Tag Archives: roles

Chocolate Mess, Related to a VP

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.

That Sounds More Organized

“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.”

Scrambling Around

“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 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.