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In office work the queue doesn’t snake out the door. Its piles up emotionally in the form of the ever-expanding Inbox, and the increasing rates of friendly-but-scary “where’s my thing?” It feels like there’s no way out….but it turns out just a spoonful of capacity goes a long way.
Read more…Today’s article is the first in a new series called “Work Models You Need To Know”. In this series I describe and summarise in each instalment one of the models that I find useful to help my clients understand certain issues that are in their organisation, and what to do about it.
This time, it’s the Four Managerial Roles, and it’s from Dr. Ichak Adizes, an organisational consulting legend who has been in the game for decades.
Adizes is best known for the Corporate Lifecycle, a fantastic model on how enterprises come into existence, how they grow toward what he calls ‘Prime’, and then how they can decay and sometimes even die. It looks like this:
Read more…
A recent study compared a couple of different ways of organising a production environment.
Both groups had 40 employees. The first group had seven types of roles and was divided into 14 subgroups, with coordination, integration and continuity of the work being the responsibility of management.
The second group coordinated itself. They had the same roles as the first group, but they decided themselves who would rotate to what tasks and which shifts they would work.
Here’s the findings:
What’s the study?
Well…I have to come clean. By ‘recent’, I was more on a geological timescale. The study was conducted in the 1950s.
Two hundred kilometres southwest, teenager John Lennon hadn’t even formed the Quarrymen, let alone the Beatles.
The production wasn’t software development. It was coal mining. In Durham, UK. The work was getting the coal from long walls. Fun stuff.
You can read about it in Gerrit Broekstra’s book Building High-Performance, High Trust Organizations.
You see, the results on this stuff are in – when people have some sort of control/autonomy/authority over their own work….things are better. We don’t need further studies on this, and if you just ponder anything in your own work life where you’ve felt totally into it…I’m sure these conditions were there.
So, here’s some thoughts on what we’re seeing here, and in similar studies and examples of self-managing enterprises: Read more…
Is this the scene at your work when another meeting is called?
Just because team meetings can be a soulless drain of vital lifeforce doesn’t mean they are not important.
For many people, the conditions for work being a satisfying experience is that we are ‘alone together’. Oxymoron fans are digging it the most, but what I’m getting at is that most of us like some sort of autonomy/authority/control over what we do and how we do it, and at the same time, most of us need some sort of connection to other people to feel OK.
Work lets us do both.
And in most organisations, meetings are the primary forum in which we have the chance to form a connection as a group, meaning the chance to satisfy one of the fundamental conditions for work being OK. Or better.
Which is why they are important. And why it’s worth trying something new if your meetings are driving you into the gutter of existential despair.
So try lean coffee!
Lean coffee (which is a trademarked thing) is a ‘structured, but agenda-less meeting‘ in the words you’ll find on the website itself: http://leancoffee.org/ . Better yet, check out co-originator Jim Benson (he of personal kanban fame) talking about it for 3:37 on YouTube right here. Read more…
“Everyone around here is just too busy being busy” sighed Merryn. Her business employed 250 people, it was growing and she was feeling the strain.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Because everyone time I ask someone ‘how’s things’, I get the same response…a roll of the eyes and ‘just busy….flat out…..you know how it is’. And things are stalling. Lots of action, no results.”
“What would you like to be hearing?”
“It would be great” Merryn continued, “if someone would say ‘I’m focussed, in the flow and we’re all delivering. Feeling great‘”
“So what are your people working on then?”
Merryn looked puzzled for a second, then replied “Lots of stuff – business-as-usual, we’ve got improvements to the warehouse operation underway, legislative change coming, our IT systems need an upgrade, the usual product development, and on top of that, we’re trying to find ways to innovate so we can play in some new fields”.
“Sounds pretty busy busy” I replied. “So if I’m sitting there with a choice as to what to work on next, which one do you want me to do?” Read more…
“OK” said Danni, GM of Operations with about 600 people under her. “So I’m accountable for the work of each of my Senior Managers, which means I’m accountable for how efficiently each of their areas runs”.
“In the end” I replied.
“And their work is about making and implementing decisions that will make their areas reach the level of efficiency that we need”.
“Yep. Outputs per input.”
“I know you like to talk about results” Danni went on. “So how do I work out what’s a reasonable result in terms of efficiency for each of my Senior Managers?”
“How do you do it at the moment?”
“Well…….if I’m honest, I guess I pretty much agree with what the Senior Managers say is possible.”
“And they may well be spot on” I answered. “But tell me this” I answered. “When you were getting those renovations done on your house last year, how did you work out what was reasonable?”
“I guess I had a think about what I thought was possible, asked some builders, then asked some friends who had been through a similar thing. Then I asked for what I wanted.”
“And what are the equivalents for deciding a reasonable result to expect for efficiency?”
“My Senior Managers of course. But also I suppose conferences, consultants, colleagues, seminars, workshops, books. All of those things.” Danni was thinking hard now.
“So that meeting with the improvement consultants last month that three of your Senior Managers went to…..” I let it dangle in the air….
“I should have been there with them.” said Danni. “I needed to listen, learn, then make my own judgement on what to expect over the next 18 months from my Senior Managers”.
“Exactly. That decision is the work of a General Manager.”