Pilita Clark: Look out when the B-team is left in charge

It should have been a relief last week when a report on the computer glitch that stranded thousands of August bank holiday air passengers declared it had been a “one in 15 million” event.

Hundreds of flights were hit when the UK’s air traffic control system abruptly shut down after receiving an airline flight plan that its software couldn’t process.

This was a first for software that had managed to handle more than 15 million flight plans in the past five years, the report said.

Yet it is hard to feel too soothed considering how often this sort of thing happens during a holiday.

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Haywire passport e-gates, crashing airline check-in systems and other IT woes have unleashed travel chaos during peak UK getaway periods at least six times since 2017. And that’s just flyers. Checking in for a Eurostar train or a Dover ferry has also been a vacation ordeal at times.

Each unhappy fiasco is unhappy for its own reasons. Ageing, complex and otherwise tricky IT systems are a remorseless source of misery, not just at vacation time.

But it is also true that one of the unspoken facts of working life is that a lot of senior managers head to the beach during holidays, leaving less experienced underlings in charge.

And having been a member of several B-teams in my former life as a deputy news editor, I know that having second-in-commands at the helm is not always ideal.

As deputies know too well, one of the tedious things about having to run the show yourself is that you do not have a deputy. Also, being the deputy rather than the boss, you do not always have the authority to get important stuff done pronto.

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None of this matters when all is running smoothly. But I still remember getting a well-deserved ticking off for underplaying an important story over one holiday period, a blunder that almost certainly would have been avoided had more bosses been around.

On the upside, no one died. This is generally the case with newspaper malfunctions, but not in other workplaces.

It is more than 20 years since researchers in several countries discovered that patients admitted to hospitals on the weekend were more likely to die than those who went in on weekdays.

It was widely assumed this deadly “weekend effect” was caused by fewer hospital specialists working at weekends, meaning that more junior staff were delivering less optimal care.

But some recent research suggests the picture is more complex. One large study of UK hospitals published in 2021 confirmed that people admitted at weekends were indeed 16 per cent more likely to die than those who arrived in the week. It also found there were about half as many specialists available for each person on Sundays compared with Wednesdays.

But it failed to prove a clear link between specialist numbers and death rates. In fact, hospital care was found to be just as good or slightly better at weekends. One telling difference was that people admitted at weekends were more severely ill than those admitted during the week.

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This is worth remembering if you happen to be in a B-team. So is the fact that being a stand-in offers opportunities to shine, or outshine, the person you are replacing.

Indeed, the lot of the fill-in can be considerably better than that of the boss who is on holiday at the wrong time, as many leaders discovered during the chaotic international withdrawal from Afghanistan.

When the Taliban took Kabul in mid-August 2021, the then UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, his foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, and the top Foreign Office civil servant, Philip Barton, were all on leave.

Raab faced calls to resign as Afghanistan collapsed into chaos. Barton later said he regretted not coming back sooner.

“I think I should have been more visible to our people who were working on the crisis,” he told a parliamentary inquiry. “They should have seen me visibly involved.”

Ultimately, the lesson here is simple. B-teams should always be as capable and well-resourced as possible and some will be more adept than expected. But A-teams need to know there will still be times when they need to get off the beach and back in the office without delay. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023