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When we started this podcast, we had to figure out a lot of it on our own, which was pretty daunting at times. When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list just keeps growing and it can begin to consume every waking moment. Finding the right tool that helps you out and simplifies everything can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify, Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com selling leadership go to shopify.com leadership.
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Management by walking around has often been touted as a critical activity to motivate your people and give them greater clarity. But we don't often talk about how valuable it can be in helping you to get a handle on what's happening below you. In this episode, I give you seven rules of thumb to help you successfully implement management by walking around.
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is design to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 386 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode Truth doesn't travel up. Trust but Verify. Leadership is about human connection. You can't lead at your best unless you can connect with and influence your people. Which is why I'm such a big fan of the face to face interactions that physical co location facilitates. Virtual and remote work has its place, but it's a poor substitute because every interaction is just a little more transactional. The concept of management by walking around was pioneered almost a century ago, but it's still as relevant today as it ever was. Your people need to see you, but it's equally important that you see them. If you want to avoid becoming insular and falling into an emperor's new clothes delusion, it's critical to gather information informally from every corner of the team. Truth doesn't travel up, you have to actively pursue it and the higher up you go the harder that is. I'll start this episode by explaining the principles of Management by Walking Around. I'll show you how it can help you to calibrate and confirm the information that you get through your formal channels. And I'll finish with my seven keys for successfully implementing a Management by Walking around culture so let's get into it Management by Walking around originated in the 1940s. First attributed to David Packard, who was co founder of Hewlett Packard. It was a defining characteristic of what he called the HP way. The theory was that getting around and talking to people in a spontaneous, unplanned way would contribute to better performance. Tom Peters further popularized this in the 1980s with his book In Search of Excellence. Peters recognised the role that Management by Walking around played in high performing companies and he argued that managers should go to see the places and people where the real work gets done. I checked the background of Management by Walking around with the most reliable website in the world, Wikipedia. It explained the benefits this A manager who employs this method by random sampling of events or employee discussions is more likely to facilitate improvements to morale, the sense of organisational purpose, productivity and total quality management as compared to remaining in a specific office area and waiting for employee and status reports to to arrive there. During my executive career I relied heavily on the corridor conversations, the site visits and the random encounters that were made possible through management by walking around. It has a huge range of application and benefits, many of which aren't immediately obvious, so I'll get to some of these shortly. The most common benefit is that you get to touch, feel and smell what's going on. It brings a much deeper sense of understanding to what you're reading in reports and hearing in meetings. Without it, it's pretty hard to know what's really happening below you, especially since the higher up you go, the more you tend to lose touch with what the business is actually doing. An article last year in the Economist by my favourite columnist Bartleby re examined the principles of management by walking around to see if they're still relevant in today's post Covid virtual world. It was titled Leaving the Seat of Power and it gets to the nub of the issue fairly quickly. One reason to leave your desk and get out into the real world, Bartleby suggests, is motivational. Most employees like attention. A recent study looked at the impact of a new divisional manager's visits to the branches he oversaw in a Latin American bank. This study concluded that sales performance is elevated around the time of the visits, but it also concluded that the effects are short lived, which may inform our view on how regularly we should venture out. This finding may not necessarily be strongly correlated, but it does rhyme with the Hawthorne effect. Emerging from research conducted in the 1920s and 30s by Australian born psychologist Elton Mayo, the Hawthorne effect explained the uplift in productivity at a Western Electric plant in Illinois. The researchers varied a range of working conditions in the factory, for example, the intensity of the lighting to see if they had any impact on productivity. No matter what they did, productivity seemed to go up. Their breakthrough conclusion was that because there were researchers moving around the factory floor with clipboards, making observations of the staff, that in itself caused them to lift productivity. Being there makes a difference. Another reason for management by walking around is to go out to the front lines to see problems and to solve them. Toyota, one of the world's most successful manufacturers, had this firmly embedded in their culture. Translated to English as go and see for yourself, Toyota emphasises the value of seeing any production problems firsthand. In one Toyota plant in the uk, managers talk about having to earn the right to digitise. This forces leaders to be in touch with problems in the real world. Otherwise things that can be consumed on a screen might end up being an excuse for bosses to stay away from the factory floor. This takes some serious discipline, though. The last thing you want to do is swoop in from above and give directions or meddle in the problems below your level. This is where the expression seagull managers comes from. A seagull manager swoops in uninvited, shits all over everything, steals a chip and then flies out again. You think you're being helpful, but the impacts on everyone else can be significant. More on this in a minute. But it's not hard to work out how a seagull manager could be viewed negatively by the people they're trying to help. The other danger of impromptu visits to the front line is that by by their nature, when you ask someone to share their issues, it raises an expectation.
- [07:54]
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That you're going to resolve them.
- [07:56]
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You talk to them and listen intently, and you may inadvertently make promises that you're in no position to keep. This can really backfire if nothing happens as a result. If there are a lot of layers between you and the front line, there are lots of potential failure points on the way to solving any problem. But if people feel as though you've made a commitment and not fulfilled it, even the most positive visits can have unintended consequences. Bartowy notes that wandering around demands some discipline. Bosses are busy, so doing Management by walking around well requires them to make a conscious effort to leave the office and to invest time into solving the problems they see. The Economist article concludes that in an era of zoom calls and data analytics, there's still no substitute for shoe leather. I think it's also important to mention one other thing that isn't raised in any of the literature that I've read on this, and that's the potential working at level problem. There may be very good reasons why the local manager has said no to something. They live with the problems on a daily basis and the story you hear at the frontline when you occasionally venture down is going to be embellished to get the desired reaction. Frontline workers aren't silly. They know what to say to hit your hot buttons. Now, you can't get into the habit of doing work that should be done at the levels below you. First of all, you're not close enough to the action to know what's really going on, so your response is likely to be ill informed. Secondly, anytime you make a decision or give direction to people below your direct reports line, you disempower every leader in between. One of the less obvious benefits of management by walking around is the opportunity for you to calibrate the other pieces of information you're receiving. Reports, verbal updates, presentations, one on one conversations. There are two effects that are inherent in every organizational hierarchy. The first is the dilution effect. This is about how information flows downwards. Think of it from the perspective of a CEO with a six layer organisation hierarchy and say, 1,000 staff. In terms of the company strategy, the CEO usually understands it pretty well. She can describe it eloquently. She can answer any question from people at any level about the origins, intent and effectiveness of that strategy. But even when you go just one level below and hear how the executives on the ELT describe the strategy, the explanation isn't quite as crisp and the answers to the questions aren't quite as confident. So you can imagine what this looks like by the time it gets to the front line leaders. Any correlation between what the strategy is and how that leader explains it is purely coincidental. The other effect is the sanitization effect. Information that flows upwards to the CEO's office is filtered at each level it passes through. People aren't necessarily being untruthful. But you can't tell your boss everything. So you have to choose what to include in reports and updates. And you have to choose the tone of the commentary that goes with it. Optimism, bias combined with the desire to be seen in the best possible light ensures that the real picture often doesn't make it to the boss's table. These two organizational realities, the dilution effect and the sanitization effect, make it even more critical that you test and calibrate any information that you receive from below. You're not trying to catch people out. Rather, you should think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. You're going to be given a number of pieces by your direct reports to explain what's going on, and their commentary is going to fill in the gaps to make it seem real and compelling. But you know you're not getting the full story. It's up to you to have informal conversations with people all the way through your team, top to bottom, so that you can get information from as close to the source as possible. And you use that to calibrate your understanding from the more formal reporting. This is by far the most effective way I found to fine tune your bullshit detector. Okay, so we've heard about the benefits of management by walking around. For your people, it's a great tool for motivating them and keeping them focused on the right things. But for you, it's a cracking way to gather information from the source and calibrate this with the more structured and controlled information you're being presented with. I want to give you seven keys to implementing a management by walking around strategy so that you can maximize your results. And we've prepared a free PDF resource which you can download@yourcomentor.com. The first key is to make your walkarounds as spontaneous and unpredictable as possible. Despite the research findings that performance improves before a site visit, I always found that I got the best results from unannounced appearances. If people knew I was coming, they'd prepare in advance. And of course they'd try to put their best foot forward. As soon as you're gone, they breathe a sigh of relief and things go back to the way they were before they heard about your visit. You never see a truly accurate picture, but the whole purpose is to get away from sanitized, stage managed interactions. This is why just occasionally, I turn up at an operating site at 2 o' clock in the morning to check out the night shift and see what was really going on. The second key is to try to have casual, meandering conversations. The purpose of management by walking around isn't to have intense discussions about their work. This is just going to drive people into defensive mode. You want to build a bit of a relationship and some level of trust. Now having casual chats on a range of topics as you drift in and out of work related matters is a great way to do this. Apart from the general small talk on football, family, the weather, the typical questions I'd weave in are things like, how safe do you feel when you come to work? What's important to you and your team right now? How does your work fit into the big picture? What's the one thing that really gives you the shits about your job? Are you enjoying your work? What should I really know about the job that you do? If I gave you a magic wand and you could change just one thing, what would that thing be? Key number three, don't disable the leaders below you. It's really easy to go into an operating team where you're speaking to people four or five layers below you and feel really important, like a royal visit to the huddled masses. But you're not the saviour coming down from on high to solve their problems. One of your primary objectives is to show your support for the local management and to pump up their tyres. The fastest way to hobble the leaders between you and that team is to solve a problem that their leader couldn't. So whenever someone raised an issue with me, I'd simply ask, have you spoken to your manager about that yet? If the answer was no, then that was their next step and they either would take it or they wouldn't. If the answer was yes, I'd say, well, okay, leave it with me and I'll talk to them so I can understand how they're handling the issue. Whatever you do, don't weaken the chain of command and don't dilute the accountability of the leaders below you. Key number four, debrief through the line. Anything you hear that raises alarm bells has to be run to ground. So after a site visit, or even just walking around the office and talking to people in the corridor, if I heard anything that didn't gel with my current view of the world, I'd raise it with my accountable executive. I'd casually ask them to follow it up and a report backed me on what they found. I wouldn't really form any opinion until they had the opportunity to explore it with their leaders and and revert with more context. Of course, this was only for substantive issues, smaller things. I'd just leave with the local supervisor and let my direct report know what I'd done. Remember, you're not trying to catch people out, you're trying to get better alignment and better understanding from top to bottom. You want your leaders to know that you know and that you know that they know that you know and. Well, you know. You get the picture. Over time, this helps to improve the accuracy of what they feed up to. Key number five, put every conversation into context. Always ask yourself three important questions. Why are they telling me this? What's in it for them? What are the limitations of their level and perspective? For example, if I was talking to a hardcore union organiser with an extremely negative view of management, I'd take any comments he made about his supervisor with a grain of salt. In fact, if he was really critical, it could mean that leader was doing a great job in raising the standard and holding the team to account. Equally, if I was talking to a foreman in a warehouse, I'd expect him to have a very strong view on inventory control, but little perspective on the commercial performance of the business. Key number six, don't make promises. You're not there to fix the problems. Remember, you can't just play the hero and trample all over the accountabilities of the leaders below you. You're there to listen, to understand and to calibrate. As I said, any actions that need to be taken have to be referred back to their leadership line. You've got to understand an issue in its entirety before you decide what to do. This in itself should stop you from making any promises in the heat of the moment. Knee jerking based on a single conversation would be totally cavalier. If you do promise to follow something up, though, make sure it gets done and communicated back to the individual. Finally, key number seven. Use your conversations to calibrate the formal reporting. As you gather information informally, you're going to find inconsistencies between this and the picture you form based on what your direct reports have told you. But there's no need to take everything back to your direct reports immediately. Sometimes you'll just park something as useful information that you can rely upon. Later. You can learn a lot about your management team by hearing how they couch information that you already have some knowledge of. For example, a few weeks after a corridor conversation with an engineer, when a progress report was submitted, I casually brought that into conversation with one of my directs. I had a brief chat with one of your engineers last week and he said there were a few problems with the turbine overhaul strategy. Have you formed a solid view on that yet? Then he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know. Management by walking around is an important tool for increasing morale, communicating what's important and increasing productivity. It's also a great way to get a better understanding of the difficulties your people face when they're doing the jobs that seem really easy when you talk about them in leadership meetings. The key thing to remember is not to go into solution mode and dip down into the problem solving process yourself. But equally important is your ability to gather intelligence and to use it to calibrate the information that your direct reports are giving you. This is your best defence against the sanitization effect. You know that the information that comes up to you from below is going to be incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The truth doesn't travel up, so you have to find other ways to get the perspective that's going to see you leading at your peak. All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 386. I really hope you enjoyed it, but as I'm sure you know, listening is easy, leading is hard. That's why we created Leadership beyond the Theory, our flagship program that turns insight into action and action into results. This is where we unlock the secrets of elite leadership performance and give you the tools you need to know what's really happening in your team. I'm looking forward to next week's episode. I asked McKinsey and here's what they said. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit.