Virtualizing and outsourcing infrastructure – 7: negotiating lean and agile in building for a competitive edge, part 2

This is my seventh posting to date in a series on lean and efficient business and on how to increase your business effectiveness and competitive edge (see Business Strategy and Operations, postings 127- 129, 132, 135 and 138.) I started to build a foundation in Part 6 of this series for effectively negotiating and instituting the right change where it would make sense. I touched on a number of issues involved in more clearly understanding where your business is now and how its organization and your employees in it come together to identify and achieve goals. I said that this was a first step and my goal here is to take a look at next steps that would follow.

At the end of Negotiating Lean and Agile in Building for a Competitive Edge, Part 1 and the analytical and review steps it outlines you have a rough draft understanding of where your business is now. Now you make a reality check on this understanding by comparing it to what others in your business organization see and in how they determine and pursue priorities. The differences here can be crucial and not just in where one of your department heads and their managers seem to be following a different agenda than you have sought to set from the executive suite. This can be just as telling and at times even more important where you see department heads and their services at odds with each other – and certainly where their productive output has to coordinate effectively to help achieve overall business goals and priorities. I have seen this type of disconnect a number of times and its impact can be far-reaching with ripple effects of increased inefficiency and scheduling problems affecting everyone. But at the same time it can be difficult to resolve these problems because it can be difficult to clearly identify where specific remediation would be needed.

Look for similarities and the coordinated meshing of goals and priorities, and of processes and approaches for meeting them. Look for gaps and disconnects and use their resolution as a tool for identifying, arguing the case for and implementing effective change.

• When you find people working on the wrong things and in the wrong way – with too much effort going into non-core activities and capabilities, chances are you are also looking at places in your organization where there are disconnects and inconsistencies, creating opportunity for poorly made strategic and operational decisions.

Communicate to bring everyone to a shared understanding of what you seek to do, and at the mission and vision level and at the higher level strategic and operational levels. Work with the people who have to carry out these higher level organizing principles in day to day detail to find the best way to do that, and to get active buy-in and support where that would call for change. And negotiate the best ways to do this.

I will finish this posting by addressing a question I have heard a few times, and that I suspect at least some of my readers have come up with as well. “Why should I have to negotiate with people who work for me on what they do and how they do it?” That is a fair question and I will cite a couple of factors that should be taken into account, however you answer it.

• The larger and more complex a business, the more likely it is that members of the senior management have never gained hands-on experience and up to date expertise in all of the functional areas and activities required to support the business, and even if it is run as a lean and agile organization. The more senior you are as a manager, the more likely it is that you will find yourself supervising people with hands-on skills you do not share, that are crucial for effectively achieving necessary goals and priorities and completing assigned tasks. If this is true for middle managers, it is definitely true for C level officers too.
• Lean and agile requires empowering the managers and employees who work for you to make decisions, and sometimes quite rapidly to address emerging challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities. This means pushing decision making down the table of organization and that requires systems and processes that make this possible, and with genuine buy-in so these decisions are not simply made ad hoc. That sort of ad hoc leads with time to precisely the sort of disconnects and gaps I wrote of above.

The next posting in this series will shift to execution, and actively implementing lean and agile in a business.