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In their new book, TIME | TALENT | ENERGY: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, Bain & Company partner Michael Mankins and his co-author Eric Garton identify the specific causes of organizational drag – otherwise known as the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output and performance, and drain people’s energy.
The book claims that the average company loses more than 25 percent of its productive power to organizational drag. This is often an inevitable complication of companies getting larger and instituting more processes and procedures. As Mankins told writer Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company, the most common processes relate to expense management.
One secret of companies with less organizational drag involves putting a majority of star performers on mission-critical projects that are essential to the business. Another relates to the development of inspiring leaders.
In the book, Mankins and Garton suggest the following strategies for liberating employees’ time, talent, and energy, and consequently eliminating organizational drag:
Understand Exactly How Time is Spent
Software is now available to track meetings and other activities that eat up staff hours. Because time is money, it should be treated as such. This means being vigilant about creating and sticking to time budgets, and practicing good meeting management.
Connect Everything to Your Mission
Make sure your “reason for being” translates into an effective employee value proposition and that your people are engaged and motivated by your mission. Help employees understand how their daily work relates to the big picture and do what you can to ensure that they “head in” as opposed to “back in” to work in the morning. This will be easier if you deliberately develop leaders who are capable of inspiring their people AND getting results.
Eliminate Needless Bureaucracy
Strive to create a high-autonomy organization without losing benefits of scalability and repeatability. Strike the optimal balance between autonomy and organizational needs, and ask yourself whether you have fallen victim to unnecessary processes, micromanaging, and overly prescriptive rule books. Count the nodes – or intersections – in your organization. Are individual employees empowered to make decisions, or are they held up by the number of nodes through which they must pass? Examine your operating model carefully, looking at structure, accountabilities, governance, and methods. Your goal should be to simplify wherever possible!
The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity. Mediocrity is not destiny. In fact, I’ve even seen examples of government bureaucracies in tragically broken countries that dramatically turned around their performance in a matter of months. They do it through four leadership practices that lead to performance excellence. Each is a prerequisite for the next.
- Show the consequences of mediocrity. Your first job as a leader is to ensure everyone is clear about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Find ways to connect people with the experiences, feelings, and impact of good and bad performance. Keep the human connection alive by telling stories that illustrate work well done — or not. And avoid impersonal/bureaucratic language when talking about performance; frame your work in human terms every time you can.
- Use concrete measures as influence. Mediocrity often hides behind a fig leaf of absent, fuzzy, or excessive measures. In contrast, meaningful measures make poor performance painfully apparent. Goals should connect clearly and meaningfully to the work leaders are doing and why they are doing it.
- Establish peer accountability. Mediocrity is also often a sign of strong supervision. My colleagues and I have found that:
- On the weakest teams, there is no accountability.
- On mediocre teams, bosses are the source of accountability.
- On high performing teams, peers manage the vast majority of performance problems with one another. On top performing teams, peers immediately and respectfully confront one another when problems arise. Once you’ve helped the team connect deeply with what they do and why, and established meaningful measures, you need to build a culture of peer accountability – where everyone can challenge anyone if it is in the best interest of serving the shared mission.
- Speak up. High performance is a norm that needs to be defended regularly and vigilantly. There will inevitably be times you will be asked to make personal sacrifices to defend that norm. What you do in these moments is a sign to the team of your commitment to high performance — and, therefore, your worthiness to demand it of them.
Individual performance problems are far easier to address if you’ve done the work of establishing a norm of excellence. These four simple but important practices can rapidly and profoundly shift a group’s expectations in a way that leads to both better results and a substantially more rewarding work experience for everyone.
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Who do you think has the most intimate knowledge of your brand culture and business? Your employees are without a doubt one of the most untapped, organic sources of promotion and content within your organization, and yet few companies know how or when to use that resource and why it works.
Finding your hidden brand advocates.
Not every member of your team is going to be authentically emphatic about your company. If you have agreed to pursue the opportunity of using employee brand advocates in your marketing strategy, the first step is finding them. A questionnaire or voluntary online survey will help you expose the staff members who are most passionate about your brand, and the survey model will help them speak freely and comfortably about your products or services.
Once you have received the survey responses, a qualitative review will connect you to the staff members who are activated and ready to share positive things about your corporate culture. Engage those who provided the most energetic responses in the campaign planning. One important aspect about sharing your culture and brand from the inside out, is to make sure that you are involving staff from various departments, and not just sales or marketing. Then what you produce will be an authentic, non-fabricated expression of who you are as a business and why your products or services are outstanding.
Campaign strategies and ideas.
Did you know that one of the most endearing exercises that brands can engage in is transparency? Giving consumers a glimpse behind the scenes can include:
- Video tour of a production facility
- Meet and greet introduction to staff, from executive leadership to shipping and receiving
- Meeting the talent or creative team behind favorite commercials, products or services
- Celebrating long-term employees who achieve benchmark anniversaries with the company
- Holiday or fun corporate events that punctuate your brand’s mission and how that carries through to cultivating an enriched social and team environment
Consumers love brands who love their employees. And they also favor organizations that are proud of achieving a positive corporate culture.
Set Key Performance Indicator’s and guidelines.
Introduce the campaign to your employees and document your expectations and standards for sharing appropriately on social channels when referencing the brand. This may involve some training and support about social media best practice for employees who many not be used to sharing in an official capacity.
Make it fun! Create an incentive, contest or reward for staff who contribute to any advocacy campaign. It will help keep them excited about their involvement and inspire them to share more often.
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