What should managers do when things go wrong?
| posted by Robert HellerWhatever the causes, there can be no doubting the result. The world is going through a period of acute economic anxiety and falling economic performance, both in large matters and small. In a sense, everybody has been here before. What goes up must come down.
The old maxim works the other way, however. But clinging to this expectation is no great comfort in the downside years.
An age of increased complexity confronts everybody with a greatly increased range of options.
Which of all too many choices should we adopt in order to achieve realistic and valuable benefits? The Peter Drucker formula shows the process:
• Which activities and policy areas do we have to tackle?
• What activities and policy issues can safely be left to others ?
• What proposed activities and policies don’t have to be handled by anybody?
There’s a fourth question of fundamental power. Are all your activities and policies directed towards purposes which are realistic, important and rewarding on every measure – financial, economic and social? And a fifth question goes to the heart of the matter. Do you analyse every activity and policy to ensure that you have understood the root causes of all situations before adopting policies which will commit you to action?
Finally, has your planning and decision-making been conducted with full participation, involving a range of independent expertise as well as the staff and clients who will be affected by any solutions?
I wrote many years ago on http://www.thinkingmanagers.com about a survey of middle managers which showed unanimous agreement that participation by staff in decisions affecting their work greatly improved the quality of both decisions and execution. Follow-up, however, revealed the strange fact that none of the managers had taken the elementary step of acting on their belief.
It sounds simpler to manage by the time-dishonoured Order and Obey method. But that misses a vital trick. To handle complexity, you need people to understand what they are doing and why.
Learning becomes easier, and has far more point, when it is based on practical problems and solutions.
To quote Mike Gibson of PricewaterhouseCoopers, reported in a Management Today discussion of How to Survive Complexity… ‘a lot of the complexity we have is self-imposed. We have created things, we have acquired things, and when we look at them they are more complicated than they should be. The impact on cost and speed is clear’.
Accountability is a key issue: ‘Often the model is not fully clear on who is in charge, who is accountable for what when it comes to execution’.
The MT debate between bosses and experts showed that complexity is itself a complex issue. In a multi-business, multi-client, multi-market group like WPP, ‘trying to simplify complexity actually ends up in destroying value’, says Sir Martin Sorrell.
Self-inflicted wounds always threaten, though. I recall a wise friend who once told me that, ‘if you need complex calculations to justify an investment, don’t do it’.
Management by Self-Imposed Overload, etc, are unnecessary evils. That still leaves Sorrell in the clear when he observes that the networked 21st century ‘is not for tidy minds’. Too right.
To read more from Robert Heller see http://www.thinkingmanagers.com.
