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No one seems surprised

27th Apr 2012
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April 27 - No one seems surprised at news of the departure of our manager for 'breaches of contractual terms'.

Did they all know?

Was it just the top of the company in the dark? 

If so, what do I do about that?

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By alistair_king
03rd May 2012 04:32

Sorry to be banging the same drum but...

...it comes back to culture and team behaviours.

I'm guessing about your setup but you seem to have a couple of recent indicators that you're not getting the most out of your people. These revolve around issues of empowerment, transparency, accountability and, ultimately, culture. My guesses about some of the background to this are:

Those people who are not surprised either suspected or knew but (apart from your whistleblower) did not see themselves as responsible for intervening and therefore sat back and waited for management to notice the problem and do something. If they have sat back and not dealt with this, what other issues/observations/potential improvements are they sitting on and failing to suggest/discuss/prevent/implement.
 I assume your sacked manager was the direct owner of the customer relationship, rather than it being owned by a team. I also assume that performance awards (if you have them) are given on individual performance exclusively rather than incorporating some element of team performance.
 Since your managers directly own customer relationships, this reduces time available to oversee the whole portfolio of customers, and reduces transparency both of the portfolio as a whole and very specifically of their personal portfolio.

If the above is correct, then I would suggest:

Avoid making a big issue of blame for failing to raise suspicions. You need to recruit support for change; not put people's backs up.
 Weaken individual ownership of customer service and billing, and strengthen team ownership. This should be accompanied by a general increase in the level of responsibilty for various activities and cooperation and sharing within teams. Obviously there is a tightrope act here because some slackers might attempt to get a free ride on the back of effective colleagues within their team. Another issue you might encounter is an inherent attitidue of I'm not paid for that, the manager is, so why should I do it?
 Focus managers more on soft skills of team management and development. There should be open dialogue between teams and managers, and part of performance rewards for both managers and teams should in part be tied to team performance (with part still being tied to individual performance, to help reduce free riders).
 This should help give you a platform to actively shape your culture to encourage a higher degree of:two way trust and unswervingly ethical conducthigh moraleworker and organizational empowermentopenness and transparencyproductive behaviourswell-informed managementlong-term commitment and assumption of responsibilty at all levels of the organisationworker commitment to the company's culture, strategy and goals

Many companies/managers take culture for granted and assume that the charactistics listed in 4 already exist within the organisation, but fail to actively encourage their existence, or do so only at infrequent intervals. Consequently these characteristics occur in haphazard fashion. In your case, the lack of surprise displayed at what has happened is an indicator that some things are not right under the surface. Some of these characteristics are missing or not deep-rooted. Which means that there is work to be done.

You're already doing some of this. I noted how you handled the young employee who was complaining about lack of direction. But why wasn't already clear to him that this was the expectation? Why did it require your intervention?

I don't think the changes above will be easy or quick to achieve. And there is always the question of how do you fit fairly generic recommendations to the scale and scope of your company's activities and workforce. You will need to plan them carefully with your management team and be alert to feedback on how the company is accepting them. But I do think it is essential to begin this journey if you are to maximise effective use of your number one resource - your people.

 

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By alistair_king
03rd May 2012 04:29

Alternatives

There are other ways to solve your dilemma – but everything is a two edged sword (including my previous suggestions). For example, if you are currently tied to maintaining strong individual ownership of customer relationships, then the easiest actions you could take would probably be:

Implement a delegation of authority for approving quotes, prices and subsequent credit notes. You would also need to prevent self-approval by the owner of the customer relationship.Advantages – Improves transparency. Catches pricing errors.Disadvantages – Can slow down response time to customer (waiting for approver). Produces a less trusting, more hierarchical, more bureaucratic culture. Ties down management time with unproductive activity. Increases data retention needs because you need to maintain an audit trail to prove things were correctly approved. Requires either more management or reduced management attention to other areas. Errors can slip through if approval becomes a rubber stamp.Implement detailed profit monitoring – by customer or employeeAdvantages – Improves transparency. Can be useful for finding dogsDisadvantages – Can reduce trust if it's obviously rolled out as a police tool (to avoid this, roll out as an enabler for employees to manage customers).  Can induce complacency (we hit the profit target, no further action required vs. how can we further develop a mutually beneficial relationship with this customer to enhance profit).Implement weekly activity reviewsAdvantages – promotes transparency and management being informedDisadvantages – Can induce complacency as the review will develop a particular form over time and may become superficial (depends very strongly on maintaining the energy of the reviewer). Somebody glib could cover avoid discovery during such reviews.

There are other possible actions too… but they mostly fall into 2 broad categories – more authoritarian, relying on management to find and fix everything, or more inclusive, empowering the workforce to identify issues and fix them. You can attempt to hybridise these but this creates its own tensions as it is easy for people become unsure whether their response to any issue should be hierarchical or empowered.

Your goal in this would be to prevent any individual employee from being a weak point. Getting away with poor performance would be harder because there would be less place to hide. Getting away with fraud would require collusion with (or complacency from) colleagues/supervisors. Be careful if you go down an authoritarian route to solving these issues as you will need to frame your narrative carefully when rolling this out to avoid impacting trust and morale (which is why my instinct would be to go a more inclusive route). 

I hope my two posts stimulate your thinking. I am sure you and your management team will come up with some creative and healthy ideas of your own and I look forward to seeing what these are in future instalments of your blog.

 

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