Leadership
old ‘right stuff!’, top-down’ and ‘command-and-control’ behaviours that tend to oppress, distrust and restrict the bulk of the real talent in many organisations.
(*NB If you want to read something around this try John Sheldrake’s Management Theory as a starter for ten and, for some interest and balance, Art Kleiner’s The Age of Heretics. Then – and you’ll need to stick with it, but it’s worth it – read W Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis.)
Imai (1997) called it ‘going to gemba’ (gemba is the Japanese term for the workplace, the ‘factory fl oor’); Peters and Waterman (1982) called it ‘MBWA’ (Managing By Wandering Around, from their observations at Hewlett- Packard); Seddon (2003) called it being ‘in the place of transaction’, whilst Covey (1999: 255) put it slightly differently, ‘seek fi rst to understand’. Seddon (ibid) puts this even more succinctly when he states that the manager’s job is to ‘get knowledge’ – knowledge about the ‘system’ over which they preside – reinforcing what Deming (ibid: 19) had said previously: “There is no substitute for teamwork and good leaders of teams to bring consistency of effort, along with knowledge.”
The leader’s role is to create a vision, not to kick somebody in the backside
The ‘crisis’ is that managers in most organisations – large or quite small – rarely spend any time at the ‘place(s) of transaction’ and, therefore, never experience the ‘system’ from a worker’s or a customer’s perspective. Managers are still living in this outdated command and control paradigm**, based on the erroneous assumption that they know best. They don’t. The workers do. All you need to do is ask them. (**Command and Control – apart from being two of Fayol’s (1916/49, pp 97 and 109). Five Elements of Management – was based on military management:
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“Primarily, the idea is that people do what you tell them to do and, if they don’t, you yell at them until they do and if they still don’t, you throw them in the brig for a while and if that doesn’t teach them, you put them in charge of peeling onions on a submarine, sharing two cubit feet of personal space with a lad from a farm who really never quite learned about brushing his teeth.” (Spolsky, 2006).
Removing obstacles By ‘workers’ I mean those people whom, day after day, have to do battle with the inordinately wasteful systems within which they are required to work, doing their best – despite, not because of, management’s efforts – to deliver customer satisfaction; those delivery drivers, nurses, lecturers, cleaners, checkout staff, council employees, call centre staff etc. All those good people you recruited. All of whom want to come to work and have a good day. And it’s management’s job to show them what that ‘good day’ looks like and then remove all the obstacles that prevent them from succeeding.
It was Deming (ibid: 315) who estimated that: “
...most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management); 6% special.”
(NB By ‘special’, Deming
was differentiating between ‘common cause’ variation and ‘special cause’ variation). And by ‘special’, Deming did not mean the people – he meant those ‘causes’ that were outside the upper and lower control limits of a statistically stable system; those things that do not form part of predictable demand and, therefore, cannot be trained for.
It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that the bulk of
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