Whose Plan?

Leave a reply

“You have a team meeting,” I describe. “Someone has to talk and it’s not you, because no one listens to you. So, who talks?”

“My team?” Gordon answered slowly.

“Yes,” I nodded. “You describe the essence of the vision and the performance Standards. The team sets out the action plan.”

“But my team may not know what steps to take and besides, it will take too long to get them all to agree,” Gordon protested.

I nodded and smiled. “I didn’t say that your team would get there quickly. Sometimes you have to go slow now, so you can go fast later. You need your team, involved, engaged, thinking, solving problems and making decisions. You are not going to get there by telling them what to do.”

Gordon was skeptical, “But, what if I am not getting what I want?”

“If you are not getting what you want, then you are asking the wrong questions.”

Memo Communication

Leave a reply

“First of all, who’s goal is it?” I asked. Gordon was perplexed. His memo to the team fell flat and he needed their cooperation to complete the project.

“Well, it’s my goal, but it’s their goal. I gave it to them,” he explained.

I sat still. Gordon finally broke the silence. “Okay, it’s my goal.”

“And your job is to get your team engaged to achieve your goal. How can you do that? I gotta tell you. I looked at the project specs and the deliverables and the milestones aren’t that exciting.”

“Well, yes, but when the project is finished, overall, it will be quite an accomplishment. That’s how I described the vision in my memo,” Gordon continued.

“And you think a memo is the best way to engage your team? This is not Mission Impossible. Your memo is not as exciting as a tape that self-destructs.” I stopped and let Gordon stew for a bit. “No one listens to you, no one reads your memos. Yet, you need them to cooperate to achieve your goal. How are you going to do that?”

Who Has the Power?

1 Reply

“Okay, here is what I want to happen,” Gordon explained. His description was thorough. He painted a good picture.

“I can see your vision,” I replied. “How do your people see this?”

“That’s the problem. I think I explained it well, in the memo I sent out, but they don’t seem to get it. For some of my team, I don’t even think they read it, and I get a little heartburn from that.”

“So, you haven’t figured it out, yet?” I asked.

“Figured what out?” Gordon’s head tilted.

“As interesting as I think I am, I finally figured it out. Nobody listens to me. As interesting as you think you are, nobody listens to you.”

“But, I’m the boss! They have to listen to me.”

“Gordon, you have a kid at home, right? Do you, as the parent, have the authority, at dinner, to demand that broccoli be eaten?”

Gordon sat up. “Well, yes I do.”

“But your kid has the power to determine whether broccoli will, in fact, be eaten.”

Where is Engineering?

Leave a reply

“Where is engineering?” Sam repeated.

“They never come to this meeting,” Mary replied. “They said it wasn’t a good use of their time, that all we ever talk about is production schedules and complain about the status of our catch levers. They do send someone to this meeting about once a month, but they never say anything, except that they are working on the catch levers.”

Mark, from marketing spoke up. “I do remember them saying they had just about fixed the problem with the catch levers and wanted to talk to marketing about some new packaging, because the new catch levers are going to require a bigger box.”

Larry, from legal, piped in. Larry was always playing on his iPhone during these meetings. “I think I found the name of the company that is competing with our unit. They are located on the west coast, with a distribution hub about 50 miles from here. The Google map of their distribution hub looks like a warehouse with some trucks in the yard. Big trucks. No wonder we didn’t know about them. But, here’s the thing, they have a patent filing on…it looks like our unit, but without catch levers. Their patent is on a sealed unit that doesn’t open.”

Sam surveyed the room. “Thirty days ago, this company was hitting on all cylinders. Every department was spinning perfect. Our marketing click rates were up, sales were increasing, production throughput was stellar, inventory was moving, returns were normal. Every silo in this company was performing as designed. Except for the catch levers. How did we miss that? Where is engineering?”

The Hidden System Defect

Leave a reply

“So, you all agree on a path forward,” Sam continued. “This is your problem to solve. We have everyone in the room. Marketing, sales, customer service, production and accounting.”

Marketing began. “We are very proud of our pay-per-click ad campaign. We are delivering more leads at a lower cost than last year and total marketing costs are under budget.”

Sales stepped up. “We have more leads, but our closing ratio is down, way down.”

Production was next. “We know that sales are sluggish. We had finished goods back up on the production floor, so we had to find room to store the excess inventory. Lucky, we found on old warehouse that the real estate group was trying, unsuccessfully, to sell. They were happy we took it off their hands, so that’s where we put the inventory.”

Accounting, always cheery, gave the next report. “Yes, putting that warehouse back in service helped our balance sheet, eliminated a non-performing asset. We saw our holding costs on the inventory were going up, but, that is to be expected if sales are sluggish.”

“There is still a problem,” Sam declared. “Individually, you all, each of you is doing a good job in your respective departments, and I am glad that I didn’t see any finger-pointing. And, we still have a problem. Sales are still sluggish.”

Customer service, Mary, who had been quiet the whole time, finally spoke up. “I was looking over our customer satisfaction surveys yesterday, in preparation for this meeting. We have been getting EXCELLENT responses, especially in our return department. The problem is, we have triple the responses, meaning we have triple the returns. So, in addition to sluggish sales, our product returns are up.”

Sam probed, “And? Why do people say they are returning?”

Mary nodded. “I know this sounds silly, but our customers are saying they found a substitute product with higher quality from another company. And, its a company I never heard of before. We have always had a problem with one of our catch levers, it’s been our biggest customer complaint. This new product doesn’t have any catch levers. It’s designed differently.”

It was Sam’s turn to nod. “So, our sluggish sales and inventory problem looks like it may be a design problem. Why isn’t anyone in here from engineering?”

Team Accountability and Integration

Leave a reply

The conference room was comfortable. New leather chairs and a marble top. Nothing like success to create a little overhead.

Sam had assembled a cast of the brightest minds in the company. Marketing was represented, sales, customer service, production and accounting. Everyone looked armed with official looking reports, charts and graphs, ready to defend the slightest attack.

Sam was good. He wasn’t looking for a scapegoat. He knew the problem wasn’t from someone being lazy, or even a wrong decision. He knew it was more likely that the organization’s system needed some attention.

He began by explaining what he had observed, and asked each member to accurately report the real figures behind the events. Unfortunately, four weeks worth of excess finished goods had translated into an eight-week inventory turn. Something had put the brakes on the market.

“So, take a piece of paper,” Sam began, “and write down your condition of engagement for this meeting? What has to happen in the next two hours that will indicate time well spent?”

It was not Sam’s intention to figure out the solution to this problem. It was Sam’s intention to have the group figure out the solution to this problem.

The responses from the team were positive.

  • We have to agree on the purpose. We have to agree on what we are trying to achieve. We have to agree on the goal.
  • We have to agree on what actions we will take. We have to agree on the coordination and interdependencies of those actions. This has to be a period of cooperation.
  • We have to agree on what results we are looking for. We have to agree on what measures we will collect and analyze. We have to agree to raise the flag when something doesn’t look right, not to bury our statistics in a warehouse.

Most importantly, this was no longer Sam’s problem. This problem now belonged to the group.

Excess Inventory

Leave a reply

The good news was that we stumbled on the problem early. Sam arrived in Corina’s office about two minutes after the phone call.

“I thought something was up when I saw the excess inventory down here a couple of weeks ago,” he reported. “I figured there must have been some snafu in shipping that was causing a bottleneck, and I had some fires somewhere else, so I hoped that shipping would figure it out on their own.”

“We figured it out,” Corina chimed in. “We put the over-production in the Fifth Street Warehouse, so we could keep working around here.”

“But, I thought we sold the Fifth Street Warehouse,” Sam interrupted.

“Almost. But I talked to the Real Estate Department and they hadn’t had any serious offers, the listing had just expired and they were actually glad that we needed the space to put the inventory.”

Sam looked especially troubled. “Corina, I need you to gather the data, the real data on what we have in the warehouse, and your current production rates. We need to do some thinking about this.”

Utilization of Resources

Leave a reply

“Come on, I think you are splitting hairs,” Corina said. “Everyone knows that the goal of the company is to make money, and the goal of the plant floor is to make as much product as efficiently as possible.”

“Is it, really?” I asked.

Corina stopped. She was trying to be defensive without being defensive. Rarely works.

“Has there ever been a time,” I continued, “where you were doing such a good job on the plant floor that you produced more than the company was selling?”

“Oh, all the time. We always produce to the sales forecast that Joe puts together. And his forecast is always wrong. I mean, right now, is a good example. If you had been here last week, you would have seen stuff stacked up all over the place. We even had three semi-trucks in the parking lot loaded with finished goods.”

“Where is it all now?”

“Well, there was a warehouse that we were trying to sell. I got lucky and found out in time to stop it, so we moved all the excess inventory there. Now, that’s utilization of resources.”

“Who knows about this?” I probed. “Does Sam, your VP of Ops know?”

“Yeah, he was down here a couple of weeks ago and saw all the inventory. He looked concerned, but I told him we were working on it. When he came down a couple of days later, I had all the stuff taken care of. He looked relieved.”

Our conversation became quiet.

Discretionary Effort

2 Replies

How do you incorporate discretionary behavior into a job description? Prescribed duties are easy, but what about the discretionary part?

When I was 17, I dropped out of high school and worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant. I quickly learned something about systems-thinking that stuck. In the middle of the work station sat a huge dishwashing machine. Temperature gauges, auto soap dispensing and a 90 second cycle timer. Whenever I placed a rack of dishes into the machine, there was a minimum 90 second cycle. No matter what I did, I could never go faster than the machine. The machine, in manufacturing terms, was my bottleneck. Herbie. My mantra was to keep Herbie working. Except for a few seconds each cycle, to move one tray out and a new tray in, my focus was to keep Herbie in cycle.

That 90 second period was my discretionary time. I could soak silverware, rack glasses, stack plates. It was my discretionary time that determined my throughput. If I kept trays in the queue, I was most effective. Whenever Herbie sat idle, I was losing ground. It is the discretionary behavior that determines effectiveness. How does a Manager capture that from team members?

What Do We Pay For?

Leave a reply

Question from the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:

How do you incorporate discretionary responsibilities into the job description?

Response:

This discussion hinges on the difference between prescribed duties and discretionary duties.

Prescribed duties are easy. Those are the ones you are told explicitly to do.

But do we pay an executive, who writes a letter, for the mechanics of pushing a pen to make ink flow onto a piece of paper, or pressing keys to make letters appear on a screen? Or do we pay an executive for the discretionary thinking that goes into the message of the letter?

Do we pay a machine operator for the prescribed duties of moving a piece of metal into position and pressing a button to cut the metal? If that were the case, we would simply purchase robotics. Or rather, do we pay the machinist for the discretion of how raw materials are organized to enter the work area, the cleanliness of the scrap produced by the machine, the attention paid to the preventive maintenance to keep the machine operating?

Indeed, effectiveness in a position may have more to do with discretionary performance than prescribed performance.

So, how do we build discretionary performance into the expectations of the job? Can it be done through the job description document? Comments?