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.

Work and Competence

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It’s an innocent question at every cocktail party. It’s an icebreaker question. “What do you do?” is a variation on “What do you do for a living?” The intent of the question may be casual, but it may be the most serious question of the evening.

Why this focus on work? And what of job satisfaction surveys? How important is work in a person’s life? And, why does some work suck, and other work engage?

Each person, based on their internal capability, yearns for work that is just within their highest level of competence. Competence is the combination of capability and skill. Skill is the combination of technical knowledge, application of that knowledge and practiced performance. Both capability and skill are required for competence.

Competence is an integral part of happiness. The invitation for every manager is to create the environment where team members are challenged to their highest level of capability leveraging their internal competence.
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Watch Tom Foster on Chris Comeaux’s Anatomy of Leadership.

Why Bother?

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Watch Tom Foster on Chris Comeaux’s Anatomy of Leadership.
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People embark on the path to accomplishment for a number of reasons. Fame and fortune are seductive ends to the journey. Others compete for the sake of competition, to beat an opponent, to win the game. Nothing like a mark in the WIN column. It feels good.

But others pursue accomplishment because they are drawn to achievement as a worthy goal, that without that effort, life would otherwise feel empty. This could be more than the pursuit of meaning in life, this could be the pursuit of experience in life.

The Measure of an Idea

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How do we measure ideas? Some ideas are novel, seemingly based on something without precedent. Some ideas are clever adaptations of old ideas. Some ideas like parity seem fair, while other ideas appear weighted to one side or the other. So we can argue and debate the worth or value of one idea against another.

But ideas have consequences and outcomes. How do we measure outcomes? This is often a far different discussion than the way we measure ideas.

Commitment to the Work

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“What do you mean, make it necessary?” Max looked confused. “We know what we were supposed to do in that handoff meeting. What more should I do, as the leader, to make it necessary?”

“Three things,” I replied. “First, what is the vision, what does that handoff meeting look like, feel like, taste like? Your vision of the paperwork is NOT a big checkmark across the page. Your vision of the paperwork is individual checkmarks on specific line items. More important is the discussion between the estimator and the project manager about each line item. So, what does good look like.

“Second. Does the team, the estimator and the project manager, have the capability to understand the decisions and problems, and the capability to make those decisions and solve those problems? Max, you are the leader. It is your judgment I depend on to assess their capability and make the necessary resources available.

“Third. Are they committed to the work? A checklist looks like compliance, but compliance isn’t good enough. You, as the leader, need commitment to the work. It is your role to create the circumstances for that commitment to exist. If you just needed compliance, you could do that with pizza. But, pizza doesn’t create commitment.”

Skip the Detail

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“We understand handoffs,” Max agreed. “That handoff between estimating and project management is so critical that we have a hard agenda, 150 boxes to check. Now, most projects only have, maybe, 50 critical items, but we go through the checklist just the same.”

“And why do you use the checklist?” I asked.

“What we found was that the output from estimating, I mean, it was a great estimate, but sometimes it wasn’t what the project manager needed. Sometimes, we estimate in one unit of measure, but install in a different unit of measure. So we mapped a checklist to make sure that the output of estimating matched the input requirements for project management. It’s all about outputs and inputs.”

“So what went wrong? You identified a problem with the handoff meeting that didn’t get discovered until you were in the field. What happened with the checklist?” I wanted to know.

“I looked at the paperwork. Both the estimator and the project manager just got lazy. Instead of checking all the items, there was just a big checkmark that covered the page. They got busy and skipped the detail. They were trying to save time.”

“And saving time turned out to cost time,” I nodded. “Why didn’t they slow down and take the time?”

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Max replied.

“No, it’s a really simple question. They didn’t examine the detail because you didn’t make it necessary to examine the detail. Often, things don’t get done, because we don’t make them necessary.”

Scale This Thing Up

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“You made it halfway through the year. You should have your numbers by now. How did it go?” I asked.

Max grimaced. “You know we have done pretty well in the past, so we wanted to see if we could scale this thing up. We had a firm target, and we were firing on most cyclinders. But we only made 75 percent of goal. I can’t put my finger on one specific thing, seems like a bunch of little things.”

“Let’s start with sales,” I said.

“Sales were good, contracts in hand, but a good portion of the projects sit in backlog. We just couldn’t get the work finished so we could bill it.”

“So, let’s look at project management,” I nodded.

“That’s where some of the problems began. There were mistakes in the handoff meeting between estimating and project management. We didn’t discover the mistakes until we were in the field. We were short some materials. Man hours were estimated too tight, so we had crews that got stuck on one job, when they were supposed to start another job. Once the schedule started piling up, we got further behind. Then a permit didn’t come through. None of this is dramatic, but it all adds up, and so here we are.”

“One of the biggest problems in a company trying to scale is handoffs,” I nodded. “You can have one or two core systems that do great, but you have to get ALL your systems in sync. Work moves sideways through the organization. First place to inspect is the handoffs, where work moves from one function to the next.”

Practice

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“But, we sent him to training,” Marjorie was disappointed.

“Just exactly what did you expect him to learn from the training?” I asked.

“His role in the company requires a very specific skill set. Without this technical knowledge, our engineers will bulldoze him over.”

“Is it possible,” I wanted to know, “that your disappointment has little to do with technical knowledge and more to do with the application of that knowledge? What you are expecting may only be learned by doing. Like riding a bicycle. Most training works only on the technical knowledge part, not the application part. And, the application must be practiced, over and over, before you see progress.”

What Changed?

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“But, this has worked, over and over for the past ten years. I am not sure why this project failed,” Jordan explained.

“First of all, the idea that originated ten years ago is not the same idea that has worked all along,” I replied. “You have modified and tweaked that idea each time there was a subtle shift in its application.”

Jordan was complaining. In this case, at this time, he would rather complain than consider a new idea he didn’t like.

“Each time you tweaked the idea,” I continued, “the shift was so subtle that you hardly noticed. And, your idea worked until it didn’t. Something has changed. Something has changed internally, externally or both. What was it?”

The Distraction of Advice

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Al Ripley believed, for every management problem, there was a management consultant. As issues surfaced in meetings, Al would look down his nose, over the top rim of his glasses, and ask the inevitable. “Don’t we know a consultant that can help us with that?” Outbound Air.

Consultants may be necessary and provide helpful direction, but a consultant will never lead you to the promised land.

The lower the capability of the team, the more consultants, the more tools will be purchased to offset. Those temporary measures can only be hurdled by building the capability of the team. Success can only be achieved with the right tools and guidance in the capable hands of your team. It has less to do with the guidance and tools and more to do with the capability of the team.

Best of Intention

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The intention to become a high performance company, or the intention to become a high performance team will not attract high performers. It may attract curiosity. It may attract attention to your attempts, but you will not receive commendations for trying.

The only measure of performance is performance.

You will only attract high performers when you are in a state of high performance. And, that starts with you. Yoda says, “Do or do not, there is no TRY.”