If you scratch the surface in most of the larger house builder's regional offices you will find examples of cronyism.
This is where friends have been appointed in positions of influence, regardless of their talent or managerial abilities, qualifications or experience.
Once this happens the brightest people are kept in junior management positions, while the mediocre see their careers thrive.
For example a Construction Director's CV may well be something like this:
Left school at 16 with CSE's in Woodwork and General Studies.
Started work as a general labourer on a building site.
Later taken on by the bricklaying contractor as a hod carrier and picked up bricklaying over the years, ending up as a bricklaying foreman.
A site manager suggests he should apply for an assistant site manager vacancy.
He learns site management on the job. He gets his own site and moves up through the ranks to become a Contracts Manager.
A regional managing director then appoints him as his Construction Director, needing someone to blame if figures are not met and someone who will not outshine him.
After 20 years you now have an under-educated, ex-labourer who is inexperienced in management as a regional construction director!
Once an incompetent is promoted to a position of power he is unlikely to hire talented sub ordinates.
Who is he going to give the contracts manager jobs to? The enthusiastic building graduate with drive and ambition or an ex-carpenter site manager who only knows about floor joists and first fixing.
He hires the latter and so it goes on until the whole company is run and managed by personnel ill equipped for the requirements of their positions.
They can never roll their sleeves up. Not through fear of hard work, but because they are ashamed of people seeing the tattoos they had done when they were working as a trade.
It is no wonder that the quality of new homes is falling and the level of customer service is so poor, when those who are in charge of the national house builder's regional offices, some may even be on the main plc board, have little education and limited managerial experience.
They can't change things to build better homes - they don't know how and never will!
In my own experience, I was once reprimanded for making suggestions via the company suggestion scheme!
My crime, was not running them by the "construction director".
On another occasion he said that "we don't give site managers a fax machine so they can send faxes"
During an appraisal he wrote "has a high degree of confidence and like all people of that elk" - must have been my antlers!
