Monday Management - common management problems: the micro-manager

This post continues my common management problem series with a look at the micro-manager, one of the most common reasons for management failure.

All staff know the micro-manager. This is the person who cannot let go real control, who tries to set, control and check every activity. Lacking authority and responsibility, staff cease to be independent workers and instead become no more than arms and legs for the manager.

One common symptom of micro-management can be found in the complaint by managers that staff will not take responsibility, that they have to do everything themselves. When I hear this complaint, I automatically check for micro-management. Most times I find it.

With some managers, micro-management is a deeply entrenched feature of their personality, a need to control. There is often little you can do with such managers to improve the situation. If they are important in their position because of their knowledge or particular skill-sets, you may just have to work around them. Otherwise, you are better off removing them, or at least reducing their staff management role.

The partial or inconsistent micro-manager can be a particular problem, simply because they are harder to spot.

Often insecure, this type of manager would not usually see themselves as a micro-manager. If queried, they would say (correctly) that they do give staff autonomy.

The core problem with these managers is that they are inconsistent. They stand back in most cases, but then intervene on an irregular basis. Having allocated a task with a report back deadline, they then ask before the due date, have you started or finished this task?

The staff member in question who has been trying to set his or her own priorities may not even have started the task. Now he/she finds a worried manager creating worry in the mind of the staff member. Suddenly the staff member has to shift focus, even though something else may suffer.

This can have exactly the same effect as the more extreme micro-manager cases in that staff take less responsibility for their own work, pushing responsibility up-stairs to their manager.

From an overall management perspective, it is easier to help the partial micro-manager improve performance, subject to one qualification: the problem has to lie with the manager, not the firm itself.

Too often, partial or inconsistent micro-management by one manager is in fact a symptom of, a response to, micro-management at the next level up. In worst cases, micro-management across the firm may be a cascade effect from the CEO or managing partner. Here we have a systemic problem.

One difficulty with micro-management is that it can yield high performance simply because the manager in question is so driven. However, it also has great dangers.

I saw a simple example of this recently at project level. The manager in question had to go on leave in the middle of a critical project roll-out. While the rest of the project team had the skills required to continue the roll-out, the project struggled because team members did not know everything that the manager had been doing, nor did they have the authority to take over key elements of the manager's role.

This case illustrates the practical problems that can arise should the micro-manager suddenly leave the scene.

At a more macro-level, the firm suffers because the bad drives out the good.

Unable to work in a micro-management environment, staff leave. Those who remain are less likely to be able or willing to accept responsibility and to provide the drive that the firm may need. Remove the micro-manager or managers, and the firm may go into sudden decline as a consequence.

I have stated the problem, but what on earth can we do about it as a personal level? The starting point for both the micro-manager and the staff affected is to ask why, why does this happen? At my next post in this series, I will look at this questions, the possible answers and responses.

Monday Management - Introducing Common Management Problems

Some years ago I began a series of blog posts on the theme common management problems – and what to do about them. The posts drew from my practical experience as a manager and a consultant. I wrote them because I had found that many people who had acquired some form of management role actually didn’t know what to do in a practical sense.

The problem is especially acute in professional services because so much of the work is individual: individual in the way work is structured, individual in relation to clients, individual in the way performance is measured. There is limited scope to learn how to manage by actually doing. Problems exist even in those areas of professional services where projects and project management are the norm.

Project management is not the same as management, although many project management techniques are also management techniques. A professional discipline in its own right, project management centres on individual projects. These may be simple or complex. They may involve a single person or a much larger team of full and part time people. However, they do not necessarily provide you with the skills required to manage a team with functional responsibilities involving multiple activities with varying time horizons, where the focus is on the achievement of broader results rather than individual project outcomes.

Lack of management skills and experience may be an especial problem in professional services, but it is not limited to that sector. Management is a craft, not a science. It has to be learned through practice. Across sectors, the thinning of management structures has reduced the opportunities for people to grow into management through progressive learning by doing. The problem is compounded by the growing role of specialists in senior management roles and by modern management command and control structures that have reduced the authority and scope of responsibility of individual managers.

Interestingly, the widespread adoption of project based approaches within organisations has further compounded the problem. This may sound counter-intuitive. Surely these approaches play an important role in improving organisational effectiveness? Well yes, but many areas that have moved to project based approaches end by displaying many of the cultural features to be found in professional services. There is the same emphasis on individual matters or assignments; performance assessment becomes narrower; it becomes more difficult to attract attention too, or resources for, issues that fall outside current assignments.

Staff have always complained about managers and management. However, the volume of complaints seems to have risen significantly over the last two decades. Importantly, managers themselves complain about the difficulties they experience in managing properly, in simply coping with the demands placed upon them. A surprising number of those in apparently managerial roles express actual dislike for the management process. Their focus is on their personal performance, on the things that they have to do themselves. The need to deal with people, to be responsible for others with varying needs and personalities, is seen as an impediment to their own performance.

If project management is not the same as management, nor is administration. All managerial roles involve a degree of administration, another thing that many professionals complain about, but that is only part of the manager’s role. Administration focuses on rules and systems, while management focuses on the organisation of resources and especially people to set and achieve objectives and to undertake specific activities.

Finally, management is not the same as leadership, although a measure of leadership is a necessary part of management. A leader may or may not be a manager. Indeed, many of those who see themselves as leaders are in fact extremely bad managers! There is a certain irony in the parallel rise in emphasis on leadership and governance at a time when management as such has been in decline. These trends are connected, for governance is a control on leadership that has become more important as management has declined.

Can management be learned? Yes. Like any other craft, management skills can be learned, although management abilities (the final capacity to do) will vary between people. The keys are knowledge and practice. For that reason, I am drawing together and updating my previous posts to provide practical guidance to all those who wish to improve their management skills.

Postscript

I was asked about the current fad for activity based working and the associated idea of bossless teams. How do these fit with the type of argument I am mounting?

Later I will write something on both. However, for the present, activity based working is popular in certain larger professional services or certain financial firms where work is predominantly individual, or involves small variable teams. The term really relates to office design as much as it does to the organisation of work, although the first affects the second. It can be a productive approach.

Bossless teams rely on particular group dynamics and types of work and on the surrounding culture to be effective. I think that they actually first appeared in certain manufacturing activities, although I stand to be corrected there. Again they can work in particular circumstances, although in the end there is always a boss!

In terms of the fit with my argument, the best way of organising work will always depend on the type of work. I don't think that either detract from my focus on the importance of management.

I would be interested in reactions from readers in terms of their own experience with these different forms.  

Policy, programs, control and complexity - ICAC on problems in NSW public policy and administration

I fear that this has been a sadly neglected blog. In this, the first post for 2013, I want to return to a common theme in my writing across all platforms, problems in current approaches to management in both the private and public sectors. One part of my message has been the way that organisations are drowning in their own systems.

The trigger for the post was a November 2012 article in Corruption Matters (Number 40), a twice yearly publication from the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption  intended to raise awareness about corruption related issues, Can those at the helm see where they are going? If you want to see the original, go here, click on publications by date and then click on November 2012. I agree that it's not a very user friendly approach; to many pdfs!

While I disagree with aspects of the analysis in the article, it does illustrate some of the points I have been making. For that reasons, I am reproducing it in full with commentary.

The article begins:   

"Almost exactly 20 years ago, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler described the importance of uncoupling policy and regulation from service delivery when it comes to driving transformational change in government; that the act of “steering” the boat, if you like, works best when separated from the act of “rowing”.

The idea that those who steer should be separated from those who row has been taken up with gusto throughout the public sector; although not necessarily in the way envisaged by Osborne and Gaebler. Theirs was a call to action for a decentralisation of authority by separating the macro-level function of government from the micro-level creation and administration of public programming. In other words, have government influence direction in a broad sense in order to empower frontline agencies and communities to solve their own problems by creating and delivering services that resonate with the needs of their specific audiences."

Comment: I actually have some problems with the Osborne/Gaebler approach because operations and policy need to be integrated and inform each other. Indeed the article recognises this. Part of the problem is that what constitutes policy gets totally confused. The simple steering/rowing classification fails to recognise the distinctions between different types of policy and operations and is, as we shall see in a moment, part of the problem. The article continues:   

"The reality, unfortunately, is that in some cases agencies and communities are stripped of this power almost completely. Frequently, almost all aspects of policy, procedures and program design are centralised within  distinct policy groups (those under the guise of steering), with little discretion devolved to staff in the operational units (those rowing). A cursory examination of almost any agency’s organisational chart will show a policy group in head office that is separated from the operational group."

Comment: Boy, did that strike a chord. However, it's much more complicated than that. A whole variety of delivery aspects get centralised, from policy through risk management to communications and reporting. As soon as you classify something as "policy", and this includes organisational policy, then it gets complicated. Create a policy or indeed oversight group, and it has to do something to justify its existence. The article continues:

"Disconnected policy

The result is that a disconnect can develop between the policies, procedures and programs directed from above and the operational realities of service delivery at the coalface. Operational staff are often unaware of he relevant policies, are unable to comply due to on-the-ground realities,or deliberately work around these policies to achieve the necessary outcomes.

For example, the Commission has seen corruption inadvertently facilitated because one policy in a given organisation, which required delegation and signature-checking for a transaction, was made impossible because of a supplier-payment timeframe dictated in another. In other cases, corrupt individuals have claimed the complexity of a policy was such that they could not understand what gifts were permitted."

Comment; Again, this struck a major chord.  You make me responsible for delivery. Then impose policies and procedures that mean I can't deliver. Of course if I'm serious about my job, I'll find a way of working around the problems created. That does open the way for corruption by unscrupulous staff. Sometimes, however, it's actually the only way in which audit trails and accountability can be preserved as honest staff fight to create ad hoc procedures that will meet the intent of policies and procedures despite the formal detail. The article continues:

"Often procedures for tendering cannot be followed in remote areas because there are neither enough suppliers nor staff to run the tender process as it has been designed. In one case heard by the Commission, a policy required an academic to be responsible for staff security vetting in specific situations, which did not work out."

Comment: I put this next paragraph on it's own because it has a certain personal resonance. I'm not sure that Sydney based ICAC staff would know what a remote area was. There are no tertiary institutions there. My own alma mater was recently the subject of an ICAC inquiry, but while its headquartered outside Sydney it cannot be classified as remote. But more importantly, rules laid down in Sydney designed for big urban centres can have unforeseen consequences.

I recently listened to a discussion on a building program in remote areas. The tender rules required a specific approach intended to protect subcontractors. The program manager said bluntly that either people would lie or we could not build. The builders did not have the financial resources to comply with well intentioned ideas. The article continues:    

"In some human service organisations, there are tens of thousands of pages of policies designed to cover every future operational eventuality and in response to almost every previous problem encountered. This so exceeds the cognitive capability of any staff that they cannot, and do not, follow much more than the broad intent that is communicated by their manager.

In short, the uncoupling of steering and rowing at this micro-level can result in policies, procedures and programs that are not suited to operational realities. Control of operations is neither by traditional policy prescription and compliance nor by devolved accountability for outcomes. All too often, the result is wasteful, low quality services. In turn, the waste, complexity and unworkability that stems from disconnected policies becomes conducive to corruption."

Comment: What can I say? Sigh, it's true!, although the problem really lies not in the uncoupling of steering and rowing, but in the attempt of the steerers to over control, to move into areas that are not properly their space. The problem is further compounded by multiple layers of steerers, multiple decision and control points. The article continues: 

"Integrating design and operations

The waste, mistakes and overall escalation of costs that results from the separation of design and operations is a central concern for personnel in the manufacturing industry. Far from seeing a benefit in separating the steering from the rowing at the micro-level, the approach of “designed for manufacturability” (DFM) aims to bring together those who design the product with those who make it. By designers understanding operations and vice versa, a product can be designed that the operations function of the organisation is suited to making. Costs and waste are reduced, and quality improved through a joint focus on, for example, simplicity, fewer parts, standard parts, ease of fabrication, minimal handling and use of modular components.

To integrate the design and operations functions of a given organisation requires significant organisational change. Culturally, the division between the designer elite and the operations staff has to be broken down. This is often difficult, as organisations may exist as silos with few connections between them. There is often a physical separation of designers from operational managers that must be overcome; as is the case with the physical separation of policy staff and operational staff in government. When coordination mechanisms are consciously developed to link design and operations, they often function for a short period at the initial stages but tend to revert to the designer-driven norm as the product is modified and upgrade – again not dissimilar to initial rounds of consultation by policy units followed by top-down directives."

I found this writing a little confusing. Design for manufacturability is a two stage process, both requiring better integration with design, manufacturing and sales staff. The first stage aims to get products that deliver better results at lower manufacturing costs. However, once the product hits the market, the process continues with the aim of further improving functionality while reducing manufacturing costs. The process takes place within a framework of corporate policies set by management.

Expressed in this simple way, we can see that policy development and then implementation can be equated to to the manufacturing process. Again, we have an issue linked to the meaning of the word policy. In equating policy to design, there is a danger that the main message - the need to achieve better integration of policy and operations - will be lost. The problem lies as much in what are now called governance systems, the framework within which policy operates and which equate to the corporate policies within which the manufacturability process operates, as in normal policy operations.

In the big organisations, the mega departments, that now dominate the public sector, you find a hierarchy of policy areas that actually suffer from very similar problems as operational areas. The result is a bit of a mess that cannot easily be resolved through better integration of policy and operations. If you actually map one of the main policy fields and its supporting programs, you will find a complex and somewhat crazy spider web of reporting lines, decision points and policy/service interactions that nobody really understands.

The article concludes:

"While there is no doubt that uncoupling steering and rowing at a macro-level is important in driving transformational change, such an uncoupling may become dysfunctional at the micro-level. For a single frontline officer to require multiple and vastly different performance reports from the one non-government organisation that is providing services under several contracts with the one agency can be seen as a symptom of problems generated by the separation of program design from operations.

Another symptom is the prevalence of policies that run to tens of thousands of pages in length or a child protection officer, in a remote location, that sleeps in their office with at-risk children, against policy, because there was no other option. Separation of the function of steering – as intended by Osborne and Gaebler – from the accountable, devolved responsibility for operational outcomes is sensible. But the separation of micro-level policy and program design from operations under the guise of steering may well be counterproductive and conducive to corruption."

Comment and conclusion

I agree. In narrowing the focus to the separation of program design and operation, the article focuses on a real problem. The examples given are real. However, the old saying that a fish rots from the head is germane.

The malaise that the article refers to starts at the top where the interaction of theories of management and governance interact with institutional structures and politics (politics is just as prevalent in the private sector, although the form may be different) to create the framework within which the delivery mess occurs. Without change at the top, reform further down the chain becomes very difficult.

Problems with cloud computing - and paperless offices

Just at present I am working on site with an organisation that has moved its computer systems to the clouds. It is also replacing its paper based records system with a paperless electronic one. I have been observing the results with interest.

Cloud computing is very popular at the present time. Quite the buzz in fact!

It is easy to forget in all this that the concept is not new. What is new is the scale of application. It is easy to forget, too, that the performance parameters are not new. They are just the same as any other computer system.

I mention this because the single greatest user complaint is simply slowness. Everything just takes more time as compared to either the local WAN or single computer use. The results are quite noticeable.

The mover to the paperless office is interesting, too, because the first apparent effects have actually been an increase in paper usage. The reason for that is a simple one.

With a properly maintained paper file, you can read stuff quickly, see the chronology quickly. With a full electronic system, access becomes more time consuming. People checking documents who see something interesting are more likely to print it off simply because it is easier to do so than to take a note of the document location and then return later. They then throw the printed document out when finished.   

The importance of simple questions in assessing technology

A week or so back I watched You've Got Mail with eldest daughter. Released in 1998, the film centres on a couple who meet via email unaware that they are clashing in real life. 

Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) runs a small independent bookstore, while Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is a member of the Fox family that runs a chain of mega book stores and is planning to open a store near Kathleen's. It's quite fun, but what struck me re-watching was just how quickly business models date under the impact of technology.

In 1998, the big issue was the survival of the independent book stores in the face of the mega chains. Thirteen years later Borders collapsed under the impact of the internet. The online challenge is especially pronounced in publishing and book selling, but it is affecting all aspects of retailing. 

Here in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported today on a new survey suggesting that internet spending in this country would exceed $A37 billion by 2013. A week back in the continuing patent wars between Samsung and Apple, a Federal Court preliminary injunction that prohibited the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia saw a surge of Galaxy sales as Australian customers used the internet to buy in other jurisdictions.

In quite a bit of my writing I have tried to warn about the excessive hype attached to new technology. For every business that has succeeded in a big way, there are many more that have failed.

Further, many firms outside the new technology areas themselves have done considerable damage to their businesses through the misapplication of new technology. Costs may have been cut, but at the expense of customers and customer loyalty. The Australian banks that cut their branch networks to save money had then to invest heavily in rebuilding those same branch networks.

One of the key points in considering the application of new technology is that initial impacts are generally less than expected, the longer term effects greater than expected. Computing and communications technologies do create businesses on the supply side, but it is the enabling effects of those technologies that have the greatest long term impacts.

Borders collapsed in part because its customers were enabled to buy books in new ways independent of bricks and mortar and specific store visits. In Australia, Borders survives as a pale online shadow of its former glory.     

I am not sure that analysis of new technology needs to be all that complex in a general sense, although specific applications may be very complex. The single most important questions are actually quite simple:

• who will benefit from the new technology and how?
• who might lose from the new technology and how?

Take the Australian bank case.

The banks were expected to benefit from bank closures because it would reduce costs. The losers were customers who lost access to the closed branches. In certain cases, transactions and transfers, customers did benefit from greater personal flexibility. In other cases, customers simply drifted away from the bank. The banks ended by losing because they weakened their single greatest asset, direct contact with a previously loyal customer base.

The business cases put forward within the major banks to justify their actions centred on the expected gains to the banks. "Hard" number could be attached to the proposals. The "softer" questions about customer reaction in the longer term were not addressed.      

Postscript

On the Samsung/Apple issue, see Asher Moses' $30m tablet black hole: Harvey Norman hits out at Samsung ban. Apple blocks Samsung, consumers but elsewhere, Australian retailers suffer!

Postscript 2

Just recording two things:

• Group buying at consumer level
• Belshaw's World - caught between a tweet and a print place, a post of mine on newspapers & online. Recording this because I want use in in context of discussion of business models in an online world.
• Peter Dinham on cloud computing
   

Research in a total connect world?

I really wanted to record this one for later use.

I have now been involved at one way or another in the application of new technology for many decades. Now Orange has released a new research paper, What's left to Know, dealing with the impact of very large data sets. The report is subtitled research in a total connect world.

In writing the last sentence I almost made a major error. I wrote a total disconnect world instead of a total connect world. That was arguably a Freudian slip because it captured my reservations about some of the new approaches.

As I write, the Vice Chancellor of the University of New England (Professor James Barber) is continuing his campaign in favour of online learning. I quote: 

ONLINE education is revolutionising the way information is accessed to the point of redefining the roles of academic staff and casualising their employment - a trend of significant consequence to Armidale.

With the University of New England seeking to source internationally-based staff to direct its students over the internet, concerns of employment security in a casualised academic work environment have arisen on the Armidale campus.

UNE Vice-Chancellor, James Barber, would not rule out an increased casualisation of academic staff in Armidale, but wished to challenge the notion that permanent, full-time tenure was the only good mode of employment.

As I have argued in other posts, I have major reservations about the hype now attached to social media and the new communications technologies. I just don't believe the arguments. So far I have only scanned the Orange report, but it appears to contain some interesting material. I am interested as to how it might affect my present thinking.

How do we manage on-line technology?

Today I just wanted to look briefly at some changes in the internet and communications world.

Quite a bit of my time this year has been spent on ways of making on-line more effective from a work process and training perspective. I summarised some of my conclusions in one of my weekly columns in the Armidale Express, Belshaw's World - the online myth.

I mention this because Australia's IT Wire has reported on a study commissioned by Ericsson across 33 OECD economies, including Australia, that found that a doubling of broadband speed produced a 0.3 percent increase in the GDP of that economy - $A3.9b in the case of Australia. I don't actually doubt the results, they are what I would have expected, but they did remind me of the difference between the general and the particular.

There is no doubt that the new communications technologies and most recently the internet have been a tremendous aid to productivity improvement. They have also created entire new business sectors. And yet there have been real downsides.

To my mind, the most important ones fall into three classes:

• business activities have been damaged or even destroyed that are still of value to many
• business processes that should have been changed have survived because automation allows them to be carried out at a lower cost. Worse, the investment in the automation then makes them hard to change
• the new technology has facilitated a variety of controls and regulation at organisation and government level that greatly adds to overhead costs.

The message that I am trying to get across in a lot of my current writing is that we have yet to develop the best model for operating in the new environment. I have also tried to argue that if we don't do this, the incremental costs and problems associated with the new communications and computing technologies may ultimately impose risks and costs that will bring the whole system down.

This is quite hard to argue because it actually requires the adoption of a new and questioning mind set.

Take as a simple example, the way in which many firms are now trying to control or even limit email. Email is just so easy, is now so deeply embedded, that effective management is quite hard.

In some ways, on-line is like a drug, a quick hit with later problems.

I am not arguing that the technology should not be used. I am arguing that it should be managed.  

Using part time & contract staff effectively

Over the last decade, organisations have increasingly looked to the use of part time and contract staff to fill gaps. The reasons vary.

In some cases the move is designed to meet the needs of particular people who for personal reasons do not want to work on a full time basis. In other cases, the appointments may be intended to fill a short term need or to give the organisation greater flexibility in managing head count.

Given that over half the Australian workforce is now part time, contract or casual you would think that organisations would have learned how to manage part time and contract staff effectively. The reality is rather different. Most organisations don't manage part time or contract staff especially well.

To my mind, the core reason for this lies the continuing tendency to treat part time and contract staff as though they were long term full time employees. The organisation knows that they are not, but it and managers behave as though they were. I thought that the best way of illustrating this was by example.

The Case of the Part Time Employee

Let's start with someone working say three days per week. We can consider two cases, the first a stand-alone employee, the second a job share arrangement.

The distinguishing feature about a part time employee is just that, they are part time. Their time is limited. If you treat them like a full time employee and expect them to be involved in all work group activities, then the proportion of their available time involved in such activities is likely to be significantly higher than the full time workers. Conversely, the amount of time available for their main job is reduced.

The next problem is more subtle. Work flows on regardless of the attendance of the part time employee. Decisions are made that affect the work of that employee in their absence.  Supervisors and indeed work colleagues do not adjust for their colleague's part time work. The end result can be wasted time and great frustration on the part of the part time employee.

In theory, this problem is overcome where work sharing is involved, because one of the work share partners is always there. In practice, however, problems can arise where their is ineffective hand-over of tasks between the work sharers.

To manage this properly, a proportion of time must be explicitly devoted to first defining hand-over procedures and then ensuring that they actually work.

The Contractor

It may seem self-evident to say this, but contractors are not full time employees. They are there for a limited time and have to judge their performance against the results they achieve while there. However, serious problems can arise where this simple fact is forgotten.

To consider this further, consider the case of someone employed on a three month contact to complete a specific assignment.

In normal circumstances, the contractor should come into a defined assignment. Then the first part of the assignment is spent on task refinement and on acquisition of the necessary specific in-house knowledge required for the work, while the last part of the three months is devoted to finalisation and hand-over.

Too often, the task or tasks have not been properly defined. Too often as well, the contractor is expected to participate in work related activities actually designed for a long term employee.

The worst results come where the manager effectively forgets that the contractor is there for a defined time. Many managers are busy, making it difficult for them to allocate effective time for consultation. Long term staff are used to this and can adjust, but for contractors it can mean periods sitting waiting for decisions or guidance that simply chews up available time.

Many managers are also inconsistent, changing priorities or directions without thought in response to immediate needs. That's fine if the contractor is actually doing a defined staff role for a short period. However, problems arise if the contractor is meant to be on a specific defined task. In worst case, this may simply not get done, or not get done to the required standard because of the interruptions. 

The Need for Thought

Contractors and part time staff can be an effective way of fillings gaps or of meeting specific needs. However, and this is my key point, this requires a degree of thought and indeed discipline that is sometimes simply not there.   

Why multi-tasking is impossible

There is a fair bit of debate in Australia at the moment about multi-tasking. It's usually phrased in terms of kids who do their homework, watch TV, SMS and play a game.  it's sometimes expressed in terms of women having greater skills than men in doing multiple things at once.

My view is that multi-tasking, at least as normally expressed, is impossible.

To start with a simple example.

Say that I am cooking and listening to the radio. Normally, cooking is a routine task involving physical activity. The mind is not totally engaged, so that I can listen and work. Say, however, that I need to consult a recipe and actually make a decision. The mind is now engaged; the radio drops out.

Alternatively, say that the radio becomes very interesting. The mind is now engaged with it. Cooking will normally slow and even stop.

Another example still involving cooking. Normally in cooking, there are time breaks during which you can watch TV, hang out washing, sort something. At one level, you seem to be multi-tasking in the sense that you seem to be doing two activities or more at once. In practice, you are sequential tasking,

It may seem that those in very busy management roles are multi-tasking. In fact, they become skilled at task shifting and chunking, moving quickly from one task to another.

Leaving aside the tension involved in this, there is a cost where the move from one task to another reduces efficiency. That is why so much management advice centres on ways to increase time available for specific tasks - shut the door, turn off the emails, etc. If we could all multi-task in terms of doing two tasks at once, then this would not be necessary.

One of the difficulties with the discussion on multi-tasking is that is misleads. Not only does it imply that we should somehow be super human, it also confuses thinking about the organisation of work.     

Sustainability vs short term managerialism

As a professional adviser, I try to help firms improve business performance and to resolve problems. More and more, I have found a conflict between reality and aspirations. Reconciliation of that conflict comes back to one word, sustainability.

At a macro level, if the total business objectives set by all firms exceeds the possible growth rate in the economy, then some firms must fail to achieve objectives. If the gap between total firm targets and what is possible becomes large, then the shortfall between objectives and performance for most firms will also be large.

Since remuneration often depends upon achievement of immediate financial objectives, the incentive for managers to do whatever is required to get to immediate target is great. This leads to short termism. Cut now, with the costs coming later. In aggregate, this results in increasing economic instability.

Obviously, the position varies between firms.

If I am advising a start-up or a firm in a rapidly growing market place, then I provide one set of advice. If I am advising a firm that wants to increase market share and is prepared to pay the price, I provide a second type of advice. If the business is unprofitable, then that's another set of advice.

But what do I do if I am providing advice to an existing profitable business in a mature market that wants to improve performance to achieve new growth targets dictated by what is really managerial hubris? How do I say that you are doing the wrong thing? How do I say keep on going as you are, just improve at the margin?

If the reality is as it is that most businesses cannot achieve their targets, then shouldn't we be adopting a new approach? Isn't sustainability combined with incremental growth better?

Say you are a reasonably profitable law firm. What do your partners, your owners, really want?

They want to be able to get on with their professional work. They want a stable income with prospects of reasonable increase. Most don't want the prospect of big increases that risk the business.

Think how nice it would be as an adviser if your client said we want to improve what we do over time. Our focus is on business sustainability, not big targets. We want you to help make things better for clients, for partners and for our staff. We want you to give us practical suggestions to achieve this.

It would be nice, wouldn't it! 

Why do we underestimate the value of broad based skills?

I followed up China's foreign reserves - what they mean, what might happen with a post on my personal blog, Australia's economic fragmentation. Since then we have had the ending of the US debt crisis, new troubles in Europe, bad US economic data and something of a stock market crash. In the first minutes of trading this morning, falls slashed $A56 billion of the value of Australian stocks. There is a smell of panic in the air.

All this took my thoughts in a different direction, one that may seem a bit odd. One problem now is that many of those involved whether as commentators or traders, those trying to decide how to respond, actually lack the broad based experience required to respond sensibly. Further, they live in a wired twenty four hour world where initial responses feed on each other, where reporting heightens nervous excitement.

My original qualifications were in history and economics. Then I worked for twenty years as a professional economist and economic adviser before moving into the private sector as a strategic consultant and manager of professional services firms. I no longer claim to be a professional economist - the profession has moved on. In a way, the economics of finance has replaced the economics of economics, financial modelling has replaced a focus on economic principles.

I was in Shanghai when the Global Financial crisis struck. I watched it unfold on the television screens. Upon my return to Australia, I was struck by the fevered nature of reporting. Australian reactions just did not seem to match what I understood of the fundamentals affecting the Australian economic performance. I was actually drawn back into my past world as an economist.

The analysis that I did then suggested that, so far as Australia was concerned, the GFC was highly unlikely to have the type of catastrophic results forecast. It just wasn't going to happen. I said so, and I was right.

One thing that I have learned from my experience is the importance of time. There is a fundamental disconnect between most current analysis on the economy and the actual lengths of time involved in economic processes. For example, just as it takes time for economic imbalances to emerge, so it takes time for them to unwind. In similar vein, it takes time for new policy initiatives to work, especially where capital investment is involved.

In 1929, the effective closure of the London capital markets to Australian borrowings plunged Australian Governments into effective depression. In similar vein, the GFC had very real world affects. Yet it pays to stand back and look. You do not need complicated models to understand what is happening, nor do ideological positions help.

Economics is about relationships. If you are going to understand what is happening, you have to look at the relationships in general and as they affect your sector. One of the reasons why I have such a high opinion of Australia's Reserve Bank lies in the standard of their analysis of relationships. I may not agree with their analysis, but I can understand it and therefore respond to it. That is not true for a lot of the other analysis I have seen.

I am not sure why we have come to so distrust general skills and broad based experience, why we now place so much weight on narrow specialisation and very task specific requirements. You see, the problem is that narrow specialisations with task specific requirements are very good at getting things done within defined parameters, but hopeless at coping if those parameters change. Then everybody is at sea, lost without a paddle or, sometimes, even the boat.

I know that I sound jaundiced, but today we have managers who have never managed, economists who know a lot about a little but very little about a lot, lawyers whose knowledge is largely limited to a narrow specialisation, policy advisers who see their key roles in terms of narrowly defined statistical outputs. It's all very odd.

While I have been writing this post, share prices have continued to decline. Time, I think, to stand back and look at what is really going on.   

Ships, knowledge & management short term ism

Back in February in Problems with maintenance I reported briefly on the problems that the Australian Defence Force was having with maintenance. Maintenance on its main transport ships was so neglected that it was now too expensive to fix them, so that they had to be taken out of service.

The report of the Rizzo review into support ship repair and maintenance has now been released. It recommends, among other things, that Navy rebuilds its engineering capability from the ground up. Now Australian Defence Minister Smith has announced a review into the availability of the Collins class submarines, another major problem area.

One of the big problems with the constant obsession with productivity improvement through cost cutting, one that I referred to in my February post, lies in the trade-off between the short and long term. It's usually possible to get apparent immediate gains by, for example, deferring maintenance or by outsourcing particular activities. However, this can then lead to later problems of the type that Defence has been experiencing.

Over recent years I have noticed what I have come to call the demise of experience, the loss of in-house knowledge and skills that can, as in the Defence case, mean that the organisation actually lacks the capability to carry out key elements of its core mission.

The problem is quite pervasive. Let me give a small and apparently trivial example.

A few years ago, I was asked to develop a training course for an organisation. Because of the nature of the training (objectives, content, timing, audience) the course was not suitable for on-line delivery. It required face to face delivery through a workshop format.  

The organisation had a variety of rules about public documents. The first thing I therefore did was to look for other course examples within the organisation that might provide a template. There were none.

Needing to design from scratch, I went in search of help on some issues with Microsoft Word. There were some things I wanted to do that I had forgotten because of the length of time since I had last done them. I found that there were no Word manuals, nor were there any people within the organisation who had the skills required to help me. In the end, I solved the problem by borrowing and then modifying a template used in another organisation. The whole process added about three days to course preparation time.

I said that this was a small and apparently trivial example, yet it is one that I have seen replicated time after time.

In thinking through this problem, the loss of experience, I ended by breaking it into two parts.

The first is the loss of what we might call background experience, the knowledge of how to do things in a general sense. As organisations have slimmed down, as people have become more narrowly focused,  organisations have lost the broader knowledge base that once could be drawn on for problem solving. At the simplest level, this leads to costs and inefficiencies in handling new challenges. More broadly, it increases the organisation's general vulnerability; more mistakes occur.

The second is the loss of mission specific experience of the Defence engineering type. In slimming down, in out sourcing, organisations reduce the number of people with the direct knowledge and skills required to carry out tasks.

The two problems interlink. When I was working in the aerospace and defence environment, the key delivery people were the commercial and project managers who combined broad based knowledge and skills with engineering and technical know how. They knew what to do because they had done it many times before. As new problems arose, they would automatically draw from experience to develop at least first pass solutions for further test.

Many of these people have gone. Initially their loss was not seen. But once things get to the point that they seem to have done in the Australian Navy, suddenly disaster occurs. When you have to scrap ships because of poor maintenance, when you cannot deliver on key tasks, then you are in trouble.

The Rizzo report recommends that Navy rebuild its engineering capability, adding some twenty positions. But where are these people to come from? How many years will it take for them to acquire the experience that Navy once had? And what happens if another emergency occurs in the meantime?

The focus on current problems in the Australian Defence Materiel Organisation ignores, it seems to me, the fact that the genesis of the problems lies in changing management approaches that began to come into effect two decades ago.

I find that as a manager and consultant I have become less tolerant of what I see as short term ism. This is not a good thing because in a professional sense I have to deal with what is now. Yet so often I can see problems coming, I can see steps that might fix or at least improve things, but it requires management to change what they do now. And that can be hard to get across!    

Proposed NSW data centres strike trouble

I see from IT Wire that the NSW Government's proposal to build two mega data centres in Sydney and Wollongong to replace existing centres has struck yet more trouble. IT Wire uses the word "farce"; that's not unreasonable.

Just at the moment I'm working on an assignment that has a connection with cloud computing. The NSW problems do raise the question as to whether thus type of mega centralised solution is still appropriate.  

Boeing, outsourcing & Ayn Rand

A brief follow up to Problems with outsourcing. There I mentioned Ben Sandiland's blog as a good source on Boeing's outsourcing problems. The 787 runs out of time and lies extends Ben's reporting.

In an apparently unconnected post on my personal blog, Ayn Rand, selfishness and reciprocity, I looked at one element of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The link is the way in which disconnects between a short term focus on both personal rewards and key performance indicators can distort behaviour.

We management consultants are meant to be practical people. Yet the biggest problem and I have found, and the cause of some of my biggest professional failures, lie in the disconnect between apparently practical solutions and underlying values, processes and assumptions.

In general, it's pretty easy as an outsider to identify ways in which a firm can improve performance. Sometimes its impossible to get that across when the client's world view is diametrically opposed to what has to be done.

I still haven't worked out how to solve that one!  

Problems with outsourcing

A post on Management Perspectives, Problems with maintenance, I spoke of the problems that could arise through through deferral of maintenance in order to meet immediate targets. I suggested that this had become something of a pattern.

The post was triggered by problems experienced by the Australian Navy. Now an article in the Australian, 'Cancerous' morale risks our navy fleet, fleshes out a related element. Reading this and related material, the argument goes that in out sourcing key maintenance functions, the Navy has lost in-house engineering capability to the point that it now threatens the very capacity to properly manage the maintenance function.

The problems Boeing faces with the 787 Dreamliner have been well documented and especially on Ben Sandiland's blog Plane Talking. Something of the same issues seem to have arisen here. Boeing outsourced to the point that it lost effective control of the whole project.

New airliners are always a complex, bet your business, project. Success depends upon strong internal management and engineering competence. Boeing appears to have got the balance wrong.         

The importance of a discipline of professional practice

Back in September 2006 in Towards a Discipline of Practice I began a discussion on the importance of the development of a discipline of practice that spanned disciplines. Here I said in part:

On the surface, the application of each profession in practice may not seem connected. What do, say, law and medicine have in common? At least this:

1. Common techniques can be used to analyse the processes followed by professionals in their work.
2. A least some of the elements in those processes are common. For example, both lawyers and doctors have to begin each engagement (matter in the case of the lawyer, consultation in the case of the doctor) with a diagnostic. Comparison of the different application of common process elements between professions can yield fruitful insights.

The commonalities between management of practices across professions are better understood. However, there is in fact a gap here.

If you look at the literature you will find a range of general advice and principles drawn from management. You will also find a volume of nitty gritty material classified under the general head of practice management. This is often encapsulated in specific practice management courses and qualifications.

The gap as I see it between the two, and I think that this holds even though David Maister among others has written on the topic, is the gap that Prem points to, the absence of a fully articulated philosophy of practice that takes into account the unique features of professional practice.

The link to Prem's comment is included in the original post.

Back in June in Reflections on professional experience, I said: 

I have been off-line for a little while simply because I have been thinking! Part of those thoughts relate to my own directions, part relate to the core focus of this blog.

Over the last few years, I have changed my mind on some issues. For example, I am a stronger supporter of partnership models than I was so long as the partners accept the limitations involved.

On some other issues such as the the profit per equity partnership concept, I think that they are just as dangerous as before unless very carefully defined.

Then, on some issues such as time based charging, I have formed the view that a lot of the discussion simply misses the point. Time based charging has its problems, but it still is the best approach in some circumstances.

I have also become frustrated about my inability to get advice across about the need for change.

Part of this relates to a purely professional question that I have discussed before. What do you do when your client wants advice that you know won't work or must be just plain wrong? Part of this relates to my own professional skills, my inability to get a story across. However, part also relates to current management structures and attitudes within professional services. Some of this is just plain wrong.

Over the next week or so I thought that I might record my conclusions from all my thought. It's hard for a professional to accept his/her failures. Yet if we don't, how can we improve? 

As so often happens, events intervened. However, experiences over recent weeks have reinforced the need to write something. Bluntly, we professionals are letting down our clients. Worse, we are sometimes doing it through our narrow definition of what constitutes professionalism.

I have no truck with approaches that guarantee clients higher costs and worse results, even accepting that clients are their own worst enemy!

So, given this, over the next few posts I want to continue my discussion on a discipline of professional practice.  

Reflections on professional experience

I have been off-line for a little while simply because I have been thinking! Part of those thoughts relate to my own directions, part relate to the core focus of this blog.

Over the last few years, I have changed my mind on some issues. For example, I am a stronger supporter of partnership models than I was so long as the partners accept the limitations involved.

On some other issues such as the the profit per equity partnership concept, I think that they are just as dangerous as before unless very carefully defined.

Then, on some issues such as time based charging, I have formed the view that a lot of the discussion simply misses the point. Time based charging has its problems, but it still is the best approach in some circumstances.

I have also become frustrated about my inability to get advice across about the need for change.

Part of this relates to a purely professional question that I have discussed before. What do you do when your client wants advice that you know won't work or must be just plain wrong? Part of this relates to my own professional skills, my inability to get a story across. However, part also relates to current management structures and attitudes within professional services. Some of this is just plain wrong.

Over the next week or so I thought that I might record my conclusions from all my thought. It's hard for a professional to accept his/her failures. Yet if we don't, how can we improve?        

Concept of sustainable profit

Only five posts this year. Talk about a useless blog!

Over on my personal blog, I have had two posts looking at profits (here and here). In the second post, I talked a little about professional services.

My problems with profits in professional services is two fold.

First, I Have come to feel that the overwhelming focus on profits is simply taking all the fun out of life, as well as creating clashes with our professional roles. Here I was talking to a former senior partner of a major law firm the other day who had decided to exit stage left.

Many things came into that decision. One was his feeling that his share of the profit pool, the attempts to increase the size of that pool and hence the size of his share, simply wasn't worth it. The extra dollars at the margin held little value.

Don't get me wrong, profit remains important. Without it, you can't do things. However, this brings me to my second point.

In thinking about profit, we tend to look to the immediate future. More and more, I think that we need to think about the concept of sustainable profit.

If the aim of the firm is to achieve maximum growth in profits per partner that's fine. However, it also carries costs in terms of life style and also risk. In many cases, a better question is how do we sustain our profit level, perhaps building in some growth, over extended periods?

This involves different strategic choices, as well as different staff management and investment patterns. It is both easier and harder to achieve. Easier in that the pressures are less, harder in that it requires action to insulate the firm to some degree from market changes. Survivability is increased, but at the cost of reduced maximum returns per partner.     

Problems with authority and responsibility - are you guilty?

I have written a fair bit on this blog over time about problems with delegation. A key problem lies in the the grant of responsibility without real authority. This often links to a related problem: constant changes and interventions that further undermine the authority of the person meant to be doing the job.

These problems are often linked to two of the management styles I have discussed: the micro-manager and the over-enthusiastic manager.

You can check whether or not you belong to either class. Simply take a small handful of delegated jobs and monitor your own involvement. Actually write down what you do.

The observer always affects the observed. The fact that you are monitoring your own behaviour will affect that behaviour and for the better. However, you can tell what type you are by your gut reactions.

Does the act of standing back make you uncomfortable? Do you find that you have to discipline yourself not to give staff new assignments before the previous ones are completed? Do you, in fact, have a tendency to delegate and then forget, fail to follow up? Do you give one set of instructions and then actually countermand them?

You cannot change your personality, but can change the way you manage your personality. All these things give you clues that you can use to improve your own perfomance.
     

Leader vs manager – reflections on Hitler as this blog turns three

I have been reading Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: Nazi rule in occupied Europe (Penguin Books, London 2009). It is quite a gripping if also depressing book.

Mazower focuses on the way Nazi Germany administered the large European empire it acquired so quickly and then lost. There is no doubt that Hitler was a great leader. He was able first to place his stamp on a nation and then lead that nation into a huge and initially successful war. He failed, something for which we can all be thankful, because he was such a bad manager.

I do not think that Hitler would have claimed to be a manager. In fact, he would have dismissed the concept. He was simply the leader. Management was the responsibility of others.

The problem is that Hitler’s own leadership approach made effective management impossible.

The Germans were very good at managing particular things, Adolf Eichman and the death camps are an example, yet the overall Nazi empire was run in an increasingly ramshackle fashion. Even those things that were effective had unforseen side effects.

Hitler’s difficulty, although he did not see things in these terms, is that he was the leader. Power was increasingly centralised in his hands. The German system dissolved into a series of satrapies each competing for the leader’s attention.

Reading the detail in Mazower left me with the very strong feeling that Nazi Germany could easily have won the Second World War or, at least, worked to a peace that preserved their core gains. The leadership that drew them into the war and gave them initial gains condemned them in the end.

Leadership versus management, that’s the rub.

When I started this blog all that time ago in July 2006, I called it managing, not leading, the professional services firm. I used the word managing deliberately, because it reflected my view that management in professional services was not very good.

In my first post on 2 July 2006 I said:

This blog has been created to encourage debate about and to provide information relevant too the management of all professional services firms.

With time, I hope that it will develop into a valuable resource.

I am not sure that I have achieved the second. However, I remain convinced that improved management in professional services is critical.