Editor's Page

Citation

Hensler, D.A. (2000), "Editor's Page", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 4 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2000.26704daa.001

Editor's Page

Man your picks and shovels, keep your head down

Recently, I had a discussion with a couple who own and operate a small consulting firm with laboratory facilities and with projects in North America, South America, and Asia. They were lamenting that they were having difficulty motivating their staff to help them grow the firm to approximately four to five times its current size. Among other concerns, their laments included an apparent lack of carry-over from one project to the other. I asked if they held a "lessons-learned" session at the conclusion of a project, to which they answered woefully, "No".

Lessons-learned sessions can be quite painful to experience and this is often the reason that managers and employees avoid them. These sessions, and other methods, can produce excellent results and provide a setting in which trust can prevail and organizational knowledge can grow. So what is a manager to do?

To answer this question, one can start with that old and true TQM advice that the manager is responsible for the system. People interact with the system and are an integral part of it. Ultimately, the manager is faced with the motivation issue, just like that earlier mentioned. So, does the manager urge his employees to man their picks and shovels, to keep their heads down attending to output, to at all times be "productive"? If so, herein lies the problem.

At one time or another, we all have probably lapsed into the mental model that unless we are actually producing some end product we are not being productive. This is often the source of the workaholic feeling underachieved in spite of being perceived as an overachiever. The problem is that the pick-and-shovel mentality leads to too much focus on output and too little focus on system design and design review. We simply do not provide enough time for people to think about what they are doing.

Senge (The Fifth Discipline) provides an excellent metaphor for this. He uses the example of a ship and asks managers to identify their roles as leaders. Answers that include directing, controlling, motivating, etc., abound. Senge's point is that the ship's design probably has more influence on its performance than any of the other legitimate leadership roles. And so we return to the manager's job, the system, more emphatically, the design of the system. Moving attention from controlling to designing marks the transition from manager to leader.

An important facet of system design is setting metrics to measure performance of the system. This journal is about measuring business excellence, but how do we know we are measuring the right things. Shouldn't we also be in the business of helping managers and leaders design their organizations so that they perform better? We can come up with all the wonderful measures for business excellence that will appear in this journal and others. But unless we provide the time for all to design better and higher performing systems, we are not optimizing our organizations. This is as applicable to the employee's job as it is the manager's. So, the next time we find ourselves thinking, "Why don't Charles and Susan have their hands on their shovels and their heads down?" let's also ask, "Have we designed the system so that Charles and Susan clearly understand where the metaphorical ditch is supposed to go?"

Douglas A. HenslerJoint Editor