LISA GILLESPIE Head of Learning and Development Make UK
Lisa has been in the HR industry for 25 years in a number of roles. She holds qualifications in law, a post-graduate diploma in HRM, philosophy, psychology and creative writing. In addition she qualified as a practitioner in PRINCE 2 and neurolinguistic programming.
HR & RECRUITMENT
www.MakeUK.org |
lgillespie@makeuk.org
The invisible decision-makers running your business
I DID toy with calling this piece ‘The invisible decision-makers ruining your business’... You see, as soon as you insert the letter ‘i’ quite often the context changes from what is best for the business to what individuals are doing, assuming or want to do, regardless of the sense it makes.
The theme for this piece came to me when I was observing a team of fairly senior managers react to someone pointing out a few errors in some marketing plans and collateral. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before. After all, my job does entail observing teams, giving feedback and coaching to get the best results. What really made me sit up and pay attention to this bunch was that almost every one of them responded to constructive criticism or challenges from their peers by using very generalised phrases such as ‘well everyone got a copy so I assumed’, ‘we agreed’, ‘they said this’, etc. They were citing an anonymous individual or group having agreed, by saying nothing at all, to what amounted to a piece of work which could have been quite a bit better if they had worked on it as a team.
I paused them and fed-back that I was wondering who is this ‘they’? Who do you include in ‘everyone’? Who was in the room or on the call when ‘we’ agreed? Why did you assume?
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There was some uncomfortable chuckling when it became obvious that no-one could actually say for sure who had agreed anything.
If universities handed out degrees for pedantry, I would get first class honours. However, in business I prefer to describe what I do as ‘playing the devil’s advocate’. There is a really strong correlation between ‘group think’ and assumption. Please beware, because these two phenomena are the most counter- productive forces in organisations which can frequently take otherwise intelligent and talented people in directions which will require a fair amount of effort to get them back on track.
For example, if I sent an email to everyone last week asking if they all agreed we should do X, and no-one said not to, then I do it. If someone challenges me, human nature dictates that I will say ‘everyone was okay with it because no-one said otherwise’. But were they? Did they even open the email?
I encountered this around 10 years ago in a business I had joined. There were lots of terribly silly, pointless processes to be followed and I recall sitting at my new desk watching what my new team were doing, thinking I was going completely mad. In order to reassure myself I spent the next couple of days doing what
Tom Peters called ‘Managing by Walking Around’; chatting with staff, consultants and getting to know the day-to-day tasks which made everything tick. I noticed that when I asked ‘and why do you do it that way?’ a good 30% of the time people could not tell me.
‘Someone told me to’, ‘I was just told to do it that way’ or ‘we’ve always done it that way’ were frequent responses. I asked one graduate trainee ‘who uses your weekly report?’ which caused him to burst into a fit of the giggles because of course he didn’t know. I told him to stop sending it and let me know if anyone asked for it. After six weeks I figured no-one ever looked at it but rather than assume, I asked, at the next directors’ meeting. No, none of them looked at it. ‘Okay so can I ask why we have a team of people doing X…?’ Blank faces. ‘Does anyone have any issues if I stop them doing X and reassign them doing this?’ More blank faces…
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I did, however, trace one hugely cumbersome and pointless process back to a team leader who had only lasted about two weeks in the business.
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