Be Different or be dead

September 2, 2019

10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed

Source: Unsplash

10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed.

Every organization would like to build a high performance culture, but these non-strategic — CRAP — activities are in the way of making serious progress, and the leader needs to take ownership of eradicating them.

They consume precious time and suck up emotional energy.

Committee work

How many committees do you have working on various projects? What would happen if you reduced the number by 50% and empowered folks to make decisions and get on with executing on the strategic intent of the organization?

Committees are generally charged with the responsibility of coming up with recommendations that satisfy everyone; consensus building is their holy grail. Often these decisions take a long time to reach, they are watered-down and produce forgettable results. And sometimes they don’t make any decisions at all, only serving to assemble people who talk about a lot but do very little.

If you want to be a standout leader, take the axe to most committee work.

They should allow committees to be formed sparingly; engaging them for a serious strategic purpose, affecting the entire organization.
They should be stopped and never started again for less important activities that could be handled by individual managers or operating teams who must be prepared to make decisions and accept accountability.

Hyper-analysis

Analysis can paralyze an organization and is a symptom of people being reluctant to make a decision. It’s a comfortable position for people to be in; as long as they’re studying an issue they don’t have to take on the risk of driving a stake in the ground and pursuing a specific course of action.

Leaders should be encouraging less analysis not more.

Paralysis by analysis prevents progress. Do the amount of study that is consistent with the decision to be made. A $10 million decision will need more work than a $100K one.

And in the end, it’s crazy to believe that more analysis will make the final decision more accurate, more perfect. I don’t recall any decision I made that turned out the way the analysis suggested it would. Something unexpected and uncontrollable always happened that required the decision to be modified to some degree. So the return on investing more analysis time to get the decision perfect was ZERO.

COVID-19 is a classic example of an unforeseeable spear that killed most business plans beginning March 12, 2020; any analysis costs that were invested for any business plan prior to that time were wasted — a sobering thought the next time someone in your organization suggests that another 6 months of study is needed to reach the right decision.

The most appropriate way forward: make the call —> start executing —> learn from what you do —> adjust the plan —> keep executing —> repeat the above.

Coordination

What value is there in this function? Coordinators fill the gaps between functions in an organization; their purpose is to ensure two or more units work harmoniously together and deliver the outcome expected.

It’s apparent to me that organizations that use coordinators don’t trust that the operating entities can execute the required handoffs on their own;
they require someone to ensure that the process is done flawlessly and that the ball doesn’t get dropped.

When teamwork fails or systems are deficient, they need to be fixed rather than insert an intermediary as the solution

Not only does coordination merely address the symptom of the teamwork problem and not the problem itself, it adds unnecessary cost to the organization.

Organizations don’t need coordination functions; they need demanding leaders who take action to ensure departments work seamlessly together across the organization to deliver expected results.

They need people responsible for delivering results, not managing processes.

Consensus building

Standout leaders know that consensus building is a wasted exercise; it consumes energy cycles of the people in the organization and typically never results in everyone being on the same page.

The process is severely flawed; it asks what people think about a proposed way forward rationalized by study and analysis, and results in a broad range of responses depending on how each individual interprets the findings.

The expectation is that people will respond objectively and will see the merits in the proposal so that everyone will support it.

But that rarely happens. Individuals almost never see things rationally; they have their own personal lens through which they evaluate what is being presented to them. Their lens tells them if the plan benefits them and they respond accordingly.

Consensus solutions are nothing more than a blend of mediocrity build by everyone that satisfy no one.

And since everyone has a different lens, arriving at a consensus is impossible unless changes to the original proposal are made to reflect everyone’s feedback.

And so the watering down process begins. Because a multitude of modifications are needed to make the proposal acceptable to everyone, the proposal essentially looses its original identity and shape — it ends up having rounded corners built by everyone but satisfying no one.

So make the call, try and sell it to others but do what’s right. Forget about the consensus building process.

Following rules

Being constrained by rules stultifies creativity and innovation. Some rules are necessary, but others have outlived their usefulness, conceived in a different time when circumstances were different.

All rules outlive their usefulness eventually and standout leaders know this. They monitor current rules and policies to decide their relevance; the gutsy ones decide that a cleansing purge is required to eliminate the ones that are barriers rather than enablers to high performance.

For your leader to-do list: develop a plan to reduce the number of rules and policies you currently have in your control kit bag by 25% over the next six months or so.

There are a number of potential positive outcomes from your audacious act: employee engagement could increase, customer service could improve, decision making could be more effective and innovation could increase. Definitely worth a shot, right?

Benchmarking

I believe benchmarking is an egregious practice that virtually every organization follows in some way or another. It sucks the motivation to create something new and different from people because it’s so easy to find a best practise (whoever defines what that is) and try to copy it.

Copying best practises under the guise of innovation is intellectual dishonesty.

A standout leader should be expunging this notion — mandate that it can’t be used — as a valid problem solving tool and, instead, nurture a value set among employees that encourages the discovery of new, unique, special, imaginative, far out, newfangled and avant-garde solutions to the problems they encounter.

Tell everyone that copycat solutions will no longer be tolerated and that uniqueness will be the barometer to judge the worth of what people do.

Following the job description

The job description is a concept — backed up on paper — intended to contain what people do.
Metaphorically it’s a box constructed for employees to run around in. It has limits in terms of what’s in the box (ok behaviour; allowed) and what’s outside the box — not ok behaviour; disallowed.

The benefit of having the job description is to avoid ‘leakage’ of work performed among the variety of positions in an organization and if duplication and overlap is prevented then efficiently and productivity is increased.

And it’s true. The JD does compartmentalize and separate work; work is distributed throughout the organization by using it.

But there is a downside that standout leaders recognize, and that is, if taken to the extreme, it encourages doing what the JD says and not what is appropriate in the moment. ‘It’s not my job!’, for example, could influence the action an individual takes in the middle of a customer service crisis, rather than fixing the customer issue regardless of what the job description says.

The great leader knows that they can get the best of both worlds — the efficient use of resources as well as the flexibility and nimbleness required to take advantage of new opportunities — by using the job description as the foundation to govern the basic activities of what people do but also by allowing people to deviate from it when necessary to do the right thing to satisfy the needs of the overall organization.

We need people to step out and do amazing things not be bridled by a straight jacket.

This work — eliminating dysfunction — should define the priorities of the standout leader.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.2.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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