Philosophy

Traditionally, organizations are not strategically oriented. Instead, they use an incremental or reactionary approach to the structure and allocation of resources. This approach is often characterized as “muddling-through” or ‘that’s the way it’s always been done”. Instead of focusing on a few vital priorities, they tend to shot-gun their efforts and incrementally move in a variety of directions.

In contrast, strategic organizations concentrate their fiscal and human resources in strategic priorities that will move the organization toward significant and sustainable results.

An intelligent approach for structuring and focusing involved employees to improve service quality is through the use of the teams dynamic. Simply put, people together who can get the job done, regardless of their function or job classifications. Regardless of what you call it, there is little doubt that teams – all degrees, all levels, and all kinds of teams – will be a key component to any successful management structure.

Error rates, redundancy, and “bureaucratic busy work” plummet as work teams manage a customer service, production, delivery, or support process right across the organization. When managed effectively, these changes reenergize current employees, attract new employees, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce costs.

Many government organizations are internally driven. An organization is internally driven when it too often makes decisions based on departmental interest or past practices, and not on constantly updated information about customers’ changing needs.

In contrast, successfully changing organizations are becoming customer-driven instead of internally driven, so they can quickly and continuously understand, meet, and exceed their customers’ changing expectations.

What matters to the customer is what should matter to us. Therefore, those business processes that support the customer relationship should be the focus of efforts. Effective, entrepreneurial governments insist on customer satisfaction. They listen carefully to their customers. They restructure their basic operations to meet customer needs.

To service the customer, the design of the organization must start from the outside in – start with the customer and then work inwards.

A major contributor to poor customer listening and learning is management’s failure to fully connect with and listen to customers and front-line employees.

Many organizations are management-centered. In other words, managers see themselves as the central players in the organizations, and assume they need to control almost everything. As a result, managers can often inadvertently deny employees the information, skills, experience, and authority that employees must have in order to make meaningful improvements in their own areas.

In contrast, successfully changing organizations recognize that the world is moving too quickly for managers to:

1. Know enough... 2. Fast enough... 3. About enough things... 4. To be right enough... 5. Enough of the time... 6. To control enough things correctly... 7. To keep the enterprise from being swamped.

What’s the alternative to “management centeredness”? It’s employee involvement.

Employee involvement and empowerment is the systematic effort to build and benefit from the knowledge, skills and commitment of the workforce. By their closeness to work processes and to the customer – and by their sheer numbers – employees can know enough fast enough to improve things on a grand scale.

The people who work closest to the problem know the most about how to solve the problem.

Teams come in all shapes, sizes, and dispositions. They can be used at all levels of the organization.

Close-to-the-action employees often know more about customers and work processes than distant managers ever could. That’s why teams will perform certain “management work” better, faster, and cheaper than a stand-alone manager ever could.