I'm Just Sayin, What Happens Next?
Mike Ferguson, Fresh Ground Consulting
Great leaders have learned to understand, appreciate, and manage a variety of work-styles. They may not articulate their understanding the same way an organizational psychologist would, but on some level they have firmly grasped the concept that different people contribute different strengths and styles to running an operation and getting things done. More importantly, they understand their own strengths and weaknesses.
One of our operating principles at Fresh Ground Consulting is to bring energy and thoughtfulness to managing our workload. This idea emerged from encountering many different situations throughout my career that benefited by achieving a better balance between thought and action.
Ernest Hemingway famously advised that one should never confuse movement with action. I have always been suspicious of a lot of movement, in myself as well as other. Movement makes me feel like things are getting done when, perhaps, very little is being accomplished. As a leader, seeing a lot of movement in your organization can also feel like progress is being made when it’s really just a lot of running in circles.
Effective leaders stay out of the movement trap by looking behind the curtain and asking probing questions and actually listening to the answers. The questions they ask all the time are simple: “What is getting done? What’s next?” So, the people who work for them learn that looking busy is not enough.
Allowing movement to be mistaken for action is not sustainable and highly inefficient. The failed process will crash regularly, forcing real action into the system, but because the system is then in crisis, the people in the organization will not be operating at optimal effectiveness and, what's worse, success will feel random, untraceable.
Some of the “fastest” companies I have ever worked with, organizations that accomplished a stunning amount of quality work, have also been the quietest and least frenetic.
As a manager, when I meet with staff I want to understand what they are doing, not so I can micro-manager how they do it, but so I can fulfill my responsibility as a manager to see that things are actually being accomplished. For most of my career, I have managed managers, so I try to pay very close attention to how they track not only their own projects, but the projects and progress of those they supervise. They learn quickly that I like to see things written down and by our third meeting they have usually compiled an impressive to-do list, which they display proudly to demonstrate how busy they are.
A simple to-do list is better than no list at all, so I reinforce the behavior while communicating that it is an incomplete tool unless they can answer the question that is at the heart David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) approach: “What’s the next action?”
Managing our personal workload and the collective workload of an organization requires a variety of styles, but also balance between thought and action, between energizers and incubators. If you’re not sure where the balance point is in your organization, and if you suspect a lot of movement without momentum, it might be time to revisit the concept of “Management By Wandering Around” and spend a day in other people’s offices asking them what is getting done and what happens next.