MUSCLE BUILD YOUR ORGANIZATION
Most top managers know that they should be doing a better job of building the superior organization they want. They may not, however, know what the more successful managers are doing, or how to do it themselves. And while most would agree that their company's success hinges on the quality of its people, very few executives are willing to adopt the tough, aggressive approach to managing people that's required to produce a dynamic organization.
The only way to make a business live up to its potential is to get tough!
The hard truth is: Only an aggressive approach can make a big difference quickly. But it has its costs. At least initially, managers have to be willing to sacrifice continuity for a thorough shake-up. Nevertheless, most top-notch companies have been through the experience; it's what transformed the company into an outstanding organization. And once the transformation has taken place, things can settle down without a loss of momentum.
Winners (e.g., IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, Avery International, among others) emphasize "people development" as the way to "muscle-build" their organizations. By stressing the identifying and grooming of talent at every level, these companies eventually create a huge gulf between themselves and their competitors. They also hold on to most of their best managers even though other companies may recruit them aggressively.
If you think you do a good job of managing employees, try stepping back and asking yourself the following questions. They're a solid indication of whether people development is your company's number one daily priority.
Do you maintain consistent, demanding standards for everyone in your company - or are you willing to tolerate a mediocre division manager, an uneven sales force, a weak functional department head?
What are your hiring standards? Are you bringing in people who can upgrade the quality of your company significantly, or are you just filling holes? Are you willing to leave a vacancy open until you find an out-standing candidate — for months if necessary?
Are you hiring enough people? Does your organization have sufficient depth — a bank of talent to draw on — or do you sometimes promote people you know will never really produce outstanding results?
How effective is each area of your company at identifying high-potential managers and developing them quickly? Are promising people rotated carefully to expose them to different problems and functions?
Do you know specifically where your organization's biggest performance problems are? Are you taking steps to solve them, or are you looking the other way?
Do you make measurable progress each year in the quality of your senior management group and in the people heading each functional area? Are you generating clearly better quality executives and backups — not just people whose bosses assert they are better managers?
As the above questions suggest, traditional approaches to people development — like promotion from within based chiefly on job tenure — are no longer good enough. A company that uses experience as its primary criterion for advancement is encouraging organizational hardening of the arteries, especially if that experience came in an undemanding environment. Businesses today need better, brighter managers with a broader repertoire of skills — a repertoire that people cannot master by working their way up the steps of a one dimensional career ladder. Mergers and acquisitions, new technology, price pressures, and the information explosion all require a stronger and more savvy management team, people who can innovate and win in an uncertain future.
Ironically, as the need for more capable managers has heightened, the talent pool has shrunk. More and more of the most promising future business leaders are choosing the service industries — Wall Street, consulting, and smaller entrepreneurial companies — rather than moving into the big manufacturing enterprises.
These trends all call for upgrading the organization: strengthening your company's entire management group from the top to bottom and attracting and preparing future leaders through new approaches — in effect, muscle building. For most companies, I believe that this aggressive approach is the only way to make a business live up to its potential.
Muscle building an organization requires five separate but interrelated steps:
1. Set higher performance standards for everyone, and keep raising the standards. Recognize that performance can always be improved, and cultivate a spirit of constructive dissatisfaction with current performance among all executives and managers.
2. Develop managers through fresh assignments and job rotation; keep everyone learning. Don't let high-potential people stay in the same position or the same functional area too long.
3. Adjust every facet of the work environment — corporate culture, organizational structure, and policies — to facilitate and reward managers' development, rather than thwart the upgrading effort (as many formal systems do).
4. Infuse each level of the company with new talent. Bring in seasoned managers to solve organizational problems, to serve as backups for management succession, and to lead by example.
5. Use the Human Resources department as an active agent for a change. Human Resources executives should be partners in the upgrading process. Expect as much from them as from other top managers.
Lets look at each step in more detail. <continue> |
