More Feet, Less Seat

At some time you may have seen one of those Black Forest Weather Houses where  a little woman comes out of the house when the weather is sunny and dry while a little man comes out to indicate rain.

A lot of managers are like the little man: the only time they come out of their offices is to deliver bad news, to give negative feedback or to dump a problem in someone's lap. The result of this is that their employees begin to associate their presence with pain and their absence with relief. ( Or to mix metaphors, perhaps they are like a groundhog, emerging from their burrow only long enough to announce six more weeks of winter.)

My theory is that managers need more feet time and less seat time. By this I mean that instead of spending so much time sitting isolated in their offices ("seat time") they should spend more time walking around catching up with their employees, listening to what they have to say, seeing what issues are emerging and what niggling sources of dissatisfaction are causing problems ("feet time").

In other words they need to humanise their workplace so that the people who work for them see them not as a source of pain but as a human being who takes an interest in them and who removes barriers to them doing their jobs well. In other words, as someone on the same side.

But this should be not taken as a 'technique' to be applied to employees as a way to manipulate them into feeling better and thus becoming more productive. This just creates its own problems. Years ago, a book was published called The One Minute Manager which basically taught managers to 'condition' their employees to perform better. In response to this followed The 59 Second Employee: How to Stay One Second Ahead of Your One Minute Manager. The application of 'techniques' is often transparent to workers no matter how clever managers might think they are being, so there ends up being an arms race between 'techniques' and defences against 'techniques' which just wastes energy and creativity that could be better focused on the work itself. Plus it leads to increasing cynicism.

Richard Farson points out in is Management of the Absurd that applying techniques to people results in the erosion of respect for the very people to whom to techniques are applied; how can a manager respect someone that they have managed to fool with their technique?

Farson says:

It is the ability to meet each situation armed not with a battery of techniques but with openness that permits a genuine response....If we genuinely respect our colleagues and employees, those feelings will be communicated without the need for artifice or technique. And they will be reciprocated.

But this means taking the time to see the person in front of you rather than the function on an org chart.

Managers need to be in for the long haul rather than the quick fix. And part of being in it for the long haul is getting out there and mixing with the workers and keeping it real. More feet, less seat.

How managers can derail continuous improvement

When a continuous improvement program is introduced into any organisation, it is introduced into a particular historically determined set of circumstances, the existing status quo. Even where current managers are trained in continuous improvement, they are likely to view it through the lens of their pre-existing biases and a day or so of training is unlikely to change this.

Problems with managers

Where a manager has managed the same organisational unit a number of years it is almost certain that:

• they have exhausted any ideas for continuous improvement that they may have been prepared to implement
• they are now acting as a barrier to further improvement because they have fixed ideas about how things should be done (as well as blindspots and pet ideas) and are not open to any CI ideas that are inconsistent with their fixed ideas
• they are blocking those ideas and as a result staff are discouraged from making further suggestions
• they have a vested interest in the status quo as representing any improvements they may have made in the past, even if those improvements are now outdated or dysfunctional.
• they have entrenched non-valuing adding activities that they may be unwilling to even discuss giving up.

Bureaucratizing the process

One threat that continuous improvement represents is loss of control.

If improvements are driven by grassroots recognition of problems by workers on the ground, the risk for some managers is that they will lose control of the process. So there may be a temptation to impose a whole set of rules which slow the process, a structure that subjects it to excessive approvals and controls so that it becomes bogged down. And in the process, the workers on whom the success of the process depends become disenchanted with trying to do anything.

Some managers may look on continuous improvement as a way to build their own profile by putting it into plans and trying to act as a clearinghouse for any ideas of the staff reporting to them and in the process act as a bottleneck (as well as bringing in the problems discussed above). I think most of us have known a manager who always manages to complicate things as soon as they get involved.

So what do you do?

The solution (which may not be possible for all organisations) is simple and brutal: replace or rotate managers, particularly ones who have been entrenched in the same workunit for an extended period of time.

By doing this, each workunit would gain a fresh perspective to look at their processes, plus they would be able to benefit from any improvement ideas that the new manager might have implemented in their previous unit, so that there is transfer of organisational learning.

The new manager would have no particular attachment to or investment in the status quo and would be more willing to consider ideas that the previous manager might have dismissed out of hand. Working in an unfamiliar area, they would have no choice but to become familiar with the existing processes and in doing so start to question things that don't make sense, but which have been taken for granted by the existing staff of the unit or which under the previous manager they had given up trying to change.

For continuous improvement there needs to be an openness to new ideas and new managers would lead to such an openness as well as a fresh rather than a stale eye being cast over any improvement ideas suggested by staff.

It may seem radical but sometimes a management reshuffle is the only way Continuous Improvement will work. Otherwise, you end up with the same old tired and ineffective ideas for improvement and a few months down the track it is looked back on as just another 'flavor of the month'.