There is a famous Father Ted scene where Ted is explaining to Dougal that, while the toy cows in their caravan appear to be the same size as the ones outside, that’s only because the ones outside are very far away.
“I don’t get it, Ted” replies a bemused Father Dougal. He was incapable of holding those two different perspectives in his mind at the same time.
On a TV comedy show, this is great for a laugh. But this is exactly what businesses do all the time.
When you’re sitting in a conference room, the activities taking place in a factory hundreds of miles away seem very small. If those same people were sitting inside the factory themselves, the problems would look enormous, and those in Head Office would look very small by comparison.
To some extent, this is a natural part of how humans behave. The proximity of a problem is often a bigger factor in whether or not it gets your attention than its magnitude.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’m not immune to this myself but, like most problems in life, just being aware that it’s a factor is generally the first step on a journey to doing something about it.
It’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of what used to be called MBWA (Managing By Walking Around).
Unstructured beats structured
Mostly, the business world tries to create structures because then you have something that’s easy to explain, understand, and track. Without structures, you can’t have KPIs, individual targets, or performance incentive schemes.
And that’s not all bad, of course. I’m not a complete hippy.
But structure creates blind spots 100% of the time.
Sometimes they are small blind spots, sometimes huge ones…but they always create blind spots. It’s an inevitable and unavoidable part of the process of putting a structure in place.
The minute you put a structure in place, the likelihood is that everyone in the team you’ve given the structure to will ignore everything that isn’t part of the pre-ordained structure and devote 100% of their energies to whatever you asked them to do.
You can’t complain about that. After all, people are only doing what you’ve told them to do.
So any blind spots are on you, not on your people.
And the cure isn’t to put even more effort into creating the structures. That quickly becomes sub-optimal and has the tendency to make the simplest task overly bureaucratic, which makes your management overhead greater than it needs to be, and so more expensive.
So don’t do that.
To be fair to structure-builders, that’s because all they can do it identify the obvious things.
Structure follows obviousness – which is why putting more effort into creating more detailed and complicated structures is largely pointless. All you’re going to do is see shadows that aren’t really there.
After a while, you’ve captured the obvious stuff. There is no obvious stuff left to capture. So from that point onwards, spending more time and effort on the structure means you’re taking away from your bottom line, not adding to it.
Management By Wandering Around was a more interesting take because this process is designed to uncover the non-obvious (or, at least, the non-obvious from inside a conference room hundreds of miles away – it’s 100% obvious to the people in that far-away factory).
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote about the practice in “In Search of Excellence”, which is still a great book even if not all the companies they wrote about 40-odd years ago would be considered to be still excellent today.
But the roots of MBWA go back to at least the 1960s when it was a standard practice at Hewlett-Packard, genuinely one of the IT industry’s most innovative companies at the time.
He didn’t call it that (or in fact anything at all) but the best boss I ever had (present company excepted) taught me the importance of walking around the factory every day and checking in with staff members operating the machines. That practice has been a key component of my management toolkit ever since.
However, all the proponents of MBWA, from my old boss, to Tom Peters, to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard agree on one thing.
It needs to be unstructured.
Don’t turn up with an agenda
In the same way as setting up a structure for people to report against means you’ve already introduced some blind spots into the reporting mechanism, doing Management By Walking Around with an agenda rather misses the point.
Sure, there might well be some things you’re interested in as you wander around, but you’re not doing this for you, primarily. You’re doing this mostly for the people who work for you.
If you’re going to set an agenda, you might as well haul everyone into your office once a week and quiz them on their KPI dashboard.
By letting your team talk about whatever they want to talk about you’re a long way towards understanding what most of the blind spots in your formal reporting structures are. This is the power of MBWA.
If you’re tempted to give this a try, there are essentially two questions you’re asking (although I suggest not asking them like a robot):
- What’s getting in your way at the moment which is holding back productivity, efficiency, or the quality of the finished product?
- What can I do to help you be more productive and efficient, or produce a higher-quality product?
While you shouldn’t ask the questions like a robot, you should always ask Question 1 before you ask Question 2.
In fact, I’d go further. You shouldn’t ask Question 2 until you’ve sorted out every issue that’s been raised as part of Question 1.
While there are occasional exceptions, nearly everyone I’ve ever met in an office or on a factory floor wants to work hard and do a good job for their employer. So if your employees are juggling 100s of problems caused by the way the company operates, poor management, or unreliable suppliers, it’s somewhat insulting to suggest they just ought to work a bit harder to meet their targets.
As a way of winning friends and influencing people, it’s not the best.
But even leaving the personal dimension on one side, here’s another pretty much universal truth…
You will almost always move an organisation forward faster by taking away the things that hold it back than you will by adding in new things designed to move it forward.
My experience is that the RoI on removing a problem tends to be several orders of magnitude greater than the RoI on introducing some “new thing” to magically solve all the company’s problems. (Spoiler: it never does.)
So always take away the negatives before you think about building in the positives.
The unvarnished truth
One big advantage of MBWA is that you get the unvarnished truth.
While department managers do their best, they are generally playing a political game of some sort and don’t want to look incompetent or, possibly worse, “a troublemaker” by highlighting things that are going wrong.
I blame the whole “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” crowd for that, which is less a management style and more an abdication of responsibility.
So there are some things a department manager can’t say, because it won’t reflect well on them, perhaps. And some things they won’t say, because it means dropping their buddy elsewhere in the business in deep doo-doo.
However if you talk to your machine operators, your call centre agents, or your office staff directly, you’ll find they have no issues at all in telling you that the reason they aren’t making their target this week is because the department before them in the process is making a mess of whatever they’re supposed to do.
Or because the deliveries from a tame supplier, who’s very friendly with the department manager, are always late.
Or because the HR department is hiring people who are incapable of doing the job properly.
Now that doesn’t mean the people raising those issues are right about the problem – at least not all of the time.
But what they are certainly doing is giving you a line of enquiry to investigate.
This is why it’s important to acknowledge whatever you’re told and to do something about it – if you do, next time round they’ll either tell you something else that’s a problem or they’ll have moved into the next category of improving their own productivity and quality.
A starter for 10
If you regard what you’ve been told merely as a line of enquiry, or a starter for 10, it’s much easier to conquer the understandable urge to tell the machine operator or call centre agent that they’re completely wrong, because all their department’s KPIs are on-track.
There’s no need to get into a battle about who’s right or wrong.
Instead, ask yourself “I wonder why they think that?” and set out to see whether that’s a perspective you agree with, after you dig a bit deeper.
For what it’s worth, I invariably find the problem is a real problem, but that the diagnosis is only right one-third to one-half of the time.
There is nearly always a measure of truth in their diagnosis, which is why that’s such an important part of this conversation.
But they, like you when designing KPIs reports in a boardroom somewhere, don’t have a perspective on second and third-order effects because they, like Father Ted’s cows, are too far away.
So it might well be true that the new staff who have been hired aren’t up to the job. And of course, HR did the hiring, so on the surface they were to blame.
But what if Finance had set an unrealistic budget to make their spreadsheet balance, and HR were just doing the best they can with a salary budget £10k under market rates?
In that scenario, it’s probably not the fault of either HR or Finance, but someone else (ahem…possibly even you…) who wasn’t prepared to take some short-term pain to unlock a long-term improvement in performance.
HR probably won’t tell you (well, not to your face anyway). Neither will Finance. They’ve got their targets to meet and they’re not thinking about anything else.
But someone operating a machine on the factory floor will tell you. Often forcefully.
And when they do, the smart thing is to take that as your starter for 10, get your Columbo raincoat on, and start digging into what’s really going on.
The challenge of leadership
Being a leader in a business is challenging at the best of times.
There are lots of moving parts to keep an eye on, any one of which can side-swipe you into oblivion when you least expect it.
So it makes sense to cast your net as widely as possible inside your business and talk to as many people as you can, especially those people you don’t talk to in the context of your regular KPI reporting cycle.
At the very least you’ll get a perspective you won’t hear any other way. And even if it’s not something you immediately need to investigate and fix, you’ve got another lens to look at what’s going on in your business through.
For that alone, Managing By Walking About is invaluable.
But sometimes people in leadership roles feel they should be in the office at all times, churning through the formal reports they get sent, and focusing on “the important stuff”.
That’s not a leadership mindset because it implies that your responsibilities in the business begin and end with the monthly KPI dashboard.
That’s not true at all. Your responsibilities begin and end with delivering the bottom line. The monthly KPI dashboard is as best a hygiene factor in the process. It’s just there to track the stuff you already know about.
Whatever is going to completely up-end your business isn’t likely to be something you already know about.
It’s much more likely to be something you had never even considered might be a factor up until the damage has been done.
And that’s why Management By Walking Around is invaluable.
While it’s not infallible, and there is an art to making it work, it might just open your mind to a perspective you hadn’t considered up to that point.
Fix that, and that’s a problem that isn’t going to side-swipe you anytime soon.
And if it’s not going to side-swipe you anytime soon, that means you’re managing your bottom line as well as you can which is, after all, your job as a leader.