Up-side down management

I had the pleasure of going to a talk by John Timpson on Monday, former CEO of Timpson, and I have to say he was excellent - amusing, modest, and very informative - highly recommended if you get the chance. He talked of his history, the history of the business, of his commitment to social causes, lovingly of his wife and children, and of course, through some of his thoughts on how he enabled the success of Timpson.

While he talked of a good variety of things that he (and his team) had done, the thing that struck me was that much of it could be summed up with the statement "enable the staff in shops to give brilliant service to customers, and get everything else out of their way to do that". Whether it was about empowering (and I mean truly empowering) the team on the front line, recruiting the right sort of people, removing policy or rules that reduced their freedom of action, making sure staff felt valued and are valued for giving great service, getting managers to serve their staff (rather than the other way round), helping people that didn't fit the company philosophy find better opportunities (my words, not his), much of it amounted to "give staff the freedom to serve customers brilliantly". And I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't too far off Timpson's company philosophy / brand value / value proposition / magic dust / whatchamacallit.

Which leads me to two thoughts...

(1) I often find myself in conversations with clients and colleagues about what organisations need to do well. To pick up an old argument using Treacy and Wiersema's Value Propositions, you could primary on one of product leadership, operational excellence or customer intimacy - best in class companies might achieve two. However, I feel otherwise... in my experience, organisations that set out to prioritise two, three, four or twenty things, rarely do any of them well. In my opinion you have to choose one - what is your (organisation's) fundamental, key, principal philosophy / mission / value / strategy / whatchamacallit / the thing that makes you super excellent. That's not to say that you can get away with doing everything else badly - not at all, but it means that when push comes to shove, you will always choose to drive the thing that makes your organisation excellent. Which leads me to...

(2) getting your business to work well together is about getting all the bits of it to join up in such a way that they all make (1) happen. In the Timpson example, serving customers truly excellently meant really really helping the guys and gals that deal with the customers to genuinely believe that they were empowered to do whatever it meant to make customers happy, to discard the processes and rules that stopped them achieving that, (with huge respect for how difficult it must have been...) to get the whole of middle management to work for the front line staff - retaining accountability while giving away responsibility, to make sure you have the right people joining and the wrong people leaving, and so on.

Whether we're talking a focus on product leadership, on operational excellence or on customer intimacy, getting your strategy, your values, your customer offer, your people, your processes, your leadership, your culture, even your financial delegation model to all reflect the thing that really makes your organisation successful, to all pull in the same direction IS going to drive organisational success. It sounds obvious doesn't it! And if it sounds obvious, then that must mean everyone's already doing it, right?

Sadly, that doesn't seem to be true - too often I hear of how process X, approval Y, or team Z get in the way of "getting the job done", but despite many clients knowing exactly what their problems are, they seem to be unable to take action to fix them. "Legal constraints", "government / regulatory policy", "best practice", "to protect the organisation", "to protect management", "to protect staff" (from themselves), the list of reasons goes on forever, and is frankly unhelpful.

So, two challenges...

(1) Do you know what is really driving value through your organisation to make it succeed? And does everyone else know? And do they really believe it?

(2) Is everyone making it happen? Or getting out of the way of those that do?

If management can do that, you may well be surprised by the up-side.

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p.s. you might also like to take a look at John's books Dear James (if you can find a copy), Upside Down Management or Ask John. And no, I'm not on commission :)