REFLECTIONS ON A CO-OP CAREER

I arrived in June 2005 having run my own small communications agency for the previous seven years. Before that, I’d learnt my craft during ten years as a BBC reporter and news producer. I had very little understanding (actually, none) of what a big business was like to work for. Nor did I know what food retail was about, or what financial services really meant. How did a multi-billion-pound organisation, working across multiple markets and with 85,000 employers operate? And what was a consumer owned Co-operative anyway? Looking back, I start to wonder how on earth I got the job in the first place.

Telling the story

I did know how to write and how to tell stories. And in a sense, that’s all I’ve been doing for the last 15 years – telling the Co-op story: magazine by magazine, announcement by announcement, speech by speech, blog by blog, annual report by annual report, AGM script by AGM script.

And it’s been an astonishing story to tell. How a business that was founded to do good, by striving for a fairer world, lost its way, and then found it again. I’m not sure it’s fair to say there were heroes, heroines, and villains – the story deserves more nuance and the charters involved were more complex. But there was (literally) sex and drugs, and even rock ’n’ roll. Dickens and Shakespeare could surely have made much of the material. Netflix could easily string it out to six seasons. By 2014 I could accurately say to friends and family that I’d experienced more at the Co-op than I could possibly have done working for half a dozen different corporates over the same time period.

Everything that could happen to a big business happened to the Co-op (usually more than once). Mergers and acquisitions; disposals and restructures; brand relaunches; new CEOs…and of course an existential crisis that almost brought down the entire consumer co-operative movement in the UK. Then there was the ‘rescue’, ‘rebuild’ and that’s taken us back to what we should be, and where we should be – a successful, respected and much treasured British institution ‘co-operating for a fairer world’. 

During that time of meltdown and rescue from early 2013 through to the end of 2014, I got hooked on crisis communications. Everyday brought another adrenalin fix as the drama unfolded and engulfed us. As the person writing the internal messages for the Bank and Group CEOs I was living and breathing every twist and turn of the story. During that same period, I was writing for the acting Chair of the Board as we navigated sweeping reforms of our democratic structures. My skills were much in demand and it made me feel wanted and valued. After one critical membership conference, the then CEO, Euan Sutherland, came up to me and said: “We couldn’t have done it without you, Robert”. That was nice. It was a pity there were no bonus payments that year!   

At the time it was difficult to adjust from the excitement of the crisis to the hard slog of rebuild. But I’m glad I stuck around to see the story through to the other side.

So, there’s never been a shortage of things to write about. The skill was to make sense of it all as it was happening, to place things in context, to create reassurance about change, and to do all of that in a way that held tight to the fact that we were a Co-op underpinned by a set of Values & Principles that were not only our corporate inheritance, but our identity and our very reason for existing. It wasn’t always an easy job to do. But who said it should be easy?

Business circumstances could make it difficult. So too could influential individuals. One thing I discovered was that you could be a ‘Co-op lifer’ and still not understand the organisation you were working for. Or you could be a total ‘newbie’ and get it straight away. I’ve come across plenty of both types, and everyone in between.

Publishing empire

When I first arrived here there was a lot more of the Co-op than there is today. In addition to Food, Funeralcare and Insurance, we had a travel business, a pharmacy chain, shoe shops, car showrooms…and a bank. There was a huge property portfolio too. In those days it was the Co-op Bank that was propping up the rest of the Group. How things were to change!

Something else changed too. When I began working here, I was managing a small publishing empire of printed journals and magazines. At the time they were genuinely ground-breaking in design and content, and all written in-house. But ‘Us’, ‘Mag:ma’ and Re:act’ are long gone and forgotten. Having birthed these publications, I slowly had to kill them off, victims of cost cutting and the rapid emergence of digital and social media. But I and my team were quick learners and the fundamentals of storytelling remained the same even if the medium changed. 

The weakest link

A could write a long essay on the role and nature of Internal Comms, where I spent most of my time at the Co-op. In brief, what I discovered was that internal communications fails if it becomes no more than internal PR or internal marketing. At the end of the day, it’s about the long-term relationship between employer and employee – the emotional contract that keeps us feeling good about who we are at work. You either build this up or undermine through your internal comms. The other great lesson was that however brilliantly crafted the message, ultimately what really counted were the personal communication skills of line managers and senior leaders. They were both your strongest asset and your weakest link.

I never thought I wanted to be a team leader myself, but it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me at the Co-op. I managed 13 people during the rescue and early rebuild years, and later a much smaller team after restructures and more cost cutting. The joy was getting to know them, and in the process getting to know myself. I wanted for them the best that I’d been given by my own line managers over the years (in particular, Adrian Britten, Mark Craig, Andrea Wilson and Jon Church). My line managers gave me the space to grow; the opportunity to show what I could do; and time to become the best version of myself. I wanted to give my own team that same experience. There was enormous satisfaction in watching the people I managed create wonderful team events, incredible pieces of writing, or major improvements to the intranet and our online communications. And of course, they were teaching me as much as I was teaching them. 

I am (according to every HR personality test I ever took at the Co-op) chronically introverted. My default method of problem solving is to lock myself in a room with pen and paper until I can write my way out. So, it seemed a contradiction that I often found myself at work events and conferences interviewing our leaders on a stage in front of hundreds of colleagues or interviewing them on camera for videos. It was my BBC background that gave me the self-confidence to do this and I tried to be genuinely journalistic in the questions I asked on behalf of colleagues and members. Thankfully, most of my interviewees grew to understand that strong questioning brought out the best in them and the most compelling answers.

The ghost writer

Thanks to Mark Craig, in 2009 I began writing speeches and presentations for the then CEO Peter Marks and the Board Chair Len Wardle. But the most significant writing relationships I’ve had were with Euan Sutherland, Richard Pennycook and Steve Murrells. All very different personalities and each with very different issues to deal with and priorities they wanted to pursue. My job was to understand them as people, learn how they spoke and how they wrote, and what was important to them. This was easier said than done. CEOs are busy people and the opportunities to sit down and just get to know them and what motivated them or challenged them, were few and far between. If I have any regrets, it that I didn’t make the case strongly enough to insist this happened more often. It meant too often I was relying on instinct and intuition and my accumulated institutional knowledge.

Writing speeches is ‘ghost-writing’, you don’t really exist, you are the invisible holder of the pen. A speech written for someone else must be heard and read as their words and not yours. But in truth it’s a more complex. 

The reality is that you bring your own thinking to the task as well as the thinking of the person you’re writing for. In corporate communications there’s not much power or authority, and most of the time few people understand the contribution you’re making. But in speech writing you can exercise what I’d describe as ‘soft influence’. Through the structuring of ideas and the words you choose, it’s possible to shape how others understand the Co-op. In the process, you can, with subtlety, push the ambition and thinking of the business forward. It’s been a niche, highly specialist, in-house role which few businesses can afford the luxury of having. Although I had other tasks through the year, like our annual reporting cycle, I knew my role was always going to be vulnerable to the next round of ‘efficiency savings’.    

‘Memory almost full’

As I write these words, what are the moments that are filling up my memory cells?

·      Organising and then having to abruptly cancel Peter Marks’ leaving party as the Bank crisis blew-up

·      Conducting live online video interviews with Lord Myners and fielding live questions from our most active members during his radical review of our democratic structures

·      Giving a sixty second lecture to Her Majesty the Queen about the 19th century industrial history of Angel Square when she came to open the new support centre in November 2013

·      Writing the AGM script in 2016 when we relaunched the Co-op brand and the Co-op Membership proposition

So how does the Co-op look to me now?

In a great many ways, I’m pleased to say that the Co-op looks and feels very different to when I arrived. Our senior leaders are less white, less male, and less obsessed with using footballing analogies to explain big business (I like to think I contributed to stopping all that).

Angel Square is a less intimidating environment than New Century House was. The big leadership ‘beasts’ that once roamed the gloomy corridors of NCH, and to whom I felt I had nothing in common and had nothing to say to, have thankfully died out.

In short, we are a much kinder, more diverse and more empathetic place to work. But there’s still a way to go.

When I arrived, too many of our food stores looked shabby and unloved. 'Limp lettuce' was how even our colleagues spoke about our fruit and veg. Now the stores are smart and welcoming and the fresh produce is what tempts you into the shop. Our wines, pizzas and cheese (and lots more) regularly win awards, beating off the elite brands. Meanwhile, our commitments to responsible, sustainable global trade (including Fairtrade) are stronger than ever.

Our support for communities in the UK used to lack coherence and focus. Now we know we're targeting our support where it really counts and where it can make a tangible difference.

The work I've found most inspiring to write about in recent years has been the growth of the Co-op Academies Trust. We support schools in some of the most deprived areas of the north of England, encouraging ambition and raising standards.

Second chances

After the crisis and rescue, we were given a second chance and, so far, we haven’t blown it. In fact, quite the reverse. We look and feel like a business that (on most days) knows what it’s here for, where it wants to get to, and how it’s going to get there. We’re back to being an outward looking organisation, concerned about the wider world in which we operate and determined to make it better.

Thanks to how we responded to our self-made crisis seven years ago, we've been able to respond to this years' national crisis with confidence and compassion. We've shown every part of the business to be resilient and agile. And it when it's come to helping those worst hit by Covid-19, we've been there, on the ground, with the relationships and knowledge to do what's right and the commercial success to give what's needed.

It's been a privilege to have been a small part of our response to this extraordinarily tough year, and in many ways, I'm glad to have had this final story to tell about the Co-op before I leave.

Some things remain the same though. The tension between ethics and commerciality will never go away. Each CEO, and each generation of Co-op managers must find their own creative path through this on-going, co-op conundrum of how to join together ‘doing good’ and ‘doing good business’.

My hope for the Co-op is that it gets better and better at navigating this creative tension and showing others how it can be done too. Climate Change has created a whole new dimension to this, and I believe there are opportunities to show why co-operative solutions are our best chance of avoiding the worst climate scenarios.

I’d also like to see the Co-op continue to push forward on diversity and inclusion, both inside and outside of the business. Culture change is as important (and as difficult) to deliver as any operational business transformation programme. And the difference it can make is longer lasting.

Thanks for reading this far. That’s me done. It’s been an absolute blast and I’m delighted I came along for the ride.

I’ll be applying my craft in new places in the future, with some academic study to begin with. But I’ll never stop being a believer and a champion of my old Co-op and the on-going value of co-operative enterprise. The old slogan remains true, and the years ahead will prove it once again: ‘Co-operate or die!’

To all my Co-op friends and colleagues over the past 15 years, thank you, take care and farewell.

 Robert