Switch from Managerial Mode to Observer Mode

When you know that your firm’s results are falling short of what they could be but you don’t have a clear, evidence-backed understanding of the root causes, it’s time to switch from managerial mode to what we at Mensana call observer mode.

Most of the time, your effort goes into managerial duties— tasks like strategy formulation, planning and coordination of business units’ workloads and resources, proactive or reactive decision making, personnel management, and performance monitoring.

If you weren’t doing these things, your company wouldn’t function at all. The thing is, when you’re doing them, your attention filters out most details that aren’t relevant to the task in hand.

You can only get a complete picture of what at your firm is working well, what is not, and how well the different moving parts cohere by switching into observer mode. This sort of work is not particularly rocket science, though it does require patience and discipline.

Above all:

• You need to have the time to set your other duties aside so you can spend whole days just watching your processes, tools, and people in action. A few hours here and there are not enough.
• As you observe, you have to put aside the assumptions and preconceptions that your past and present job roles at the firm have ingrained in you. These will only get in the way of letting you see things as they actually are—things that you may have been unaware of even though they’ve been happening in front of you for years.
• Your firm’s people need to be comfortable with your presence as an observer. If you being in the room as they work changes how they do their job, you won’t get a reliable picture of their working habits.
• You have to have an eye for detail. Inefficiencies are often the product of several small, unforeseen distortions or flaws in working processes, not one conspicuous issue.
• When you first notice what looks like inefficiency, you have to follow the trail that takes you to its origins, because what you have initially observed may just be a knock-on effect of a problem that arises elsewhere—even, perhaps, outside the firm.

When it comes to diagnosing what’s holding a company back from fulfilling its performance potential, you and your colleagues have the ability to do the kind of observational work described above. And if you did do it, you’d probably arrive at insights that could revolutionize how your firm operates. The problem is simply that your other commitments don’t give you time and space to properly go into observer mode.

That’s where firms like Mensana come in. We’re there to be your observer while you get on with running your company.