What’s the most effective way to deliver customer satisfaction and bottom-line results? Most executives will claim consistent production and effective delivery. Let up on efficiency – or so the belief goes – and your business will suffer.
Certainly, carefully controlled project management, known as “organizing to execute,” is important, but it is rooted in early 20th-century assembly-line systems designed to minimize human error and limit variation.
In today’s knowledge-based economy, however, these strategies no longer apply. “More pay for productivity” is motivationally ineffective for any non-repetitive task (unlike work on a factory line). The focus on getting things done, and done correctly, ultimately drowns the innovation critical to long-term sustainability.
The problem with execution alone
By continuing to use antiquated execution strategies, companies lag behind in many ways.
When employees are told that speed, efficiency and productivity are what matters, ideas and information are not shared, especially with upper management. Questions are stifled, concerns are muzzled, insights are lost.
Also, unhealthy internal competition is born – in which information and insights are guarded closely and distrust is bred. And when a company is married to the organizing-to-execute management style, it can quickly fall victim to attribution error, crediting any success to its own practices and ignoring other possible factors.
A culture of learning
Companies that place learning as a cornerstone of their culture don’t focus on getting things done faster than their competition. Instead, they focus on learning faster. While some short-term gains may be sacrificed with this approach, the long-term consequences of not adopting it can be seen in the thousands of companies that died from a lack of innovation.
Some points on fostering a learning culture in the workplace:
•Accountability from above. C-level executives must be willing, open, and vulnerable to their staff in admitting when things went wrong and why.
•Hire smart. Skills are important, but so is the ability to take calculated risks and to be comfortable with change.
•Encourage and reward candour. Those who ask tough questions should be rewarded for doing so.
•Allow for mistakes. So long as employees are taking acceptable risks, learning cultures support them, even (and especially) when they fail.
•Build teams, not stars. Reward and recognize teams, not just individuals.
•Create systems. Organizing-to-learn and organizing-to-execute cultures are both rooted in systems, but the former rely on data collection and include means for real-time input.
•Encourage personal mastery, but collaborative decisions. Give your employees opportunities to perpetually master their skills and reward them to pool their knowledge for solutions to problems.
•Managers as coaches. Feedback is based on growth, not fault finding.
Casey Miller is president of Six and a Half Consulting, a management consultancy in Vancouver that specializes in leadership development, team building and corporate culture.
