Some company is buying your company (or vice versa). Why? They claim it's “Economies of scale,” and the combined organization will save money by centralizing “overhead” and flattening management.
You know who that “overhead” is: the people who support the business, such as finance and HR. And, the managers. Worse, the new management asks managers to “reapply” for their old jobs, the jobs they have right now.
It's a game of musical chairs that costs the organization way too much money, in value and delays.
First, a little review of musical chairs.
Musical Chairs Leave the Last Person Standing
If you're in management, you might feel as if you're playing musical chairs.
For those of you who haven't played in a while, here's how it works:
- The game leader counts the number of people and places one less chair than the number of people in a circle, their backs facing each other.
- Now, the game leader plays music, and people walk around the chairs.
- When the music stops, everyone has to find a chair.
- The person who can't find a chair gets knocked out of the game.
- The remaining people continue to play until just one person remains.
Why do managers feel as if they're playing musical chairs?
The musical chairs game focuses on resource efficiency. It disregards flow efficiency, management experience, and how the best managers support their teams. Because effective managers smooth the friction for the people they lead and serve. And effective managers reduce the cost of delay of the various necessary decisions.
This isn't a new idea. As with all these supposed cost savings and economies, these decisions increase management decision time. Let me start with people you've probably never seen in your job: Administrative assistants for departments and managers.
Administrators Smoothed the Work
Back in the 1970s, when I started to work, every department had an administrative assistant. (The managers each had their own assistants. Each department also had their assistant.) Those assistants had several roles:
- Take care of the non-promotable work that enhanced the culture, such as organizing condolence cards and birthday wishes. (See Leadership Tip #7: Be Wary of Spending Time on Non-Promotable Tasks.)
- Buying and stocking office supplies. (And making sure no one hogged them all. Don't get me started on how crazy it is to worry about the pennies companies spend on office supplies.)
- Removing work impediments, such as sufficient furniture, so people could collaborate.
We called these people secretaries or administrators, but they were much more than that. They removed the friction from the daily work while offloading some of the social niceties from the managers. And today, not even all senior leaders have an administrator.
Administrators made it easy for managers to do their value-added work of one-on-ones, coaching people, working with teams across the organization, and more. If you're a manager now, how much of your time do you spend on this work? Would you be more effective if you had an administrator to support you?
The 1980s changed work with the personal computer. Now, everyone could have a computer on their desk. What did we need administrators for? The people could do their own administration. The 80s were also an era of cost-cutting for many reasons. That's when many department administrators vanished. Some of the senior managers still had “their” admins, but the rest of us peons did not.
Consequences of Removing Support Staff
What were the consequences of this decision?
- Too many senior managers did not read their email—their secretary printed their emails. (A way of increasing “power over.”)
- Way too many women picked up the slack of the non-promotable work and enhanced the culture. (Read the Leadership Tip #7: Be Wary of Spending Time on Non-Promotable Tasks to see how that affected me as a director-level manager.) How many senior leaders do these kinds of culture-enhancing tasks? Not many. And in my experience, if women did this work, they lost their chance for a promotion to senior leadership.
- The work impediments increased. Too many organizations locked the supply cabinets because they spent “too much” money on office supplies. The coffee ran out. People and their managers had to fight the Furniture Police to get desks and chairs that fit.
And, as always, the cycle time to do the work increased.
Yes, you read that correctly. If you want faster throughput, people need to be able to do the work as part of a collaborative team. If you don't have a desk or chair that fits you, or if you can't find stickies or cards, you might not be able to do the work.
However, because we had our own computers and we worked in resource efficiency, not too many people noticed. (Unless you were female. I certainly noticed.)
Then came the “Great Flattening,” where senior leadership “flattened” the organization. All because senior leadership did not understand the value talented managers bring to an organization. (See the Modern Management Made Easy books for how to add value as a manager.)
Assessing a Manager's Value
Managers can offer substantial value at all levels of the organization. See Modern Management: What Value Do You Offer? for some ways I like to think about value.
Great managers can reduce the friction for the work we want and increase the friction for the work we don't want. That translates directly into decreasing cycle time and increasing throughput. Here are ways managers can do that:
- Make all the support work easy. Examples: Make office supplies and furniture easy to order and use. There are many ways to do this, but let's not make office supplies or furniture a version of The Hunger Games. And pay attention to the UI of the HR systems people are supposed to use to request their vacation, etc.
- Teach everyone how to offer feedback and coaching to each other, so the team can manage its interpersonal collisions and create better teamwork.
- Reduce the time to make a decision, especially management decisions. See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.
We might need some friction in the organization to prevent people from doing work that harms others. But most of that friction I see is the time to make more strategic decisions.
We need managers to make more strategic decisions because the people doing the work don't have enough time or context to make those decisions. Here's an example: If your manager asks you to work on two projects at a time, your manager is asking you to make the project portfolio decisions. How often has your manager explained you made the wrong decision?
That's a Cost of Delay. That one seemingly small decision creates friction for you, increases your cycle time, and costs the organization money.
When organizations choose to centralize, they focus on reducing operational expenses, not the value of reducing friction, the Cost of Delay. That will be in the next post.