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The Value Exchange podcast out now!
This week we are delighted to be joined by former Police Chief Constable Bill Skelly. Having retired a couple of years ago, with over 30 years of public service, Bill has a passion for sport, having played Volleyball for over 40 years, he understands the importance of physical activity for both physical and mental health, which has led him to now sit, amongst other interests, as Chair of TeamPolice Ltd. This week’s podcast sees us discussing bureaucracy (the good, the bad and the ugly), why we should be talking more, how Value Exchange can help with that, the importance of being happy and healthy at work, and the need to do more.
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Youtube video – Episode 6 – Bill Skelly – We need to talk more, we need to do more (click to watch)
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Transcript – scroll to see text below
TRANSCRIPT – Episode 6 – Bill Skelly – We need to talk more, we need to do more
00:00:00:03 – 00:00:33:28
Rob Pye
And welcome to The Value Exchange. We’ve got as usual our hosts. Me, Rob Pye and Annabelle Lambert. Our special guest today is a former Chief Constable of the UK Police Force. We have Bill Skelly and Bill has been around in the police force 30 years. He’s been a keen proponent of sport all through his working career and for some reason got involved with Ethos in a wellbeing venture that we call TeamPolice.
00:00:33:28 – 00:01:16:26
Rob Pye
And he currently Chairs the joint venture between the UK Police Force and Ethos, the TeamPolice venture. So just quick introductions, if this is the first time that you’ve tuned in I’m Rob Pye, one of the founders of Ethos, along with Annabelle, I often say I’m a reformed management consultant and I met Annabelle about 24 years ago now when we were working, EY and my thing in terms of social value and making the world a better place is that being frustrated with organizational bureaucracy, not that we want to do away with organizational bureaucracy, but I just think we often solve the wrong problems very well, and we don’t do a good job for people and planet and social value.
00:01:16:27 – 00:01:20:16
Rob Pye
So that’s sort of me. Annabelle about what About you?
00:01:21:00 – 00:01:47:05
Annabelle Lambert
Yes. So I’m Annabelle Lambert. I’m still in West Sussex, and pleased to say I still have two kids. I’m in the middle of half term. I may have background noise. Dogs usually bark and but my thing, my thing, why I’m here, is all about really I’m on a mission with people to put them back at the centre of what they’re doing and in their relationship with their work to give more meaning, more purpose, and just create a lot more social value.
00:01:47:05 – 00:01:53:08
Annabelle Lambert
I think around the world, generally, I’m going to invest in a white cat quite soon, but that’s me.
00:01:54:07 – 00:02:15:28
Rob Pye
Okay, so Bill, really informal, but do you want to just talk us through your bit of policing and if I might need to meet, if my dog just decides to bang open the door but police sport and then finish this segment with how you found Ethos. So the whole bit would probably be within half an hour, the interview.
00:02:15:28 – 00:02:18:25
Rob Pye
But so, yes, introductions, Bill.
00:02:19:10 – 00:02:47:17
Bill Skelly
Okay. Well, thank you, Rob. Thank you, Annabelle. It’s a delight to be able to speak with you about the issues of value and social capital and how we can improve those. I joined the police service 33 years ago, back in 1990, up in Edinburgh, where I am now, and had a thoroughly rewarding and interesting career for the next 31 years.
00:02:48:00 – 00:03:20:21
Bill Skelly
I retired just coming up for a couple of years ago and throughout that career I suppose I felt that my purpose was to deliver the best possible value to policing in whatever force I was in and as I moved through the hierarchy of the police service, I had the opportunity to have more influence over larger areas and indeed the whole of the UK as part of the national police coordination that takes place at that level.
00:03:22:12 – 00:03:49:25
Bill Skelly
How did I go about kind of adding that value? But I suppose that’s the subject over the next half an hour. And also what I’ve been doing throughout my life. But essentially it was trying to recognize where the positive things that I could do would have best effect. And that wasn’t always necessarily in the way that I could directly affect the public, although at the beginning that was definitely my role.
00:03:50:12 – 00:04:13:26
Bill Skelly
But as I progressed, it was more about the influence I could have over the workforce, my colleagues, and the influence I could have over the kind of service that we were delivering. And throughout that period, I’ve also been a very keen sports person and volleyball is my kind of passion. I’ve been part of that set up for over 40 years and still am.
00:04:13:26 – 00:04:51:06
Bill Skelly
I still coach and I still play. And throughout my policing career I was part of the police sport set up and again, as time went on, I moved into different roles within that. And for the last 16 or so years, I’ve been part of the management set up of police sport across the United Kingdom and able to do what I can to improve the health and wellbeing of police officers and staff and then retired employees through sport and through the physical activity that they can take part in.
00:04:51:06 – 00:05:41:05
Bill Skelly
How did I come across Ethos? Well I suppose that was kind of a happy kind of coincidence at the right time. I had been sort of concerned over the level of funding that was dwindling within the police sport area and was seeking to find new ways to bring external investment into police Sport UK and I came across the joint venture that was taking place at that point between Ethos and the armed services, and this looked like a really interesting, really innovative way of engaging with the commercial sector to bring extra cash into the armed services sport and support them.
00:05:41:18 – 00:06:07:21
Bill Skelly
And I thought this could be replicated within the police environment. And fortunately, so did Rob, and he felt that this was also an idea that we could start up within the policing environment. And from those early discussions we came to the agreement of having TeamPolice, which is now essentially the forward facing brand of police sport across the United Kingdom.
00:06:08:17 – 00:06:34:21
Bill Skelly
But it is very much about engaging with commercial companies and encouraging them through the responsibilities about increasing social capital, but also through their interest and networking with the police sector to part with their money and for us to then use that in a not for profit organization to invest in the wellbeing of officers and staff right across the country.
00:06:35:20 – 00:07:02:08
Bill Skelly
I’m glad to say that despite very difficult start because we got going during the pandemic, that we have now got some really good traction. And indeed I’ve started to diversify into the areas of sporting grants and have been successful in being awarded grants from Sport England to support other physical activity work, outside of the traditional approach to Police Sport UK has.
00:07:02:08 – 00:07:28:06
Bill Skelly
A really exciting joint venture. We have very interesting times as we look to develop our kind of standalone organization, but it’s been a fascinating time for me and has really been something that I’ve enjoyed, particularly as I’ve left the full time policing role and taken up more part time roles with different organizations like TeamPolice.
00:07:28:06 – 00:08:00:02
Rob Pye
So I want to take you back to a quick question raised when you were talking about your influence within the police. So I’m talking about culture. So as a 30 plus year, you know, public servant in the police force, there’s a lot of culture there. And then you transitioned outside. So a lot of people find that transition hugely challenging, public service to, you know, what people call “retirement”.
00:08:00:09 – 00:08:32:21
Rob Pye
You know, it’s a transition. It’s certainly, in your case, not what one might conceive as a retirement. But now Ethos and now your life outside of the force, how different is the culture on the outside versus the inside? And then just a follow up to that, how similar is it? What were your sort of learnings to share in terms of that, your cultural transition or the cultural components of that?
00:08:33:24 – 00:09:02:07
Bill Skelly
Yes. So there’s a lot of things which some of them are difficult to unpick because they are interwoven and layered on top of each other so that you can’t necessarily define say the culture of policing in a short sentence or a kind of single word. So this is always going to be a bit of a partial answer to that question.
00:09:03:04 – 00:09:47:03
Bill Skelly
But essentially, I suppose there are real positives about the culture of police, public service, and they tend to be around the duty aspect, the sense of duty and the sense of discharging or doing that duty. So that brings with it the sort of action focused, task focused approach which seeks to see things kind of completed, seeks to see things getting done, and that can be in for a lot of environments, A real enabler to achieving any particular kind of goal or milestone.
00:09:48:00 – 00:10:29:15
Bill Skelly
And the unfortunate flipside of that is that with most public services, there’s also a lot of bureaucracy. So it’s almost like the push and pull, the pull is this draw to delivering on a sense of duty. But the pushback against it is almost labyrinthine bureaucracy and decision making, which then tends to kind of slow things down. So you have this tension that exists around wanting to achieve things and then having to achieve them within an environment of administrative processes.
00:10:29:26 – 00:10:59:10
Bill Skelly
And those processes seem to get more and more complex and more and more numerous as time goes on. So that brings about an interesting culture, doesn’t it? Because you’re going to have this sense of tension that people are going to have to hold because not everything can get done overnight, and particularly because you have this difference between what policing would describe as an operational environment, which is almost, you know, policing loves a crisis.
00:10:59:18 – 00:11:25:15
Bill Skelly
And I don’t mean to, you know, talk that down because quite often these crises are life threatening or life losing. And so I don’t wish to kind of come across so flippant about it, but very often it’s around the emergency response or the quick time response, and there’s lots of training and lots of effort goes into developing that cultural approach. That then struggles with slower activity.
00:11:25:15 – 00:11:58:11
Bill Skelly
So if you have to introduce a wellbeing initiative over a period of two years, That is a challenge for the culture of policing because it is geared towards quick time change. Lots of lots of things that happened during that kind, a lot of disruption short term and then move on to the next thing, trying to embed slower change, trying to make what we might call a
00:11:58:11 – 00:12:25:21
Bill Skelly
step change is a much more difficult thing to do within policing and so there’s that part of it. And then in terms of the transition coming out of it, well, I suppose those two sides change and I’ve kind of been engaged now in environments where there isn’t the same pressure or sense of doing things quickly but then there’s also not so much bureaucracy as well.
00:12:25:21 – 00:13:03:00
Bill Skelly
Let’s be flexible now let’s let’s approach this in a more innovative, more interesting way. And let’s be prepared for it not necessarily to work straight away, but let’s try it. And so that difference is very interesting. It’s very interesting. And I think that if you’re able as a leader, particularly if you’re able to keep the drive but embrace the ambiguity, then you are going to be very happy.
00:13:03:00 – 00:13:37:24
Bill Skelly
But also you’re going to help a lot of people in organizations because that’s quite rare. That’s that joint holding of those two things together. So I do feel that it has been interesting as you transition from the kind of full time, full on employment to to something different and working with others. And it is, you know, a source of reflection for me to consider, Well, how do I, I try to bring the best of all those worlds to bear on whatever given issue that I’m faced with?
00:13:37:24 – 00:14:12:24
Rob Pye
Yeah. And it leads me to a slightly complicated question that I haven’t had time to express simply, but Annabelle and I were just talking about it prior to this after some article reviews from a guy called Michelle Bauwens who hopefully will be on the show soon, although we haven’t asked them. Hello, Michel, you’re coming! And he’s the founder of something called the Peer to Peer Foundation, which is all about the sort of individual behaviors that we need to develop.
00:14:12:24 – 00:14:40:18
Rob Pye
You know, culture’s a big word I’m picking into, as you’ve done brilliantly in bureaucracy and duty, and something that is a problem that we want to solve in the world is to do with the behaviours or culture that comes from the established wisdom of economics, which in a word you might say.
00:14:41:09 – 00:14:42:13
Annabelle Lambert
A tiny topic.
00:14:42:19 – 00:15:18:00
Rob Pye
If if it doesn’t have a price, it has no value. Because economics is about scarcity, you know, the buying and selling of scarce resources, and yet it doesn’t work very well for natural resources such as the air and the world that we live in. And minerals are, by definition, finite for organic things like animals, nature, because they don’t follow the established wisdom of economics.
00:15:18:22 – 00:16:04:24
Rob Pye
And yet, I believe when you use the word duty that you’re unpicking much, much more when you say that in terms of public service than following rules, you know, a sense of social value, a sense of purpose and mission that actually you’re there to do something that puts into society rather than takes out. And something that fascinates me and has done for the last 15 years of this venture is that there is a different culture in policing than there is in an organization that is, you know, primarily that to produce profit regardless of, you know, people and planet.
00:16:06:25 – 00:16:39:19
Rob Pye
So if there was a lovely question, have you had further thoughts and this is just oversimplifying it in how to stitch all of that together your last bit was, well, what could I apply inside? What have I learned outside? How might.. what’s your Tony’s grand Theory of Everything was a previous interview, system theory. Have you had any thoughts on where this might take you and what would motivate you most in the space?
00:16:41:08 – 00:17:34:19
Bill Skelly
I suppose the notion of what is profit in that context. So as you’ve mentioned, the economic model of what, you know, ultimately trying to increase some kind of economic value, which tends to have its definition in sort of financial value, some sort of GDP or something that’s going to increase. And then so say, well, there are other definitions of profit or gain and when you look at something like a public service, you try to define what is the gain that that organization is bringing, what is the gain at that individual is bringing as part of that organization and trying to redefine it so that people can relate to it.
00:17:34:19 – 00:17:58:10
Bill Skelly
People can understand that their activity for which they’re getting paid or may not be if they’re volunteers. How is that contributing to the gain the organization is seeking to achieve. So for policing, I really simply define the gain as improving the safety of everybody who, you know, lives, works and visits in any particular area.
00:17:59:01 – 00:18:24:27
Bill Skelly
And so how you break that down and then if you’ve to find it in those simpler and clearer ways saying, well, how do you align your activity best to achieve that gain? And so what do you do, what are you actually doing that is then improving the overall position of you and the organization and achieving what it’s trying to achieve.
00:18:25:17 – 00:18:40:19
Bill Skelly
Probably tell people some straightforward, but you may or may not be aghast at how rare that actually happens in practice. You know, how individuals, very largely speaking, have little understanding as to what they’re actually.
00:18:41:16 – 00:18:45:00
Annabelle Lambert
They’re never required to think about it. They’re never asked to think about it.
00:18:45:16 – 00:19:23:07
Rob Pye
So the interruption now I have to get excited about this is that’s the perfect segway into Value Exchange this great. So it you know, we could say value exchange, social value exchange, economic value exchange, environmental value. So this enlightenment or awareness of all the things that are helping but might not have a number, might not over monetary value, might not, you know, but it is about, you know, if you if you talk about safety, security, cohesiveness of the community or all of these concepts.
00:19:23:07 – 00:20:10:22
Rob Pye
So the thing that would excite me most anyway is, is more conversations, which is when we have value recognition. We’re not trying to just have a conversation about where’s the money in that strip, all of that, you know, But actually where are the conversations that are important about this? So is there is this stuff inside policing in TeamPolice, in what you want to do moving forward that might relate to promoting more conversation, more about how these things, the social value might be achieved or where you might be able to help to raise awareness?
00:20:10:22 – 00:20:21:02
Rob Pye
Where are the big opportunities and what are the challenges in your mind? Again, sorry for such small questions, but I know you love them.
00:20:21:29 – 00:20:49:27
Bill Skelly
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that there’s a huge number of opportunities and as I mentioned at the start, in terms of push pull, there are certainly plenty of barriers in the way. But let’s kind of talk about and they’re also different kind of levels. So there is the multi-agency level, you know, how do you better coordinate collaborations and partnerships and, and co-operative activity across public and private sector and you know.
00:20:50:06 – 00:20:52:00
Rob Pye
Another small point.
00:20:52:08 – 00:21:17:29
Bill Skelly
You’re aware that there are new public duties in relation to violence reduction and so how are you actually going to make those work any better than some of the previous collaborations on other kind of civic duties? So there’s that from the get go. There’s organizational level in terms of how do you make the corporate organization more productive, more aligned to achieving, you know, goals.
00:21:18:09 – 00:21:52:13
Bill Skelly
And then there’s the individual level part of the organization. How do you know? And I suppose the common theme of all those, as you have articulated, that is the concept of exchanging value as opposed to any other kind of dialog or lack of dialog that might have been taking place. So throughout the policing organization, then there’s things like performance development reviews, the kind of PDRs and performance about plans PDPs and so on, I never liked them.
00:21:53:11 – 00:22:29:14
Bill Skelly
They are not generally well adhered to in terms of them actually being carried out. So you might, you would have one, an annual one. There’s plenty of evidence out there that the actual completion rate is very poor and I mean in some cases well well below 100% sometimes like 50% and some are years out of date. So if you’re not actually having the conversation, then you’re not going to be exchanging value or increasing someone’s connection to their purpose.
00:22:30:01 – 00:22:59:18
Bill Skelly
And even if you are having a conversation, if the conversation is poorly constructed and the ones that I’ve experienced over 30 years were by and large all of them poorly constructed. So they were written by people who weren’t really, in my view, trying to get an idea of value and purpose and no real dialog. And some of that was because if you do that, then you have to be prepared for the answers.
00:23:00:00 – 00:23:00:11
Annabelle Lambert
Yeah.
00:23:01:15 – 00:23:24:06
Bill Skelly
I mean, you know, a whole bunch of stuff and you have to then acknowledge it, listen to it and act on it and not organizations large bureaucratic organizations that police forces don’t really want to hear that. They want to hear that you’ve done this many things and that you’re going to carry on doing them. And well done. See you next year.
00:23:25:19 – 00:23:30:02
Bill Skelly
And if that sounds harsh, that’s not nearly as harsh as I could be, because.
00:23:30:12 – 00:23:44:10
Annabelle Lambert
No, I think that sounds quite normal. I think often organizations both, you know, wherever they are not prepared to be on the other side. You know, I find that that’s not unusual, I don’t think.
00:23:44:20 – 00:24:09:07
Bill Skelly
And what they do is rethink or re-imagine what the expectation for them might be. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to have, you know, lots of vacancies and lateral movement and changes or so on. It might just simply being acknowledged the way that the link the individuals making to the organization needs to be described or thought of in a different way.
00:24:09:29 – 00:24:36:03
Bill Skelly
But again, generally speaking, organizations and particular departments who are either there and given a job to do, find it difficult to then think, think a bit differently about what that conversation will take place. And it’s the same as, I say, a kind of organizational and a corporate level as it is the dialog around the purpose of being there and how you describe that purpose and how you’re going to achieve it.
00:24:36:03 – 00:25:11:06
Bill Skelly
It’s what gain are you trying to achieve. So a board level, corporate level, executive team level discussions tend to get very sidetracked on other issues. As I say, if you spent 25 years being a doer in an emergency or a crisis, planned event type things, that’s not necessarily a helpful mentality or characteristic. If you’re then in an environment where you’re talking about something differently that you are going to have to achieve in different ways.
00:25:11:14 – 00:25:48:12
Bill Skelly
You can’t just tell the organization, you know, go and stand on that line and do that. That’s not how it’s going to work. You have to have a different approach. And so and then at the third level, that level of collaboration, this is where it becomes even more interesting because you then have, you know, very different cultural perspectives or outlooks or notions of value coming together with either a directive because it’s legislation or a shared desire, because it feels like the right thing.
00:25:49:00 – 00:26:22:25
Bill Skelly
And they come together, but with no necessarily real work together to understand how they’re going to achieve that. At its simplest level, you might have something like a police kind of culture which says, we want to do this and we want to do it by next Monday. And then you might have another organization says, well, we want to do something similar, but it will be, you know, a year from now or two years from now or actually actually it’s not it’s not doing that that we’re here for.
00:26:22:25 – 00:26:50:02
Bill Skelly
It’s discussing this. It’s about sharing information, sharing dialog. It’s about having a channel of communication. And the gain for us is having dialog, whereas the gain for you is constructing something new or dismantling something old. And we are already talking to different languages and we achieve the same thing. So clear understanding of what value you’re seeking to achieve together comes around by having that conversation.
00:26:50:02 – 00:27:12:17
Bill Skelly
So a value exchange at a collaborative level seems to me like a hugely important and beneficial thing. So you ask kind of, you know, what are the opportunities? Well, I’ve tried to describe some of them. They’re out there and huge. The barriers are that some of these systems are hardwired into the organization. They are in with the foundations.
00:27:13:03 – 00:27:40:16
Bill Skelly
And there are lots of people that benefit by them being the way they are. So the old kind of Machiavellian you know, the innovator, you know, is at risk from everybody else around them, because you know that change is going to be really difficult. And that was a terrible paraphrase, Machiavelli. Then he wrote in Italian and that and so any English translation is going to be wrong.
00:27:40:16 – 00:28:31:06
Bill Skelly
So there’s lots of things which are pushing against this kind of innovation and change. And that’s where it’s about trying to, kind of, either do it organically by inspiring some individuals to take this forward or some areas to kind of take it forward. Or seeking to do it. I mean, I suppose in a different way, because if you are if you’re talking about a wholesale introduction of a new way of doing something around people management, then there are, there’s a whole organizations out there in terms of, you know, the HR directors forums and all this kind of thing where they you’ve got to persuade some
00:28:31:06 – 00:29:18:09
Bill Skelly
people in there that this makes sense and it’s going to change and then you’ve got cost . So I suppose that the barriers are people are comfortable with the status quo, even though it’s not actually very productive and it’s frustrating and it’s bureaucratic and it’s wasteful. The safety of the status quo is compelling, whereas the risk and ambiguity and scariness are something different and change that will hold some people up, or perhaps a lot of people kind of back, even though at some level they might be persuaded that, you know, actually it’s got to be better than what we’ve got because what we’ve got we’ve had for decades and is pretty poor.
00:29:20:03 – 00:29:45:13
Rob Pye
So so I’m going to just attempt to just to a couple of words of summing up and then just leave you for the final words, Bill because it’s just coming up to the half an hour and we might cut bit edits, although it’s just been all so brilliant and my brain is just spinning all over the place. So it’ll be a terrible job of summing it up.
00:29:45:13 – 00:30:28:19
Rob Pye
But where to start. So on the opportunities and barriers and your summary of multi-agency multi organizational collaboration, single organizational issues culture individual is a fantastic summary I think of the both the opportunities and the the barriers there. Last week we interviewed another great mind, a guy called John Stepper, who has written a book.
00:30:29:05 – 00:31:09:15
Rob Pye
I don’t know when he wrote it maybe a decade ago called Working Out Loud and Working Out Loud is an attempt to communicate more open, an inclusive culture rather than one that is bounded by any particular organization or hierarchy. And he made the point it’s in use by lots of people all over the world, lots of organizations, that when he first tried to introduce it for for him, it was a viral mass movement that individuals would then sort of percolate into organizations and then organizations would just get it and then spontaneously, culturally combust.
00:31:10:12 – 00:31:39:12
Rob Pye
But in a good way. But he’s now working much more for HR Directors being commissioned by the bureaucracy to go in and do training and development under the guise of, you know, an HR business case. And, of course, you know, the summary of where we got to at the end of this chat is the barriers are significant.
00:31:39:12 – 00:32:14:22
Rob Pye
And it’s those barriers that, you know, we need to think collectively of, you know, how to address things, those barriers. And there’s no right or wrong answer, but it’s the sort of continual experimentation, you know, Tony calls active research research. So you try and you learn, then you fail and you learn and succeed. And I’ve learned and I think that the reasons to change are getting impossible to ignore.
00:32:14:22 – 00:32:40:29
Rob Pye
Wherever you are in the world at the moment, whether you’re in an organization or whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor or, you know, single person outside or because social justice, climate change, net zero, you know, bio degrading kind of wildlife issues, wherever you look, there’s sort of the the call to change, I think has never been greater in my view anyway.
00:32:40:29 – 00:33:13:23
Rob Pye
But maybe I’m wrong or whatever. But it’s how to integrate on those three levels. Do you start by helping a group of people get involved in those conversations? Value Exchange outside. Do you have some corporates that will experiment? You know, maybe small organizations, you know, may be big, you know, maybe tiny organizations. Do you actually get a group of organizations together to kind of talk much more about value that social value about?
00:33:13:29 – 00:33:41:06
Rob Pye
And everybody is whichever organization everybody’s talking about this stuff. So it does seem as though the scales may be tipping that if we do what we’ve done for the last 200 years and keep doing that, what we’ll just do will be extinct pretty quickly. So, you know, we’re in the sphere of wicked problems. And I think that if I was to summarize simply the point that’s come out of this, it would be dialog.
00:33:41:06 – 00:33:59:15
Rob Pye
We’ve got to talk about this stuff, which is what we’re trying to do badly, maybe in The Value Exchange series. But thank you so much and I’ll leave the final words to you if you want to say anything. But my bad summary followed by your good.
00:33:59:15 – 00:34:25:15
Bill Skelly
So thank you. Thanks for inviting me. I’m very happy to kind of talk about these things. I suppose a couple of points. The first one following on from what you said. So yes, dialog is important and it’s important at all of those levels that we’ve been chatting through. So I think there’s no one level that’s going to necessarily unlock the other two.
00:34:26:11 – 00:35:04:05
Bill Skelly
And, you know, even if you get dialog in the boardroom, unless that, you know, spreads into action elsewhere, it’s going to be isolated within the boardroom. It’s got to be whole organizational change. It’s got to be partnership and network change. How you bring that about, I think, is, you know, a number of different points of contact and and that’s creating multiple points of contact and influence that’s going to do that at the most senior levels of government through to the, you know, the small independent organization that’s just going to bring up and and become an exemplar.
00:35:05:08 – 00:35:33:16
Bill Skelly
But it is also about the doing. And you know, I’m sure a psychologist listening would say, well, I’m obviously going to see this aren’t I did 31 years in the police service and I’ve just described the culture as being a doing culture. So I’m going to say, Oh, but we need to do stuff. Well, yeah, okay. So I’ll be true to my stereotype and just kind of say that that is the case, that one of the things I was really proud of in my career, and certainly the latter part of it, was that we didn’t just talk about these issues, we did stuff.
00:35:34:05 – 00:35:56:23
Bill Skelly
I ensured that stuff changed and that stuff happened, that it wasn’t just a dialog in a committee room or a conference room. It was then about right now. What does this mean for the organization? How are we going to create a different environment? Now does that mean I build gyms? Does it mean I give people time off? Does that mean that we have extra support services?
00:35:56:29 – 00:36:28:05
Bill Skelly
If it does, then let’s do all of those things. And because when we do these things, people will judge us by the actions that we’ve implemented, not necessarily by the good words or the fine writing that we put elsewhere. So I’m very proud that we did change dialog and into action because then you create outcome. And the final word kind of leave you with is that this is looking at individuals and organisations in a very kind of rounded sort of way, policing, in my view,
00:36:28:05 – 00:36:54:02
Bill Skelly
had talked about health and wellbeing of individuals in a two dimensional way. They talked about physical health and mental health, and they’re both really important, no doubt about that. But to me, there were two other dimensions. So as a four dimensional approach to this and the other two were emotional health and the the best word I could use to describe this and this is someone who is not religious but is spiritual health.
00:36:54:27 – 00:37:18:22
Bill Skelly
Their health and this is one that we’ve talked about, particularly value exchange. It’s about connection, connection to a purpose, connection to a goal, connection to an organization’s way of working, at a very individual level. And, you know, simply put, people should be healthy, they should feel valued, so the physical and mental aspects of it, they should be happy for goodness sake.
00:37:18:22 – 00:37:34:10
Bill Skelly
You should be happy at your work. We should create happiness. So when we had a family day, the first family day the force had in a decade was just about people smiling and being happy and also feeling valued and also doing other stuff.
00:37:35:02 – 00:37:58:13
Annabelle Lambert
But yes, so I would, I always refer to that as enjoyment or, you know, or fun, enjoyment in the sense that when the day, you know, I mean, imagine the stress on the front line in the police force, but even on those days when everything is just awful, awful, awful, awful, you know, you still want to come back to work the next day because it’s like, I know why I’m here, I enjoy it.
00:37:58:13 – 00:38:02:24
Annabelle Lambert
I’m happy, you know, I’m connected with what I’m doing. Yeah, those things.
00:38:02:26 – 00:38:27:17
Bill Skelly
And that and that final one. So the spiritual side of being connected to some, some idea of purpose and reconnecting people that purpose when they’ve lost it and there’s loads of loads of stuff out there that says that if you are a person who is connected with the purpose of your organization, you will be more resilient. You’ll be physically and mentally healthier, you will be happier and you will do better work, will be more productive, you will add more value.
00:38:28:01 – 00:38:59:26
Bill Skelly
So the idea of a value exchange or a process where you are discussing with someone, having dialog in a conversation with someone around the value that they’re adding inevitably means that you are connecting someone closer to the purpose that they feel they have and the purpose of the organization. And that’s why it’s kind of scary to organizations because you have to listen to that and they have to manage that and cope with that, and absorb that. But the old, old kind of saying that would come from people saying, well, what how will we cope if we do that and what will happen?
00:38:59:26 – 00:39:31:04
Bill Skelly
These individuals will want to move places. They might leave the organization. Well, the answer to that is, well, what if you don’t? You end up with people that are not connected or are not happy, that don’t feel valued and are unhealthy. And that has got to be a blessing, hasn’t it? So change yourselves. We are. Re-imagine how you should perform this and then get people on board with a value that they cannot and you will fly.
00:39:31:04 – 00:39:48:26
Rob Pye
What a wonderful way to wrap up this episode of the Value Exchange. Bill, thank you very, very much. A huge honor to listen to your wise words, Annabelle, as always, thank you. Until the next episode, Goodbye.
