Leadership
Management Services Spring 2012
boss? Or the customer? Or – and more importantly – those customer-facing employees who are trying really hard to satisfy your customers whilst trying to clear or circumnavigate all the pointless and wasteful hurdles your own systems place in their way – systems you put there. Remember, when you get your new diary each year, it’s empty. If you start by fi lling it with meetings, then that’s a choice you have made. If, instead, you decide to fi ll it with numerous and regular blocked- out periods for visiting the front-line in your organisation/ department/unit, so that you can do some real learning and gain some true knowledge about how the work fl ows (or doesn’t) through your organisation, then that’s also a choice. It’s just a better one. Sam Walton had a refreshing approach to how he prioritised and spent his time: ’‘He says his weeks are very simple... [he has] three-and-a-half days in the store, a day with his vendors and a half-day in the offi ce, which, he says, is excessive but he says he’s 68 and it’s not too late to learn new tricks and he’s trying to cut it back!” (Peters, 1985).
Never – never ever – blame your people for problems in your organisation... all problems are
management’s problems
And that was more than 25 years ago! But it’s not even that new. Mant (1979: 53; citing Sheldon, 1923) put it quite clearly: “Management is no longer the wielding of the whip; it is rather the delving into experience and the building upon facts*. Its leadership is based upon knowledge* rather than upon force. Its task is no longer solely that of ‘getting the job through’ rather, in many of its activities, it operates through the application of a capacity trained in the investigation* and solution of problems. Management, in fact, instead of being a law unto itself, has found that there are laws which it must obey.”
And, just to emphasise the
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point, that was almost 90 years ago. (*Note also the repeated references to ‘getting knowledge’ – seeking ‘fi rst to understand’!).
Of course, you will never know any of this from your offi ce. No-one is going to come and tell you, despite your so- called (occasionally) ‘open door’ policy. Some years ago, one of my own former bosses used to send out a monthly email with the dates and times when her ‘door would be open’. So I used to reply: “Well, go out of it then.” She did. Once, under the pretext of attempting some ‘MBWA’ (I think they’d all been told to do it) and when she saw something that she didn’t like, instead of seeking ‘fi rst to understand’, she went back to her offi ce and -mailed a grapeshot ‘all-staff’ bollocking. She just didn’t get it. If you are going to spend time with your people, whether or not that’s at the ‘front line’, then it has to be to genuinely show interest. You have to do it on the basis that it’s a real attempt to understand what it is that they do – and how you might help them to do it by removing some of the obstacles in their way; obstacles that (normally) you have put there. Robert Townsend (1984: 69) said: “So get out and ask them if there’s anything you can do to help” and Deming (ibid: 51) regarded it as the requirement of managers to remove the ‘barriers to pride of workmanship both for production workers and for management and engineers’. Nordstrom made this principle of managers being the support group for customer- facing employees real, by incorporating it very visually in its organisation chart, seen on p32.
Roll up those sleeves Those of you old enough to remember Brian Clough will recall that he didn’t spend his
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