Nepotism – the recruiting or promotion of people because they’re a mate, or family – is generally seen as bad, and picking people on merit is good, writes Mark Rowe.
In the UK private security industry, the grumble has long been that former military or police give jobs to others who likewise used to be in the military or police. The complaint is not quite as widespread as it was at the turn of the millennium, because of wider changes in private security, and indeed in the military and police; the stereotype of the cop or colonel, who leaves their first career in their late 40s with a good pension and who has a second career rather than take to the golf course or a villa in Spain, is not what it was. In the 1960s, when the first security managers with that as their job title began work, former military and police were assumed to be best suited for the job of security, and middle-aged men (work generally and the uniformed services in particular were then still very much a man’s world) who’d been in the military were plentiful after the Second World War and national service.
The complaint of military or police (usually separate) cliques was not quite precise, because those who had served in the Royal Air Force tended to hire others from the RAF (hence the term, which some glories in, of a ‘Raffia’), and likewise Royal Engineers, the Royal Military Police, and so on. They did it, and still do it, for good reasons.
Here’s an historical example. One of the more remarkable true stories of last century was first told in a book called The Ultra Secret, by FW Winterbotham, of the Secret Intelligence Service in the 1939-45 war. Briefly to explain, Ultra was the codeword for the British ability to intercept German wireless messages including by and between Hitler and his commanders, and break the enemy’s supposedly unbreakable cyphers, so that the Nazi messages might be read by Churchill and Allied commanders within the hour. It meant the Allies knew where the Germans were, and what they intended to do. The code-breakers worked, famously, at Bletchley. The signals once broken needed translating. Winterbotham recalled that in summer 1940 ‘we had been very lucky to find a number of WAAF officers who spoke German who were pressed into service …. In addition, a lot of wives and friends of Bletchley people were involved …. Where total security is vital, family ties prove more reliable than the most elaborate form of screening.”
Later in his story, in 1944, Winterbotham recalled that owing to ever more ‘liaison units’ in the field, he needed ‘some 60 RAF Cypher sergeants and a dozen officers; they all had to be very thoroughly screened – a process which in itself took some time – and only when we were satisfied on security grounds did I myself interview each one to make sure we had the right type of man for the highly responsible and exacting job’.
In a word, Winterbotham like most employers needed people he could trust, and who would repay that trust with loyalty. Significantly, Richard Aitch in the new edition of his massive and thorough volume on close protection (CP) early on tells the Japanese story of the 47 ronin. Aitch comments to CP readers that ‘we should uphold a certain loyalty that stems from a complete devotion to the protection effort and the safety and comfort of the Boss’, the person being protected and usually, though not necessarily, the one paying.
Aitch goes into detail about the required personality and attributes of a bodyguard (BG). Intriguingly, he notes that while the British police and military who get trained for government bodyguarding work (protection of a general, royalty and the like) have been stringently tested, physically and mentally, it’s not (‘unfortunately’) always true that if you don’t reach the pass mark, you don’t make the grade, due to ‘favouritism, nepotism and in-house party politics especially where administrative targets are set for the employment of females’.
That airs a long-standing dilemma for the EDI (equality-diversity-inclusion) agenda; if your sector, such as private security, physical and cyber, at all levels, has too few women (for example) do you seek to remedy that, more quickly, by deliberately hiring women over as suitable, or even more suitable, males?
The military, then, is not monolithic. But one of the reasons for favouring fellow military or police would be that the hirer can assume those with a miliary or police background have gained (and retained) certain useful skills, whether handling on weapons, or how to conduct an interview according to PACE. In a word, as much as Winterbotham in the crisis of world war when time was at a premium, those hiring know what they are getting. That’s not the same necessarily as getting what’s ideal for the corporate, campus or hospital that the security professional will work in, among largely non-security people. The former police investigator has to appreciate they no longer have the powers of arrest; yet equally, the non-police investigator has to appreciate that they’re not Inspector Morse or Sherlock Holmes (oddly, no civilian investigator ever models themselves on Inspector Clouseau).
Simon Akam late on in his book on the British Army since 9-11, The Changing of the Guard, noted that men who’d served in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, including some who had moved into corporate security, had ‘markers that showed that for years they had been part of a closed and curious society’ – the British Army, that is; ‘they tended to dress similarly, their shoes highly polished, evidence of that terrible military truism that if you stand tall and speak clearly, and have sharp creases in your trousers people are quite likely to follow you, regardless of the material merits of whatever it is you are in fact saying’. They were fluent in military lingo. As Akam mentioned, in business there’s a separate language, ‘commercial-ese’. Yet just as military people learn their own lingo and others learn NHS, high education, local government terms, and so on, a police or military veteran can learn a new lingo, and better understand their organisation’s purpose, and get listened to and offer appropriate protection. To name only three former police who’ve achieved that: Corin Dennison, director of global protection at the sports retailer adidas, who recently spoke at the Retail Technology Show at London Olympia; Mike Lees, head of business security at Barnsley Hospital; and Ian Paton, head of security at Sims Metal Recycling. All three had long careers in the police (indeed, when last interviewed by Professional Security, Ian reflected that he had just passed more years working in security and loss prevention than in Strathclyde Police) and all three have mastered their new sectors, to hold down responsible jobs. Police and military, in a word, can be adaptable.
A complaint against police and military who hire others is that they make teams that think, look and act the same – which is held to be a bad thing because businesses thrive on diversity. An intriguing commentary on that comes in a chapter of Mike Croll’s new book The Rise of Security, based on an essay he posted on LinkedIn some years ago, telling of his experience of working in security at a senior level for Facebook. For a former police or military man (Mike worked at a senior level in security for the Foreign Office and the United Nations), to go to work in Silicon Valley in suit and shiny shoes would have been so out of place among the sneakers and t-shirts as to be peculiar. As Mike showed in his essay – as insightful as any about corporate security, and indeed about corporates’ workplace culture more generally – the tech sector has its own assumptions and ways of working as uniform as the police or military. The opposite of diversity. Here is the flaw in the liberal EDI agenda: how accepting are its believers about someone who is conservative, such as the black evangelical Christian who on the grounds of Scripture states a dislike of homosexuality? Or the stereotypical middle-aged white male who is indifferent to agendas and just wants to get on with doing the job?
As that implies, screening a new hire is about more than a criminal record check. Will the shortlisted person fit in with colleagues in the department, and the wider organisation? We’re assuming that you want the new hire to fit in. It’s striking how organisations that outwardly promote tolerance are revealed as a misogynistic or otherwise toxic workplace – to name only a few in the public eye lately, Cricket Scotland, Plaid Cymru, the Metropolitan Police as set out in Baroness Casey’s review, and London Fire Brigade.
Being nepotistic, picking someone because you know them, can perpetuate a toxic workplace culture; or not, because picking someone known to you and your network allows you to carry out a quick (important if your HR department is slow) and informal check of a candidate. Being a toxic worker, a bully or a misogynist, is not a crime; it won’t explicitly show up on a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check. How useful it can be, to frankly ask someone you know about a candidate; would you employ them again?! In the small world of close protection, for example, if you do something unprofessional – such as, post a boastful image of you on duty, that may give away the whereabouts of the principal – you might find that work dries up. Those hiring make judgements – maybe unfair, and without giving feedback or second chances; but anyone hiring has to make judgements.
Photo by Mark Rowe; Enigma machine, Bletchley Park Museum. Visit https://bletchleypark.org.uk/.
