Auditing Your Company’s Output – Peaking Productivity
Posted on February 28, 2010 | No Comments
Lance Winslow asked:
Before you can increase productivity and improve your company’s efficiency, you must audit your team’s output. Not just the executive team, but the teams in all your business units.
This is a lot more difficult than you might consider, you see middle managers that run these business units consider them their domain. They thus have procedures in place that work for them that they have designed.
They do not wish to have anyone come in and tell them how to run things. The idea of a process productivity audits seems to say; “we do not trust the way you are running things and so we are going to come in and show you a better way, because you are not smart enough to figure this out,” and thus, you can see why this does not sit well with them.
Further, these middle managers turn towards protectionism to put a fortress around their fiefdom. Worse, in all this misunderstanding most of the inefficiencies exist not because of the middle manager, but due to many years of their bosses telling them what to do, and how to do it, basically micro-managing every aspect.
It is for this reason that any efficiency auditing must be met with initial meetings asking for suggestions from the middle managers and look at their lists of ideas and potential process innovations first. Long before any recommendations are rendered from upper management.
Meanwhile, the efficiency auditing team must also get input from the underlings of the middle manager, so they do not feel slighted by any new policies that come down the pipeline. Please consider all this.
Caffeinated Content
Before you can increase productivity and improve your company’s efficiency, you must audit your team’s output. Not just the executive team, but the teams in all your business units.
This is a lot more difficult than you might consider, you see middle managers that run these business units consider them their domain. They thus have procedures in place that work for them that they have designed.
They do not wish to have anyone come in and tell them how to run things. The idea of a process productivity audits seems to say; “we do not trust the way you are running things and so we are going to come in and show you a better way, because you are not smart enough to figure this out,” and thus, you can see why this does not sit well with them.
Further, these middle managers turn towards protectionism to put a fortress around their fiefdom. Worse, in all this misunderstanding most of the inefficiencies exist not because of the middle manager, but due to many years of their bosses telling them what to do, and how to do it, basically micro-managing every aspect.
It is for this reason that any efficiency auditing must be met with initial meetings asking for suggestions from the middle managers and look at their lists of ideas and potential process innovations first. Long before any recommendations are rendered from upper management.
Meanwhile, the efficiency auditing team must also get input from the underlings of the middle manager, so they do not feel slighted by any new policies that come down the pipeline. Please consider all this.
Caffeinated Content