All Posts Tagged With: "management"
Leading Also Means Managing
Some leaders believe that leadership and management are two different things and they are only responsible for one of them. In “True Leaders Are Also Managers” (HBR, August 11, 2010), Robert I. Sutton uses the words of Warren Bennis to describe a common perception: “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.”
Sutton disagrees, arguing that such a distinction produces leaders with big, vague ideas that can have little to do with reality or can be nearly impossible to implement. It isolates leaders from reality, giving them a reason “to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve.”
The Baldrige Criteria does not make this distinction. The first Category in the Criteria asks a number of questions about how senior leaders lead and manage:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders personally promote an organizational environment that fosters, requires, and results in legal and ethical behavior? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create a sustainable organization? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create an environment for organizational performance improvement, innovation, and agility? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce? (Manage)
- How do senior leaders encourage frank, two-way communication throughout the organization? (Manage)
- How do they take an active role in reward and recognition programs? (Manage)
- How do senior leaders focus on creating and balancing value…
What Great Organizations Achieve
The bottom-line question every senior leader asks about Baldrige is: What does this management system stuff have to do with the bottom line?
John Friel, former president and CEO of Baldrige Award-winner Medrad and the man responsible for leading the metamorphosis of its management system, answered that question for himself in 1989 when he visited Milliken, a textile manufacturer that had won the Baldrige Award the previous year. “They talked about two things that struck me,” said Friel. “They were the market share leader, charging the highest prices and getting the highest margins in the industry, and they had the highest customer satisfaction and retention. That’s when I was converted.”
Milliken’s second point put the responsibility to act on Friel’s doorstep. “They told everyone to stand on a chair and yell at the top of their lungs, ‘Management is the problem!’”
When Friel took over as Medrad’s CEO in 1998, he solved that problem by committing Medrad to annual Baldrige applications. The results came quickly. The company’s revenue started growing at 15% a year. It increased operating income as a percent of revenue, a measure of profitability, from 16 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2002. Its percent of “very satisfied” customers exceeded 70, with more than 80% very satisfied with its service. Employee satisfaction exceeded the best-in-class industry benchmark. In a national survey of 57 medical imaging companies, Medrad ranked second. None of its direct competitors finished in the top 20.
A management system consists of interrelated parts. Medrad’s approaches deliver the…
22Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.
- Mobility of management. It takes a long time to understand how a company works. Annual performance ratings encourage management mobility, which leaves too few people who really understand…
What Makes a Good Manager?
“If we put all of their heads together, the great management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer,” writes Matthew Stewart in his thought-provoking book, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009). This is his answer:
“A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.”
A former management consultant, Stewart questions the value of a business school education and the validity of management consultant’s theories in helping leaders and their organizations succeed. While he takes dead aim at such luminaries as Taylor, Drucker, and Peters, he ignores gurus like Juran and Deming who helped define total quality management and,…
30Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Baldrige Right for Your Organization?
Absolutely.
It doesn’t matter what you do or how big or small you are, integrating the Baldrige model will make you a better organization. I’ve worked on Baldrige with medical centers, a K-12 school, a college and a university, a Wing Command of the National Guard and an Army base, a district court, a large market research company and a small one, a pharmaceutical company, medical device manufacturers and a computer manufacturer, a transport refrigeration manufacturer, a dental products manufacturer and dental insurers, printed circuit board manufacturers and a power supply manufacturer, and a gas and electric utility. Baldrige helped all of them improve performance.
But.
These organizations wanted to improve. Your organization may not. Baldrige is definitely right for your organization if you can answer these questions “yes”:
- Do senior leaders believe change is necessary?
- Will they support transforming your management system?
- Are senior leaders (preferably the senior leader) promoting Baldrige?
- Is your organization committed to performance excellence?
If you answer “no” to any of these questions, you can still conduct a Baldrige assessment and apply for the Baldrige and state awards and act on the opportunities to improve that are identified, but change will be slow and it will be hard to sustain. In the end, senior leadership must embrace Baldrige as a systematic, long-term approach to improving performance or you’re just diverting resources to a short-term program.
As Deming and Juran stated, 85-95% of an organization’s problems are caused by the system, not by the people working the system, and management controls the system. It will only…
2Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHands-On Leadership
“Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry.”
The quote from Stanford University emeritus professor James G. March appeared in a BusinessWeek article, “The Best Leadership Is Good Management,” by Henry Mintzberg (August 9, 2009; h/t Richard Mallory on the LinkedIn MBNQA Examiners Group). The point of the article, Mintzberg writes, is that “U.S. businesses now have too many leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing. So they don’t know what’s going on.”
The Baldrige model addresses this issue head on. In the first Item of the first Category, the Criteria ask how senior leaders are personally involved in setting, sharing, and living their organizations’ vision and values, promoting legal and ethical behavior, creating a learning environment committed to performance excellence, and engaging in two-way communication with employees.
By embedding core values such as a focus on the future, Baldrige organizations value long-term thinking and ensure that leaders are involved in the actions, as well as the ideas, that will achieve their goals.
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Reconsidering Layoffs
In tough economic times, too many companies turn to the quick fix of laying people off. Michael W. Rude, global HR chief at Stryker, a medical technology company in Michigan, says, “From our perspective, any kind of layoff is a sign of mismanagement.” (BusinessWeek, “Is Optimism a Competitive Advantage,” August 13, 2009)
The alternative to laying people off is engaging them in finding solutions that avoid layoffs. In my first book, The Baldrige Quality System (Wiley, 1992), I told a story I heard from Frank Caplan, a Washington consultant:
“When I was a kid we lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My grandfather and uncles worked in the steel plants there. During the Depression, Bethlehem Steel got its employees together in large groups and said, “It looks to us like this depression is going to be a long-term proposition. We’re afraid the economy as a whole is in trouble. We want you to help us think very carefully about how to deal with each other and the company in these circumstances.”
“I remember my grandfather talking about this at the dinner table that night. He said, ‘We decided that those of us who had the most seniority will only work two or three days a week if times get really bad, so the rest of the people can be kept on the payroll.’”
Times got bad. Steel companies let people go to the degree, Caplan remembers, that “one out of three people on Pittsburgh’s streets was a laid-off steel worker.” But nobody got laid off by Bethlehem Steel.
Stryker…
17Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
