Woven into the Flow of Work
The opening pages of my new book, The Balanced Business, begin like this: “With over thirty years of business management and leadership experience, I can attest that there are no silver bullets to management success. No quick fixes. Remember the Staples® Easy Button? There are no easy buttons. Santa might have one, but they seem to be out of stock everywhere else.”
The point of opening the book in this way is to stress that management and leadership are hard work. The problem is that we are wired to resist change and conserve energy whenever we can. We love the status quo and routinely get caught in the trap of firefighting and “doing” to keep ourselves busy. We look for shortcuts and the fastest path to achieving whatever objective lies in front of us. The typical result from this tension—that business is hard versus our innate wiring to look for shortcuts—is that strategic planning, goal setting, process mapping, defining standard work, and establishing organizational clarity take a backseat to just getting things done.
Operating in the absence of organizational clarity means that unwritten rules and ad hoc processes become the norm. Since nothing is codified and communicated, the organization’s culture becomes one of firefighting and crisis management. Fiefdoms are established, job protectionism flourishes, and information about what’s really going on is traded like state secrets.
Few people enjoy working in cultures like this, but oddly, we tend to avoid the difficult work to improve the situation. I’ve literally had senior leaders tell me that strategic planning, goal setting, process mapping, etc., are a waste of time. These same folks yearn for a more cohesive, healthy organizational culture, but aren’t willing to put in the work to drive meaningful change.
The reason why previous efforts to define clarity through strategic and tactical planning tend to fail is because those activities are seen as “extra work” and are not woven into the flow of business operations. Of course efforts to drive continuous improvement, organizational health, and operational excellence are doomed to fail if they’re viewed as extraneous to the day-to-day operations of the business. In our modern always-on, harried, information-overflow existence, anything that’s viewed as extraneous or a nice-to-have will fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, learning and development also falls into this category in many organizations.
I’ve been asked what makes the management operating system introduced in The Balanced Business different? The primary differentiators of my approach are (a) I focus on the intersection between the tenets of organizational health and continuous improvement, and (b) I stress the importance of establishing smooth workflows to optimize the balancing act between trust and accountability.
Why weave the tenets of organizational health and continuous improvement into the flow of work? If a process is mapped and the outcomes from the process mapping event are not used to create new standard work for the team, then I wholeheartedly agree—you’ve wasted everyone’s time. If standard work—the current-state best practice for a role or job—is not routinely updated and not shared within and outside of the team, then the initial work expended to define standard work will have been a waste of time. If a corporate learning activity does not directly translate into improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, or job advancement—to name just a few key performance outcomes—it will all have been for naught. You get the point.
So, if you’re tired of unspoken rules, firefighting, fiefdoms, a culture of obfuscation, and ad hoc processes, pick up a copy of my new book, The Balanced Business: Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows today.
