Two interviews were planned for today: Christopher and Sarah but Sarah had to cancel due to her child being poorly. We managed instead to interview Jean Collins, one of the helpers.
I was a bit tense going into the interview with Christopher as I was aware of the possibility that a badly performed interviewed could reflect poorly on us. Christopher is quite an abrasive personality and doesn't suffer fools. He also has the capacity to remove our access. Interviewing elites with power is always going to be stressful and it wasn't helped on Monday by Amanda worrying about it. Still better to be aware and plan than to go in blind, as it were.
As it turned out the interviews went well. Christopher ended up volunteering to hold the mic which made for an interesting experiment. Very talkative and keen to talk about what he wanted to. He even mentioned that he would like to do a follow-up interview and we chatted for a short time off the record afterwards.
Christopher is particularly keen to talk about the organisation of TQ and his management philosophy. He seems to prefer a devolved structure and mentions that because TQ can not afford to pay high wages that he keeps talented staff by offering them a lot of autonomy. This would be interesting to bring up with the staff in question. He also gave us some documents to read after the interview that gave us a decent insight into how they see themselves progressing.
I think it is clear that his agenda with us is for us to provide feedback about how TQ works. I suspect that he sees as acting a little like consultants because there is a recurring theme in TQ staff about the need for and difficulty of evaluation.
The interview with Jean was pretty straight forward. Bambo and I hacked together an aide in the TQ cafe and used it to guide the interview. Jean seemed quite pleased with her role though some (or all) of the helpers do appear to feel undervalued.
So far the interviews seem to have gone well. Bambo and I have got into a routine but talking afterwards we're both a bit worried about how we're going to integrate other team members.
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