Transport manager: know thyself!
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• How good are you? Who does what in your organization? What precisely does your organization set out to achieve? Searching questions on these lines were a feature of a talk "The transport manager's role in industry" given to the Forth division of the Industrial Transport Association by Mr. J. E. Brandon, controller of supplies, Scottish Gas Board.
Mr. Brandon explained that in asking "how good are you?" he really intended that the transport executive should ask himself how effective he was, rather than how personally efficient he was. It was essential to know the purpose and intent of the company for which one worked and he gave as an example a code of practice produced by the SOB which: clearly defined how the transport department fitted into industry, stated what the department could and could not do, and left other functional management in no doubt about where they stood in relation to the transport organization. This, he stressed, was a long overdue exercise in communication, whose example could well be followed to greater or lesser extent by other businesses according to their size.
On the personal evaluation of one's effectiveness, Mr. Brandon thought it was essential that each human being should realize how he interpreted his job, and the transport manager, for example, should be aware of how effectively he communicated with other people in the organization. He asked: "Does the other chap understand your problems?" And he gave several examples of good and bad communications at management level.
It was essential for the transport manager to ask himself whether he understood the organization, the human beings involved, the cost system and the cost motives. Having studied this aspect the transport manager must then ask himself how he blended into the organization.
Explaining that transport managers fitted into the scheme of things by breaking down a particular facet of transport and studying it, Mr. Brandon said he thought that a transport manager's knowledge, being specialized, was all too often too self-contained. Too many were so imbued with their own specialized knowledge and the technicalities of keeping vehicles running that they failed to see the larger picture involving the traffic and distribution aspect of their fleet. He gave an example of a large firm whose transport section represented 15 per cent of total annual cost, and in which consultants studying the whole company were able to make the biggest savings simply by reorganizing the transport section.
Transport managers were always moaning that they could not get the right men, said Mr. Brandon, and they blamed this on better wages in other jobs. He rejected this, saying that the reason for the difficulty in recruitment was simply a failure to study personnel and all aspects of industrial relations. He questioned whether transport managers knew enough about this aspect. In his experience and opinion the main reasons for men staying with a job were: atmosphere; congeniality: and security.
The speaker felt that the Transport Bill and all the surrounding publicity and legislation provided the ideal opportunity for transport managers to "get out and about", both within their own firm and outside it, making their own special knowledge known at all levels and especially to non-transport management.
In the lively discussion which followed, Mr. Brandon was asked whether the code of practice produced by his own industry was a protection for the transport manager. He said that basically it was not. but it did contain all the legal requirements concerning drivers and it was a positive document which would no doubt be taken into consideration by a Licensing Authority in any proceedings which might come before him.