Managing Leadership^®

As we sink deeper and deeper into organizational life, we sometimes can seem to lose our initiative, even our identity. It is this sort of sensation that makes all the commentary about life in the cubicle maze so amusing – we identify with it; we are its victims, too.

And so organizations look for ways to light the fire in all of us, to improve our morale and increase our productivity – even to the extent of helping us to find a better work/life balance. Consultants are hired, work-spaces and lighting are reorganized, modern-day Hawthorne experiments continue to generate their unanticipated – and temporary – consequences in us.

But, it might be asked, what are we waiting around for? Why sit passively blaming our ills on policy from higher up; why not simply take charge of what we can control right where we are?

David Anderson, at Agile Management, asked this question directly in a recent article. Indeed, the gauntlet appeared before us with his opening statement:

If you are a manager reading this, then the chances are you are running a department with sub-optimal performance.”

Can any of us deny this? Certainly, most of us would hesitate to assert that we are perfect, or that we have achieved complete efficiency in our units. It is just as well that we should shrink from such arrogance, but we shouldn’t shrink from examining why it is true.

Wherever we are, at whatever level in the organization, we need to take an honest look at those policies and procedures that we can control or influence, and their effect on productivity. Never mind their lineage or history – much of that is nonsense anyway, legend constructed after the fact.

If they can be tweaked to generate better results, then do it: Talk it over with your staff, now. Give a specific time for feedback. Then make a decision and implement it.

If you can’t think of any reason why they should exist at all, then expose them to feedback as above (or in whatever manner is appropriate to your unit and the magnitude of the issue), and, if your assessment of the feedback endorses your initial view, then dump them.

After one or two experiments like this, consider simply asking for comment from your staff on what, in their view, helps and hinders them in advancing your unit’s charter. Then, as the manager, make the decision and implement it.

There are ways to institutionalize and manage such a process. We have touched on them in the past, and will look a bit more closely at them in the near future.

After all, your job is to facilitate your unit’s accomplishment of its mission. This is done by supplying and improving the tools that help it do that, and by removing barriers that hinder it. Many of the latter we inadvertently put in place ourselves. Apply your assessment and process refinement skills to your own performance – that’s the mark of a good manager.

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Technorati Tags: productivity, work/life balance, Hawthorne experiments, David Anderson, Agile Management