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Management Services Spring 2012
today’s supposedly (but actually not very) enlightened managers still insist on spending 100% of their time on what is (in effect) less than 6% of the problem – ‘managing the people’ – when their time would be far more effectively employed initially addressing genuine ‘special causes’ and then addressing ‘the system’ itself: “
...any substantial improvement must come from a change in the system, the responsibility of management,” (ibid). If this prevailing top-down, command and control, hierarchically structured, target-driven, inspection- and appraisal-ridden regime is to be changed – and change it must – then management across the UK is going to have to change the way it thinks. It’s what Seddon (2007) called a ‘thinking thing’.
Current general thinking amongst most managers is to treat any variation in a person’s performance as a ‘special cause’ when, in fact, it is most likely to be normal, ‘common cause’ variation within the upper and lower control limits of a ‘stable system’ and, therefore, outside of the control of the front-line worker – the ‘system’ is management’s responsibility. The snag is, as Tribus (1989) said: “ ...[management] question everything except their own theory of management.”
And this is not new stuff. Just three years after their benchmark book Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer & Champy, 1993) was published, James Champy (1996) wrote Reengineering Management because he realised where the real obstacle to solving ‘process’ (or systems) problems lay. With the people who had created them – managers. As Tribus (ibid) said: “The enterprises which continue to be managed the old way are going to disappear.”
Never – never ever – blame
your people for problems in your organisation. All – and, again, I repeat – all problems are management’s problems. It might make some
managers (and especially those arrogant, company-hopping, career-minded managers) feel good to set individuals ‘stretch’ targets, but the fact remains that most managers have absolutely no understanding of this concept already mentioned, called common-cause variation – those ‘variations’ in normal performance; ie what happens in any ‘stable system’ – and instead seek to ‘performance manage’ their people so as to satisfy in turn their own bosses’ demands.
Eyes on the prize Let’s deal with those ‘less than 6%’ fi rst and get that out of the way. Ricardo Semler (2003), reckoned that about ‘3%’ of his Semco people had their hand in the till (I paraphrase) and my own experience, over a couple of decades of operations management in the fi eld, (a big ‘fi eld’) suggests it was something similar, at around ‘4%’2
. Semler said he’d tolerate that.
I didn’t. The reason I didn’t was because the remaining ‘96%’ mattered. They needed to see that management cared about the rogues and vagabonds who were shafting the organisation, so we did something about it; we did not ignore the less pleasant aspects of a manager’s job.
Remember, the rest of the
staff know what’s going on, but it’s not their job to tell you. It’s your job to know and then to do something about it. That one aside, the ‘94%’ (Deming, ibid) of ‘most troubles [and] possibilities for improvement’ are where, by far, the bulk of management time should be spent. And please don’t say you have ‘more important’ things to do. ‘More important’ to whom? Your
Nordstrom Organisation Chart CUSTOMERS
Sales and support people Department managers
Buyers, store managers, merchandise managers
Board of Directors/ MD
‘A helping hand facing upwards’
Source: Peters, TJ, (1988) Thriving on Chaos, London, Macmillan, p370, fi gure 16
Leadership
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