Improve your life – sort the work system

If you’re a manager, you’re in charge of a work system.  I’m not talking about technology systems, I mean a system as in there’s an external world that puts things in, your area does things with them, and then something comes out to the external world.

A system.

You might even have done that thing where you draw the boxes and arrows, some ‘swimming lanes’ if you’re fancy and so can now declare “there’s my work system.”

Nice one.  So how come you still don’t have enough hours in the day?  Why is there still a line of people outside of your office?  And why does that diagram just fester on your G: drive and you didn’t know that your Visio licence expired two years ago?

The reason is because your work system isn’t so great.  You haven’t yet put in focussed effort to see your area as a work system, and then, every time something requires your intervention, see this as a work system failure.

That’s right – every time one of your people needs to come to you to ask a question that is not of the nature of ‘why do we do this?’, it is actually a failure of your work system.

• “But sometimes there are tricky customer questions that require my expertise”.  Make it someone’s role to handle these and teach them how to do it, and tell them to teach people so they don’t have to ask anymore.
• “But my people need to work with that other area and it has to go through me”.  Set up a role relationship so they can go directly to the other area.
• “I need to check what my people are spending so they don’t go over budget”.  Give them the limits of expenditure, check the monthly reports, assess their decisions and coach them to calibrate.

Here’s the thing – every time your people need to come to you, it’s going to be a failure of either knowledge or empowerment.  The good news is that these are fixable.  By you.  And by simply asking “what knowledge or authority would have allowed that person to get on their way without me“, then sorting that out…..you’ll be able to start adding the true value that your role expects.

Make your New Years resolution “I will set up my area so it can run fine without me”.

Everyone wins.

And by the way – doing this is one of the fundamentals of leadership in an organisation.  If you’re a manager – not optional.