Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

Chocolate Mess, Related to a VP

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
I was hired into the company six months ago, in a managerial role. One of my team members, a supervisor, was promoted beyond his capability. It’s a mess, but a mess that I inherited. This guy is not a bad person, he means well, just over his head. Oh, did I mention, he’s related to one of the Vice-Presidents?

Response:
You are doing no one favors by leaving this person in a role where they consistently underperform, no matter who they are related to. This person may be doing their best, but pace and quality suffers.

The fix is managerial work for you. Your options range from modifying parts of the role to a complete reassignment to a different role. If you intend to modify the role, you will need to break it down into Key Result Areas and determine which parts of the role are done well, reassign the rest to someone else. In your assessment, take a look at the history of this person, what were their previous positions and how well did they do? Everyone has competence, somewhere, you just have to find it.

The political part, being related to a current VP, will require some finesse, but will likely be easier than you think. If you truly have a chocolate mess on your hands, everyone already knows it, they just don’t talk about. And yes, the VP knows it, too. You will be doing the VP a favor if you can determine a more suitable position.

It’s Not About Project Buffers

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Sharon was perplexed. “We missed the deadline,” she explained. “And my Project Manager doesn’t seem to understand why.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I wanted to know what caused the delay in the schedule that put us behind, and he just shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not my fault,’ he says. ‘Circumstances outside of my control.’ I mean, I know the customer changed the spec on the project, and that we had to go back for another permit, but I expect my Project Manager to anticipate things like that.”

“How so?”

“Projects of this length always have changes, customers always change their mind, that’s why we use project buffers in the schedule,” Sharon sorted out.

“What could you have done differently?”

“Me?” she quizzed. “I’m not the Project Manager, it was his job.”

“Who assigned this project to this Project Manager?” I pressed.

Sharon stopped. She had overlooked that one small detail. “You are right,” she began. “I hold my Project Manager accountable for the output of the Project Team, but I am accountable for the output of my Project Manager. I should have had more interim meetings with him to see how we were using the project buffers, to help him make decisions and solve problems.”

Can’t Put a Schedule Together

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Morgan was complaining. “You have been talking about checklists and schedules as the core tools for Project Managers and Supervisors. It just doesn’t seem that hard. Why doesn’t my lead technician get it? I have showed him how to create a schedule a dozen times.”

“Morgan, it’s not just a matter of training. Supervising and Project Management are clearly Strata II roles. A lead technician role is more likely Stratum I.” I could see Morgan was struggling with this.

“But, if I take my lead technician, why can’t he seem to put a schedule together?” Morgan was pushing back.

“Morgan, a lead technician likely has experience, best machine operator you have, yet may only be capable of running his machine in an expert way. You are asking him to think about coordinating other people.

“The time span required for a supervisor is longer. And the story doesn’t end with just scheduling. Scheduling responsibilities may only require a two or three week time span, but there’s more. Supervisors must also think about building bench strength, recruiting technicians, training technicians, testing technical competence, cross-training. For a supervisor to be successful, I usually look for a minimum three month time span. The supervisor needs to be able to work into the future, without direction, using their own discretionary judgment, on tasks that may take three months or more to complete.”

No Real Work Experience

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From the Ask Tom mailbag

Question:
I am interviewing a lot of college hires that possess limited if any relevant work experience. While I am very comfortable interviewing candidates with experience, I find it very difficult to translate the Hiring Talent approach to those without any real experience in the field I am interviewing for. In some cases there is barely a internship to ask questions about.

Response:
They have work experience, they just didn’t get paid for it. Work is comprised of these two things –

  • Making decisions
  • Solving problems

Here is the sequence –
Look at the typical task assignments in the open role.

  1. Identify the Level of Work.
  2. Identify the critical role requirements, keying in on decision making and problem solving.
  3. Create questions based on the critical role requirements.

“Tell me about a time when” – this could be a student project, coursework, volunteer work, extracurricular activities, a hobby, a contest.
Let’s say the critical role requirement is to create and maintain work schedules for seven people on a project team where the duration of the project is thirty days.

  • Tell me about a time when you had to maintain some sort of written schedule on a project?
  • What was the project?
  • What was the purpose of project?
  • How long did the project last?
  • What did you have to schedule (people, project elements)?
  • How many elements (people, materials) did you have to schedule?
  • What information did you have to gather before you entered elements into the schedule?
  • After you created the initial schedule, did it ever change? How often?
  • Before you changed the schedule, what information did you have to gather?
  • Were your schedule changes ever challenged? How did you resolve the situation?

I am listening for decisions they made and problems they solved. And I don’t care if it was a pageant for the school choir or volunteer work at a hospital.

Market Responsive

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“You improved your quality, so your warranty program became a competitive advantage instead of a liability. Your lead time was down to four weeks. You lowered your cost structure. Your output and unit profit was consistent and predictable, systems focus. And then the rug got pulled out?” I asked.

“Yes,” Arianne reluctantly explained. “Everything, up to now had been internally focused. Efficiency, pace, quality. Then, the market fell out. Our customers would shrug their shoulders and buy from someone else. At first we thought they didn’t understand what a quality product we had. We even sent out our engineers with our sales people to explain why our product was more durable, lower cost and could be delivered faster. But, it was us who didn’t understand.”

“What do you mean?” I quizzed.

“We had been so internally focused that we didn’t notice a shift in the market. Our market moved. Our product was fine, but our market wanted something different. Our competitor smoked us. They had re-tooled a number of features based on user-feedback. We had no clue.”

I nodded my head, “Market responsive.”

“Yes,” Arianne confirmed. “It cost us a million dollars in stagnant inventory and months of development time to catch up. We had been so internally focused, we almost lost the ship.”

Your Customer is Not Your QC Department

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“You cut your lead time from six weeks to four weeks. Higher throughput with the same number of people, with the same equipment, in the same facility, you lowered your cost. You shifted from just getting the orders out the door, to a consistent, predictable system. And that’s when your troubles began?” I was curious.

“Yes, we were certainly focused on our systems,” Arianne continued, “but we had to match a competitors warranty. We figured, no problem, but we were wrong. We had our cost-to-produce down, but our warranty returns went through the roof. Everything we made up in cost savings went right back out the door in warranty repairs and replacement. We had a quality problem.”

“Pace and quality,” I said softly.

“Yes, our throughput was quicker, but it just meant we were making mistakes faster.”

“What did you do?”

“We were relying on our customer to be our Quality Control department. Bad move. We had to retrench, put inspections after each major step, so if we had a problem, we could identify it before we made another thousand parts. We tracked everything on white-boards. We didn’t make it to six-sigma, but enough quality improvement to make a big difference.”

“So, finally you got organized, accelerated your throughput, beat your internal quality standards. It must have been a proud moment,” I encouraged.

“Not really,” Arianne replied. “That’s when the rug got pulled out from under.”

Shift to Efficiency

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“You were more organized, but you almost went broke?” I pressed.

“Yes, we managed to get all the orders out the door, but it cost more to produce, than the revenue could cover,” Arianne replied.

“So, you needed to raise your prices?”

“Not that simple,” she explained. “We had competition. Our competitors price-to-the-customer was 15 percent below our cost to produce the same product. We waited for two years for them to go out of business. There was no way they could sustain that loss. But after two years, we figured out they weren’t losing money after all. They had found ways to be more efficient and productive.”

“What did you do?”

“It wasn’t enough to be organized. We had to examine every step. Turns out there were more efficient ways to work. We changed the sequence of some of the steps. Some steps could be done at the same time by different teams, increasing throughput. It was amazing. We cut our lead time from six weeks to four weeks. Higher throughput with the same number of people, with the same equipment, in the same facility, we lowered our cost. We shifted from just getting the orders out the door, to a consistent, predictable system.”

“Problem solved?” I asked.

“Not really. That’s when our troubles really began.”

That Sounds More Organized

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“Why are we having this discussion in the first place?” I asked. “What do you see, as a manager, that is creating a problem?”

Arianne was puzzled. She knew the answer, but didn’t know the words to express it. “There are all kinds of issues. I guess it’s just getting organized. Our company has grown, things are more complicated, now. It used to be, everybody did a little bit of everything, and somehow, all the work got done. Now we have more customers, way more customers, and the volume, we now do, in one day, what we used to do in a month. We started out with eight people, now we have eighty-five.”

“When you think back to when your company was small, and then you added more people, what was the biggest change that you noticed?” I pressed.

“I remember, clearly, everybody was doing a little bit of everything, and then we had to divide up the work. Some people would work on one part, others would work on another part, and someone else was assigned to find new customers,” Arianne explained.

“Well, that sounds more organized,” I observed.

“Are you kidding. That was the beginning of the first set of problems. We ended up with two people doing the same thing, duplicating work. And other work that no one was doing, gaps all over. I felt like Hans Brinker, plugging the dike with my thumb. But there were too many gaps. Too many customers, too many orders. It was a mess.”

“What did you do?”

“Somehow, we got it sorted out. We drew a big flowchart on the wall, with boxes for each of the major steps. It became easier to see the holes in the dike, and where work was duplicated. We made checklists, created push schedules. It was a lot of work, a lot of effort, a bunch of overtime, but at least we got all the work out the door.” Arianne took a breath.

“Well, that sounds more organized,” I repeated.

“Are you kidding,” Arianne sat forward. “That was when we almost went broke.”

What is Work?

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“What’s the Level of Work?” I asked.

Arianne puzzled her face. “We’re looking at two roles. One is a finish carpenter and the other is a machine operator. The carpenter is finishing wood products within one sixteenth of an inch. The machine operator is working to tolerances of four decimal places. I would say the machine operator role is a higher level of work, it’s more precise.”

“Is it a higher level?” I insisted.

Arianne paused, “I guess I am just thinking out loud. I don’t know.”

“As a manager, working with a team member, after you have provided work instructions, what is the most valuable thing to talk about?”

“Working through things that aren’t in the instructions,” Arianne was quick to respond. “Talking about the problems that might occur, and the decisions that might pop up.”

“And that’s how I measure the Level of Work. What are the problems to be solved and the decisions to be made? These require judgment on the part of the team member, and that’s where the complexity of the work is revealed. The machine operator may be working to four decimal places, but the machine is making the cuts according to a computer program. The finish carpenter, working to one-sixteenth of an inch is taking manual measurements and constantly using judgment. The likelihood of field adjustments and variance in materials is high.

“Working with my team, the most important discussion is -what decisions do you have to make in the course of your work. What problems do you have to solve?”

Hiring is an Annoyance

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Julia hesitated before she asked the obvious question. “So, you think I should become involved in the hiring process earlier?”

Julia, a division manager, had described how job openings were listed on the internet, with resumes sent to the receptionist. The receptionist followed some basic criteria to sort the resumes into two piles, in and out. Two supervisors, then, picked through the in pile. They would make a few phone calls and get some candidates to the office for interviews. If they liked them, they would kick the candidates upstairs for another round of interviews with the department managers. Only then, would Julia see the successful candidates.

Julia’s description was predictable, “I can’t believe these candidates made it this far in the process. They were awful, totally unqualified, but the best that’s out there. It’s really difficult to find good people these days.”

Julia’s process is upside down. The front end is handled by the wrong people moving candidates up the food chain. Here’s why this happens. For managers like Julia, hiring is a distraction, an annoyance to be handled quickly so she can get back to important manager stuff.