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.

A Bonus Problem

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“This has nothing to do with bonuses,” Dean protested.

“As I look at these goals, each attached to a bonus, every team has an internal goal, based on some efficiency. The highest efficiency for each team can best be achieved by ignoring the goals of the other teams.

“Here is the central question,” I continued. “Do you think the company can be most effective by making each of its internal departments most efficient?”

“Well, yeah,” Dean replied.

“It seems counterintuitive, but for the company to be most effective, some of the departments may have to be less efficient.”

Dean looked puzzled.

“Look, Dean, of your four departments, which is the slowest, the department that everyone has to wait for?”

Dean looked at a chart with his four teams. Red, blue, green and orange. “It’s the green team. They’re the bottleneck. We would put more resources in there, but they are too expensive. We just do the best we can.”

“And when everyone is focused on their own stuff and not paying attention to the green team, what happens?”

“Well, the blue team feeds them work. But the blue team works most efficiently in batches, so they feed zero work for two days, then dump a bunch of work on the green team at the same time. The green team can only work so fast, so everything stacks up there and everything goes late.”

“So, why doesn’t the blue team work in smaller batches and feed work sooner?” I asked.

“Well, if the blue team works in smaller batches, they can’t produce enough to make their goal. And their goal is tied to their bonus.”

“So, you have a bonus problem.” -TF

Not a Failure to Communicate

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“I don’t understand,” Dean complained, disappointed with a botched handoff between two of his departments. “We had a meeting about the need to communicate better in the middle of the project. Both sides dropped the ball and everyone is playing the blame game.”

“Yes, but did they get their bonus?” I asked.

Dean looked at me like I was from Mars. “We’re not talking about bonuses, here. We have a communication problem.”

I was looking at pre-project package. It clearly pointed to several team goals for each of the four teams that had to coordinate on the project. And there was a $2000 team bonus tagged to each goal.

“You think you have a communication problem. I think you have a bonus problem.” -TF

Complain to Upper Management?

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:

How do you handle Managers who take credit for your work (my immediate manager and his boss)? My immediate manager does not know the job well and depends on everyone for support. The operation has downfalls due to his shortcomings. Only a few immediate individuals know the truth and feel uncomfortable going to upper management.

Response:

The Manager and the Manager-Once-Removed are both absolutely responsible for the output of their teams. I hold them both accountable for the team’s successes and the team’s failure. So, they DO get the credit when times are good and they shoulder the blame when things go bad.

And often, it is not necessary that a Manager have in-depth technical knowledge. That’s what the team is for. I often lead teams where I have zero knowledge of their internal processes or technology.

So, my concern is for the downfalls in operations. Why are they happening? And how can we get better in the future? I use the following questions to debrief. You might be able to share these with your boss so your team can make some progress.

  • What did we expect?
  • What did we do well?
  • What went wrong?
  • What can we do next time, to prevent that from going wrong?
  • When will we meet again?

When the team focuses on these questions, things begin to change. Complaining to upper management accomplishes little. -TF

The First Ingredient

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:

Please, help me. I am 26, a mechanical engineer, Egyptian, living in Egypt. I am working as a mechanical engineer on drilling rigs, but I want to move into a career in management. I think I am ready for this move, but the problem I face is that I don’t know how to start. What should I learn first?

Response:

There is no technique to learn that makes you a manager. It is a role that you play inside an organization. You report to either a supervisor or a manager. Your next step is to simply observe your boss. What kinds of things are they doing, what kinds of things are they responsible for? You will find it is a totally different job than your job. Talk to your boss, explain your interest.

Understand, this is a long term process. You may think you are ready, but you are only ready to start. You are only ready to start to learn. You are NOT ready to take a position as a manager.

Explain to your boss, that, over the next few months, you would like to help, assist in some of the smaller duties, so that you can understand what is involved, so that you can practice.

Becoming a manager is not something you learn. Becoming a manager is something you grow into. You have the first ingredient, your desire to grow. -TF

For More Than a Day

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“What would be the benefit of drawing a flow chart of this system?” I asked. Valerie had solved the problem, but I wanted her to transform the solution into a system that could be used again.

“For starters, drawing a picture of the system helps me get it straight in my own mind, and makes it easier to explain it to someone else,” she replied.

“And what if one of your team members has a suggestion for improvement?”

“They can go right to the spot on the picture and we can talk about it.” Valerie was already pulling a piece of paper to the table.

“Valerie, what’s different about your supervisor solving this problem yesterday and the work you are about to do now, as a manager?”

“Well, my supervisor solved the problem to get us out of a jam, yesterday. I am working on a system to prevent the jam from happening again. My supervisor was working for one day. I am working on the future.”

Now Build a System

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“So, what does it take to create a system like that?” I asked. “To create a system that would notify for rejected parts along with lead times for replacement parts and alternate suppliers?”

Valerie was shaking her head. “I know our computer software pretty well and to program that functionality would be pretty expensive.”

I reached in my bag and pulled out a handful of 3×5 index cards. “Suppose I said that you were not allowed to modify your software and the only tool you could use were these 3×5 cards? Now build a system. Let’s start with how frequently it happens.”

“You’re right,” Valerie started. “It doesn’t happen that often. Our QC guy who certifies incoming parts, could send a card with the details to our purchasing person. Our purchasing person has access to lead times and alternate vendors. Purchasing gets their order quantities from sales orders, so they could run a reverse report to find out what orders would be impacted, that’s easy.”

“What else do we need to know to effectively respond?”

“We would need to get our sales people involved to find out what wiggle room we have on those orders. Since we are three weeks ahead of the game, there are all kinds of adjustments that can be made with ample notification.”

“If I asked to draw a picture of this on a piece of paper using circles, arrows and labels, could you do that?”

“You mean, like a flow chart?” Valerie asked.

“Like a flow chart.” -TF

Three Weeks, Not Three Days

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Our next Leadership class in Fort Lauderdale begins May 21. Visit www.workingleadership.com.
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“Well, I thought our team did pretty well, given the circumstances,” Valerie continued to protest.

“Yes, they did,” I replied. “And those circumstances should never have existed. To come down to the wire and find you are missing 500 critical parts on an order should never have happened.”

Valerie shifted in her chair. “But stuff happens.”

“Yes, stuff happens all the time and that’s why your system should detect these conditions. When did you find out that your supplier had shipped 500 defective parts?”

Valerie looked to the left. “Three weeks ago.”

“What difference would it have made if your system had delivered a report three weeks ago that showed 500 rejected parts along with replacement lead time, a list of alternate parts vendors and their lead times, along with all orders pending that required that part?”

Valerie’s head was nodding. “We would have had three weeks to work on the problem instead of three days.”

Create the System

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Our next Leadership program in Fort Lauderdale begins May 21. Visit www.workingleadership.com.
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“But, we got the parts in and shipped the units. I thought we handled that quite well,” protested Valerie.

“You are right, your supervisor did a good job. That’s what supervisors do. But your work, as a manager, was not done,” I replied. “The job of the manager is to create the system. When you discovered you would be short of parts, it was your supervisors job to go find the parts, but it was your job to ask

  • Why didn’t our system anticipate this shortage?
  • Why didn’t our system detect this shortage as soon as the order was placed into our system?
  • Why didn’t our system spot our supplier’s inventory and indicate a shortfall in those parts?
  • Why didn’t our system have alternate vendors for those critical parts?
  • Why didn’t our system continually track alternate supplier inventories to find odd lots at aggressive pricing?

“The job of the manager is to create the systems, monitor the systems, improve the systems. It’s great that we have a supervisor who knows how to scramble. But I prefer a system that responds to our constantly changing circumstances. The role of the manager is to create those systems.” -TF

Lucky Break

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“Then what is my role, as the manager?” Valerie asked. “I do all the same stuff as the supervisor, it’s just that most of the time, I handle the bigger problems.”

“Bigger problems, like what?” I followed.

“Like last week, we had a large order for a customer, an international customer, and one of the components from a supplier was defective, 500 units we had to reject. The customer is screaming because he has already sold the first three shipments that we can’t deliver.”

“What did you do, as the manager?”

“Well, I scrambled around and found 500 units from a supplier in California. In fact, they were leftover stock and we got them cheaper than our normal supplier.”

“Why didn’t your supervisor locate them for you?” I asked.

Valerie looked sideways. “Well, actually he did. I said I scrambled, meaning my supervisor scrambled. He is the one who found the parts. It was kind of a lucky break that solved the problem.”

“So your supervisor did his job, as a supervisor, and you failed to do your job as a manager.”

Valerie looked puzzled. -TF

Accurate and Complete

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This short conversation with Valerie was moving toward the near side of frustration for her.

“Look,” I said, “the role of the supervisor and the role of the manager are distinctly different. It’s not that one is smarter or has more experience, but they bring separate and necessary value to what we do as an organization.

“The role of the supervisor is to make sure the work gets done. The tools are schedules, checklists and meetings. The value-add is accuracy, completeness and timeliness. It’s the role of the supervisor to make sure the entire project is complete, not ninety five percent, that there are no gaps in service and, at the end of the day, the project meets the customer’s specifications and deadlines.

“That’s the role of the supervisor.” -TF