How to get out of the detail…and start doing your real job.

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PART ONE – CLARITY

The problem

If you’re in any sort of managerial role, it’s almost a given that you’re spending your time in the detail and not spending enough time doing the job you’re really paid for.  And that you’d rather be doing.  That job you’re paid for is about longer timespans –  looking into the future, maybe strategic stuff, maybe it’s improving things.  For you to be able to do your work and not be involved in doing the work of your people, three things need to be in place….

Clarity, Capacity, and Capability.

The Three Cs. Or, be fancy,  3C.

If your people don’t have enough Clarity of what they need to do, if they haven’t got the Capacity to get it done, and if they don’t have the Capability to do it, who’s going to end up doing it?  You are!  And don’t feel bad – this happens because you’re a decent person.

This first article is going into Clarity.

Clarity for the frontline[1]

For the frontline, those producing the actual work of the organisation, make sure you’ve given them what they need so they can do the job. Not only the equipment and the tools, but think of what we might call ‘job aids’ – procedures, guidelines, checklists, all things that help them to do the job well.  Remind people that these items are not an insult, they exist because you want their minds being used to think about how to actually do the job, not trying to remember whether they have the keys.  

Pilots use checklists. Helps planes not crash. It’s a good idea.

Clarity for those who manage the frontline

Your people who manage the frontline, their job is not to pick up shovels and to get things done (unless it is an emergency of course).   Their job is to optimise and solve so that production works the way we thought it was supposed to. The role is to step back and ask “what’s really going on here”.  They might identify issues such as equipment not working or training is required, they may see better ways to do things and modify procedures and guidelines.  This is called managing!

Manage means take accountability for the outputs or the results.  This is what is being asked of those who manage the frontline, and doing this properly requires thinking in timespans of 3 to 12 months.  If the longest change someone in this role is making will be done in only 5 weeks, then they haven’t stepped back far enough to really see how things are working.

To put this into practice, make sure you’ve had a conversation about what their area needs to look like in 3 months’ time.  What standards need to be met, what changes will be in place.  If this discussion never happens, they might perceive that their job is just to simply get involved on the frontline. 

And this means you will be doing the managing!

Clarity for those who manage manager or teams of teams.

Roles that have accountability for multiple teams are ‘middle management’.  Some organisations call them ‘Senior Managers’, some organisations call them ‘Managers’ and in turn call those managing the frontline ‘Team Leaders’.  Word games aside, you need Managers of Managers  in charge of thinking about the whole system.

This means asking questions like

• “how does the work flow through from beginning to end?”
• “On what basis do we choose suppliers and is the current group doing the job”
• “Are things changing that suggest we need to think differently about how get things done”. 

While those managing the frontline might identify that the equipment’s not working, those running the full system look to where the equipment comes from in the first place, and is that relationship effective for everyone?  

Another way to look at this work is as putting together and maintaining a network of teams, suppliers, support areas and customer relations which comes together to create the value that is expected over time.  This means working in longer timespans of 1 to 2 years.  If these roles are done well and put into place changes to the fundamental way that ‘work works’ to create more value for the people that we’re serving, it’s going to take more than a few months.

And…these increasing timespans of roles is what gets hierarchy to work.

(Stop being scared of hierarchy. Hierarchy run badly is awful, it should rightly be booted out. Hierarchy run well, however, is a valid and good way to organise many businesses, and can be very appropriate for what they’re trying to get done and the value of the people involved.)

The strategic aspect of middle management roles

The other key role of the people who are in charge of the whole system is changing the system according to the strategic requirements. In other words, if it’s decided that strategically there is no longer value in pursuing a certain product or service, and instead we can now create more value by moving resources into a new area,  ‘middle management’ roles are accountable for planning and implementing how to move from one reality to another without losing the farm in the process.

Accountability and judgement

A crucial note on accountability. If a role has accountability for certain decisions, it does not mean it gets to sit by itself and make calls in a vacuum.  Without gaining the input of those who will involved, without finding out potential impacts in other areas of the business…decisions will simply not be as effective.  This applies as much to Executives as those who manage the frontline. 

Work itself is about making decisions and then taking action based on those decisions. And decisions means judgment. In other words, not answers that the calculator or the algorithm or the Excel spreadsheet can tell you the answer for.

This means what you are really paying people for is their judgment, and we want to make sure that:

• Those on the frontline know they are judging which procedures, methods, training and guidelines to apply in this situation.
• Those managing the frontline are judging how to optimize and solve problems at their core to make sure that the system works the way it was intended
• Managers of managers are making judgments about whether the whole show still makes sense, whether is there a fundamentally better way to do it, and how would we move to a new way of doing the show.

And….Executive or Strategic work, often by a role called General Manager or in smaller organisations might be the CEO, is about making judgments about what we want the shows doing, and for who will they do it for, in order to any create value at all.   To ask “given who we are, where we are, what is needed and what’s possible – what’s the most valuable thing we could be doing”?

In Summary

Have a discussion with each managerial role you may have within your area to make it clear the types of decisions you are asking for.  Use the timespans of 3-12 months and 1-2 years to create tasks that will cause the level of thinking needed. 

Do this, and you’ll create that first step of Clarity about what you’re looking for from the roles, which is your first move to get yourself out of the detail.

[1] These concepts draw on the work of Elliott Jaques