In today’s current economic climate, there is an increased focus by many companies on maximising cost savings through significant investments in Lean and Six Sigma programs. However a recent article in The McKinsey Quarterly (November 2008; From Lean to lasting; Making Operational Improvements Stick) estimates that many companies are achieving less than 50% of the potential savings from Lean and Six Sigma processes by failing to pay sufficient attention to the soft skills required to embed them into the organizational culture.

Part of the reason for this is that many Lean and Six Sigma initiatives are focused on production and manufacturing processes where there is a tendency to prefer quantitative, statistical results as the yardstick through which we measure success.

Clearly, these are the ultimate objective but a successful process of continuous improvement, which is the driving philosophy behind such kaizen techniques, requires us to drive organizational change at the same time; otherwise, what tends to happen is a series of short, sharp shocks which are initially successful but soon fade as the original champions move on. The reality is that if we ignore the ‘hearts and minds’ approach that is required to bring about lasting change, we’re only addressing part of the problem.
It’s worth being clear that Six Sigma techniques are the tools used to drive changes in the process; kaizen philosophies require a change in the underlying organizational culture.

Several of our clients, particularly in the manufacturing area, have commented that they suffer from a tendency to roll out big initiatives which are launched on an initial wave of enthusiasm but then run into the brick wall of organizational inertia and there are a number of reasons for this;

• The organizational culture and the associated internal performance management system do not support the values that the process is designed to drive; it’s no surprise that many of these kaizen techniques originate (as the very word implies!) in the consensus-based, group oriented cultures of Japanese manufacturing companies. They require much more effort to make them last in cultures which tend to focus more on individual achievements, where it can be seen as your problem rather than mine;

• Quite often, the people who are charged with responsibility for implementing these initiatives tend to lack the skills to influence what happens outside their immediate physical area of control; in many cases, they are trying to create buy-in to a global process where team members are based in different locations and operating in a variety of cultures.

• A frequent complaint is that the people above them, particularly those in other locations or in functions, don’t have the same objectives and may even have conflicting objectives. There are also some companies where the simple fact that an initiative originates within ‘Head Office’ induces immediate resistance! Bridging this gap takes time, which tends to be the one resource we’re not given and also leads to burn-out for the individuals concerned – after all, how many two hour conference calls at 5:00 am can we tolerate?

• The project-based nature of how we work often means that people are assigned to these initiatives for a fixed period of time and then move on once their term has been completed; this can lead to a natural focus on short term results on the part of the project leaders (because if I do well here, I’ll move on) and a certain amount of cynicism within the organization; how many of us have come across the idea that if you don’t like an initiative, just give it time to go away because there’ll be a new one along in a while.

The big issues we observe are whether we are equipping our Lean/Six Sigma champions with the ‘soft skills’ needed to turn an initiative from ‘my project’ into ‘our project’ and whether we have the ability to focus both on short term, measurable results and embedding long-term organizational change?

We increasingly find that our clients are using Speed Lead tools and techniques to complement their lean and six sigma activities and to extend them beyond manufacturing ads supply chain into people management.  Their attractiveness lies in part from the origin of the ideas: Kevan Hall, the author of the book “Speed Lead- faster simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies, ” spent several years leading Manufacturing Operations in a global FMCG business, where he introduced and was exposed to many of the concepts of total quality now known as lean.

The underlying philosophies, applied to managing people in complex organizations and tested in over 300 major organizations, subsequently developed into “Speed Lead”. In the process they were refined and adapted to succeed in typical North American and European corporations with their accompanying culture.

Today the Speed Lead tools and techniques hark back to their Japanese total quality roots, but are readily applied to the people management challenges facing western businesses today. They also have immediate relevance to the many busy managers and leaders who have not been immersed in a manufacturing mindset, yet still require ideas for improving efficiencies, accelerating business activities and engaging an increasingly dispersed workforce.

Mar 11 2009

Many global HR organizations have adopted the Ulrich model of specialists and HR business partners. In doing so they have introduced the complexities of matrix management into their HR organization, often without giving people the skills required to mange this form of working.

For specialists in the global HR organization there is still a strong functional reporting line but their internal customers the HR business partners are typically more numerous and demanding.

The HR business partners in the global HR organization are much more embedded in their client organizations. They sit on management teams and operational groups. They often support two or more organizations and find themselves stretched between the needs of their clients and the needs of the functional structure to drive HR projects and priorities.

Unfortunately each of these groups see their own objectives as most important and invite the HR business partner to their meetings and copy them on their emails. If a business partner explains that they do not need to be at every meeting this can be seen as a lack of loyalty.

Read our 2005 article global division on how Global HR people suffer divided loyalties more than other functions.

These are some of the classic matrix challenges

• divided loyalties
• competing (sometimes conflicting) priorities
• too connected to get things done

The traditional remedies of working harder, more teamwork and more communication are either impossible (not enough time) or don’t seem to work. See our article less haste more speed on these themes.

In a matrix organization the structure itself solves nothing - it is the way people work together to operate the structure that makes it succeed or fail.

Find out more about our matrix management training or listen to our podcast Managing complexity in HR at our sister site specializing in matrix management issues - Life in a Matrix.

Mar 02 2009

A number of our clients have seen their climate survey / opinion survey results deteriorate this year.

It’s hardly surprising in a tough economic climate that the messages of doom and gloom people read every day result in greater uncertainty and concern about job prospects.

In general, climate and opinion survey results reflect the overall level of performance of the organization - when things are going well most scores are influenced positively, and vice versa when things are not going so well.

But this is a critical time for working on employee motivation

• people are feeling insecure and value any sign that the organization is continuing to invest in them
• after job cuts we need a strategy to build back the motivation of the survivors.
• this is when people can see what their organization really believes about people (rather than just what they can afford as a “nice to have” when times are good.)

So we need a plan to rebuild employee morale and satisfaction, this is when HR people have the opportunity to show what they are made of and take a leadership role.

At the same time, business is tough, and productivity is essential.

The great news is that it is not so hard to get huge increases in productivity because about 20% of all the work people do in large organizations just does not need doing.

One example - people tell us that they spend an average of 2 days per week in meetings and half of this is completely unnecessary. A large proportion of communication and internal control mechanisms do not add any value and waste time and effort.

Find out about or save a day a week program. It saves time, reduces costs and at the same time improves job satisfaction (nobody enjoy pointless meetings, conference calls and emails)

Training and OD budgets are under pressure, time to focus on delivering real productivity improvements - another year of presentation skills training will not do it. What is your organization doing to improve motivation?

Feb 26 2009

Listen to the latest podcast in our Life in a Matrix series. The subject is Global account management.

Global accounts have become common in large global organizations and their suppliers. Find out what makes a global account, what is different about global account management and how to manage the marked step up in complexity that successful global account management requires.

Listen to the global account management podcast

Feb 23 2009

I came across this really interesting article from Seriosity - they have developed a product called Attent which runs with Outlook and attempts to manage email overload by allowing senders to attach “monetary” credits to their emails - called Serios. This currency signals importance, people tend to read a message tagged with 250 serios faster than one with 50.

As the serios have a value and can be used to prioritise your own messages it introduces a kind of internal market for attention - and attention is becoming our scarcest resource.

We have done something similar in the past in face to face meetings, giving participants “tokens” to spend each time they want to contribute, it has the effect of making participation levels more even. The high contributors start to run out of token and the low contributors feel the need to get more involved as their pile of tokens sits in front of them.

I can see some downsides to the Attent approach (primarily because it is the sender that attributes the value) but it is worth a try - they put the cost of information overload at $588 Billion - that’s a lot of emails.

Feb 18 2009

Just spotted a good article on global account management at marketing agency OMD Omnicom - it highlights the benefits they have seen from introducing more integrated global account management information.

They consider global account management to have been instrumental in a number of major client wins.

Read the full article on global account management here. See our other posts on global account management or more about our global account management training.

Feb 16 2009

Kevan Hall will be running an interactive workshop about faster, simpler ways to manage complex projects and teams at the Neeley School of Business TCU 2009 Global Supply Chain Conference “Managing Supply Chain Complexity – Keys for Success in Challenging Times” on 4th March.

Appropriately enough for the author of the book Speed Lead, the venue is The Speedway Club at the Texas Motor Speedway.

Feb 12 2009

There was extensive coverage in the Sunday Times this weekend on some particular individuals in the banking industry.  I am not going to name names, because I think there has been enough written about particular individuals, but one of the key behaviours that was mentioned was very high level of micro management.

One chief executive of a very large organisation held a 9.30 am meeting, every morning with his direct reports, and asked them very detailed information about what had happened in a particular branch on a particular day. The environment was quite hostile, and quite antagonistic –  the morning meetings became known as the  “Morning Beatings”

But it is the behaviours that this micro-management approach drives outside the meetings that concern me.  I worked with this particular organisation last year, and it was very clear that because that behaviour was driven from the top, it created what I call a control cascade.

If you were the very senior person invited to that meeting, you needed to know the details of everything that went on in your organisation in case you were asked a question. Because of that, the people who worked for you needed to know everything that was going on below them in order to feed your information need, because you were feeding the need of your boss.

In a large organization this creates a massive reverse cascade of work informing someone right at the top of the organisation, about information that, frankly, they don’t need to have.

This is one of the clearest indications of the scale of waste that is caused by micro management, and of course the micro management was clearly focusing on the wrong topics, because it wasn’t the sales in a particular branch in the UK that caused the subsequent problems in his industry.

In many organizations and admiring press pieces, these very smart and hardworking senior executives were lauded and rewarded (often by the same journalists who are now criticising them for the same behaviours). My view is that this kind of manager is dangerous and can easily drive a culture of micromanagement that feeds their own inappropriate control tendencies and undermines autonomy in the whole organization.

Perhaps what we need is lazier senior managers – a lazy manager is generally a good delegator.

Feb 11 2009

We have been running a series of Podcasts on our various websites over the last year, and have been quite surprised at the results of what people access in terms of downloaded files.  On our www.speedleading.com  site we offer people an option of an introduction to speed lead on MP3 or more or less the same information as a PDF.  97% of people will choose the Podcast MP3 file.

If we look on our matrix management blog again over 95% of people choose the MP3 podcast option over the PDF.

Now on this Global Integration site, we don’t have an option to download MP3s directly from that site.  The links bring you into one of the other sites where they are hosted.  Here  (relative to traffic) we find a similar number of people download resources, (so sites with similar amount of traffic are generating similar amounts of downloads) but of course without an MP3 option, everyone chooses the PDF articles.

It seems that offering MP3s doesn’t necessarily increase the volume of downloads, but it does massively change the proportion and people seem to prefer audio by a factor of 20 to 1

Maybe for the kind of people who are interested in what we do, who are regular travellers and busy people, the MP3 format is just more convenient.  Unfortunately we don’t know how many MP3s are downloaded through iTunes. We don’t get traffic information from there.

Take a listen at our podcasts or download our articles and choose for yourself.

Feb 10 2009

No-one starts their career by saying they want to a micro-manager, but micromanagement is an easy trap to fall into.

People often become inadvertent micro-managers from acting with the best possible motivations – sometimes even by being too helpful.

Managers, particularly those who come up through a technical career route, have become successful by solving problems.  As they get promoted and become people mangers, what could be more natural then to keep solving problems for people.

Unfortunately when you manage people, if all you do is ever solve problems for them, then very quickly they learn that it is just easier to escalate to you for the solution.  You may inhibit them from coming up with their own solutions by always having your own solution – especially if it is a better one!  At some point you have to let other people solve these problems for themselves.

I did some work with a very large US conglomerate this year, whose name I can’t mention for contractual reasons, focusing on this particular area of micro management and control.  We ran some sessions with managers, based around a short self evaluation of “Are you a micro-manager?” asking some basic questions around these themes.

Many people were horrified, because they had never thought of themselves as micro managers- just helpful.  On reflection, they realised that in their desire to be helpful, they were often undermining the autonomy and capability building of their own people.

In remote, virtual and matrix teams this can be even worse as team members are often physically or organizationally remote and may find it harder to “fight back” against micromanagement.

My bit of advice for today, if you want to avoid micromanagement, don’t be too helpful.

Feb 09 2009