It's All Down To Teamwork

As you probably know I'm an audit manager in a Chartered Accountants practice, I've been in accountancy since I left school 29 years ago and one day, I keep promising myself, I will get myself a proper job.

I have four women working for me in my audit and accounts 'team' whose ages and ability range from a 23 part qualified accountant, through two 26 year old's who can vary wildly between useful and useless to a 41 year old who helps run our practice's book-keeping bureaux. So as not to breach any confidentiality or cause potential embarrassment I'll refer to them as Mary, Mungo, Midge and Billie Piper.

Mary is the 23 year old part qualified accountant who treats me with complete deference, head down, works hard, studies hard and has the confidence to take responsibility. Out of work she's a completely different animal: down the pub at the weekends, leather mini skirts, travels all over the country in her old Ford Escort to watch Keane (the group not Roy) and has bought her first house (with a girlfriend) already. She's the archetypal career girl, she's whizzed through all her exams getting great results but needs some more work on her practical work, she'll probably end up earning a fortune and good luck to her.

Mungo is the first of our two 26 year olds. She's loud, rude, snappy, lacks confidence but whatever you try to tell her she already knows the answer. I gave her her annual assessment recently and she admitted all the above, she lacks respect, sees the job as a way of paying off her debts and has a time-keeping record that would shame Didier Drogba. When she arrived for her first day at work she said to me, "I really need this job and I'll do anything to keep it," - isn't that some sort of entrapment? Her background is in management consulting and it took a year and a lot of work to get her into shape, even now I find myself wondering if she's right for the job.

Midge is a forty-one year old mother of two daughters, one of whom goes to school with my Nathalie. She is hard working, will put in extra hours if required, never moans, has the rudest sense of humour I have ever come across in a woman and likes to sneak up on me so that she can polish my head, complete with fake squeaking noises. She can also take a joke, which means you can go a little further with her than with the three younger women. She had a horrendous childhood and this manifests itself in funny little ways, but you can't stop liking her and enjoying her company.

Bille Piper is the other 26 year old and quite why she works at all is a mystery to everybody. Her husband is the managing director of one of the countries most successful window making companies, she has a new car every birthday, currently a Merc, and an allowance of £1,000 a month for clothes, entertaining, eating out etc. She works two days a week from 8:30-3:30 and one from 8:30-12:30 and is the most disruptive person in the office, it doesn't matter what she does wrong I can't get rid of her because my boss thinks she brightens the place up! She looks like Billie Piper, so much so that she gets asked for her autograph on aircraft, and her clothes cost more than my monthly take home. She's had problems with me in the past because she can't separate the personal from the professional - I'm there for her as a friend when she's having marital problems but she can't take criticism from me as her boss.

If all four women are in the office at the same time the noise is unbelievable for the first half an hour of the day, because they all arrive at different times and you hear the same story over and over as each one of them arrives. We operate an open door policy in our office, literally all doors are left open (except the loos), so that everybody feels there isn't a "them" and "us" situation, although this can have its problems as I've said before.

The point is that despite, or perhaps because of, we work brilliantly as a team - they each know what I expect of them and I know what they can and can't do. I've told each one of them as they've been taken on that I'll never ask them to do something I couldn't do myself and that no question they want to ask me is stupid whatever they might think.

As a result of all this nature/nurture - good boss/bad boss stuff - they've invited me out on a girls night out. I've declined of course, well, youngsters don't have the same stamina do they, last thing I need is to be shown up by three twentysomethings wanting to get an early taxi home!