I had the privilege of listening to John Seddon present in Durham last week. He is the managing director of Vanguard and an advocate of using an approach to transforming businesses and the public sector using principles akin to the Toyota manufacturing process. I have seen him present several times and have always found him to be thought provoking and challenging. He is also very entertaining. If you get the chance, go and see him.
He has the (enviable) position of being able to challenge conventional wisdom, especially in the public sector as he is successful at what he does and remains outside of local or central government. His approach to management using a systems approach and moving away from a command and control and target driven culture is refreshing and rewarding, we know as we have had some notable success in our attempt to adopt a similar approach.
But there are a couple of points he raises which I find hard to accept and which are that there is no requirement for either planning or for meetings between employers and employees, commonly know as one-to-ones.
Planning is a key process in any business, preparing to manufacturer a car, borrow money from a bank or even laying on a series of presentations around the country cannot be down without some coordination or documentation, some thought process whether it is written down or not. I cannot think of any way to describe this other than planning.
But I doubt that this is what he means. I can only assume his objection is to the overly elaborate planning process which somehow foretells the future and is based upon unsound business processes and figures. When the planning process becomes a religion, a way of life and is separated out into a another part of the organisation then this is wrong but it is not planning that is at fault but rather the bastardisation of the process, the unnecessary extrapolation of a necessary task (in my opinion).
The same is true with one-to-ones. Taking time to sit down with your people has to be time well spent if it is done in the pursuit of improvement. This could be to cover personal development, to kick around some seemingly intractable problem or even to off-load some thorny issue.
But I doubt that this is what he means either. I can only assume his objection to the use of one-to-ones is when they are used to support a culture of targets and control through regular performance assessment focussed on metrics that bear little or no relation to the needs of the business or its customers. Again this is not the fault of the process but a misuse of the valuable time that a manager must make for his employees, after all the role of a manager (in my opinion) is to create an environment in which people can do the work they are paid to do rather than setting out to control them.
Whether these things are said for effect or to be provocative I can’t tell but some care is required. Planning and meetings with staff, whatever you happen to call them, are an essential part of business improvement. Just as knives can be dangerous in the wrong hands, it is not the fault of the tools themselves but rather the people holding the handle.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 