Courses for Horses

 Back in the early days of my Graduate Trainee scheme, we used to have regular conversations with the Graduate team about what kind of roles we would like to have when we moved into a “proper” management position. This would crop up again as your career progressed, because for the first few years of my time at Lloyds Bank, people were appointed to positions rather than having the opportunity to apply for something they were keen to do.

I quickly became convinced that there was one big joke going on within HR and the Management development people (I know what you might be thinking, but stop that now!), because whatever you expressed as a preference you were almost bound to get the exact opposite. People expressing a desire to work in the City of London’s Corporate team, might be sent to a remote branch in Lostwithiel, while those wanting to go into an IT team seemed to end up in the Treasury. I had gone first to Lloyds Leasing (see previous post) and then into the Branch network subsequently (more on this later) even though I was keen to become a Trainer at one of the Bank’s Training Centres.

There is of course an irony in that when I left Lloyds after 18 years it was to follow that ambition, one that had been repeatedly thwarted in those early years. Although, given how much has changed in L & D over the years, the initial life I craved is one that has largely disappeared these days. In any case, I now have no regrets. But more on that in later posts.

In the early nineties Lloyds had a whole empire invested in training centres around the country. As well as the two residential ones that attracted so much attention, there were numerous regional centres, one of which was the workplace of a future Mrs. B for a time. But the real flagships of the Learning fleet were the prestigious estates at Hindhead and Kingswood, both located in the green belt territory of Surrey. Huge grounds surrounded these places, and you could almost imagine the actual Downlands Cancara galloping over the fields to meet new recruits.

I was to go to these centres many times for residential courses over the years, learning everything from selling to lending, negotiation to managing performance, and much more besides. But the core part of the curriculum were management courses, and I must have spent weeks in total learning all the theory, systemic practicality, and the Lloyds’ philosophy on how to manage people.

Both centres were former grand country house hotels I think, and were equipped with sports pitches, bars, plush restaurants, and all kinds of other facilities to make the learning experience come alive as only Lloyds Bank could. As with all things I think they had been even more plush in decades gone by. There were rumours of halcyon afternoons filled with golf, and of training courses lasting weeks and weeks, with spouses coming down for weekends. Apparently, this was a true test of the 1950s manager whether his (sadly it was always a man) wife could use the correct knife and fork.

That had all gone by my time, and the trainers all seemed very dynamic and cutting-edge young people, full of new ideas and progressive yet commercial ways to manage others, that they were very good at communicating to willing sponges like me. Sad to say it took me quite a long time to really be a good manager in the real world, but I knew all the theory. It’s just that it took a while for it to blend with the tougher world of inner-city London and a bunch of hard-nosed staff who had no time for highbrow nonsense from Kingswood. Or from idealistic young managers like me.

A lot of drinking went on, of course. Young people away for a week or so, with nothing to do but “training” what else were we supposed to do in the evenings? Well, there were earnest conversations to be had, and debates about a whole range of subjects. I also met a very wide range of different types of managers, from all over the UK, a great way of learning different ways of approaching the same issues. It taught me that bringing people together to learn is actually half the learning anyway. Put intelligent people in a room together, give them time, a relaxed environment and plenty of nice food and drink, and their brains will do the rest.

But there were also friendships to be made, and one of them was to a man who I am still in contact with through our shared misery of being West Ham season-ticket holders. Better than that, it was on an Influencing Skills Course at Kingswood, one that I very nearly did not go on because of pressure of work, held at the Kingswood Centre, that I met my best friend and life-partner of over 30 years. Not sure the course taught me much about “influencing” in the professional sense, but at least I was able to use appropriate influence to persuade her to marry me though!

As with many of the things from those times, most of that way of learning has simply become too expensive to deliver at scale, and residential learning has been driven to very senior levels in organisations as the cost of it is now so expensive and there are other more efficient means of delivery. Not that I am someone who thinks it was all good, much of the uniformity of approach was a bit stifling, and there was definitely an extravagance to it which was not sustainable, no matter how good it made you feel as a delegate. Hindhead was knocked down and replaced by a housing estate and Kingswood was sold off to become a development of luxury flats. Few people will remain in the organisation that remember these places.

But there will be a generation of managers who were influenced in a broader sense by what they learned there, and I always carry that with me. If nothing else, it was pictures like the one below, of a whole cohort on a Junior Managers’ Course at Hindhead in early 1990. See if you can spot the West Ham fans!