Four managers in two years, and a team that did not want a fifth

A branch like this serves three parties at once. Clients who need people today and different people tomorrow. Temporary workers looking for work, and for certainty. An internal team that has to serve both without anything falling between the two.

The work was reactive by design. Whatever came in was handled: a client called, a vacancy arrived, a temporary worker dropped out. Whatever did not come in did not exist. Growth could therefore only come from one direction, and that was the management.

With two people doing everything, every change lands on the same two desks. A new client, a peak, an absence, an administrative correction: there was no second place for it to go, other than my own desk. Anyone who wants to improve something in that situation has to do it on top of the running work, and by definition there is no room for that.

But the heaviest load was a different one. In two years four managers had come and gone. Every change brought new plans, new agreements and explaining once again how things work here. The change that was meant to solve the problem had become the problem: it arrived every time as an extra load rather than as relief. The team was dissatisfied, and that was not an attitude but a conclusion.

That is the pattern I would come to call change load twenty years later. Not too many projects, but a structure in which everything arrives at the same people, until even well-intended improvement feels like a burden.

Work alongside them first, change things later. A team that has seen its management leave four times no longer believes a plan. So I started by doing the work myself: taking on files, serving clients, running part of the administration. That served three purposes at once. I learned the trade from the inside, the new clients could be absorbed, and it stayed bearable for the two people who were there.

That is a bridge, not a solution. As long as I absorbed the overflow, the branch kept running on one person; it was just that I was now that person. It bought time to build, and it built trust, but it solved nothing. Anyone who stops there has the same branch a year later with a more tired manager.

Trust had to be restored alongside it. The first months were also about the tensions that were there, personal and between people, and about clearing them. Without that no redistribution works, because every new agreement is read as one more in a series.

Only then could the roles come apart. Recruitment and administration were separated, responsibilities were divided and people were hired. That is the actual design work: not making the two existing people run faster, but making sure the work has somewhere else to go. During busy spells the work was redistributed and planned rather than everyone working harder at the same time. That is the same movement, made small.

A growth path was built into that same structure. New and experienced employees were first coached by me. As people gained experience, they could grow and start coaching new colleagues themselves. That made the structure self-sustaining: every subsequent hire no longer had to be coached by me.

Alongside the operational management and people management ran the commercial side: drawing up account and business development plans, reporting on those and on the results to the regional manager, retaining and satisfying existing clients, and winning new clients through active prospecting.

The service offering broadened along with it. The branch started with blue-collar profiles. White-collar profiles were added, then specialised technical profiles, and after that assessments. Every extension was a commercial move and an organisational one at the same time: it gave employees a direction to grow in without leaving the branch.

The hardest part was that the nature of the work itself changed. The employees were used to executing: they did what came in. They started doing commercial work. Proposing temporary workers to companies unprompted. Actively looking for vacancies at clients and prospects who did not call of their own accord. Contacting those companies themselves and booking appointments.

That asks for something other than a new task on a job description. It asks people to do something they think they cannot do, and to keep doing it after the first attempt disappoints. They took that step and moved out of their comfort zone.

The moment employees picked up the phone of their own accord to call a company that had not called them.

Until then the branch was a processor: work came in and was done well. From that moment it became a source. Growth no longer depended on what happened to come in or on what I went out to get myself, but arose in the place where the work was done.

A second movement hung from that one and made it durable: experienced employees started coaching new colleagues themselves. That let the branch multiply itself, and staff turnover stopped being a problem, because those who could grow, stayed.

The team grew from two to ten. By the end the branch served four kinds of profiles instead of one, was known in the region, and revenue grew along with it. Within the region it was among the best-performing offices.

Growth ran so fast that the branch outgrew its own building. It was redesigned and rebuilt, an investment carried by head office and one I helped decide on.

More important than the figures is what sat underneath. Where it started with two people executing what came in and a management that had fallen away four times, it ended with a branch that created its own work, in which decisions were made where the work happened, and in which people stayed because there was something in it for them.

What I learned there I still use. An organisation that runs on one agenda is not stable but vulnerable. Dividing the work so that decisions fall close to the work is not delegating but designing. And a team that has had to absorb too much change needs calm first and a plan only after that.