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

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