What’s the goal of your organization?
Do this. Ask executives in your business what the goal of the business is. Is it to make market leading products and services? Is it to make and serve customers? Or is it really to make money?
Eliyahu M. Goldratt writes in his book “The Goal” that the goal of the organization “is to increase net profit, while simultaneously increasing both ROI and cash flow, and that’s the equivalent of saying the goal is to make money.”
The business may be about making a particular product or service. But the root goal is to supply money to its stakeholders and employees.
Is there an urgency within the organization to make money?
The farther you go up in the organizational chart the more you’ll find an urgency for making money. It’s sensible, because the higher the position the more responsibility it has for delivering results. Delivering financial results is directly correlated to keeping a job.
Yet you won’t find this same urgency in the lowest ranking levels of the organization. Those at the bottom of the organization are tasked with following procedures, gaining approvals, and struggling against organizational entropy. The processes we make, though well intentioned, often become the focus and goal of the rank-and-file. Getting through the day is not about making money, but about getting an approval and checking a box.
Urgency and bloated processes clash.
Let’s face it. Processes, by nature, grow with the aim of filling something that is missing. When something goes wrong human nature is to insert a new step so it doesn’t happen again. The process grows to try to cover it’s own inadequacies. Before long processes become filled with redundant and unnecessary steps. The irony is the process grows to account for exceptions and errors, but not to achieve the original goal.
Workers are rewarded for following all the steps and they soon find comfort and protection in the process. So it makes sense that the focus of the workers is on the process, not making money for the organization.
There should be an urgency to streamlining processes.
I’m not saying to abandon process and created an unstructured environment of work output. All organizations need some type of process to help create consistent work output at regular time intervals. Process is necessary. But leaders all the way up to the C-suite need to develop an urgency in keeping processes lean and focused on the goal. Help workers deliver more consistent work by making sure they are empowered and enabled to do the work efficiently.
Urgency comes from the top.
If an organization is to change it’s mindset about processes, it needs to come from the top. Management expectations do cascade downward. But if upper management is only concerned about the urgency of making money and not looking at how the organization can make it through operations, then inevitably the organization won’t make the money fast enough.
So spend some time thinking about current processes. Remove steps that don’t directly move work towards output. Remove redundant steps. Identify system bottlenecks, whether people or process, and determine how to alleviate it.
Am I missing something here? I just see big business has a big appetite for making money. But it can’t move fast enough because it trips over itself. So where is the urgency in that?