Use this approach to make your ways of working more disciplined, consistent, and effective by level, remit and choices, and systems and tools:
- Level, Remit and Choices:
- Board – governance
- CEO – cultural leadership
- C-Suite – strategic leadership
- Middle Management – operational leadership
- Front Line supervisors – tactical leadership
- Systems and Tools: Decision rights, communication platforms and linking mechanisms, feedback loops and adjustment
Accepting that these overlap, let’s add some color to each.
Ways of Working by Level, Remit, and Choices
In general,
- Boards are accountable for governance and oversight. They approve strategic, annual operating (P&L, cash flows, balance sheet), future capability, succession, contingency, and compensation plans, laying out mandatory physical, reputational, and financial policies in line with regulations and societal norms, and are consulted and informed on everything else.
- CEOs must own the culture and values: Who we are and what we stand for.
- C-Suite owns core strategic choices and processes: arranging resources before deployment with a focus on the longer-term, crafting a master narrative and intent.
- Middle Management owns relationships across units and functions, shepherding the most important cross-functional programs.
- Front-line Supervisors are the tactical leaders, deploying and adjusting resources in real time with a shorter-term focus on the decisive point, bounded by mandatory polices, recommended guidelines, strategic choices, and cultural mandates and playing out in projects and tasks.
- Front Line: The people actually doing the work design, produce, sell/market deliver/distribute, or provide service.
Ways of Working Systems and Tools
All these inform the right set of systems and tools to support the way people in your organization are going to work together.
Decision Rights
There should always be a single decision-maker who is the individual with the best talent, knowledge, skills, experience, and, where appropriate, craft-level caring and sensibilities to make any particular decision. Others, whether they work with or for the decision-maker or the decision-maker works for them, should either be consulted – providing their perspective to help the decision-maker decide, or informed – either before or after the decision is actually implemented depending upon the circumstances.
Communication Platforms, Linking Mechanisms, and Feedback Loops
It’s time to trade reports and presentations for click-throughs. Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have reached the point at which almost any organization can have a single, continuously updated, real-time data-base of information coupled with an AI engine to enable anyone to understand the current:
- Mission, vision, values/guiding principles, and governing policies
- Status, understanding, and insights into customers, collaborators, capabilities, culture, competitors, conditions
- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats => key leverage points and business issues (SWOT)
- Strategic priorities
- Status of any key performance indicator at any level with a couple of clicks at the enterprise, function, business unit, program, project, or task level.
If you follow the “what” – “so what” – “now what” approach to analysis, your technology/AI engine should spit out what’s going on so everyone can spend their time drawing “so what” conclusions, and debating “now what” implications and actions – behind-the-scenes, and in all meetings including board meetings. Trade all meeting pre-reads for a single, continuously updated portal/platform.
Meeting Management
This suggests a new set of guidelines for meeting management:
-
- One person responsible for the meeting process
- Single overall objective set – purpose/outcomes: celebrate, learn, contribute, decide
- Agenda (process) set with clear expectations for celebrating, disseminating/learning, debating/contributing, and deciding by item with time allocated to match what’s needed and a bias to tackling fewer things better with more time on each thing in any one meeting
- Attendees include those needed to celebrate, learn, contribute, decide – and no one else – with a bias to seven people +/- two in decision-making meetings. More than nine and people have to fight for air time. Less than five and you sacrifice diversity of perspectives.
- Pre-work, analysis, and pre-reading to people far enough in advance for all to learn/contribute to their fullest potential, including thinkers that like to mull things over ahead of time – ideally through a single, continuously updated portal/platform
- Meeting participation and timing facilitated to optimize celebrations, learning, contributions, and action-oriented decisions, ending when the overall objective is achieved
- Meeting notes out promptly (or up on portal/platform) likely with an AI assist to reinforce the celebrations, memorialize decisions and actions, invite other ideas to improve current best thinking, and kick off the preparation for the next meeting as part of continuous feedback loops and adjustments.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, do send any ideas on any of this to me at [email protected].
