The situation
You are working in an organization with a clear structure. Your employees do have detailed job descriptions. The performance of your employees is being steered with targets. The progress is monitored via periodic reports and dashboards with Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Little is left to chance. You got the situation under control.
I could be that you recognize yourself in this situation. It may well be that your control is not optimized yet. In both cases I recommend you keep reading.
The problem
Still something is eating at you. As manager you are confronted with disappointing results. You think that many employees are showing too little initiative to achieve better results. The capacity for change is low.
Gradually you are beginning to be aware that this perfectly controlled organization might well be the problem instead of being the solution. You are accumulating control work and you are increasingly spending your time in meetings. You are looking for a sustainable solution, but you hesitate if you need to overhaul the entire organization. Your experience tells you that such a reorganization has an uncertain outcome. You would give much to find a way out instead of working even harder with little effect.
The solution
My perhaps surprising advice to you is to get lazier. In my recently published book ‘De luie manager’, or ‘The lazy manager’ if you would translate it in English, I describe in detail what it means. A lazy manager doesn’t walk into the trap of working increasingly harder and getting stuck finally. In order to become a lazy manager, you need to change the division of roles between you and your employees. The result is a new way of cooperation in which trust and taking responsibility are obvious. It requires anything but a reorganization. The only thing that can help you is a guide that has dealt with this kind of situation more than once.
Your guide to a solution
I have had a lot of experience with this change to a new way of cooperation. With my strategic experience and my ability to see through complex systemic problems I focus on influencing the behaviour of those involved in my support activities. I support employees, teams and managers in organizations towards a new way of cooperation, in which self-organization and learning capacity are key.
In my company Convolo I let organizations benefit of this experience. I work for small and large organizations. My current clients Demcon, Fast & Fluid, Océ, Shell and Vionq are companies where technology plays a key role. Considering my industrial experience in research, product development and strategic marketing this doesn’t come as a surprise. My solutions are, however, not limited to this target group.
Your question is:
How do you get, in your desire to a more agile organization, your people moving in the right direction and how do you increase the capacity for change and the clock speed of your organization?
Your action is:
Don’t hesitate any longer and contact me. A conversation about this topic doesn’t subject you to anything and will not disappoint you.
If you would like to know more about my approach first, fill in your data and click on the blue bar with the text 'Send me the whitepaper'. You will then receive the whitepaper as soon as possible.