What does a Growth Engine involve? (Part 1: Business Models)
This is the part one of a multi-post article, which explains what’s involved in a Growth Engine.
Many businesses today are not even remotely reaching their potential because they operate under legacy models that are not well-suited for modern business. Many of these models are so ingrained in our psyche that we do not recognize them as the root causes of many organizational problems even though we are painfully aware of the symptoms they cause.
Following are some examples of unsuitable models to give you an idea of what we are talking about.
Academic learning model
With this model, large audiences are given the same large quantities of information with the hope they will retain it for some future use. Most often, there is very little practical training and feedback received during the instruction. The instruction is broad and often includes much history and theory. Very little of this received instruction is retained and applicable when an occasion to use it arises.
When the same instruction model is used within a business, the same low retention and application issues occur, resulting in poor ROI and unachieved business objectives.
Military-style management model
With this model, a very strict chain-of-command hierarchy is established to enforce the execution of orders from the top commanders. The orders must be executed without question. Intelligence is gathered to inform the decision-making of the top commanders, but often the truthfulness of this intelligence is affected by the quality of the top commanders. If the top commanders value validation (yes men) over the cold, hard facts (listening to those on the front), their decisions will be detrimental to the war effort.
We all understand all too well what happens when this management model is used in a business and the top management starts getting the idea the job of the staff is to serve them, do what they say, and not cause any trouble. The office politics heat up, everybody is focused on how to stroke the boss's ego, the workplace becomes toxic, people forget about serving the customers, and a lot of really, really bad business decisions get made. Enough said.
Rather than listing more such legacy models, let’s talk about the innovative models used by Growth Engineering to build Growth Engines.
Innovative Organizational Models
Just-In-Time Performance Support
Just-in-time is the concept of providing what is needed, when it is needed, how it is needed, and in just the amount/intensity needed. When applied to performance support this means moving as much of the training, job aids, references, checklists, guidance, etc., to the moment when the person performs the action. This is done to reduce the burden on the person’s memory and the time it takes them to perform with the required competence. It also facilitates better quality and compliance.
When prerequisite training or practice is required, this is restricted to the minimum necessary for job execution, and refresher support is provided in the workflow.
If a person realizes they need some support when executing an action, the required support materials and connections for human assistance are provided in the workflow for immediate access.
Real-Time Feedback and Evaluations
For various reasons, in most organizations feedback and evaluations are separated by time and distance from the action in question. This limits their effectiveness and precision. Further, the more displaced they are from the action, the more they tend to be subjective and not based on fact or the current reality. Additionally, evaluations and feedback tend not to be evidence-based or standardized resulting in arbitrary and irregular assessments that vary greatly from case to case and among managers. All of which creates doubt regarding their validity and fairness—leading to serious employee dissatisfaction.
To solve these problems, Growth Engineering builds feedback and evaluation into the workflows. The workflows contain checklists, standards, regulated processes, and desired output examples by which both executer and evaluator can objectively evaluate the output and the competency in the disciplines [Disciplines] used to produce that output. A feedback or evaluation workflow is designed for the evaluator and linked to the relevant executor workflow to ensure timely, accurate, and immediately helpful feedback.
Structuring feedback and evaluation in this manner also reduces the oversight burden on evaluators, especially managers. This is because everything they need to conduct the evaluation is readily available and conducting the evaluation is made part of their regular workflow. Further, the workflow includes a means for recording and storing the feedback and evaluations. This archived information is then available to the executer for reference and to the manager for review in preparation for regular performance reviews.
Thus, real-time feedback and evaluation serve two major purposes—to promote continuous improvement and development through coaching-like support and to standardize performance evaluations and ensure their objectivity to keep employees enthusiastically engaged.
Cascading Alignment
“Why are we doing this?” “What’s the reason for this?” “What are we trying to achieve?”
In far too many businesses, these types of questions are a daily occurrence among people lower in the organization chart or on the frontline who are trying to make decisions on how best to move forward. Often, they cannot get a clear answer from their manager because they aren’t sure either. Thus, they are left to their own devices resulting in decisions that are misaligned with top management strategy and policy. This is a huge waste of resources and a cause of lost opportunity. It also causes unnecessary friction between management and the rest of the troops.
For these reasons, there is much talk about the necessity of alignment but how often is it achieved? Alignment is one of the guiding concepts [Guiding Concepts] of Growth Engineering and thus alignment is built into workflows and the Growth Engine using the Cascading Alignment Model.
Briefly described, cascading alignment requires the major decisions, policies, and strategies of top management to be passed down (“cascaded down”) the organization all the way to the frontline. Here, cascading has a deeper meaning than just issuing a general directive and having it repeated down the line. Cascading consists of four major components: 1) Explaining the purpose and rationale (the WHY) of the directive, 2) breaking down execution responsibility by business unit and role as the directive cascades down the organization chart, 3) providing a protocol for cross-functional alignment, and 4) providing a communication feedback channel that allows business units and roles at the lower levels of the organization to request and promptly receive clarity and confirmation when needed.
To facilitate alignment, Growth Engineering builds the alignment cascading mechanisms into the workflows to ensure the people at each level have the information they need to make informed decisions.
Enabling Management/Leadership
The management of most businesses would deny their leadership model is structured after the traditional order-giver/order-taker pattern claiming their people are “empowered.” An objective observation of how “work gets done” in their organizations, however, often reveals a strong order-giver/order-taker dynamic. Further, in many organizations, being elevated to a management role means “Now I’m a boss” for many people who view their role as “serving their boss and being served by their reports.” Their goal becomes “making their boss happy and expecting their reports to make them happy.” Such a dynamic is the inhibitor or destroyer of high-performance organizations.
The enabling management/leadership model used by Growth Engineering turns this dynamic around. Order-givers and order-takers are abolished and replaced by enablers and executers. Executors are those who do the actions necessary to produce the specified output. Enablers are in charge of executers and are tasked with making it easy for the executors to execute. A single person is often both an executer and an enabler. They are an executer for their supervisor while also being an enabler for their reports. Their supervisor, in turn, is their enabler.
In other words, enablers serve the executers by facilitating the execution of their tasks, and executers serve the people downstream, whether that be an internal or external customer, by providing them with timely, high-quality output. Thus, according to Growth Engineering, the president or CEO serves as enabler for the entire company, and the entire company serves as executer for the end user. The value provided by the company to the end user is rewarded with money, which is shared among all the company stakeholders.
This is not some clever wording gimmick like reclassifying waste collectors as sanitation engineers who perform their work the same as always regardless of the name change. Under Growth Engineering, the organization and its operations are designed and set up to facilitate enabling management. This includes incorporating cascading alignment and a unified problem-solving methodology among other required elements to make enabling management possible and practical.
Systems Thinking-Based Objective Achievement
Systems thinking means to view your entire business—the entire value stream, the entire customer journey, the entire business environment—holistically taking into consideration the impact one element has on the others and the final outcome. What happens in most businesses is that actions are not fully coordinated resulting in optimization in one area that causes suboptimal results in other areas.
For example, optimizing the operational cost per unit of a major piece of production equipment by running it at peak operation could actually hurt profits due to producing more product than can be sold, causing raw materials to be processed before necessary, intermediate products taking up more space in the factory, and finished product piling up in warehouses—slowly deteriorating and becoming obsolete. Not to mention Sales offering discounts in an effort to move this overstock. So while somebody somewhere may be getting a slap on the back for reducing the per-unit cost of a certain process, the business as a whole, and the bottom line, are suffering.
Growth Engineering designs Growth Engines to prevent such “localized optimization” by evaluating and balancing the myriad of tradeoffs to achieve the overall optimum result.
Built-In Problem-Solving Culture
According to CEOs, a lack of sufficient problem-solving ability is one of the major weaknesses of many businesspeople. However, few companies have a standardized and objective problem-solving system against which to compare employee performance. Thus, problem-solving skill becomes one of those “You have it or you don’t” or “I know it when I see it” kind of things. This leads entire companies to be poor at problem-solving.
Problem-solving is teachable and can be standardized. Growth Engineering is used to reengineer workflows, departmental operations, and even the entire corporate culture to build robust problem-solving into everything that people do. This is one of the fundamental and more beneficial aspects of Growth Engineering.
Problem-solving is not the same for everyone in the organization, however. For the CEO, it will be highly focused on strategy formulation. For middle managers, it will mainly be used for troubleshooting. Planners and developers will also use it for risk management. People on the frontline might be focused more on problem awareness and reporting than on being the ones tasked with solving the problem. Growth Engineering takes all of this into account to build practical, sustainable, and effective problem-solving systems into daily operations.
Such a built-in problem-solving capability is also key to achieving enabling management/leadership as responsibility for identifying, mitigating, and solving problems is pushed lower down the organization chart and bottom-up reporting and feedback becomes an increasingly valuable asset to top management.
What does a Growth Engine involve? (Part 2: Guiding Concepts)
