A few days ago I was asked to meet two senior managers at Royal Mail to talk about approaches to building and sustaining a partnership with the CWU.This took me back to the early 1990s when Sir Pat Lowry and I worked together to help Royal Mail find ways to build better relationships with the union and with staff in sorting and delivery offices.It was a great privilege to work with Pat and learn from him about listening before talking, and helping people find their own solutions, even when he had planted the idea.He would never take credit for that.I had met him a few times before: he always remembered me and somehow seemed to know what I had been working on and showed interest in it.Ever since I was a student at LSE in 1968 I had admired him: his writing of an EEF paper on what the UK could learn from American approaches to industrial relations; grappling with the curse of piecework payment systems at British Leyland; sitting on numerous courts of inquiry; and as Chair of Acas in its most difficult period in the 1980s, let alone his work in the CBI, and with the IPM (Institute of Personnel Managers), now CIPD.It is about time someone wrote his biography.What would Sir Pat have made of policy makers' current preoccupation with employee engagement?He would want to know a lot more about it and certainly would not dismiss it as yet another fad.In his gentle and polite way, he would ask 'so what?': what are the practical implications, especially for managers?He would, undoubtedly, have been co-opted to the task forces now assembled to take the engagement movement forward.He would eschew the so called 'guru' group.I can see him shaking his head and denying he was ever a guru, but of course he was, and a very fine one, too.
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