Handling a big initiative from headquarters

Dear Bob …

I work at a plant location for a Fortune 500 company, and during my time I have seen an incredibly capable IT team build value and enable the business better than anywhere I have ever worked. High accountability wasn’t how we got things done, project success depended on the individuals effort and the teams skills. There was CONFIDENCE across the board. In the end there really was no need to measure, the results spoke for themselves. Now, the leader we had has moved on and the company is undergoing an IT globalization effort. My sole job, and everyone else at my location is to advance the globalization effort. The real message there is to do what headquarters says. To prove that we’re doing what is needed, there is accountability – to _their_ goals. We have no ownership, no real input in the corporate goals, just tasks we will be measured for. Consequently, I am both continuing my education and looking for another job.

I think manufacturing companies fall into this trap much too easily. After all, all the workers on the production floor just do what they’re told, why can’t IT be the same?  Well its because we need to think about and design the systems to get work done and improve productivity, that is not a make 1, then make 1000 type of job. That’s a find/make the best one and do it well type of task, and it doesn’t get repeated, its got to be done right the first time. But I’ve always found that doing IT systems right requires more creativity and thinking than it does procedure and policy.

– A [broken] cog in the wheel

Dear Cog …

Your letter got me thinking about a frequent theme in our consulting practice, mentioned in Keep the Joint Running (“Optimizing the organization,” 10/27/2003″) – figuring out where you want to optimize. It’s something of a truism – in organizational development as well as engineering – that to optimize the whole you have to suboptimize the parts. When the enterprise has established a globalization initiative, it’s perfectly valid to insist that all parts of the company do their parts to make it succeed, yours included.

That leaves two challenges. The first is that you can’t plan a strategic program that immense as a single project. You have to break it into chunks, and ask those closest to the action to plan the chunks in detail. The risk there is that all too often, those responsible for the chunks don’t like the strategic program and plan their pieces so they succeed in support of the status quo, giving only lip service to the envisioned change they’re supposed to be advancing.

The second challenge is optimization: Left to their own devices, the different parts of the company will optimize themselves, usually at the expense of the rest of the company. So even if each area sincerely tries to support the overall initiative, it will do so with blinders on, optimizing for its own peak efficiency instead of making the trade-offs necessary for the whole company to work best.

Solving for this risk creates the Soviet Union challenge: Trying to manage a centrally planned economy. Most decisions are best made locally, where the expertise lives and the communication paths are shortest.

The only way to succeed in this kind of change is to push knowledge of and buy-in to the business reasons for making the change down to all parts of the company, so decision-making is local, but informed by the goals of the overall program.

Which gets me to my diagnosis of your situation. The missing piece is providing a better type of leadership, where you and your colleagues work in an environment where you have a better chance to make the goals your own, so you can actively contribute to them instead of just following instructions and painting by numbers.

Too bad. It isn’t easy to achieve this, but on the other hand your typical corporate executive does receive just a bit more than minimum wage – that’s what they’re paid to do.

Since they didn’t, you and your colleagues have a choice to make – to behave as if your company leaders had done what they’re paid to do, or to focus on your own patch of the world. I’m not going to advice you as to which is the better choice. On the one hand, supporting corporate is generally advisable, since corporate determines your long-term destiny. On the other hand, since corporate is going about this all wrong, the initiative is more likely to fail than succeed. If it fails, everyone will be judged based on how their own patch of the world is doing.

Which is to say, there are worse ideas than your plan of making yourself employable elsewhere.

– Bob