Liberate Your Team with Clearer Processes
Ask the members of any team if they want to
institute better processes, and be prepared for them to roll their eyes.
“‘Better processes’ means ‘more bureaucracy,’” someone will mutter. But ask that
same team how much they enjoy doing projects the hard way — duplicating
efforts, scrambling to meet deadlines when someone drops the ball, or bearing
the brunt of customer fury — and you can expect the floodgates to open.
Why do people love to hate “process” but rail
against disorganization? It is because most people associate processes with
checklists, forms, and rules — the overseer breathing down their necks. Not
surprisingly, leaders wanting to foster innovation and creativity are reluctant
to institute such rigid controls and procedures.
In one
sense, this aversion to processes is justified. Historically, formal procedures
have been used to maintain control, not to simplify work. Process engineers can
get carried away with forms and spreadsheets. However, a culture of “winging
it” can be just as frustrating. In their 2011 book, The
Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity
at Work, Harvard professor Teresa Amabile and
developmental psychologist Steven Kramer show that employees are least
motivated on days when they face setbacks that inhibit their work. And
sociologist Randy
Hodson has found that coherent production processes are
a key driver of trust in management. Hassles, exceptions, and “gotchas”
increase stress, sap the feeling of progress, and force your team to fight the
same fires over and over. Even worse, winging it tends
to erode safety and quality, and increase the risk of ethical drift.
At their heart, effective processes are not
about adding red tape — they are about enabling “flow.” According to
management thinker Eli M. Goldratt, the real innovation behind Ford’s
production lines, the Toyota Production System, and “lean” production is the
shift from managing resource efficiencies in isolation to managing the flow of
value generated by a system. Wherever there is an activity that happens
repeatedly in your business, there is a potential flow. As a leader, you have
the choice to leave this flow to chance, to control it, or to channel it.
Think of a river. If the banks are not strong
and defined, the river dissipates across the countryside and has little force.
This is like the operation in which employees are given little guidance, and whose
efforts meander or collide. Another river may have locks that strictly regulate
how much water can flow when and where. This is a company that tries to control
every step every employee takes every day. The entire system is rigid and slow,
because management can never keep up with the exceptions and
re-prioritizations, and employees’ time is consumed by filling out forms and
following procedures.
By contrast, a company with effective
processes is like a river with strong banks. People’s attention and energy are
channeled where they will have the most impact. The work environment, habits,
tools, and methods guide people into doing things right the first time, based
on a continually evolving set of shared best practices. No locks are required:
Instead, employees are liberated to focus their creativity on developing new
best practices, delighting customers, noticing changes in the competitive
landscape, or tackling their company’s next moon shot.
Designing
processes this way involves looking at how work naturally gets done and where
simple structures can increase the throughput of value — much the way Japanese
gardeners will design the paths in a garden after seeing where people walk.
There are several approaches that incorporate this idea of flow, including Goldratt’s
“theory of constraints” (and its project-based counterpart, “critical chain”),
agile project management, and lean
production’s “pull-based” scheduling.
Whatever method you choose, here are three core ideas that I’ve found lead to
the biggest breakthroughs:
• Make
sure everyone sees the big picture.
When
people focus on efficiency in one part of a process, they suboptimize the
system as whole — because they don’t weigh the impact of their actions on
downstream groups or on the customer. To improve the flow, ensure everyone
understands how their work fits together and how to prevent downstream defects
through clearer handoffs, giving other departments sufficient lead time, and
prioritizing based on overall goals.
• Love
your bottlenecks.
As
Goldratt has shown, every flow has a capacity constraint — a “Herbie.” Instead of blaming your bottleneck, treat it as
scarce resource whose capacity should never ever be wasted. Does it receive
top-quality inputs from other groups? Is it ever left idle? Do you squander
capacity by constantly switching priorities? A meta-analysis
of Goldratt’s methods found companies reduced lead times by 75
percent and improved on-time performance by 50 percent.
• Do
the right things more reliably.
As management
theorists W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran have shown, variability kills
quality. Your team may produce excellent work most of the time, but if it is
inconsistent, people will be forced to waste time checking to ensure no one
drops the ball. Did you call the client with the update? Should I? You can
reduce workload and increase the psychological experience of flow by
identifying a few best practices and making them into solid habits.
What
flows do you need to master in your business? Launching apps? Integrating
mergers? Hiring and retaining employees? Select one that will increase your
firm’s competitive advantage, set a goal, and then support your team in using
one of the methods above. Don’t wait until the fires are out — firefighting is
a symptom of poor processes. Instead, dedicate small chunks of time to
improvement, chipping away at the biggest time wasters first. A Pareto
chart can help you rank problems by frequency
or cost. Wherever possible, listen to your team and adopt their
recommendations, but insist on rapid feedback so they learn which solutions
work. In the end, working on processes in a collaborative way is one of the
fastest, most effective vehicles for building engagement and translating values
into action.
Elizabeth Doty
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Liberate-Your-Team-with-Clearer-Processes?gko=b4eb7&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20170905&utm_campaign=resp
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