Does your work style make you a magnifying glass -- focused, concentrated power -- or a prism -- lots of pretty colors, no heat?
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John Rowe, president and CEO of Exelon, tells this story:
In my first C.E.O. job, a young woman who worked for me walked in one day and said, “Do you know that the gossip in the office is that the way for a woman to get ahead is to wear frilly spring dresses?”And I just looked at her and asked, “Where did this come from?”
She said: “Well, you said, ‘pretty dress’ to four women who happened to be dressed that way. And so now it’s considered policy.”
I said: “Well, it’s the furthest thing in the world from policy. I was just trying to be pleasant in the elevator.”
People hang on a leader’s every word on what seems like trivia and can resist like badgers your words when you’re really trying to say something you think is important.
I wrote about this phenomenon, which I call "Godzilla in the corner office," before. Godzilla's tail alone can destroy hundreds of buildings without him even realizing it, and people high up in the food chain in an organization can wreak havoc without even realizing it. John Rowe's story is a perfect example.
You create expectations and tacitly encourage behaviors through your own actions. Do you check your smartphone when you're talking to a direct report? Do you arrive five minutes late to all meetings? Do you send emails on Sunday afternoons? What messages are you sending to your team? Is that what you want?
It's ironic, of course, but people in your organization will attend closely to what seems like trivia, and ignore or resist what you think is important. This is the nature of hierarchical organizations. Recognize it, be alert to the messages you're sending, and periodically seek honest feedback from people throughout the company. You might be surprised at what you learn.
In 2009 Google launched "Project Oxygen." You probably haven't heard of it, because it's not a product. It's Google's quest to build a better boss. In typical Google fashion, the company gathered enough data on managerial performance to float a battleship. They followed up with interviews, coded feedback, and ranked results in order of importance. What they found is music to any lean manager's ears. Here's how the NYTimes describes it:
Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight [drivers of managerial excellence]. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
John Shook over at the Lean Enterprise Institute has been talking about this for awhile now (most recently here). It seems so simple, doesn't it? Go see. Ask why. Show respect.
And yet.
Even assuming that your managerial team is staffed by well-meaning people and not those who think that Mein Kampf is the sine qua non for leadership lessons, this simple activity is surprisingly difficult, for two reasons.
First, finding time to "go see" is absurdly hard. Managers and executives spend so much time cooped up in conference rooms that you'd think they were mapping the human genome, not setting the sales price for a new candy bar. Spending six hours a day stifling hypnagogic jerks in a Powerpoint-induced stupor isn't exactly a solid foundation for a "go see" culture.
Second, we want to help. We want to solve problems. And, frankly, we like demonstrating our smarts. But in providing answers, we undermine people's intellectual development and corrode their self-esteem, just as surely as salt air rusts the supports on a bridge. People need to stretch themselves and solve their own problems -- with guidance and instruction, yes, but largely on their own. Otherwise they neither develop the capacity for learning nor the pride of accomplishment.
Your company may not be like Google (or even aspire to be like it), but good management transcends industries and idiosyncratic corporate culture. In lean terms, go see. Ask why. Show respect. In generic terms, make yourself available. Ask questions. Take an interest.
It's really not that hard. And hey, Google has quantitative proof that it works.
I used to work at Asics many years ago, where the strategic direction was to focus on the serious athletic enthusiast. We made wonderful, relatively high-priced (and high-margin) shoes that addressed their needs. Unfortunately, we also wanted to chase the sales volume that major retailers like JC Penney and Kohl’s could provide. That required us to make low-priced, low margin shoes. Our designers and developers were overburdened by the need to produce great shoes for both enthusiasts and for, well, septuagenarian mall-walkers in Miami. That bifurcation of work made it impossible to handle all their responsibilities. It also confused them as to what our business strategy actually was. As a result, we missed deadlines, made product development errors, and didn’t deliver to either market terribly well.
It’s not exactly a Copernican insight to say that your strategy should match (sorry, I should use the all-important buzzword, “align” with) your daily work. If it doesn’t, you run a serious risk of overwhelming yourself and your people with pointless activity that leads nowhere—except to feelings of overwhelm, missed deadlines, and unmet commitments.
As I’ve written about before, what often manifests itself as a time management “problem” is actually a mismatch between your strategic direction and what you’re asking people to work on. Because people are being pulled in two or three different directions, they can’t get any of their important (i.e., strategically aligned) work done. They’re busy serving pretzels when they should be piloting the plane.
Asics wasn’t the only company in this boat, of course. According to data in The Strategy Focused Organization, 80% of businesses fail to accomplish their strategies because of poor execution. 65% percent don’t align budget with strategy. Less than 35% of mid-manager activity contributes directly to the execution of business strategy, and less than 10% of front-line employees can articulate the institution’s strategic imperatives.
The numbers may not have been exactly right, but that sure describes Asics when I was there: a whole bunch of activity not tied to the company’s strategy.
Next time you see overwhelmed staff and unconsummated strategy, consider those “problems” as symptoms. The real problem—the root cause—may very well be strategy that’s neither clearly defined nor clearly articulated.
At Asics, we made the tough decision to adjust our product line to match our espoused strategy. We dropped the bottom end of our product line—saying goodbye to a sizable chunk of revenue and earning the rather considerable wrath of our sales reps. It sure hurt for awhile. But it freed up our designers and developers to do the right work, and in the long run it positioned us to build a truly sustainable business that leveraged our core strengths. Three years later we had regained all the lost sales and built a rock-solid position at the high-end of the market.
Who are your septuagenarian mall-walker customers? Bringing clarity at the top level leads to focused action at the front line. And that’s your job.
Bob Lutz, longtime car guy who held senior leadership positions at GM, BMW, Ford, and Chrysler, tells a story about the feedback that David Davis, an auto industry expert, received on a speech he delivered at GM:
Sometime in the early '80s, he'd accepted a gig as speaker to a large group of GM executives. The speech appeared to go well, and the applause felt genuine. David went home pleased and thought no more about it until he received the following letter:Dear David:
You asked for feedback on your remarks at our recent conference. The data is just now available.
The rating scale was zero to ten with ten being "best." The five non-GM speakers had scores ranging from zero to ten. Yours ranged from three to ten. The five "outside speakers'" average scores ranged from 5.25 to 8.25.
Your average was 7.35.
Two speakers had higher scores than yours. Your standard deviation from the mean was 1.719 and ranked second among the variances, showing that most people had a similar opinion about your remarks.
I personally enjoyed your remarks very much. Your refreshing candor, coupled with your broad understanding of people, product, and the market, gave us exactly what we asked you for—"widened competitive awareness."
Absurd, right? Hopefully you didn’t snort the milk from your Cheerios out your nose as you read this. It’s a miracle that GM survived as long as it did with this kind of bureaucratic plaque clogging its organizational arteries.
But before you sprain your shoulder patting yourself on your own back for how much smarter you and your company are than big, stupid GM, think about the birth of that colossal dysfunction. At some point, a diligent, well-meaning employee—or her manager—probably wanted to help improve the quality of presentations. And he probably read in business school that what matters gets measured, so he created a simple 10-point rating scale.
[Stop here. Does your organization use one of these scales to evaluate speakers, or training sessions, or the selection of deli meats in the company cafeteria?]
It’s a short—very short—step from a 10-point rating of an individual event, to a comparison of multiple events. And an even shorter step from that comparison to a deeper, more thorough statistical analysis, replete with r2-values and more Greek letters than you’ve seen since your last purchase of foreign yogurt.
Organizations, and individuals within organizations, drive themselves to the land of absurdity all the time because they don’t ask the first question that lean thinkers focus on: What is customer value?
Learning that a speech was well received with a score of 7.35 out of 10 is valuable, important, and worthwhile for the customers (in this case, the speaker and the people who invited the speaker). The other data, not so much. The Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group could have identified that value by simply (gasp!) asking the customers what information would be helpful for them. Hell, there probably wouldn’t even be a need for an Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group in the first place had GM focused on this question.
In my mind, this is where traditional approaches to productivity go wrong. These approaches focus on improving the efficiency of producing these reports without considering whether or not they should be produced in the first place. The lean approach—first, identify the value—is, to me, a far better way to operate. And once you’ve identified the value, you can apply the lean tool of 5S to the information: sort the value from the waste, set it in order, systematize the delivery of the information, etc.
Of course, the waste from not focusing on customer value isn’t always as obvious as having an Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group (The existence of a department like that is pretty much a dead giveaway.) Sometimes it’s subtler, like having the IT department generate dozens, or even hundreds, of reports per week, most of which go unread (as happened at one of my old employers).
Unless you continually evaluate your own generation of data, reports, and statistics, you run the risk of becoming the punch line to a joke and an object lesson in making good data go bad.
Middle management has been gutted like a trout since the recession started in 2008. Unfortunately, the job growth we're seeing now isn't rebuilding this class of managers: most of the new positions are at the bottom of the pyramid, primarily minimum wage and temporary jobs. In fact, out of the 260,000 jobs created in April, 60,000 came from McDonald's. The evisceration of middle management, combined with a swelling front-line work force, means that span of control is increasing. The burden placed on the remaining managers -- already stretched thin by layoffs -- will only get heavier.
This situation will challenge their ability to work effectively and execute daily, weekly, and monthly plans. And as I wrote last week, this necessitates developing clear organizational strategy; limiting the number of priorities each person is responsible for; simplifying systems and processes; establishing manageable cultural expectations; and finely honing individual skills.
Is your organization ready for this? Are you setting your middle managers -- arguably the backbone of any organization -- up for failure or success?
No. You don't have 13 priorities. You only have one. And if you want to have a prayer of completing getting any of your important work, you've got to come to grips with that.
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I'm back. The last few weeks have been hectic for me: I finished the manuscript for my book, A Factory of One, and submitted it to Productivity Press, who will be publishing it in November or December this year. Many thanks to all of you in the lean community who provided feedback, comments, stories, and challenges to my thinking along the way.
I've also spent a long week clarifying my thinking about how lean concepts and tools tie into time management and individual performance. In the spirit of visual management, I thought that drawing this relationship would be helpful. This is what I came up with:
Obviously, I'm no Rembrandt. But I think this iceberg does a pretty good job of expressing the actual situation that I've seen over the past few years when people complain that they're overwhelmed, or that their group needs time management training, or that they simply don't have enough time to do everything. Their complaint -- the visible symptom, the part of the iceberg above the water -- is not the problem at all. It's a symptom. The root cause -- the real problem -- lies below the waterline. And while it's invisible, it can -- and will -- sink the ship.
Time management "problems" are really just manifestations of dysfunction in one or more of the following areas: strategy; priorities; internal systems and processes; corporate cultural expectations; or individual skills. And this is why very often time management programs fail to improve the lives of the people who so diligently construct lists, who carefully discriminate between urgent and important, who pursue inbox zero, who never check email in the morning, etc. All those approaches -- as valuable as they are -- only address the problems in individual skills. They ignore the systemic issues that undermine individual performance. You can try not checking email till 11am, but if your boss reams you out for missing an urgent email she sent at 8:15am, you're probably not going to stick with that 11am plan for very long.
Carrying the iceberg metaphor a bit further, even if you do lop off the top -- even if you address the symptoms by adding staff, or bolstering a person's individual skills, the problem will just rise to the surface again. At some point you'll have to get to the root causes, or you'll end up sinking the ship.
Take a page from Jim Collins: learn to apply lean techniques and improve the quality of your own work.
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Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined the term BHAG (“big, hairy, audacious goal”) in their article, Building Your Company's Vision, back in 1996. Since that time it’s become so much a part of the lingua franca of business that you practically can’t call yourself a leader if you haven’t set some BHAGs for your company, your team, or yourself. It’s fascinating, though, to see just how many BHAGs are entombed in 2” D-ring binders collecting dust on people’s bookshelves, with pretty much zero chance of actually being implemented. There are all kinds of reasons—you don’t have the time or money or people, for example, or first you have to take care of your boss’s stupid pet project, or you’re trapped in too many meetings—but regardless of the excuse, those BHAGs are joining flying pigs in the list of things you won’t see in this life.
Now Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work, explains why in an article in CIO:
Goals that are too big paralyze you. They literally shut off your brain, says Achor.
Here's what happens to your brain when faced with a daunting goal or project: The amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to fear and threats, hijacks the "thinker" part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, says Achor. The amygdala steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, the creative part of the brain that makes decisions and sees possibilities.
"We watch this on a brain scan," he says. "The more the amygdala lights up, the less the prefrontal cortex does."
Breaking a big goal into smaller, more achievable goals prevents the fear part of your brain from hijacking your thinking cap and gives you victories.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think your lizard brain (in Seth Godin’s term) is the only reason that so many organizations fail to achieve their BHAGs. Corporate inertia has a thousand fathers—reading any Dilbert is proof of that. But the daunting prospect of a BHAG, combined with a lack of clarity of how, precisely, to get from here to there, often plays a role in paralysis at the individual level.
In companies that struggle to realize their BHAGs, it’s frequently because no one has taken the time to map out precisely what small steps are needed to reach them. When I worked at Asics years ago, we set ourselves a goal to dethrone Nike as the number one brand among running enthusiasts. (To put this goal in perspective: Nike was a $4 billion company at the time. Asics was $180 million.) Pretty ambitious stuff for us.
We laid out a careful roadmap to reach this goal: recasting our running product line by eliminating lower-end shoes and building our first legitimate high-end shoe; providing special sales and customer service support to specialty running stores; creating special sales programs; focusing our advertising on the core running enthusiast; and having the product marketing and development teams spend more time visiting specialty running retailers during the product development stage. No step by itself would have done the job, but the steady accretion of these moves eventually toppled Nike among these customers.
We didn’t talk about BHAGs then. (That was before Collins’ article, for one thing.) But we did achieve one, by rigorously implementing a series of small steps. And because we were dealing with small steps, we didn’t have to worry about illuminated amygdalae, or struggle to clarify the vacuous ambiguities that too often paralyze good people.
Why is business execution so hard? Why are offices littered with the dessicated carcasses of strategic plans? Why can small companies work miracles with a tiny staff, but large organizations can't even get out of their own way? I don't have all the answers to those questions. But I do have some of the questions that you should be asking to get to the bottom of this issue. I just co-authored an article at Fast Company that might help you think about the problem more clearly. Read "Are You Excited About Your Business Execution & Collaboration?" here.
No matter how unpredictable and unstructured your job is, standardized routines are necessary -- or at the very least, helpful -- for enabling your creativity to flow unfettered.
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Exhibit 1: Computer consulting firm Atos Origin announces that it’s abandoning email within three years. The CEO says that “information pollution” burdens managers with an unsustainable load of 5-20 hours of email per week (and climbing), so the company is shifting to social media in order to lighten the load. Exhibit 2: Google announces that for part of each day, new CEO Larry Page and other top executives will sit and work together in an area of the company's headquarters that's accessible to all employees. As part of the effort to recapture some of the nimbleness and entrepreneurial speed of a smaller company, he’s also encouraged employees to pitch him new product ideas in emails of 60 words or less.
I think we’re seeing a trend here. As organizations grow in size and complexity, the volume of communication (via email or meetings) explodes. But it’s becoming painfully obvious that the use of meetings and email just doesn’t scale very well. Past a certain point, the very tools that expedited communication at a smaller scale begin to throttle it. Organizations sclerose under the weight of their tools – too many emails, too many formal meetings. The attempt to communicate crowds out all other work -- even the value-creating work. Nothing gets done, and people bemoan the hulking, slow-moving battleship their company has become.
Certainly, there’s no panacea for this problem. Atos Origin has taken a technological approach, while Google has taken a physical approach. W.L. Gore has, since 1965, taken an entirely different path: no teams bigger than 200 people, so as to ensure that it will be free of stifling bureaucracy. I worked with one client that used to hold an unending string of formal (and time-consuming) status update meetings to ensure that product development teams would cross-pollinate ideas. They eventually gave up those meetings and just bought the teams pizza for lunch every other month. That worked better and eliminated the time suck of needless meetings. Other firms are adopting visual management systems—often, low-tech whiteboards or corkboards—to communicate important information quickly and efficiently. Still other organizations are now using A3s to not only aid problem solving, but also to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communication.
If the goal of lean is to provide the greatest value at the lowest possible cost, then there’s plenty of room for improvement in our communication. But the first step is to realize that the status quo just isn't good enough, that the way we communicate is needlessly costly and inefficient. Atos Origin, Google, and Gore are taking steps to eliminate that waste. What about you?
You might want to reconsider saying yes to the latest project that your boss drops on your desk like a side of beef. Saying no might help you do a better -- or at least a faster -- job. Turns out that managing so many concurrent projects that you're the white-collar equivalent of a Chinese acrobat spinning dishes doesn't work so well.
A study of Italian judges who were randomly assigned cases and who had similar workloads found that those who worked on fewer cases at a time tended to complete more cases per quarter and took less time, on average, to complete a case. The authors concluded that
Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of effort, ability and experience: work scheduling is a crucial “input” that cannot be omitted from the production function of individual workers.
The problem is that too much work-in-process causes a system -- whether machine or human -- to bog down. In a phrase that will likely make Jim Benson and Tonianne deMaria Barry smile (or call their lawyers), the MIT Sloan Management Review draws the analogy that
excessive multitasking may result in the workflow equivalent of a traffic jam, where projects get backed up behind other projects much the way cars get stuck in traffic when there are too many on a highway at once.
If this phrasing rings a bell, it should: here's how Jim and Tonianne made this point visually (check out slide #7):
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to use your calendar as a tool to assess your daily production capacity, but not with the goal of filling up every minute of each day. Overloading the system writ small -- stacking up tasks during the day like 747s over LaGuardia -- is a bad idea. But overloading the system writ large -- scheduling too many legal cases or too many projects at one time -- is also a recipe for slow turnaround, frustrated customers, sub-optimal performance, and probably premature hair loss.
Remember, you're not a circus performer. Neither your boss nor your customers "ooh" and "ahh" because you're juggling 26 projects at once. They ooh and ahh when you deliver the goods quickly and with perfect quality.
You're on line (not online) at Starbucks for your iced skinny half-caf semi-grande caramel macchiato with soy whip on top. You've got about three minutes from where you are now to picking up your drink. What do you do? Pull out your Droid and check email, of course. After all, you've got three minutes. Why waste them? That's what the mobile internet is for.
But here's a suggestion: instead of filling your brain, why don't you try emptying it?
Let's face it. In the three minutes you've got to look at your inbox, you really can't get much of anything done. Sure you can skim some of your new email, and you might even be able to answer a couple of the easy ones. ("Yes." "No." "Chicken.") But for the most part, you're pre-ordaining yourself to seeing a bunch of subject lines or messages that you can't do anything about at that moment. Not when you've got to elbow your way from the pick-up counter to the Splenda dispenser.
That's a recipe for stress. You know you have to respond to a customer or to your boss, but you don't have the time right now. It's festering in your inbox. And you know it. Enjoy the macchiato, bub.
So, a modest proposal. Next time you have three extra minutes, instead of filling up your mind with stuff you can't do anything about, why not empty it? Take a notebook and write down stray ideas that have come to you, to-dos that you've forgotten about, questions you need to ask, whatever. Use the time to empty your head of the flotsam that washes up on the shores of your consciousness so that you can actually do something about them later.
Last week I wrote about why you need slack in a system. Filling every minute with work guarantees that your throughput will decrease. My modest proposal to empty your head, rather than fill it, is, I think, a related concept. Giving yourself more work (more email busy-ness) just because you have a few minutes of unbooked time in your day is utterly counter-productive.
Yes, this means that you'll have to stop mainlining the internet for just. Three. Minutes. And you may suffer from some withdrawal symptoms. But you're likely to become more relaxed. More focused. Less frazzled.
Now, enjoy your coffee.
For a long time now, I've advocated "living in your calendar" in order to, among other reasons, understand your production capacity. Mapping out your work on a calendar helps prevent you from taking on more commitments than you have the time to handle. I was wrong. (Sort of.)
I just finished reading Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria's book, Personal Kanban, in which they point out that capacity is irrelevant. It's about throughput. No one -- not your boss, not your customers, not your family -- cares about how much capacity (hours) you have each day to work. They care about how quickly that work gets done, whether it's preparing next year's budget or cleaning the garage.
What's the lead time? What's the cycle time? How long do I have to wait? These are the key questions they want answered. (Well, only engineers ask the first two questions. But everyone asks the last one.) And those are the key questions you should be asking yourself. Not, "How much time do I have to work this week?", but "How can I get this work done most quickly?"
To shamelessly steal an analogy from Personal Kanban, no one cares what the capacity of a freeway is. In fact, it's completely irrelevant to you how many cars can be packed into one stretch of asphalt. What's really important is how long it takes to move down the road and whether you'll make it home in time to watch reruns of "Webster." And as any urban planner or operations manager will tell you, once your system exceeds 65-70% of maximum utilization, you're guaranteed to reduce throughput and increase cycle time.
This is why living in the calendar can be dangerous. There's a tendency to look at empty space on the calendar as something to be filled up with some ostensibly productive work. After all, if you're not filling those minutes and hours, then clearly you're either a lazy slacker or you're just terribly inefficient. With unemployment at 9%, who wants to be accused of either?
But how fast would traffic move if every square foot of the freeway was occupied by cars? How fast will your work move if every moment of your day is occupied by some pre-planned task or meeting? It wouldn't move at all. Just look at the cars around you at rush hour -- or look at the crap that's been piled up on your desk and your inbox for a few weeks. That tells you all you need to know about throughput.
So, by all means live in your calendar. Use it to assess your production capacity. But remember that 100% utilization of that capacity is ultimately self-defeating. You need slack in the system, because throughput is what counts. Not capacity.
Providing excellent service doesn't mean that you have to respond immediately. What your customers really need is predictable response, not instant response.
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Your calendar never lies. If something is a priority, then it must be reflected in your scheduled work. Period.
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Consider this: great client service does NOT require you to be always accessible, 24/7.
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Stress is your reaction to the demands of your work. It's not inherent in the work itself. Creating "standard work" to manage the repetitive and predictable tasks in your job will reduce stress.
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