I was interviewing some executives recently in an organization famous for its strong individual objectives and metrics driven system of management.

The problem with individual objectives and clear measures is that they can drive managers to be “one dimensional” and very focused on meeting objectives. This can cause real problems in a matrix when, for example, functional and business objectives are not aligned or legitimately compete.

When bonuses and careers depend on hitting your own objectives and metrics it can be hard to find reconciliations to the complex trade-offs and dilemmas that are normal in a matrix.

Sometimes competing objectives and metrics are desirable - for example focusing sales people on sales volume and commercial people on risk management to balance each other in large bids. On other occasions conflict is created when insufficient alignment is in place.

At junior levels people can be successful by focusing on their metrics and objectives and working hard. At middle and senior management level in a matrix this can be counterproductive where it is necessary to take other competing priorities and metrics into account and to make trade-offs.

This is a common issue in very results oriented companies with a matrix structure and suggests that we may need a different performance management system for these complex organization structures. One that rewards doing the right thing for the organization rather than the department or other entity.

How is this managed in your organization?.

Jul 15 2009

As the financial services industry braces itself for an inevitable increase in regulation following credit-crunch government bailouts, we should not overlook the serious negative impact of over-regulation and micro-management on business performance and employee productivity.

The Barings, Enron and MCI WorldCom debacles, among others, have led to a large increase in regulatory workload and focus on compliance but this appears to have done nothing to prevent the latest round of problems.

In a fast moving and innovative industry a backward looking, rules based regulatory regime is unlikely to anticipate the next round of risks.

In our work with major multinationals around the world (many but not all in financial services), we have identified a consistent drift towards higher levels of central control. In our survey of 1,300 managers, 34% thought their company already had too much central control, and 43% felt that the direction was towards more central control.

We believe that this is a response to increased business complexity – operating large, complex, fast moving organizations with people in multiple locations, cultures and timezones, makes it hard for managers to understand their operations and to know and trust their people. In this environment managers often react by tightening approvals, reporting and other mechanisms of control in order to get back their feeling of “having their finger on the pulse”.

Unfortunately, this is counterproductive because in a complex environment central control is ineffective

1. Central control is slow – if we wait until problems are escalated or uncovered by central controls then we are inevitably too late. Real control is exercised fast and close to the action. We learned this in manufacturing quality control in the 1980s and achieved huge improvements in product quality and cost. Yet in management, we are heading in the opposite direction.
2. Central control is more expensive – by introducing delay and getting more people involved, we make solving the problem more expensive and ensure that things go wrong for longer.
3. Central control creates employee dissatisfaction – nobody likes being controlled and a typical reaction is to tick the boxes but not feel committed to the results.

If you can afford your control mechanisms to be slow, expensive, ineffective and demotivating then central control is a good choice. Otherwise, recognize that real control is fast and close to the action.

Unfortunately, the instinct of politicians and regulators is often the opposite. Many come from a legal or political background and consider writing rules to be the solution. They represent an outdated paradigm of control that is just not effective in managing and controlling large complex organizations.

If they learn from previous experiences, they will realize that all the effort and cost of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory approaches did little or nothing to prevent these latest problems and will realize that this traditional approach no longer works.

I fear they will not learn, and that the industry will be subjected to more counterproductive bureaucracy, form filling, meetings, approvals and checks – and that none of these will prevent future problems.

The financial services world may have lost the moral authority and financial independence needed to resist regulation but it must come up with some ideas of its own to replace rules based compliance with a new way of managing for more complex environments.

Here are my suggestions based on our consulting work with over 300 major multinationals and in delivering over 100,000 participant days of training in how to manage and exercise control in complex organizations.

• Look outside the industry for new ideas. Specifically, groups considering new regulatory regimes should include those with experience of modern manufacturing quality assurance techniques which offer insights into effective, fast control.
• Resist the temptation to gold-plate externally imposed regulation. You will have no choice but to be compliant but compliance is not control.
• Any effective solution requires distributed control – make sure that people close to the action have the skills, information and authority to make the right decisions locally.
• Consider escalation of decisions as a control failure. Whenever a problem requires escalation it is a signal that you have not given people the knowledge, skills or confidence to make decisions for themselves – it is a sign of a capability gap.
• Focus on building judgement skills rather than mechanical compliance. In a fast moving environment, last year’s rules will not help.
• Create clearer individual accountabilities and responsibilities. Unclear and shared collective control is not as effective.
• Reward should include a longer term balance of risk and return
• If you can’t understand it, you can’t manage it. Either distribute control to the people who do understand it, or you cannot afford to play that game.

In financial services, we know that risk and reward are linked. Higher investment risks tend to correlate with higher rewards and lower risks attract lower returns. If we drive out the risk, we drive out the returns and may also drive out the creative people and demotivated the ones that remain.

To those of us struggling with the consequences of the credit crunch and its impact on the wider economy this may seem of little consequence right now, but in the longer term we all need a motivated, creative and confident financial services industry to enable a successful economy.

In order to achieve this we need a regulatory environment that encourages fast, decentralized control, not an outdated centralized rules based approach.

Kevan Hall is CEO of Global Integration, and has founded and runs companies in Europe and the USA in consulting and medical technology marketing.

Global Integration develops and delivers ideas, consulting and training to help people lead and succeed in complex companies. www.global-integration.com

He is author of Speed Lead®: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies

Jul 13 2009

Federal officials in the USA are apparently trying to boost the amount of time that government employees telecommute to their jobs Only 5 percent of 1.9 million federal employees telework.

Telework reduces the cost for office space, aids recruitment and retention and reduces rush hour traffic.
However the idea has faced resistance from middle managers according to the Washington Examiner.

One agency last year told all teleworking employees that they had to do three extra weeks of work a year because they weren’t sitting in traffic like their colleagues in the office. The telecommuting numbers immediately dropped.

Often resistance to teleworking is led by managers who do not have the skills or confidence to manage people remotely, employees love the flexibility but managers worry about lack of control.

I have worked remotely for 20 years now and just about everyone in our company does too - I am convinced that people working remotely (for many but not all roles) are more effective and work longer than office based people who take more breaks and spend more time on social chit chat.

But only in government could managers propose to penalize people for saving their own commuting time.

Jun 08 2009

We will be exhibiting at the 2009 SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans from 28th June to 1st July.

If you would like to meet Kevan Hall, author of Speed Lead and the Life in a Matrix blog or other members of our US team Tim Mitchell, TH Ong and Kevin Nyland please come and find us in the exhibition hall.

We look forward to seeing you there.

May 21 2009

Companies have invested heavily in communications technologies like video and web meetings, but often these technologies are not being used or are being used badly - and the problem is not the technology!

We have been running training through online tools for many years with a particular focus on creating interactivity and participation - which is the real challenge. So here are our 7 top tips for running great webinars.

1. Forget the technology – start by planning the audience experience. How is it relevant to them, how can they use the material,  what you want them to know, do or feel as a result of the webinar.
2. Compelling content- what materials (slides, downloads and other resources) do you need to create this audience experience. Planning is absolutely essential – it is hard to be spontaneous with materials on webinars, you need to think it through in advance, prepare and upload the materials.
3. Think more about participants– how will they be involved. When we focus on content we tend to obsess on what the presenter will do, but great events are ones where the audience participates. In webinars the audience can chat, write, share whiteboards, web pages and applications, vote, ask questions etc… But only if the webinar leader provides the opportunity.
4. Allow participants to create materials, add comments, complete templates etc… rather than expect them to just passively consume materials you created.
5. Set expectations early – if you present for an hour and then ask for questions you have trained participants to shut up. Get them doing something quickly and regularly – learning some basic web meeting functionality like trying out a poll or changing their online status can be enough to begin. Keep building in chances to interact at regular intervals.
6. Keep sessions short – take breaks if they last more than an hour.
7. Use small group discussions. To change pace and improve interaction try having people attend in small groups, 3 to 6 people in each location. Take breaks to allow these subgroups to discuss or complete local assignments then bring all the sub-groups back online to share findings. Some webinar technologies enable sub-group rooms where you can connect individuals to do this online too.

Interactivity is key. In a face to face meeting people will (usually) try to look interested even when their mind is wandering, online your participants will just do something else if you lose their attention.

You do need to learn the technologies and what they are capable of. This is pretty easy to do, just sign up for the free webinars and trials at providers like LiveMeeting or Webex and play with the tools.

More difficult is to get into the planning habit. Running really successful webinars requires you to think through the process you will follow and to plan interactivity - not just think about your content. This is a great lesson and one we should apply face to face as well.

Check out our podcast - dismal meetings and surprisingly useful coffee breaks - for more on fundamentals of planning for more participative meetings.

If we do this properly, our webinars should be shorter and more satisfying than our face to face meetings – not just a second rate cheaper alternative. An hour spent planning to save hours of travel and large costs for you and other participants is a good investment.

In the absence of planning, expect people to blame the technology.

If you would like some help designing your next webinar or online team event we can help bring both content and interactivity – including running team building activities online - contact us now.

May 18 2009

Two very interesting posts on the same blog  Some banks have become too complex to manage and is big bank complexity irreversible.

Both focus on the complexity that characterizes large banks and how this has changed over time, with some excellent examples from Citibank and others. Interesting reading - it is clear that you can only control what you can actually understand.

As people capability becomes a limiting factor in our ability to manage complex organizations we need a combination of business simplification, higher levels of skills in managing complexity and an organization design that takes these limitations into account.

Find out what we can do to help

Apr 08 2009

The ‘Tomorrow’s Leaders’ study, from Henley Management College, shows that managers skills are not keeping pace with the reality of flexible and remote working.

• 73% of managers say flexible working is common in their organisation,
• 37% now look after teams who are either entirely or predominantly based away from the office.
• 44% of respondents say managers are unprepared for the supervision of remote teams
• only 25% had received any training on how to manage such a team.
• 75% of managers believe remote workers are more productive,
• 90% say they trust their remote employees (but a third also want to monitor their employees closely - just to make sure.)

Read more here

Find out more about our remote and virtual management training.

Apr 07 2009

I was working with a client in the South of France last week when the topic of prioritization came up again.

There is plenty of stuff around on prioritization per se, the most used model we come across is the Urgent and important grid, which helps. On our matrix skills training we use a model called “drive, drag, drone” to aid prioritization. In a matrix, competing, sometimes conflicting objectives can make prioritization even more challenging.

What is different about prioritization in the complex organizations we work in is that - even when you only select the important things - there still may not be time to do them all!

This can lead to a form of guilt about prioritization - “I have cut out a lot of unnecessary work, focused on what is important and I still can’t do it all! I must be a poor performer.” This is likely to get worse as layoffs and increased business pressure can lead to increased workload for the survivors.

So sometimes prioritization is not enough, we also have to have barriers, to decide how much is enough and to say no when it gets to be too much.

Apr 06 2009

We have just produced an updated pdf document that includes our key thoughts about global account management skills, a global account management skills questionnaire and links to our other resources in this area.

Global account management skills cube

You can see more about our global account management approach on our main site or contact us to request a copy of the questionnaire and pdf. Check out our global account management podcast.

Mar 23 2009

We are seeing a strong trend, particularly in our financial services clients, towards building a much more integrated back office operation. IT / HR and other services are experiencing rapid organization change, cost pressure and often outsourcing.

These are all rational responses in the search for greater efficiencies and can lead to improvements in cost and service levels.

There are however risks. It is common for the early stages of integrated back office implementations to focus on structure and systems changes and to ignore skills.

But running these more integrated back office organizations is complex, it requires new skills for many people. They need to work with colleagues in virtual, remote and matrix teams, they need to operate in a more complex organization structure. Many will need to manage outsourced partners in different locations or cultures and who they may never meet. At the same time it remains essential to deliver fast, stay cost effective and maintain employee engagement.

If you are trying to build a more integrated back office organization and you realize that your people need new skills to make this work see more about our training expertise in this area or contact us to find out more

Mar 18 2009