderate manner. But apart from that, I was upbeat and cheerful: I was still worried about the very tight project deadlines and the poor state of the project plans, but I thought that as the plans were tightened up the unrealistic nature of the project schedule would become apparent and we would have the ammunition to bid for an extension.
That evening, the Head of London Operations took me aside. And what he said was like a knife to the heart. In the meeting to which I had not been invited, the Hong Kong project manager had complained about me, not on a professional but on a personal level. He didn't like me, found me "abrasive" and was refusing to work with me. London Operations were not taking this entirely seriously - the Hong Kong project manager had a history of volatility - but the manager warned me that I needed to be far more careful about how I spoke to him and what I said. It was just like GALM all over again, or even my childhood.....I had upset someone, apparently, but I had no idea what I had done. I asked for specific examples of occasions when I had spoken too abruptly or abrasively, but he was unable to give them. So I could not fix the problem. I would have to walk on eggshells the whole time and hope I didn't inadvertently crush one without realising it.
After he left, I sat in the office for a long time looking out of the window, tears rolling down my face. It was sunset: against the red and gold sky I could see the silhouettes of planes taking off from the airport. I longed to be on one of them. Why I didn't call a cab, go to the airport and get on the next plane home I will never know. I suppose I thought I might be sacked if I did - and after all, my whole reason for doing this job was to support my family. I had to stay, for their sake.
And stay I did, the whole three weeks. I hated Hong Kong, but I liked Tokyo. The manners of our Japanese hosts reminded me of the manners drummed into me as a child. I understood them, perhaps better than some other members of the team. I had studied Japanese business as part of my MBA: perhaps that helped. Anyway, I got on far better with my Japanese colleagues than I did with the Hong Kong people.
It was after I came back that the real problems started. The project was, quite simply, impossible. We all knew that. But none of us had the courage to go back to the Board and tell them that the project simply was not deliverable in the time frame. To be fair, we all thought the Board would not listen anyway. But collectively we all - including me - suffered from a massive lack of gumption. We worked longer and longer hours just to get the work done. I produced a one-page Testing Strategy that outlined the approach to user testing: backing it up would be test plans and scripts for each application to be tested. These had to be created. We also started to design new business processes for the functions affected by the changes, a work stream that I added to the programme at the Operations users' request. But it quickly became apparent that we did not have either the resources or the time to complete the extensive process redesigns needed. Meanwhile IT provided a delivery schedule for systems to user testing, which turned out to be unworkable: delays built on delays, while the project deadline grew ever closer. By mid-July I was doing 12-hour days.
One evening, my boss caught me staring at yet another screen of horrible test results. "Is it really that bad?" he said. I didn't need to answer - I just looked at him. He knew.
"I'll do what I can", he promised. And he did. He persuaded senior management that the project was in trouble. Next thing I knew, there was a full-blown project review. I welcomed this as an initiative - but what I hadn't realised was that it meant even more work for me. I was expected to keep the user testing going - on which I was already doing silly hours, coordinating testing activities around the world. And I was now also expected to participate in the review, providing data and doing analyses to support the argument that the project needed to be restructured.
In addition to the morning testing review meetings, I now had 8am project review meetings as well. I used to get home at 11 pm or later after working all day and all evening without a break, eat something and fall asleep, then be up in time to catch an early train to London so that I was back in the office by 7.30 am, in time to produce the updates from overnight test runs before the 8am meeting because I wouldn't have time after the meeting. I never saw my little boy, because I left the house before he woke up and didn't get in until after he was asleep. And he didn't know where I was: Mummy had simply disappeared.
One night in August, he woke up at 2 am because he was teething. I went in to comfort him. It was like a light bulb going on. Mummy was there.... After that he woke up at that time every night and refused to go back to sleep. The middle of the night had become playtime.
I lasted three weeks on hardly any sleep. Eventually the inevitable happened: I blew my top in a project review meeting. I had had an hour and a half's sleep that night, my temper was on a knife edge, and in that meeting I had one demand too many made of me. I lost my temper. I am not proud of this, but in the circumstances it is perhaps surprising that I hadn't blown up before. But it didn't do my reputation any good. Once again, the message went round: Frances was difficult to work with.
Eventually the project was restructured and re-staffed, and a new deadline was set which, I noted with some amusement, was the same as it would have been if the original project management estimate had been accepted. The project did indeed need 9 months, not 6 months, and even that would be tight - people would have to work very hard. A new overall project manager was put in place and the London and Hong Kong project teams were dismantled, being replaced with a new task-based structure. I lost my job, of course. They suggested that I could join the team preparing new business processes. I thought about it, and decided that was not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to complete what I had started. I wanted to run the user testing. There was a Test Manager job in the new structure, so I said I wanted to do that.
It wasn't as simple as that. There was another candidate. My well-meaning boss had assigned some more of his staff to the new project, including one senior project manager. The staff had not been assigned roles, because my boss viewed it as the overall project manager's responsibility to assign them. However, I know that my boss had intended the senior project manager to go to Hong Kong for five months to run the Daedalus project office there - clearly not a job I could or would do. Unfortunately, the senior project manager had other ideas. He had just started a new relationship, and feared that spending a long time abroad would disrupt it. So he looked for a senior role on the project that would keep him in the UK. And there was an obvious one - the Test Manager role. Suddenly I was in a competition. I had to prove I was the right person to keep on doing the job I had been doing now for two months.
The new overall project manager, concerned about the hours I had been working, put me on strict work-to-rule (9 to 5) and excused me from breakfast meetings. I was so tired by then that it was a relief. I didn't have to work late, I didn't have to come in early, I could see my little boy. But it left me in a very vulnerable position. I was not present at important project meetings. I was "off the radar".
One day there was a breakfast meeting at which the final staffing of the project was determined. I did not attend this meeting, obviously.....but the senior project manager who was bidding for the Test Manager job did. At that meeting he presented a one-page Test Strategy as a blueprint for how to conduct testing. And on the basis of that presentation, he was given the job.
Later that day, the overall project manager jokingly asked me if I fancied five months in Hong Kong. Then I knew.There was no role for me on the project. Just as I had been after GALM 1, I was employed .....but unemployed. The project to which I had given so much had rejected me. I no longer had a job.
I only found out several months later that the Test Strategy that the senior project manager had presented at that meeting was the Test Strategy that I had written some months before, and that we had actually been using in the user testing that we had already done. He was so worried about losing his girlfriend if he ended up in Hong Kong that he resorted to fraud to get what he wanted. He stole my work and presented it as his own at a meeting where he knew I would not be present. He knew I had been doing that job: he knew I wanted to continue doing it. He knew that my circumstances made it impossible for me to spend five months in Hong Kong, which was the only alternative. But he didn't care.
I reacted to this much the same way I had to GALM 1. I had nothing to do, but I still had to come in to the office, and this time I didn't have the relief of MBA studies. I was bored out of my mind and dreadfully unhappy. It soon became evident that the new Test Manager was way out of his depth: the test team used to come to me for advice and information. I was no longer even a member of the project team, but they couldn't do without my knowledge. This went on for several weeks.
Eventually my boss found me another job - a small project to develop a time reporting system, coupled with running the Operations project office. It soon became apparent that there were so many big, business-critical and high risk projects going on at the time - plus the takeover of Dillon Read, of course - that no-one was remotely interested in a time reporting system. I could not get any senior management buy-in for this project and I admit that I was not really interested in it myself. It soon died, leaving me with only one job - the project office. As with the GALM "personal assistant" job, this was widely viewed as a demotion. But more importantly, I hated it. I knew that I was temperamentally unsuited to that kind of administrative role: but there was nothing else do do. I was bored out of my mind, miserable and stressed. I guess it showed in my behaviour: I was irritable, intolerant of minor annoyances and totally lacking any sense of humour. Not surprisingly, I became unpopular.
Underlying the problems at SBC Warburg was of course the tension at home. My husband was still unemployed, but was unwilling to be a house husband: he was spending lots of time doing voluntary work in order to gain experience with a view to becoming a charities fundraiser. Our son was in nursery, we had a cleaner and a gardener, all of it paid for by me. I felt that I was sacrificing everything I had ever wanted so that my husband could pursue his dreams at my expense. Something had to give, so I took us to Relate. We worked with a counsellor for several months, but the eventual (unsatisfactory) outcome was that I had to either accept the situation or leave. I agreed to continue to support the family if I got the second baby I wanted. It was an unholy deal that resolved none of the real problems and only delayed the inevitable. However, I did get the baby. In November 1996 I found I was pregnant. It was a high-risk pregnancy: I spent a lot of time visiting doctors and midwives, and as time went on I spent increasing amounts of time in hospital. There is little doubt that my mental state contributed to the risk: I was stressed and unhappy all the time, and this communicated itself to the baby.
Not long after this, my boss was moved sideways. He was replaced with someone who already had a vast team - we were simply additions. And he wasn't having any of the "flat management structure" that his predecessor liked. He chose the people he wanted as direct reports and assumed that everyone on the projects where they worked reported to them. But that left me out. I wasn't on any project.....but that didn't mean he wanted to be my manager. He simply ignored me completely. I was on my own.
I had to negotiate the terms of my maternity leave directly with Human Resources. The baby was due on August 12th, so I agreed that I would leave at the end of June. In practice I left earlier. I spent the last two weeks before going on maternity leave in hospital.....except for one visit to London. That visit was for my annual appraisal.
SBC Warburg appraisal involved 360 degree feedback and self-assessment. While in hospital, I completed the self-assessment form, which had been sent to me in the post. I didn't think I was particularly kind to myself in the self-assessment: I was by no means proud of my performance and felt that I had in many ways behaved pretty badly, though I did think that there were substantial mitigating factors.
I left hospital on the day of the appraisal and took the train to London, taking the self-assessment with me. The appraisal was to be conducted by a former colleague of mine who had recently been promoted, and a lady I had never met who had flown in from Switzerland. Apparently these two between them were now my line managers.
That appraisal was the worst one I have ever had in my life. Their assessment of me was far worse than mine: they refused to take into account any of the mitigating factors I had identified - not even my fragile physical state and the worry caused by a high-risk pregnancy, nor the fact that my marriage was in serious trouble (which they knew). None of it mattered. All that mattered was what people thought of me, and that was generally negative. There was a positive report from my team members: unsurprisingly, there was a very negative view from the senior project manager who had stolen my work in order to get my job. I had been unable even to be polite to him once I found out what he had done.
They refused to change any of their findings in the light of my self-assessment. I might as well not have bothered to do it. At the end of the appraisal, they said "well, now we'd better get this signed". I didn't say it, but I'm sure they knew what I was thinking. No way was I signing my own death warrant.
I spent all of the return train journey in tears. And I kept saying to myself, "I'm not going back. I'm never going back there again". I went back into hospital in a very upset and stressed state - not good for woman in the late stages of a high-risk pregnancy.
I look back on this experience now with absolute horror. I have managed people, and I can say in all conscience that, whatever crimes a staff member may have committed, calling someone out of hospital to give them a strongly negative appraisal is simply appalling management. Even if the bad appraisal is justified, you just don't do that to someone who is in a fragile physical or mental state. But it was symptomatic of the generally awful management at SBC Warburg.
I returned from maternity leave in January 1998. I negotiated the terms of my return directly with HR, because Operations didn't know what to do with me. I wanted to come back on the basis of working at home a couple of days a week, but all the Operations business units would consider was full-time in the office. So I found myself once more in limbo, with no clear role. No-one would assign me to anything meaningful because of what they saw as my restricted availability.
It didn't last long. SBC Warburg took over its rival UBS: Operations was restructured and I had yet another change of line manager, this time someone I liked and respected. But I never had a chance to work for him. Not long after the takeover, I was made redundant.
The next bit I am going to write is possibly illegal. But it is now fifteen years since I left UBS. Does it really matter any more?
I was sent to see HR to sort out the terms of my redundancy. There was a queue for interviews with HR officials, so I was shown into a waiting room. The room was full of women.....pregnant women, women who (like me) were just back from maternity leave, women with small children. There were no men.
In the HR interview it became clear that the new UBS was using the merger to get rid of everyone - from both sides - who didn't fit their "work hard, play hard" ethos. That's why so many women with children were being made redundant. We weren't going to commit the time that they wanted.
We were offered an enhanced settlement package in return for relinquishing our right to claim for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. UBS provided legal advice for us at a reduced price: but it is fair to say that the solicitors were looking after their own interests, not those of UBS. The solicitor I went to see suggested that I could go back and ask for more money.
I didn't. The awful appraisal was still in the back of my mind. And because of it, I considered that I deserved my redundancy. In fact the appraisal was bad enough for dismissal, really. I decided that I didn't have the moral right to ask for more money. I had not behaved well.
But HR had a slightly different take. They knew what had happened over my maternity leave, and they no doubt knew about the appalling appraisal done at a time when I was officially off sick - after all, no-one had ever insisted that I signed it, indeed it had never been mentioned again and I no longer reported to those individuals. They apologised to me for the awful management of the Operations department. I still remember the comment of the HR official who dealt with my redundancy:
"We do our best", she said. "But there are some management black holes".
Clearly I had been in one of them.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
The horror: Credit Lyonnais January - March 1995
Going back to work after my son was born was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I didn't want to leave my baby. And actually I wasn't in a fit state to return to work. I had postnatal depression.
I arranged a contract at Credit Lyonnais while I was still on maternity leave, and sent my child to a nursery at 3 months old even though I wasn't starting work for another month and a half after that: this was to accustom him to the nursery routine and deal with any problems before I had to face the long commute to London every day. Looking back, I know now that I did not have to return to work quite so early: I had enough money to take at least 6 months off, and had I done so I might have coped better.
But Credit Lyonnais had even worse problems than mine. I arrived in January to find there was nothing for me to do. The job they had had in mind for me had been hijacked by a rival department. I thought this was odd, but decided to make myself useful anyway. So I spent the first week reorganising the department, clearing out cupboards and getting to know people.
It quickly became apparent that the rival department was intent not only on hijacking projects, but taking over the department itself. I had inadvertently walked into a fight to the death. Not only that, but the department that recruited me decided to field me as their main protagonist in the fight. My opponent was a senior official from France, backed by the full might of the French senior management. Even had I been emotionally stable and physically robust, I would have found this difficult. In my fragile state, I never stood a chance. It was a disaster from beginning to end.
Technically, what we were doing was setting up a new bond trading desk in London and moving the bond trading book from France to the UK, which is actually quite fun to do. My opponent made life difficult for me, though. He wanted me to come in at 7 in the morning because that's when the traders started. He had a point: we did work closely with traders. But we were not providing live support to the trading desks - we were doing a project. Being in at 7 am was simply not necessary. And my contract said nothing about starting at 7 am: I would not have agreed to it if it had. As I lived some distance from London, being there at 7 would mean having to be on a train at 5.30 in the morning, which as my (by then) 6-month-old baby's nursery didn't open till 7 was a non-starter. My opponent was shocked. In his book, a woman with a baby that young shouldn't be there at all. But I was, and I was in his way.
Things progressively went from bad to worse, and I eventually wrote formally to senior management saying I could not work with this man because of his attitude to me. Predictably, they responded by terminating my contract. But unusually, they did an exit interview. I think I achieved more in that interview than in the whole of my time at Credit Lyonnais. The senior manager asked me how I saw the situation, and what he should do. I said that I thought the evident fight for supremacy between the two departments was incredibly unhealthy: people feared for their jobs and productivity was crashing. And I said that he should make a decision as to which department would survive, and which staff would be made redundant. He did as I said. Three weeks later the department that had recruited me was no more, and all the staff had either been transferred to other jobs or made redundant.
This was not the end of Credit Lyonnais' difficulties, though. It was slowly destroying itself from within. I have never encountered a company so intent on self-immolation before or since, and I hope I never do.
Credit Lyonnais was disastrous for me. I was already on the way down when I went there: but while I was working productively I could keep the negative thoughts at bay. But working for a company that was tearing itself apart reinforced my own negativity. By the time the fight got going in earnest I was seriously depressed.
The traumatic birth of my son, followed by my son's feeding difficulties, had left me feeling a failure as a mother. Now it seemed I was a failure as a worker too. There seemed little point in staying alive: I actually thought everyone would be better off without me. And I became increasingly disconnected from reality. I remember watching the crowds of people walking along the City streets, black and white and grey....they looked like ants. I didn't see them as anything to do with me. Whatever street they were scuttling down, it wasn't the same street as the one I was on. My street was empty, and I was alone. But once I was at home, I really was alone. I cut myself off from my friends and my family, withdrew from my husband. Fortunately I didn't cut myself off from my son. He was the only person with whom I could connect.
The final straw came as I crossed the road outside Cannon Street Station one day. A car was coming.....I nearly didn't step out of its path in time. I felt nothing: it wasn't that I wanted to die, more that I couldn't be bothered to move fast enough to avoid it. I found myself wondering idly what it would be like to be hit. Fortunately I came to my senses and got out of its way. But at that point I realised I needed help.
I didn't know who to turn to. I knew that I should see a doctor, but I hated doctors. Doctors had intervened to save my son when he failed to thrive, but their intervention to save him had hurt me deeply. No way was I going to talk to a doctor about how I felt. Especially the doctors who had dealt with my son. Why did dealing with my son's failure to thrive have to hurt me? Why couldn't there have been a solution that worked for both of us? It sounds unreasonable, and in many ways it was. I couldn't resolve it in my mind. I read everything I could find: I went over and over what had happened, trying to work out what had gone wrong and what I could have done differently. In fact I reacted to this in the same way I had to the loss of my job in GALM 1, only much, much worse - obsessing about what had gone wrong to the point of being unable to sleep, unable to eat, filling my time with pointless activity, anything to take my mind off the horror.....
In the end I contacted my midwife. She was no longer responsible for me, but agreed to see me. We had a long talk, and she eventually persuaded me to see a different doctor, one unconnected with the horror. I went to see this doctor, who suggested antidepressants. I refused medication: I felt that I wanted someone to help me unpick the tangled web of negative thoughts and emotions, not numb me so I couldn't feel or think any more. Maybe I was wrong: maybe medication would have calmed me enough to enable me to think clearly. But it's easy to be wise after the event. At the time, medication was the last thing I wanted. Deep down, I was desperately lonely: my self-inflicted isolation had cut me off from all the people who might have been able to help, and I felt there was no-one who was even interested in how I felt. Anyway, the doctor referred me to a psychotherapist as an emergency case. It was the start of eight years of therapy.
Therapy didn't help to start with. In fact if anything it made things worse. After I lost my job at Credit Lyonnais it was some months before I found another job, but I was on the job market the whole time, so my son had to stay in nursery. I was stuck at home with no job and no baby, bored and miserable. I took to roaming around the shops to keep myself occupied. And I read. Huge amounts of psychological stuff. It helped me to understand the deep roots of my depression, but it didn't cure it. I remained in the black hole throughout that summer.
Once again, Nat West came to the rescue. In the autumn of 1995 they called me in again to do the same job that I had done before, only for exchange-traded products in capital markets this time. I spent a mostly happy four months at Nat West, finally leaving when it became clear that what Nat West IT were prepared to do wasn't what I wanted to do. We agreed to part on good terms. And I planned never to go back. It had dawned on me that although my husband didn't earn much, I could take a career break while my son was tiny....we would be poor, but at least I could spend the time with my son in his early years, and maybe have the second baby that I wanted.
But it was not to be. What happened next was the worst time of my entire life. Worse even than the mental horror and near-suicide of the Credit Lyonnais days. At least then I felt nothing much: if there is one thing that depression does for you, it blunts emotions. But by the time I went to SBC Warburg, I was no longer depressed. I was angry - furiously angry. And the result was two years of almost unbearable pain. Pain that I still feel, even now, whenever I think about what happened there.
I arranged a contract at Credit Lyonnais while I was still on maternity leave, and sent my child to a nursery at 3 months old even though I wasn't starting work for another month and a half after that: this was to accustom him to the nursery routine and deal with any problems before I had to face the long commute to London every day. Looking back, I know now that I did not have to return to work quite so early: I had enough money to take at least 6 months off, and had I done so I might have coped better.
But Credit Lyonnais had even worse problems than mine. I arrived in January to find there was nothing for me to do. The job they had had in mind for me had been hijacked by a rival department. I thought this was odd, but decided to make myself useful anyway. So I spent the first week reorganising the department, clearing out cupboards and getting to know people.
It quickly became apparent that the rival department was intent not only on hijacking projects, but taking over the department itself. I had inadvertently walked into a fight to the death. Not only that, but the department that recruited me decided to field me as their main protagonist in the fight. My opponent was a senior official from France, backed by the full might of the French senior management. Even had I been emotionally stable and physically robust, I would have found this difficult. In my fragile state, I never stood a chance. It was a disaster from beginning to end.
Technically, what we were doing was setting up a new bond trading desk in London and moving the bond trading book from France to the UK, which is actually quite fun to do. My opponent made life difficult for me, though. He wanted me to come in at 7 in the morning because that's when the traders started. He had a point: we did work closely with traders. But we were not providing live support to the trading desks - we were doing a project. Being in at 7 am was simply not necessary. And my contract said nothing about starting at 7 am: I would not have agreed to it if it had. As I lived some distance from London, being there at 7 would mean having to be on a train at 5.30 in the morning, which as my (by then) 6-month-old baby's nursery didn't open till 7 was a non-starter. My opponent was shocked. In his book, a woman with a baby that young shouldn't be there at all. But I was, and I was in his way.
Things progressively went from bad to worse, and I eventually wrote formally to senior management saying I could not work with this man because of his attitude to me. Predictably, they responded by terminating my contract. But unusually, they did an exit interview. I think I achieved more in that interview than in the whole of my time at Credit Lyonnais. The senior manager asked me how I saw the situation, and what he should do. I said that I thought the evident fight for supremacy between the two departments was incredibly unhealthy: people feared for their jobs and productivity was crashing. And I said that he should make a decision as to which department would survive, and which staff would be made redundant. He did as I said. Three weeks later the department that had recruited me was no more, and all the staff had either been transferred to other jobs or made redundant.
This was not the end of Credit Lyonnais' difficulties, though. It was slowly destroying itself from within. I have never encountered a company so intent on self-immolation before or since, and I hope I never do.
Credit Lyonnais was disastrous for me. I was already on the way down when I went there: but while I was working productively I could keep the negative thoughts at bay. But working for a company that was tearing itself apart reinforced my own negativity. By the time the fight got going in earnest I was seriously depressed.
The traumatic birth of my son, followed by my son's feeding difficulties, had left me feeling a failure as a mother. Now it seemed I was a failure as a worker too. There seemed little point in staying alive: I actually thought everyone would be better off without me. And I became increasingly disconnected from reality. I remember watching the crowds of people walking along the City streets, black and white and grey....they looked like ants. I didn't see them as anything to do with me. Whatever street they were scuttling down, it wasn't the same street as the one I was on. My street was empty, and I was alone. But once I was at home, I really was alone. I cut myself off from my friends and my family, withdrew from my husband. Fortunately I didn't cut myself off from my son. He was the only person with whom I could connect.
The final straw came as I crossed the road outside Cannon Street Station one day. A car was coming.....I nearly didn't step out of its path in time. I felt nothing: it wasn't that I wanted to die, more that I couldn't be bothered to move fast enough to avoid it. I found myself wondering idly what it would be like to be hit. Fortunately I came to my senses and got out of its way. But at that point I realised I needed help.
I didn't know who to turn to. I knew that I should see a doctor, but I hated doctors. Doctors had intervened to save my son when he failed to thrive, but their intervention to save him had hurt me deeply. No way was I going to talk to a doctor about how I felt. Especially the doctors who had dealt with my son. Why did dealing with my son's failure to thrive have to hurt me? Why couldn't there have been a solution that worked for both of us? It sounds unreasonable, and in many ways it was. I couldn't resolve it in my mind. I read everything I could find: I went over and over what had happened, trying to work out what had gone wrong and what I could have done differently. In fact I reacted to this in the same way I had to the loss of my job in GALM 1, only much, much worse - obsessing about what had gone wrong to the point of being unable to sleep, unable to eat, filling my time with pointless activity, anything to take my mind off the horror.....
In the end I contacted my midwife. She was no longer responsible for me, but agreed to see me. We had a long talk, and she eventually persuaded me to see a different doctor, one unconnected with the horror. I went to see this doctor, who suggested antidepressants. I refused medication: I felt that I wanted someone to help me unpick the tangled web of negative thoughts and emotions, not numb me so I couldn't feel or think any more. Maybe I was wrong: maybe medication would have calmed me enough to enable me to think clearly. But it's easy to be wise after the event. At the time, medication was the last thing I wanted. Deep down, I was desperately lonely: my self-inflicted isolation had cut me off from all the people who might have been able to help, and I felt there was no-one who was even interested in how I felt. Anyway, the doctor referred me to a psychotherapist as an emergency case. It was the start of eight years of therapy.
Therapy didn't help to start with. In fact if anything it made things worse. After I lost my job at Credit Lyonnais it was some months before I found another job, but I was on the job market the whole time, so my son had to stay in nursery. I was stuck at home with no job and no baby, bored and miserable. I took to roaming around the shops to keep myself occupied. And I read. Huge amounts of psychological stuff. It helped me to understand the deep roots of my depression, but it didn't cure it. I remained in the black hole throughout that summer.
Once again, Nat West came to the rescue. In the autumn of 1995 they called me in again to do the same job that I had done before, only for exchange-traded products in capital markets this time. I spent a mostly happy four months at Nat West, finally leaving when it became clear that what Nat West IT were prepared to do wasn't what I wanted to do. We agreed to part on good terms. And I planned never to go back. It had dawned on me that although my husband didn't earn much, I could take a career break while my son was tiny....we would be poor, but at least I could spend the time with my son in his early years, and maybe have the second baby that I wanted.
But it was not to be. What happened next was the worst time of my entire life. Worse even than the mental horror and near-suicide of the Credit Lyonnais days. At least then I felt nothing much: if there is one thing that depression does for you, it blunts emotions. But by the time I went to SBC Warburg, I was no longer depressed. I was angry - furiously angry. And the result was two years of almost unbearable pain. Pain that I still feel, even now, whenever I think about what happened there.
A life changed forever: Nat West Markets January - August 1994
After leaving Midland in the spring of 1993, I turned freelance as a business systems consultant. I trained as an IT auditor during my notice period, and then had a couple of early successes - an IT strategy for Woolwich Equitable Building Society, and a quality assurance report for Girobank. But something else reared its head. I had a meeting with a recruitment consultant I had talked to previously when I was considering leaving Midland after the GALM 1 disaster. He dug out his notes from our previous meeting and read them to me: "Needs to decide whether she wants to be in banking and IT or whether she really wants to be a singer".
It brought me up short. My first love had always been music, and in particular singing: I had fallen into banking because of the ruin I had made of my voice due to stress and poor technique, but that was some years ago and I knew I could now sing again. My husband was working as an executive officer in the Civil Service, we had no children, and although we had a house we had no other ties. I discussed it with him and we agreed that I would try to return to the Royal College of Music to study opera.
In November 1993, I got in touch with the Royal College and arranged an audition for February 1994. I knew this was my last chance to go into the opera school: I was already older than most other students, and if I left it any longer they would not even consider me because of my age. But there were other things in the back of my mind too.....I had made a life plan towards the end of my time at OSS, in which I said I would like to have one child within 5 years. I didn't realise it, but that was the real plan.
In December 1993 my former boss from GALM rang me. He was now at Nat West Finance. Nat West Markets had got itself into a bit of a mess with over-the-counter currency options, losing a fair amount of money and sparking complaints to senior management that compliance and risk management were not all they should be. He wanted me to come in to design a financial control system for currency options that would track the underlying FX positions, enabling traders to price the options better and reducing the incidence of in-the-money option exercise at poor strike prices. And just to make it more complicated, he wanted the system designed in such a way that it could be used for other OTC derivative products. The system was to be PC-based, small and very flexible - clearly he had in mind something like the GALM PC system I had designed at Midland.
I duly turned up at Nat West Markets, worked out a high-level design, then in partnership with a Visual Basic contractor, designed and developed what we unimaginatively called the Currency Options Accounting System (COAS). Early on in my time at Nat West Markets I discovered I was pregnant, which effectively killed any ideas of being employed permanently by Nat West. I remained a contractor, with a firm departure date of the end of July. My pregnancy also forced me to cancel my Royal College of Music audition. I had not only wrecked my only chance of studying opera, I had also - though I didn't realise it then - ended whatever hope there had ever been of a professional singing career.
I'm not going to talk much about my time at Nat West, except to say that I enjoyed it. It was hard work, and towards the end I became very tired - especially as I actually left two weeks later than planned, leaving me only two weeks of rest before my due date. But we delivered a working prototype of the system, designed a second phase for interest rate options, and finally handed the system over to IT for porting to their preferred technology. COAS ran successfully for the next 8 years and was finally decommissioned by RBS as part of the systems migration after the takeover of Nat West.
But my life was never the same again.
It brought me up short. My first love had always been music, and in particular singing: I had fallen into banking because of the ruin I had made of my voice due to stress and poor technique, but that was some years ago and I knew I could now sing again. My husband was working as an executive officer in the Civil Service, we had no children, and although we had a house we had no other ties. I discussed it with him and we agreed that I would try to return to the Royal College of Music to study opera.
In November 1993, I got in touch with the Royal College and arranged an audition for February 1994. I knew this was my last chance to go into the opera school: I was already older than most other students, and if I left it any longer they would not even consider me because of my age. But there were other things in the back of my mind too.....I had made a life plan towards the end of my time at OSS, in which I said I would like to have one child within 5 years. I didn't realise it, but that was the real plan.
In December 1993 my former boss from GALM rang me. He was now at Nat West Finance. Nat West Markets had got itself into a bit of a mess with over-the-counter currency options, losing a fair amount of money and sparking complaints to senior management that compliance and risk management were not all they should be. He wanted me to come in to design a financial control system for currency options that would track the underlying FX positions, enabling traders to price the options better and reducing the incidence of in-the-money option exercise at poor strike prices. And just to make it more complicated, he wanted the system designed in such a way that it could be used for other OTC derivative products. The system was to be PC-based, small and very flexible - clearly he had in mind something like the GALM PC system I had designed at Midland.
I duly turned up at Nat West Markets, worked out a high-level design, then in partnership with a Visual Basic contractor, designed and developed what we unimaginatively called the Currency Options Accounting System (COAS). Early on in my time at Nat West Markets I discovered I was pregnant, which effectively killed any ideas of being employed permanently by Nat West. I remained a contractor, with a firm departure date of the end of July. My pregnancy also forced me to cancel my Royal College of Music audition. I had not only wrecked my only chance of studying opera, I had also - though I didn't realise it then - ended whatever hope there had ever been of a professional singing career.
I'm not going to talk much about my time at Nat West, except to say that I enjoyed it. It was hard work, and towards the end I became very tired - especially as I actually left two weeks later than planned, leaving me only two weeks of rest before my due date. But we delivered a working prototype of the system, designed a second phase for interest rate options, and finally handed the system over to IT for porting to their preferred technology. COAS ran successfully for the next 8 years and was finally decommissioned by RBS as part of the systems migration after the takeover of Nat West.
But my life was never the same again.
The lost heart: Midland GALM 3
A short while after the "leaks" incident in Midland GALM 2, I sat in a meeting between my boss and an Andersen partner, watching the Andersen partner twist my boss round his little finger. I see deviousness and manipulation very clearly when I am not the target.....if only I could learn to see it so clearly when I AM the target!
The Andersen partner wanted to get going with a pilot study for Phase 3 of GALM, which would bring in data from overseas entities and add additional reporting. He proposed to send in some of his minions, who were at a loose end, to visit the various user departments and produce a high-level scope and initial requirements document. The consultants would be supplied at a very large discount, since they were currently not gainfully employed. I listened in disbelief as my boss agreed to this Machiavellian scheme.
Afterwards I said to him, "You do realise that Andersen's real objective is to wind up the users into expecting a Phase 3 even though we haven't finished Phases 1 and 2 yet? He knows we don't have the resources to do phase 3. Before you know it the place will be crawling with Andersen consultants expensively doing Phase 3 at user behest."
"No, no," he replied. "He's got a problem - he has some staff he doesn't have work for at the moment. We're helping him out, that's all. There won't be a project from this".
Such naivety. I was right, of course. He did apologise, later.....after a very difficult meeting with Andersen Consulting at which he explained why they would not be running Phase 3 despite their reasonable expectations that they would be doing so. Followed by an even more difficult series of meetings with user management, as a result of which he was forced to create a Phase 3 project even though we had not finished Phase 1, Phase 2 hadn't started and there were no free resources for Phase 3.
I saw my chance. Overseas systems I knew about, better than almost anyone. And I had long thought that the GALM 1 massive database containing detailed data, while useful for investment banking and markets, would not be appropriate for the smaller and simpler - and largely autonomous - overseas units. So I wrote a formal letter bidding for the Phase 3 project on the basis of a stripped-down PC-based system producing a range of reports using summary data feeds from overseas systems and GALM1. It would be far smaller than the previous phases, far quicker and easier to implement, require a much smaller team and cost far less. It would need to be accompanied by a much larger programme of data enhancement in overseas systems themselves, but that could be rolled out over a period of time, with manual data submission to fill gaps until automated feeds could be provided. I didn't know it then, obviously, but this proposal was to become the blueprint for my later work with Nat West and RBS.
My proposal was accepted and I became Phase 3 project manager. I recruited a small team - helped by the sudden availability of people from other departments who would otherwise face redundancy under Midland's "Profits Improvement Programme". Work got under way on design and development of the PC system itself. Around this time, Phase 2 of GALM (which was supposed to incorporate UK retail banking data into the GALM 1 database) was cancelled due to cost constraints, so we bid for that one too on the grounds that extending the PC system to accommodate high-level data from the retail bank was no big deal and we happened to have a team member who had come from retail banking, knew lots about the systems and the data and - even more importantly - had good established user contacts in retail banking. We won that one too, and the project officially became GALM phases 2 and 3. Suddenly I was a success, doing the sort of project work I love - small quick win developments that deliver real business benefit at low cost.
I knew that to do the overseas systems part of the project, we would need to work closely with OSS. I didn't see this as a problem: after all, I had come from OSS. So I met with a senior manager in OSS, who was very interested in what we were doing. He offered to head up the overseas data feed part of the project, staffing it with OSS people. He was more senior than me, which was a trifle awkward, but it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, so we agreed to it. His name was written into the project structure reporting to me. But in reality he had other ideas.
By this time GALM 3 was a hot topic. It was being discussed at very senior levels in the bank. So the head of OSS saw an opportunity to get approval for his own pet project - standardisation of all the overseas systems. This would of course supersede the overseas feeds part of GALM 3, since the feed requirements would be incorporated into the standardisation programme. He won his bid... but not for his department. A new Midland Finance-sponsored project was created, headed up by the manager who should have been leading the overseas feeds part of GALM 3. The heart had been ripped out of my project. And there was nothing at all that I could do about it.
I should have known, I suppose. After all, why would someone volunteer to report to someone more junior, even on a project basis? Why not bid to run the project themselves? He knew he couldn't dislodge me as project manager of the system itself - but he didn't want to. The job he wanted was the much larger overseas systems enhancement programme. He agreed to my proposal, then went behind my back to get what he really wanted.
Despite the loss of the overseas data feeds part of the project, we still continued with the rest. We delivered the basic PC system with manual data submission for UK retail banking (GALM 2) and the larger overseas units (GALM 3). There was more work still to do - more reports to be written and more data to collect - but my development team leader was well capable of running the remaining developments. So when Midland was taken over by HSBC and the rest of the GALM project was cancelled, along with the overseas standardisation programme, I engineered my own redundancy. I felt it would be wrong of me to hang on to a job that could be done by my team leader: I knew that he had a young family, so job security was important to him, whereas I had no children and at that time no plans to have any, and had now completed my MBA, so the sponsorship was no longer an issue.
By this time my original boss had been moved sideways and I had a different manager. Ian was one of the best "people" managers I have ever encountered, and I liked and respected him a lot. It is thanks to him that I am a qualified project manager: he sent me on the pilot run of Midland's in-house project management course which led to a formal qualification. And I felt for him, as a "people" person, being tasked with probably the most horrible job any manager can be expected to do: the silent dismantling of an entire department. SMI was being eliminated, not by making people redundant - that would cost too much - but by making life so uncomfortable for the staff that they left of their own volition. They hated him, of course, even more than his predecessor. But they did what he wanted. One after another, they found new jobs and left. How he coped with that personally I will never know. I know he hated doing it: I think I was one of the very few people he trusted enough to show a little of what he really felt about it all.
But he didn't do that to me. He simply asked me to produce my plans for next year. The plans I produced didn't include me. My redundancy came two weeks later. My former boss was made redundant a day or two before, and I knew mine would follow. I remember being very agitated for those two days, waiting for the phone call....."come on, get on with it!" I thought. Eventually the call came, and I went down to the basement room where my manager was waiting.
"You know why you're here", he said.
"What took you so long?" I replied.
I don't think he wanted to do it. But I had left him with no choice. Looking back now, I regret my decision to leave HSBC/Midland, although I don't see that there was any alternative. Ian was someone with whom I could have enjoyed working, and there were others too that I liked and respected. I remained in touch with ex-Midland people at HSBC for some time afterwards.
The Andersen partner wanted to get going with a pilot study for Phase 3 of GALM, which would bring in data from overseas entities and add additional reporting. He proposed to send in some of his minions, who were at a loose end, to visit the various user departments and produce a high-level scope and initial requirements document. The consultants would be supplied at a very large discount, since they were currently not gainfully employed. I listened in disbelief as my boss agreed to this Machiavellian scheme.
Afterwards I said to him, "You do realise that Andersen's real objective is to wind up the users into expecting a Phase 3 even though we haven't finished Phases 1 and 2 yet? He knows we don't have the resources to do phase 3. Before you know it the place will be crawling with Andersen consultants expensively doing Phase 3 at user behest."
"No, no," he replied. "He's got a problem - he has some staff he doesn't have work for at the moment. We're helping him out, that's all. There won't be a project from this".
Such naivety. I was right, of course. He did apologise, later.....after a very difficult meeting with Andersen Consulting at which he explained why they would not be running Phase 3 despite their reasonable expectations that they would be doing so. Followed by an even more difficult series of meetings with user management, as a result of which he was forced to create a Phase 3 project even though we had not finished Phase 1, Phase 2 hadn't started and there were no free resources for Phase 3.
I saw my chance. Overseas systems I knew about, better than almost anyone. And I had long thought that the GALM 1 massive database containing detailed data, while useful for investment banking and markets, would not be appropriate for the smaller and simpler - and largely autonomous - overseas units. So I wrote a formal letter bidding for the Phase 3 project on the basis of a stripped-down PC-based system producing a range of reports using summary data feeds from overseas systems and GALM1. It would be far smaller than the previous phases, far quicker and easier to implement, require a much smaller team and cost far less. It would need to be accompanied by a much larger programme of data enhancement in overseas systems themselves, but that could be rolled out over a period of time, with manual data submission to fill gaps until automated feeds could be provided. I didn't know it then, obviously, but this proposal was to become the blueprint for my later work with Nat West and RBS.
My proposal was accepted and I became Phase 3 project manager. I recruited a small team - helped by the sudden availability of people from other departments who would otherwise face redundancy under Midland's "Profits Improvement Programme". Work got under way on design and development of the PC system itself. Around this time, Phase 2 of GALM (which was supposed to incorporate UK retail banking data into the GALM 1 database) was cancelled due to cost constraints, so we bid for that one too on the grounds that extending the PC system to accommodate high-level data from the retail bank was no big deal and we happened to have a team member who had come from retail banking, knew lots about the systems and the data and - even more importantly - had good established user contacts in retail banking. We won that one too, and the project officially became GALM phases 2 and 3. Suddenly I was a success, doing the sort of project work I love - small quick win developments that deliver real business benefit at low cost.
I knew that to do the overseas systems part of the project, we would need to work closely with OSS. I didn't see this as a problem: after all, I had come from OSS. So I met with a senior manager in OSS, who was very interested in what we were doing. He offered to head up the overseas data feed part of the project, staffing it with OSS people. He was more senior than me, which was a trifle awkward, but it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, so we agreed to it. His name was written into the project structure reporting to me. But in reality he had other ideas.
By this time GALM 3 was a hot topic. It was being discussed at very senior levels in the bank. So the head of OSS saw an opportunity to get approval for his own pet project - standardisation of all the overseas systems. This would of course supersede the overseas feeds part of GALM 3, since the feed requirements would be incorporated into the standardisation programme. He won his bid... but not for his department. A new Midland Finance-sponsored project was created, headed up by the manager who should have been leading the overseas feeds part of GALM 3. The heart had been ripped out of my project. And there was nothing at all that I could do about it.
I should have known, I suppose. After all, why would someone volunteer to report to someone more junior, even on a project basis? Why not bid to run the project themselves? He knew he couldn't dislodge me as project manager of the system itself - but he didn't want to. The job he wanted was the much larger overseas systems enhancement programme. He agreed to my proposal, then went behind my back to get what he really wanted.
Despite the loss of the overseas data feeds part of the project, we still continued with the rest. We delivered the basic PC system with manual data submission for UK retail banking (GALM 2) and the larger overseas units (GALM 3). There was more work still to do - more reports to be written and more data to collect - but my development team leader was well capable of running the remaining developments. So when Midland was taken over by HSBC and the rest of the GALM project was cancelled, along with the overseas standardisation programme, I engineered my own redundancy. I felt it would be wrong of me to hang on to a job that could be done by my team leader: I knew that he had a young family, so job security was important to him, whereas I had no children and at that time no plans to have any, and had now completed my MBA, so the sponsorship was no longer an issue.
By this time my original boss had been moved sideways and I had a different manager. Ian was one of the best "people" managers I have ever encountered, and I liked and respected him a lot. It is thanks to him that I am a qualified project manager: he sent me on the pilot run of Midland's in-house project management course which led to a formal qualification. And I felt for him, as a "people" person, being tasked with probably the most horrible job any manager can be expected to do: the silent dismantling of an entire department. SMI was being eliminated, not by making people redundant - that would cost too much - but by making life so uncomfortable for the staff that they left of their own volition. They hated him, of course, even more than his predecessor. But they did what he wanted. One after another, they found new jobs and left. How he coped with that personally I will never know. I know he hated doing it: I think I was one of the very few people he trusted enough to show a little of what he really felt about it all.
But he didn't do that to me. He simply asked me to produce my plans for next year. The plans I produced didn't include me. My redundancy came two weeks later. My former boss was made redundant a day or two before, and I knew mine would follow. I remember being very agitated for those two days, waiting for the phone call....."come on, get on with it!" I thought. Eventually the call came, and I went down to the basement room where my manager was waiting.
"You know why you're here", he said.
"What took you so long?" I replied.
I don't think he wanted to do it. But I had left him with no choice. Looking back now, I regret my decision to leave HSBC/Midland, although I don't see that there was any alternative. Ian was someone with whom I could have enjoyed working, and there were others too that I liked and respected. I remained in touch with ex-Midland people at HSBC for some time afterwards.
Things are not always what they seem: Midland GALM 2
After my time in limbo following the Midland GALM disaster, eventually my line manager found me a job.....working directly for him as his assistant. This sounds like a good thing: as he put it, it was a more "protected" position, and it gave me the opportunity to learn far more about what was really going on. But it was not really appropriate: personal assistant to a top manager is a good job for a graduate trainee, but he was not a top manager and I was more senior than a graduate trainee. It was widely regarded as a considerable demotion. I had no choice but to accept the job, but I became a laughing stock. But not to Andersens. They started to take me seriously. "Personal assistant" to them meant "useful".
One of the things that I had to do, as his assistant, was try to introduce good project management practice into SMI, a department that he had taken over. The trouble was that SMI hated him, and did everything in their power to undermine him. They also hated me, as his representative. This was not obvious, and it was not universal. The head of that department had a small circle of close associates. And those associates did everything in their power to discredit me. The methods they used ranged from outright obstruction to lies and deception. Obstruction I could handle: it made my job difficult, but not impossible. But lies and deception were a different matter.
Just as with GALM 1 I had no idea what was really going on, so in this case too I was completely blind. I don't "read" people very easily and I find it difficult to judge when someone is lying. And because I am straightforward to the point of bluntness myself - which is partly the cause of my interpersonal difficulties - I assume everyone else is playing with a straight bat too. That's why it is laughable when people accuse me of being "manipulative" or "twisting things". If they only knew.....I'm more devious than I used to be, but even now it doesn't come naturally and I can easily be wrongfooted by a more gifted player. Colin Duthie, one of my managers at OSS, commented once that I "don't play the game". He was only partly right. I didn't play the game, not because I chose not to but because I didn't even realise there was a game. These days I understand the game, though even now I don't always see it when I am part of it. Just as in a poker game, if you can't see the sucker, it's you, so in office politics: if you don't see the game, you are the one who is going to be stabbed in the back. And stabbed in the back is exactly what it feels like when you realise that someone is systematically spreading lies about you in order to discredit you - someone that you thought was friendly......
The first I knew of this was when my manager called me in and said that he had been told I had made some remarks that were extremely critical of a particular individual in SMI. I had indeed made some incautious remarks over drinks with a few members of SMI : not all of them were hostile, and at that time I didn't realise how much bad feeling there was anyway, so going for drinks with them didn't seem unreasonable. But what was being said was a huge distortion of my remarks. I defended myself, of course: I admitted to the remarks but said that they were quoted out of context and distorted. He warned me to be careful what I said in future. There we left it....
But then there was a disaster. A few days later, I was accused of leaking details of a senior recruitment, including grade and salary. Apparently it was all round the office. He said it could only have come from me.
I was appalled. Given my disgraceful exit from the GALM project not long before, I could not afford another disaster. And even though it was seen as a demotion, the role of PA requires absolute discretion. If I couldn't be trusted, then I was dishonourably out of a job.....again. I had to defend myself.
I knew I had not leaked that information. I had told a couple of people from SMI that someone they knew from Andersen Consulting was joining Midland, but certainly hadn't given details of grade and salary. But my manager believed it came from me. I had to establish who else might have known about it. It transpired that my manager had disclosed the same information to everyone who reported directly to him - me, and two department heads. One was the head of the finance team with whom I had previously worked: the other was the head of the department that my line manager had taken over. Either might have had reason to try to discredit me. But the leak was in the department that had been taken over. I pointed out that it was possible that the head of the department had leaked it himself. My manager agreed that was possible, but then questioned why he would do that. I did not have an answer.....
But he turned out to be the source, although indirectly. By this time I had realised that the information leaks attributed to me were malicious. And although I had not given details of grade or salary, I had told a couple of people about the recruitment. One of them I was pretty sure would not have said anything. But the other.....I was not so sure. So I decided to test her.
The following day, I engaged her in conversation, and in the course of the conversation dropped a piece of confidential information. I had thought carefully about what I was going to drop - it had to be something that didn't really matter if it got out, but significant enough to make her want to leak it if she was the source of the leaks, as I suspected.
Sure enough, by the end of the day it was all round the office. And the following day it reached my manager. I explained to him what I had done, and why. I think that was the first time that he had realised just how much some people in SMI hated him.
It was still a bit of a mystery as to why this particular individual was so intent on destroying me. It was my boss she hated, not me. But there was a good reason. She was having an affair with the head of SMI: the information on the senior recruitment had come from him as "pillow talk". She assumed that the relationship between my boss and me was the same as hers with her boss, and therefore she could hurt him both professionally and personally by forcing him to dismiss me. It was thoroughly nasty.
And it brought home to me just how vulnerable I was to devious and manipulative people. I was far more guarded after that, being careful what I said and to whom I said it. It was a painful learning experience. But it was not enough. Far worse was to come.
One of the things that I had to do, as his assistant, was try to introduce good project management practice into SMI, a department that he had taken over. The trouble was that SMI hated him, and did everything in their power to undermine him. They also hated me, as his representative. This was not obvious, and it was not universal. The head of that department had a small circle of close associates. And those associates did everything in their power to discredit me. The methods they used ranged from outright obstruction to lies and deception. Obstruction I could handle: it made my job difficult, but not impossible. But lies and deception were a different matter.
Just as with GALM 1 I had no idea what was really going on, so in this case too I was completely blind. I don't "read" people very easily and I find it difficult to judge when someone is lying. And because I am straightforward to the point of bluntness myself - which is partly the cause of my interpersonal difficulties - I assume everyone else is playing with a straight bat too. That's why it is laughable when people accuse me of being "manipulative" or "twisting things". If they only knew.....I'm more devious than I used to be, but even now it doesn't come naturally and I can easily be wrongfooted by a more gifted player. Colin Duthie, one of my managers at OSS, commented once that I "don't play the game". He was only partly right. I didn't play the game, not because I chose not to but because I didn't even realise there was a game. These days I understand the game, though even now I don't always see it when I am part of it. Just as in a poker game, if you can't see the sucker, it's you, so in office politics: if you don't see the game, you are the one who is going to be stabbed in the back. And stabbed in the back is exactly what it feels like when you realise that someone is systematically spreading lies about you in order to discredit you - someone that you thought was friendly......
The first I knew of this was when my manager called me in and said that he had been told I had made some remarks that were extremely critical of a particular individual in SMI. I had indeed made some incautious remarks over drinks with a few members of SMI : not all of them were hostile, and at that time I didn't realise how much bad feeling there was anyway, so going for drinks with them didn't seem unreasonable. But what was being said was a huge distortion of my remarks. I defended myself, of course: I admitted to the remarks but said that they were quoted out of context and distorted. He warned me to be careful what I said in future. There we left it....
But then there was a disaster. A few days later, I was accused of leaking details of a senior recruitment, including grade and salary. Apparently it was all round the office. He said it could only have come from me.
I was appalled. Given my disgraceful exit from the GALM project not long before, I could not afford another disaster. And even though it was seen as a demotion, the role of PA requires absolute discretion. If I couldn't be trusted, then I was dishonourably out of a job.....again. I had to defend myself.
I knew I had not leaked that information. I had told a couple of people from SMI that someone they knew from Andersen Consulting was joining Midland, but certainly hadn't given details of grade and salary. But my manager believed it came from me. I had to establish who else might have known about it. It transpired that my manager had disclosed the same information to everyone who reported directly to him - me, and two department heads. One was the head of the finance team with whom I had previously worked: the other was the head of the department that my line manager had taken over. Either might have had reason to try to discredit me. But the leak was in the department that had been taken over. I pointed out that it was possible that the head of the department had leaked it himself. My manager agreed that was possible, but then questioned why he would do that. I did not have an answer.....
But he turned out to be the source, although indirectly. By this time I had realised that the information leaks attributed to me were malicious. And although I had not given details of grade or salary, I had told a couple of people about the recruitment. One of them I was pretty sure would not have said anything. But the other.....I was not so sure. So I decided to test her.
The following day, I engaged her in conversation, and in the course of the conversation dropped a piece of confidential information. I had thought carefully about what I was going to drop - it had to be something that didn't really matter if it got out, but significant enough to make her want to leak it if she was the source of the leaks, as I suspected.
Sure enough, by the end of the day it was all round the office. And the following day it reached my manager. I explained to him what I had done, and why. I think that was the first time that he had realised just how much some people in SMI hated him.
It was still a bit of a mystery as to why this particular individual was so intent on destroying me. It was my boss she hated, not me. But there was a good reason. She was having an affair with the head of SMI: the information on the senior recruitment had come from him as "pillow talk". She assumed that the relationship between my boss and me was the same as hers with her boss, and therefore she could hurt him both professionally and personally by forcing him to dismiss me. It was thoroughly nasty.
And it brought home to me just how vulnerable I was to devious and manipulative people. I was far more guarded after that, being careful what I said and to whom I said it. It was a painful learning experience. But it was not enough. Far worse was to come.
Stormy waters: the Midland GALM disaster
I started at Midland Bank in 1986, working for their Overseas Systems Support (OSS) department, originally as an analyst/programmer then later as a project manager. I remember OSS as a protective environment: although I was criticised - after all, who isn't? it was always done in a supportive way. Looking back on it now, OSS seems like a haven. But then in many ways it was a department of "misfits". The senior management team had a policy of recruiting people who in one way or another were perceived as "difficult", because it kept staff costs down. But they also invested heavily in training and development, including personal skills training, precisely because of the management challenge that their recruitment policy created. Of course I didn't know all of this at the time: I know now because although OSS has long since disappeared - along with Midland Bank - my boss there has remained a personal friend, and over the years we have talked about all of this.
The particular problem that I created stems from a very difficult childhood and adolescence, some of which I have written about elsewhere. I don't propose to go into that here. Suffice it to say that OSS took on someone who, in the words of my younger brother, "didn't know how to behave". Perhaps I am being hard on myself: but I really did have problems with interpersonal relationships. I could be very hard on people, critical of those who didn't think as fast or as clearly as I did and intolerant of people who didn't work as hard as me. And I was insensitive towards people's emotional state and unaware of their personal concerns. I know now that my own emotional "noise" was getting in the way and preventing me from hearing others....but it has taken me a a very long time to learn that.
OSS management sent me on assertiveness training, and provided supportive management. And I gradually became better at dealing with people, though it didn't come naturally. By the time OSS was restructured in 1990, I was a successful project manager with full lifecycle experience. So when I was invited to join a huge Group Asset & Liability Management (GALM) project in Midland's Finance Systems department, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity.
It turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. The project was a joint venture between Midland Finance and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). I was to manage part of the project, reporting to a programme manager from Andersen who reported to a programme director from Midland (who was my line manager), with a team made up of a mixture of Midland Finance staff and Andersen consultants, none of whom actually reported to me or even worked anywhere near me. It was an unbelievably complex matrix management structure, and the team was dispersed - team members were all based in different areas, many in their own departments. To get any of them to do anything, I had to go through their respective line managers. And it soon became apparent that there was a history of bad relationships between some of the Andersen consultants and the Finance staff. I had no idea how to manage this cats-cradle of apparent and hidden relationships, and I made some bad mistakes, especially in my handling of Andersen staff. I am by no means proud of my dictatorial style of management at that time, but I had no idea how severe the retribution for my mistakes would be.
Early on, I was censured for publicly criticising a member of my team - an Andersen consultant - for ignoring the objectives that I had set him. That consultant was removed from the project and replaced, and the replacement's line manager - who was the Andersen programme manager - supervised her closely. This caused increasing friction: I felt I was being undermined as a project manager, while the Andersen programme manager complained that by trying to direct my Andersen staff as I saw fit I was interfering with the line relationship. It was an impossible situation. Something had to give.
One day my line manager called me in for a meeting, and informed me that I was being removed from the project. Apparently both the Andersen programme manager and the line manager of the Finance staff had complained about my treatment of their staff. He accepted their complaints at face value, and executed me.
I was devastated. And I was unemployed. Or rather, I was still employed, but I had nothing to do. For several weeks I forced myself to come into the office every day, knowing there was nothing to do when I got there. And every night I cried myself to sleep, unable to bring myself to talk to my husband about what I was going through. We had only been married a few months.....
Had my line manager investigated, he would have found that the truth was rather different from what had been presented to him. But I suppose because of the mistakes I had made in my dealings with the Andersen consultants who supposedly reported to me, he had already been primed to expect trouble. And in the end, the project was more important than me. I have no idea whether he ever found out about the distress his decision caused: although he was my line manager, I was physically located in a completely different department several floors below. The manager of that department knew about the situation and was concerned: I was doing an MBA at the time, so she gave me permission to study openly in the office....but I knew everyone around me resented the fact that I was reading books while they were working.
I was dreadfully unhappy. I considered looking for a job, but I lacked the confidence to blag my way into another job, especially as I now believed I was a failed project manager. Anyway, it was the 1990 recession and the jobs market was terrible. And Midland were part-sponsoring my MBA: I couldn't leave without forfeiting the sponsorship. I felt I was trapped.
What hurt most of all was being told that the finance team manager had complained that I had upset his staff. It was far too close to comfort to being punished for "upsetting people", without further explanation, as had happened all too often in my childhood. And I was pretty sure it was untrue. A short while before my removal from the project, in a one-to-one meeting, one of the young accountants in my team had become very upset. I don't handle tears very well, but I did my best. I asked her outright what the problems were that were causing her so much distress, and whether it was something I had done. She said it wasn't me: the Andersen team leader who was directing their work was being persistently rude and unpleasant to her and to the other young accountant involved, setting them impossible deadlines then criticising them when they didn't achieve them, refusing to answer their questions, hanging up the phone on them. That Andersen team leader supposedly reported to me, so after the meeting I asked her about it. "Oh, they're useless", she said. "They are completely unfocused". I said that her personal opinion of them didn't justify being unpleasant to them, and asked her to treat them with more respect. Unknown to me, she told her line manager about our conversation. Her line manager was the Andersen programme manager..... My dismissal from the project followed a few days later.
I did not discover for quite some time that the complaint about me came entirely from Andersen Consulting, who had claimed the support of the finance team manager for their complaint when he had not given it. It transpired that they had never wanted me, or any other Midland staff, on that project, so were systematically setting us up to fail. The emotional abuse of the young finance staff by the Andersen team leader was deliberately done to engineer their removal from the project. I suppose I was a bit more difficult to shift, being a direct report of the Midland programme director. But my Achilles heel was my interpersonal skills, so that's what they attacked. Their aim was to secure 100% Andersen staffing for the project, and they didn't care who got hurt in the process.
This was the first time I discovered just how vicious office politics can be. But it was certainly not the last, nor even the worst. To this day I remember that time at Midland, bad though it was, as less painful than either SBC Warburg or Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). I think SBC Warburg was probably the worst place I have ever worked, but CAF runs it close - which may be surprising to people who believe that big banks are bad, small banks good and charities wonderful. Give me a big retail bank any day. As employers they are far better than either investment banks or pretentious charities.
The particular problem that I created stems from a very difficult childhood and adolescence, some of which I have written about elsewhere. I don't propose to go into that here. Suffice it to say that OSS took on someone who, in the words of my younger brother, "didn't know how to behave". Perhaps I am being hard on myself: but I really did have problems with interpersonal relationships. I could be very hard on people, critical of those who didn't think as fast or as clearly as I did and intolerant of people who didn't work as hard as me. And I was insensitive towards people's emotional state and unaware of their personal concerns. I know now that my own emotional "noise" was getting in the way and preventing me from hearing others....but it has taken me a a very long time to learn that.
OSS management sent me on assertiveness training, and provided supportive management. And I gradually became better at dealing with people, though it didn't come naturally. By the time OSS was restructured in 1990, I was a successful project manager with full lifecycle experience. So when I was invited to join a huge Group Asset & Liability Management (GALM) project in Midland's Finance Systems department, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity.
It turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. The project was a joint venture between Midland Finance and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). I was to manage part of the project, reporting to a programme manager from Andersen who reported to a programme director from Midland (who was my line manager), with a team made up of a mixture of Midland Finance staff and Andersen consultants, none of whom actually reported to me or even worked anywhere near me. It was an unbelievably complex matrix management structure, and the team was dispersed - team members were all based in different areas, many in their own departments. To get any of them to do anything, I had to go through their respective line managers. And it soon became apparent that there was a history of bad relationships between some of the Andersen consultants and the Finance staff. I had no idea how to manage this cats-cradle of apparent and hidden relationships, and I made some bad mistakes, especially in my handling of Andersen staff. I am by no means proud of my dictatorial style of management at that time, but I had no idea how severe the retribution for my mistakes would be.
Early on, I was censured for publicly criticising a member of my team - an Andersen consultant - for ignoring the objectives that I had set him. That consultant was removed from the project and replaced, and the replacement's line manager - who was the Andersen programme manager - supervised her closely. This caused increasing friction: I felt I was being undermined as a project manager, while the Andersen programme manager complained that by trying to direct my Andersen staff as I saw fit I was interfering with the line relationship. It was an impossible situation. Something had to give.
One day my line manager called me in for a meeting, and informed me that I was being removed from the project. Apparently both the Andersen programme manager and the line manager of the Finance staff had complained about my treatment of their staff. He accepted their complaints at face value, and executed me.
I was devastated. And I was unemployed. Or rather, I was still employed, but I had nothing to do. For several weeks I forced myself to come into the office every day, knowing there was nothing to do when I got there. And every night I cried myself to sleep, unable to bring myself to talk to my husband about what I was going through. We had only been married a few months.....
Had my line manager investigated, he would have found that the truth was rather different from what had been presented to him. But I suppose because of the mistakes I had made in my dealings with the Andersen consultants who supposedly reported to me, he had already been primed to expect trouble. And in the end, the project was more important than me. I have no idea whether he ever found out about the distress his decision caused: although he was my line manager, I was physically located in a completely different department several floors below. The manager of that department knew about the situation and was concerned: I was doing an MBA at the time, so she gave me permission to study openly in the office....but I knew everyone around me resented the fact that I was reading books while they were working.
I was dreadfully unhappy. I considered looking for a job, but I lacked the confidence to blag my way into another job, especially as I now believed I was a failed project manager. Anyway, it was the 1990 recession and the jobs market was terrible. And Midland were part-sponsoring my MBA: I couldn't leave without forfeiting the sponsorship. I felt I was trapped.
What hurt most of all was being told that the finance team manager had complained that I had upset his staff. It was far too close to comfort to being punished for "upsetting people", without further explanation, as had happened all too often in my childhood. And I was pretty sure it was untrue. A short while before my removal from the project, in a one-to-one meeting, one of the young accountants in my team had become very upset. I don't handle tears very well, but I did my best. I asked her outright what the problems were that were causing her so much distress, and whether it was something I had done. She said it wasn't me: the Andersen team leader who was directing their work was being persistently rude and unpleasant to her and to the other young accountant involved, setting them impossible deadlines then criticising them when they didn't achieve them, refusing to answer their questions, hanging up the phone on them. That Andersen team leader supposedly reported to me, so after the meeting I asked her about it. "Oh, they're useless", she said. "They are completely unfocused". I said that her personal opinion of them didn't justify being unpleasant to them, and asked her to treat them with more respect. Unknown to me, she told her line manager about our conversation. Her line manager was the Andersen programme manager..... My dismissal from the project followed a few days later.
I did not discover for quite some time that the complaint about me came entirely from Andersen Consulting, who had claimed the support of the finance team manager for their complaint when he had not given it. It transpired that they had never wanted me, or any other Midland staff, on that project, so were systematically setting us up to fail. The emotional abuse of the young finance staff by the Andersen team leader was deliberately done to engineer their removal from the project. I suppose I was a bit more difficult to shift, being a direct report of the Midland programme director. But my Achilles heel was my interpersonal skills, so that's what they attacked. Their aim was to secure 100% Andersen staffing for the project, and they didn't care who got hurt in the process.
This was the first time I discovered just how vicious office politics can be. But it was certainly not the last, nor even the worst. To this day I remember that time at Midland, bad though it was, as less painful than either SBC Warburg or Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). I think SBC Warburg was probably the worst place I have ever worked, but CAF runs it close - which may be surprising to people who believe that big banks are bad, small banks good and charities wonderful. Give me a big retail bank any day. As employers they are far better than either investment banks or pretentious charities.
Saturday, 5 October 2013
Mothers and work
This was my response to a Newsnight debate in which Laura Perrins, representing Mothers At Home Matter, claimed that for a mother to stay at home with her child is "not a luxury" and that therefore stay-at-home mothers should all be subsidised even if their husbands earn megabucks.
The ensuing twitterstorm lasted for a day and a half and was extremely bruising. Insults and misunderstandings were rife. I was accused of feeling "guilty" about my "decision to work", and told I should "change my lifestyle" - move house, take up knitting and grow my own, apparently - in order to stay at home with my children. I ended up blocking someone who has been a follower for over two years. And I feel really sad about that - but I couldn't take all the "mumguilt" she was throwing at me. Not that she was the only one by any means.
Many people took particular exception to my use of the term "luxury". The Free Dictionary defines a "luxury" thus:
1. Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
2. Something expensive or hard to obtain.
3. Sumptuous living or surroundings: lives in luxury.
To me, a free decision by a well-off mother to stay at home with her children is consistent with the first two of these definitions. A parent staying at home with children full-time is not generally considered to be essential to their wellbeing or development, though it may enhance family life and it certainly fits better with the archaic way in which schools operate. And the financial and personal sacrifices that stay-at-home parents make can indeed be considerable.
But many people ignored the first two definitions of "luxury" and focused on the third, throwing sob stories at me about families "scrimping and saving" so mum could stay at home. Because these people were much poorer than they would be if both parents worked, apparently that meant their decision that one of them would be a full-time unpaid child carer was "not a luxury". Indeed this was Laura Perrins' argument. But it's nonsensical. They chose to invest in an expensive luxury, namely full-time child care: clearly their household income took a beating as a consequence, so they are not "living in luxury", but that doesn't mean the childcare itself isn't a luxury. Nor does the fact that looking after children full-time is a difficult job make it any less a luxury.
I should emphasise that my comments about full-time child caring being a "luxury" apply only to those families where a parent can freely choose whether or not to work. Most families have no such choice. In many families, two incomes are necessary to pay very high housing costs. And conversely, in other families, the cost of child care makes it uneconomic for both parents to work. The CHOICE for a mother (or father) to stay at home with children is only available to well-off couples like the Perrinses. Everyone else's decisions - including mine - are dictated by economic circumstances.
It seems to me that whether women (or men) who have freely chosen to stay at home with children deserve state support, as Perrins suggests, depends on whether having a parent at home full time is essential for children's well-being and development. That is exactly the argument put forward by the organisation that Perrins represents, Mothers At Home Matter - and it is potentially dynamite. A whole generation of women has grown up expecting to work while their children are young, because of the damage done not only to their household incomes but - more importantly - to their career prospects if they stop work to look after children. But if having a parent at home full time is essential to a child's well-being and development, then working mothers are seriously neglecting their children. In which case, the clock urgently needs to be turned back to a more "traditional" model in which mothers of young children do not work outside the home, and families with children must receive state support so that they do not end up living in poverty when mothers who currently work give it up.
Personally I don't buy this argument. And fortunately, research is on my side. There is zero evidence that children are damaged by being looked after by professional carers so both parents can work. On the contrary, there is some evidence that the diversity of care is good for them, improving their confidence and broadening their experience - and that is certainly consistent with my own experience. I was a child of a traditional family with a stay-at-home mother: but my children are far more self-assured, confident, responsible and resilient than I was at their ages. I believe that it was the diversity of the care they received throughout their childhood that has made them so.
Admittedly, my childcare arrangements did get very tenuous, and eventually I changed my job and adjusted my working patterns so they fitted better with the needs of my children. I didn't want to be the sort of parent who relies entirely on professional carers and rarely sees their children. There was enough of the "traditional " in me for me to want to have the time to do "mumsy" things such as picking them up from school, baking birthday cakes for them, taking them to after-school activities and playing games with them. But I'm not convinced that my children needed this as much as I did. Both of them wanted me to spend more time with them, of course, but I don't think they suffered because my time with them was limited.
Having said that, there is no doubt that a parent working long hours amounts to absence as far as the children are concerned. Actually "traditional" families are the worst for this: the flip side to the stay-at-home mum is the dad who is only at home at the weekend, if he isn't on a business trip or playing golf. I would oppose any support for single-income families that encouraged such polarisation in family life. If families freely choose to organise their lives in such a way, let them: but don't support it through the tax system.
Turning back the clock to a more traditional model is simply not going to happen in most families, for which I am exceedingly thankful: no doubt there will be some families for whom it is a model that works, but far more families welcome the fact that these days women with children are able to remain in the workforce. And the economy needs mothers to remain in the workforce, too. The loss of skilled women from the workforce in their childbearing years is a serious problem, given the extent of skills shortages that employers say they face. Laura Perrins complains that single-income families are being discriminated against because the economy needs women in the workforce. Good. Let the discrimination continue.
However, most working parents experience high levels of stress, especially if they are working very long hours. This applies irrespective of the family model: high stress levels are as characteristic of single-income families as they are of dual-income. Too many relationships don't survive the combination of financial pressure, the demands of work and the needs of children. So in my view, working patterns for both women AND MEN need to adjust so that children have more contact with their working parents and parents have more time together. Somehow, we have to find a model of work that supports family life and relationships without forcing women (and some men) either to take jobs that don't fully use their skills or leave the workforce completely. And I think this means that it is traditional MALE working patterns that need to change. Is it impossible to foresee a future in which it is normal for both women and men to work part-time while their children are young, sharing the care of their children and making appropriate but not extensive use of professional child carers? For me, this is a model that is far more deserving of state support than a traditional model with one parent not working and the other one working far too much. Children need time with BOTH their parents.
Related reading:
Working mothers "do no harm to children's behaviour" - BBC
At-home mothers should stay out of childcare debate - The Observer
At last, working mothers can ditch the guilt - Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
The betrayal of single-income families - Laura Perrins, Conservative Home
Where were you on 9/11? - Coppola Comment
Sorry, Laura Perrin, but a stay-at-home mum IS a luxury. Most families can't afford it. #Newsnight
— Frances Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) October 1, 2013
The ensuing twitterstorm lasted for a day and a half and was extremely bruising. Insults and misunderstandings were rife. I was accused of feeling "guilty" about my "decision to work", and told I should "change my lifestyle" - move house, take up knitting and grow my own, apparently - in order to stay at home with my children. I ended up blocking someone who has been a follower for over two years. And I feel really sad about that - but I couldn't take all the "mumguilt" she was throwing at me. Not that she was the only one by any means.
Many people took particular exception to my use of the term "luxury". The Free Dictionary defines a "luxury" thus:
1. Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
2. Something expensive or hard to obtain.
3. Sumptuous living or surroundings: lives in luxury.
To me, a free decision by a well-off mother to stay at home with her children is consistent with the first two of these definitions. A parent staying at home with children full-time is not generally considered to be essential to their wellbeing or development, though it may enhance family life and it certainly fits better with the archaic way in which schools operate. And the financial and personal sacrifices that stay-at-home parents make can indeed be considerable.
But many people ignored the first two definitions of "luxury" and focused on the third, throwing sob stories at me about families "scrimping and saving" so mum could stay at home. Because these people were much poorer than they would be if both parents worked, apparently that meant their decision that one of them would be a full-time unpaid child carer was "not a luxury". Indeed this was Laura Perrins' argument. But it's nonsensical. They chose to invest in an expensive luxury, namely full-time child care: clearly their household income took a beating as a consequence, so they are not "living in luxury", but that doesn't mean the childcare itself isn't a luxury. Nor does the fact that looking after children full-time is a difficult job make it any less a luxury.
I should emphasise that my comments about full-time child caring being a "luxury" apply only to those families where a parent can freely choose whether or not to work. Most families have no such choice. In many families, two incomes are necessary to pay very high housing costs. And conversely, in other families, the cost of child care makes it uneconomic for both parents to work. The CHOICE for a mother (or father) to stay at home with children is only available to well-off couples like the Perrinses. Everyone else's decisions - including mine - are dictated by economic circumstances.
It seems to me that whether women (or men) who have freely chosen to stay at home with children deserve state support, as Perrins suggests, depends on whether having a parent at home full time is essential for children's well-being and development. That is exactly the argument put forward by the organisation that Perrins represents, Mothers At Home Matter - and it is potentially dynamite. A whole generation of women has grown up expecting to work while their children are young, because of the damage done not only to their household incomes but - more importantly - to their career prospects if they stop work to look after children. But if having a parent at home full time is essential to a child's well-being and development, then working mothers are seriously neglecting their children. In which case, the clock urgently needs to be turned back to a more "traditional" model in which mothers of young children do not work outside the home, and families with children must receive state support so that they do not end up living in poverty when mothers who currently work give it up.
Personally I don't buy this argument. And fortunately, research is on my side. There is zero evidence that children are damaged by being looked after by professional carers so both parents can work. On the contrary, there is some evidence that the diversity of care is good for them, improving their confidence and broadening their experience - and that is certainly consistent with my own experience. I was a child of a traditional family with a stay-at-home mother: but my children are far more self-assured, confident, responsible and resilient than I was at their ages. I believe that it was the diversity of the care they received throughout their childhood that has made them so.
Admittedly, my childcare arrangements did get very tenuous, and eventually I changed my job and adjusted my working patterns so they fitted better with the needs of my children. I didn't want to be the sort of parent who relies entirely on professional carers and rarely sees their children. There was enough of the "traditional " in me for me to want to have the time to do "mumsy" things such as picking them up from school, baking birthday cakes for them, taking them to after-school activities and playing games with them. But I'm not convinced that my children needed this as much as I did. Both of them wanted me to spend more time with them, of course, but I don't think they suffered because my time with them was limited.
Having said that, there is no doubt that a parent working long hours amounts to absence as far as the children are concerned. Actually "traditional" families are the worst for this: the flip side to the stay-at-home mum is the dad who is only at home at the weekend, if he isn't on a business trip or playing golf. I would oppose any support for single-income families that encouraged such polarisation in family life. If families freely choose to organise their lives in such a way, let them: but don't support it through the tax system.
Turning back the clock to a more traditional model is simply not going to happen in most families, for which I am exceedingly thankful: no doubt there will be some families for whom it is a model that works, but far more families welcome the fact that these days women with children are able to remain in the workforce. And the economy needs mothers to remain in the workforce, too. The loss of skilled women from the workforce in their childbearing years is a serious problem, given the extent of skills shortages that employers say they face. Laura Perrins complains that single-income families are being discriminated against because the economy needs women in the workforce. Good. Let the discrimination continue.
However, most working parents experience high levels of stress, especially if they are working very long hours. This applies irrespective of the family model: high stress levels are as characteristic of single-income families as they are of dual-income. Too many relationships don't survive the combination of financial pressure, the demands of work and the needs of children. So in my view, working patterns for both women AND MEN need to adjust so that children have more contact with their working parents and parents have more time together. Somehow, we have to find a model of work that supports family life and relationships without forcing women (and some men) either to take jobs that don't fully use their skills or leave the workforce completely. And I think this means that it is traditional MALE working patterns that need to change. Is it impossible to foresee a future in which it is normal for both women and men to work part-time while their children are young, sharing the care of their children and making appropriate but not extensive use of professional child carers? For me, this is a model that is far more deserving of state support than a traditional model with one parent not working and the other one working far too much. Children need time with BOTH their parents.
Related reading:
Working mothers "do no harm to children's behaviour" - BBC
At-home mothers should stay out of childcare debate - The Observer
At last, working mothers can ditch the guilt - Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
The betrayal of single-income families - Laura Perrins, Conservative Home
Where were you on 9/11? - Coppola Comment
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