Ode to Martin O’Donnell

We had a restructure at Peabody and Martin, my boss took redundancy.

 

He wrote this about me in an open email

 

Hazel – A lot of people would interview someone like you and be scared to appoint someone at least as competent as themselves.  You add much needed structure to our world and are super practical in addressing issues.  I love that you will take up the cause of residents who may not have been treated so well by other parts of the business.

What would I want to say about him?

I have had managers who I thought were decent and honorable, models of professionalism, expert in empowering supervision and nice people. Martin stands out on two counts – fun and emotional literacy.

I came back from Sri Lanka and my last job in the UK as a classroom assistant managing young women with behavioural difficulties which was zero fun, to working in a team of extraordinarily talented and gifted whizz kids who went down the pub at regular intervals and got pissed. The last time I had so much fun with a work team was when I worked at the Scarman Trust and we had manager meetings all over the UK which always ended with late night intense discussions in nice eateries.

It was great to work with young talented people. Martin is good at recruiting talent.

He was influential in getting me to start my blog.

The fun side of him also manifests itself in his free ranging thinking. He thinks outside the box and can use his people skills to pull together partnerships of potential. Peabody are losing a visionary.

 

Secondly, he has great emotional literacy. I even dated one of his best mates, assuming, wrongly as it turned out, that he would have a similar level of emotional literacy to Martin. He gets situations and people. He has a nice way of saying difficult things. He has a waggy-tail-dog charm that takes joy in the moment. This is not common.

 

Maybe there were things he was not so good at – detailed delivery, a propensity for favourites – but he was intelligent enough to draw around him teams of diversity who covered up for that.

 

It’s the end of an era and I am sad.