Alphabet Soup of
Management
By Martin VanDerSchouw
ITIL, Six Sigma,
Lean, TQM, Agile Development, Scrum, XP, APM, PMBOK, strategy maps,
and portfolio management the list goes on and on. How does anyone
make sense of all the management mantras? The reality is that most
do not. The average organization will attempt to implement three of
these, or other management techniques, every two years. Each
initiative will cost approximately U.S. $750,000 and will be
cancelled within 12 months. Yet, the management problems these
ideas were undertaken to solve will continue.
As an
organizational leader tirelessly attempting to keep your firm moving
forward, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, retain your
most valuable employees twenty other major strategic and operational
goals what are you to do? The key to wading through the myriad of
mantras is to keep your focus on what really matters. Remembering a
few simple rules can dramatically improve your chances of success.
Firstly, process won’t get you there, people will. And secondly,
strategy drives your success.
In almost every
situation, the first thing a new leader instinctively wants to do
when they walk in the door is change something. They cannot help
themselves. It’s the simple logic of self preservation. In most
situations, the new leader is replacing a leader that was dismissed
from the organization. If they keep everything the same, logic
dictates they will end up in the same position as the previous
leader. Therefore, the only logical course is to change something,
put the leader’s imprint on the organization. For many leaders this
leads to some sort of process.
Six Sigma, Lean,
Agile Six Sigma or TQM are all examples of continuous process
improvement initiatives. Agile Development and specifically Scrum,
Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Project Management (APM) or Crystal
Clear are all represent popular information technology development
methodologies. The Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK
represents the writings for the field of project management
consolidated in the Project Management Institute’s PMBOK Guide®.
Finally, strategy maps and the like are best expressed by the work
of Robert S. Kaplan. Each of these represents a process that an
organization might select to try and change current performance.
The numbers say most will fail. However, it is the reason for
failure that is important.
In most cases, when
a leader brings a new process to the organization they achieve a
reasonable amount of initial success. Everyone seems on board with
the new processes. Meetings are being scheduled and attended
according to the plan. There is apparent energy and excitement with
the initial results. Then somewhere around months six through nine
the wheels seem to fall off. Those once grand processes are no
longer being followed without constant reminders. The once
promising investment is simply not paying dividends. Is this a
failure of process? Maybe it is a problem with you people. You
simply have the wrong people in the wrong jobs. The truth is it’s a
failure of leadership, yours. Unless you correct the problem
quickly you are going to become part of the ever increasing list of
failures.
The problem in
these situations is too heavy a reliance on detailed process, and
too little attention being paid to your staff taking ownership of
the initiative.
If you have ever
read anything on change management or taken any training on the
topic you have likely learned about the supposed importance of
buy-in. Getting buy in is a great idea if you are a change
consultant, but fails miserably for organizational leaders in the
real world. The problem comes from understanding what buy-in truly
represents. Buy-in is the leader selling organizational members the
leader’s ideas for how the organization should be run or changed.
The problem with
buy-in is that the buyer can always choose to buy-out. This occurs
when the change is no longer new, cool or sexy. It also happens
when team members feel they have become bogged down in process and
can no longer remember why the process was created in the first
place. Two things have to occur to resolve this problem. First,
leaders must ensure focus is always on the end goal. This requires
constant reminders. Secondly, leaders must ensure the process does
not become rote and overly cumbersome. A good process should NEVER
try to account for every contingency. The target of a good process
is to account for 90% of the cases and then give your people the
latitude to deal with the last 10%. Remember, the tendency of most
people is to keep their heads down assuming that if they do not get
noticed the change initiative will eventually lose steam and they
can go back to doing things the way they always have. People do
this because they have no ownership in the idea. It’s your idea so
when they get tired or frustrated it is easy to revert back to the
old ways.
The key to
instilling a sense of ownership is understanding the relationship
strategy has in the process. Strategy represents the plan created
achieve the long-range organizational objectives. For many leaders,
strategy is their domain. It is not the domain of the average
worker. Unfortunately, this opinion ensures the strategy is never
achieved. The true objective of an organizational strategy is to
loudly and clearly state, “this is who we are and where we are
going.” Every member of the organization must feel a sense of
ownership in the strategy and be able to express how their personal
actions impact the strategy. In other words, they must be able to
answer the question, “How do I fit in?” This cannot be done by
having the senior leadership hand down the strategy from on high.
True leaders
understand the importance of getting every member of the team to
take ownership of their actions and the strategy. This requires
more than an alphabet soup of process, it requires an owned strategy
Read other articles and learn more about
Martin VanDerSchouw.
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