How to
Walk Around the Office--Even If There Isn't One
Consultant Tom Peters popularized the idea of "management by walking around" as an effective way to monitor an organization. In the era of working from home, technology can replace shoe leather.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Tom Peters, whose 1982 book, In Search of Excellence,
(co-authored with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.) started an entire movement, got a
lot of things relating to management strategy correct. And he got almost as
many guesses wrong when it pertained to which specific companies were likely to
be long-term winners. Prediction is tough under the best of circumstances; predicting
the future is even harder.
But one of the things he absolutely hit out of the park was his
concept of Management by Walking Around (MBWA), which suggested that (a) the
best managers are those who were most adept at regular, ongoing communication,
especially with the front-line troops, and that (b) the most valuable and
instructive of those communications are almost always informal and face-to-face
in the field. Covid-19 has largely removed the prospect of many of these
conversations going forward.
Not surprisingly, those critical conversations were most often
accomplished by managers who spent a significant amount of time patrolling
their offices, buildings and factories and listening to their people at all levels.
Careful and consistent listening to everyone who is willing to share is the way
important insights, crucial data, innovative ideas, suggested practical
changes, and employee attitudes are gathered and ultimately evaluated and
implemented where appropriate.
Peters made clear that the image of a bunch of executives
quietly sitting behind their desks on the umpteenth floor trying to manage
complex entities and waiting patiently for the news and reports of the day to
make their way upstairs, was an old time and unrealistic fantasy. Information
has no value unless it's effectively and timely communicated and turned into
actionable knowledge. Knowledge is nice to have, but it's not useful and
powerful until it's applied and results in concrete actions and reactions.
Shared knowledge and ideas are force multipliers that aren't subject to the law
of diminishing returns. Businesses have simply become too complicated, too
distributed, and too layered to be effectively administered from afar,
after-the-fact, or exclusively top down.
In addition, we know that the precision, quality, and immediacy
of information deteriorates as it rises and is sweetened and softened through
the organizational ranks. Some things never change, and no one wants to be the
messenger who gets killed or the bearer of unpleasant news or the
"bad" in anyone's day. Just ask any of the mopes remaining in the
Trump White House these days who are scared to death to be in the presence of
the raving mad Orange monster.
If anything, an informal fact-finding and investigative process
like this is even more important in a time of abrupt change, disrupted org
charts, broken chains and channels of communication, and a growing and
semi-permanent remote workforce. But unless senior managers start making house
calls like the doctors of old, it's hard to imagine that things aren't likely
to just keep getting worse.
In a world permanently turned inside out by the continuing
necessity/desire to work from home (WFH) the need for
alternative methods of effective communication, information sharing, morale
management, productivity measurement, and, of course, innovation is going to be
one of the most massive challenges every business will be facing. The reality
is that if you can't see your business, it won't be your
business for long. MBWA, if it's not absolutely obvious by now, simply cannot
work with a material portion of your workforce perpetually remote.
As new team members enter this radically changed environment
where any company's protocol, culture and strategy will all be much more
difficult to share, maintain, and embed in the newbies, they will be
increasingly reluctant, if not loathe, to say much of anything, step forward
with suggestions, complain or criticize. In addition, many will be
technical resources who are notoriously introverted to begin with, which will make
the prospect of them readily and promptly participating and contributing to the
critical company conversations even more unlikely. But at least the techies
have shared code bases, enforced peer review, and an underlying set of
procedures for input and review. The majority of the other team members (new
and old) will have little in the way of tools to help them cope with the new
world of remote work.
Fortunately, there are powerful solutions at hand, one of which
I wrote about in 2016 that has only gotten
better and added new important features and functionality as well. It's a
company started in 2015 in Chicago (when I was the CEO of the incubator 1871)
and now based in San Francisco called Balloon, which has
developed a comprehensive system for companies to connect and collaborate with
their workforces. I think of it as a streamlined and tech-enabled way of
"keeping in touch," but, even more importantly, as an effective
replacement for some of those MBWA one-on-ones and factory floor conversations
that may never return.
And, for management, it's especially timely and valuable because
your employees, wherever they're located, will do most of the initial,
relatively painless work by anonymously inputting their own concepts, comments,
suggestions, proposals, etc. into the system and/or responding to prompts
generated by the company or by Balloon's experts. The system encourages and
incents them to do so in an efficient and emotionally rewarding fashion as
others join in the discussion. The company's analogy is to a new idea, or
balloon, rising through the organization, urged on and advanced by others as
they evaluate and get behind it. Similar to sites such as Reddit -- and a
cousin to concepts such as prediction markets -- they basically upvote an idea
by secret ballot until it reaches management for final review and action. At
that point, and usually not before, the identity of the idea's author (if the
employee chooses) is revealed and, where appropriate, credit and recognition
can be given to that team member.
Even more importantly, no one is penalized or stigmatized for
suggestions that don't make the cut. In addition, as the process proceeds,
there are no uncomfortable collisions between departments, turf wars,
stepped-on toes, or other structural or personal impediments to progress. And
finally, management will have clear quantitative evidence of the amount and
extent of support for the suggestion, comment or proposal throughout the
company. Implementations and change management are a great deal easier when
everyone's already leaning in the right direction.
But the four even greater wins for companies who quickly
incorporate the Balloon program into their own post-pandemic communication
plans are: (1) substantially improved team buy-in at all levels because
management is demonstrably encouraging and asking the right questions and
listening to the answers; (2) huge jumps in the quality and quantity of the
innovation pipeline because all of the typical and traditional barriers to the
free flow of ideas (as well as systemic biases and prejudices) are instantly
removed by the initial anonymity surrounding the submissions, including
concerns about age, experience, title, authority, gender, position and rank.
Anyone, anywhere in the company can have a great idea and see it come to fruition.;
(3) ideas are improved, iterated, enhanced and expanded through the process
with asynchronous input from experts across the company without wasting
enormous time and resources in assembling teams for physical meetings, which
would most likely be impractical or impossible right now anyway and (4)
everyone has a new, real-time connection to, and engagement with, what's going
on, what's around the corner, what needs to change or be fixed, how can things
be improved, and how they can contribute to the business's progress in
meaningful ways.
Instead of just talking about it, companies that want to grow
and prosper can incorporate real and substantive transparency into their
organizations. As one Balloon client said a long time ago: "It was like
putting on glasses for the first time." And there's another very critical
benefit that senior management, in its ill-founded belief in its omniscience,
often overlooks.
Applications such as Balloon represent an internal,
next-generation, early warning system to provide alerts and actual data from
the field about unexpected, unforeseen and unanticipated threats and risks.
Because today, it's what you don't know that you don't know that can kill your
business in no time at all.
JAN 5, 2021
