Management: April 2008 Archives

And they cause big trouble.

Let's be honest, American businesses (and probably all businesses) are filled with all kinds of dysfunctions that create stress, inefficiencies, loss of productivity, waste, and stunt the development of the talent for which we pay so dearly.  The assumption that is the most deadly to business today can be summarized in the five most dangerous words in business:

That's just how it is.

It's almost if instead of the ten commandments, Moses came down the mountain with the blueprint for the modern organization.  An act of God determines how we do things and the dysfunctions we deal with, well, that's just how it is.

Except it isn't.

Organization design, management practices and processes are human artifacts, not holy relics.  They are the product of human design processes.  And anything humans design, humans can redesign.

How is it that we have fallen into the trap of assuming that when things go wrong that someone must be responsible?  Why is it that when there is a lack of trust among employees (or worse, leaders) that the people are the problem?  The facts are:

1) The people are uncaring, negligent, incompetent, and indifferent or

2) The people are caring, attentive, competent and committed, but are responding to the pressures and rewards of the ecosystem in which they work and to which they pay very close attention, and the dysfunctional behavior is symptomatic of the system in which they work.

What other options are there?

If you believe your people are caring and committed, then the only place to look is the system.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, "When all other alternatives are eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

We do not have the luxury of putting up with the wasted efforts of people working at cross purposes in our companies.  We have to reinvent business around a different model.  We need to study the culture of business and realize the trap we've fallen into is that we have gotten so used to our organizational dysfunctions we assume that, "That's just how it is."

The good news is that nature is showing us the way.  More on this over the next few weeks.  

Meanwhile, the next time you let out a sign of exasperation about the dysfunctions in your organization and hear those five most dangerous words wander through your mind, I hope all your alarms go off.  The right response is, "We created this mess, and by God we can fix it." 

Most people would agree, their lives (work and personal) tend to hover around their maximum capacity, sometimes in overload, sometimes a bit less than their maximum.

On the surface, this looks like the optimum scenario, the content of what we are doing notwithstanding which I'll touch on in a bit.

It appears we are making the most efficient use of our time and talents. But, as usual, there is a fly in the ointment.

Figure Two shows us the fly.

As soon as we are confronted with any change, any surge in workload we immediately go into overload.  I think everyone would agree that overload is not our best gig.  Tempers get short, stress increases, work hours cut into family time, sleep deprivation starts to impact our effectiveness.

Granted, there are those who would say they do their best work under pressure.  I'm one of them actually and there is some basis of truth to this.  However, over the long haul, the cost in physical, emotional, relational well being, clarity of thought and action belies the notion that this is a desirable scenario in any way.  

The quality disciplines for example demonstrate conclusively that it is the consistency of throughput that yields the highest quality work and that spikes and slack times undercut quality.

This brings us to the workload paradox. 

What if we throttled our activities back to something that looked like Figure Three?

Well, the first complaint is that we're not being as efficient as possible.  At one level, clearly this is true.  But let's look at it from another point of view.  What production manager ever born does his/her production planning based on the assumption of 100% uptime of production machinery?  

None.

Murphy lurks on every factory floor.  Machines break, machines require preventative maintenance.  Smart 

production people conduct predictive maintenance.  All this downtime has to be factored into any and all production expectations.  

Why do we consider this principles not applicable to human beings (ourselves as well as our employees)?  Imagine the overload scenario in Figure Two taking place in the context of the workload of Figure Three.  The result is shown in Figure Four.  

In this scenario, we have surge capacity.  We can assimilate changes in our world.  We can deal calmly and effectively with crises.  

Here's the real kicker.  

"I really should train Bob/Sue to take this responsibility off my plate but I'm just too busy to take the time.  It's quicker to just do it myself."

Anyone out there in blog land ever had that conversation with themselves?  It's OK.  We've all done it.  This is called being trapped and it is a byproduct of working at your maximum practical capacity.  If you don't have time to leverage yourself, you're trapped.  If you don't have time to work yourself out of a job, you're trapped.  Whether you're an employee or the CEO it doesn't matter, you're still trapped.  Ironically, trapped in a prison of your own making.

As a leader of a company, division, or workgroup or even just yourself, getting out of this trap requires voluntarily driving yourself into overload for some period of time.  You have to do more before you can do less.  What are the steps?

1) Identify the least strategic, important, or skilled activities you spend your time doing.

2) Identify who you can offload them to.  If you don't have anyone to offload them to, ask yourself the question, "What would happen if I just didn't do them?"  You'll be surprised at how often nothing of importance would happen if you just quit doing some of the activities you do routinely.  

3) Be prepared to defend your lower level of activity.  You will be bucking the trend of the people around you (and above you).  

4) Demonstrate the value of your new level of productivity by taking on new, more important activities or assignments, being sure to push an equivalent amount of your least important work down to others.

The results will be that you will do less and accomplish more.  You will be clearer minded.  You will be better rested.  Your family will be happier.  Your employees will grow and progress faster which will attract the best talent in your organization.  You will be doing increasingly more strategic and important work which will be rewarding to your career, be you entrepreneur or employee.  You will be having more fun and be happier.  Others will enjoy your company more.  In other words, you will have created a self-reinforcing updraft.

Will you be less efficient?  Yes.  Will you be more effective?  Also yes.  

In one of his early books, Peter Drucker, the great management thinking and writer once said (and I'm paraphrasing), efficiency isn't necessary to create success, it's necessary to sustain it.  To create success we have to be effective.  He characterized the difference between the two by saying efficiency is doing things right.  Effectiveness is doing the right things.

Doing the right things is the key to resetting your workload to a lower but more effective level.    

Here's an alternative approach:

1. Give me a heads up about the problem so i can be thinking about it.

2. Bring some possible suggestions for solutions.  You probably won't have all the data so don't get too attached to any one solution.

3. I'll come up with some ideas, but I probably won't have all the data either so

4. Let's meet and share our ideas and craft a solution together which is much more likely to be more powerful and effective than anything either of us could have come up with alone.

There are two principles at work in this suggestion.

1. One of the fundamental principles of the quality disciplines is that all employees work in a system that they don't own and don't control.  The employees are intimately familiar with the limitations of that system but they are largely powerless to effect any changes.  Managers, who have the authority to change the system, don't work in it and therefore have little visibility into the problems or any visceral sense of the cost or impact of the problems.  It is only through the collaboration of managers and employees that process improvement can take place.  Managers must acknowledge that employees have the information and then work with employees to make the process and systemic changes that produce real improvement.

2. In their excellent and classic little book Getting To Yes Roger Fisher and William Ury show elegantly how two minds together are far more likely to create a more creative outcome than either mind alone, no matter how talented.  By coming together with ideas rather than solutions, a collaborative dynamic is created which will be much more likely to lead to a mutually satisfying outcome.  As soon as one party brings a "solution", a very different dynamic is created in which the manager is much more likely to take a black and white position in response, which often is "That won't work."  End of conversation.  Employee is demotivated, problem is likely to persist.  

Discuss this shift in approach at your next staff meeting.  See what happens.