What does a Growth Engine involve? (Part 2: Guiding Concepts)
This is the second part of a multi-post article, which explains what’s involved in a Growth Engine.
These concepts serve as the guiding principles for developing a Growth Engine. The more faithfully they are followed, the more effective and powerful the Growth Engine will be.
The Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated and act in the way that you want others to act.
Don’t Blame; Enable! The Growth Engine is lubricated by trust, transparency, and teamwork. Playing the blame game is like dumping sand into your engine. Blaming people when performance is below expectations is not only lazy, it’s incompetent. But why?
Because poor performance is an organizational problem.
But what about bad actors, you say. Well, if bad actors are infiltrating your business, then the root cause likely lies in the hiring process—an organizational issue. If you are not weeding out the bad actors, that’s an organizational issue too.
What about in other cases of poor performance? The root causes for these are also found somewhere in the organization. Are the wrong people being hired? Is onboarding and training not delivering? Is the organizational structure or culture getting in the way? Are unsuitable people being assigned to new roles or promoted? These are organizational problems. To fix them you must remove the organizational root causes.
Further, fixing organizational problems requires bottom-up cooperation—teamwork. This is only possible if there is top-down trust and transparency. Employees who are afraid of blame or are evaluated against each other will not feel it is safe or beneficial to bring up issues or cooperate in fixing them.
Focusing on building the necessary trust, transparency, and teamwork necessary to identify and fix such organizational issues is a key benefit of Growth Engineering. Another key benefit? Understanding how to enable people rather than blame them will transform the workplace environment into a vibrant engine for growth!
Believe in synergy. 1+1=5. Plus 1 more = 15. That’s the math of synergy. Synergy is the torque generated by the Growth Engine. And this torque grows exponentially as you build out and maintain your Growth Engine.
This is not hype or deception. It’s science. These guiding concepts combined with the Disciplines and Engine Components discussed here allow us to collaborate with you to build immediately effective Growth Engines, no matter how small the start, that with each added element or component produces ever greater synergies and thus exponentially more power.
Growth Engines need to be strategically built and methodically maintained but when humming along they produce fantastic results.
Systems thinking means focusing on the collective optimization of all components to produce the best end result (output) from the system. Individual component optimizations or efficiencies that hurt the output of the larger system are to be avoided.
Alignment means all actions in the organization need to be aligned with the higher-level strategies and policies for the organization to perform at a high level. This means all top-level strategies and policies must be effectively cascaded down through the organization such that each person is always correctly aware of how their role must support those strategies and policies for them to be effective and be able to take action accordingly.
Built-in is a state. It means that the competencies and support needed by people to execute a workflow are built into that workflow. The acquisition of any competency or support that cannot be built into that workflow is made prerequisite to authorization to execute that workflow. The provision of prerequisite competencies or support is done in a way that will provide the necessary competence in a timely manner.
In a timely manner means the individual has had sufficient time and practice to acquire the required level of competency and has been able to begin applying that competency in the corresponding workflow before the effects of passing time have caused that competency to decline below the required level. In other words, people are not up-skilled so early that they lose the skill before they are required to use it.
Mechanisms for maintaining and supporting prerequisite competencies will also be built into that workflow (reference material, pointers, quick reference guides, etc.).
Built-in also means that things such as quality and compliance are built into the workflows in a way that makes following them a routine part of work performance that that not following them will be identified by the checks and balances incorporated into the workflow.
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 to execute the workflow.
This applies whether what is needed is a part, device, supply, training, feedback, guidance, information, assistance, etc.
Real-time means providing input such as feedback, information, evaluations, metrics, etc., as closely as possible to a related event (need).
This is equivalent to “striking the iron while it’s hot” and means the closer input is to the event/need, the more efficient and effective it is.
Always current means that whenever or wherever a decision, change, modification, or adjustment is made in the organization, that change is promptly propagated throughout the organization to update all relevant materials. Promptly means as close to instantly as is feasible to satisfy the need for immediacy.
In particular, all related workflows will be promptly updated in a manner that will allow the worker to seamlessly handle and incorporate the change.
Top-down enablement is a management concept. It means that rather than managers being order-givers and direct reports being order-takers, direct reports become aligned objective executers and managers become enablers, meaning they enable their direct reports to execute on the objectives.
Top-down enablement goes hand in hand with bottom-up engagement.
To facilitate top-down enablement, as much of the administrative and supervisory workload as possible is redistributed and automated or semi-automated and firefighting is significantly reduced through proper problem-solving methodology to free up managers to focus on high-value enablement of their reports.
Note that almost all employees will wear two hats: for one activity they will be an enabler (supervisor/manager) and for another they will be an executer (a direct report to another person).
Bottom-up engagement is an organizational management concept. It goes hand in hand with top-down enablement. Bottom-up engagement is achieved by implementing proper problem-solving methodology throughout all levels of the organization to shift the responsibility and authority to identify, escalate, and solve (when appropriate) problems to the people who are facing those problems.
There are built-in mechanisms in place to enable workers to efficiently and effectively communicate with their supervisors and other related staff to identify problems and solve them or get the organization to solve them.
Bottom-up engagement is also about making bottom-up continuous improvement and innovation part of the corporate culture. There are built-in mechanisms in place to enable workers to efficiently and effectively communicate their insights and ideas to the organization where they are properly evaluated and acted upon. How those insights and ideas are being handed is made transparent.
Bottom-up engagement means people are fully empowered and expected to participate in improving the workplace and the business in line with top-level strategies and policies with their managers focusing on enabling them to do so.
Growth balance and harmony. Unbeknownst to most organizations, they are engaged in an eternal battle between Sustainers and Innovators.
Innovators are those people who disrupt the here and now to ensure the organization’s viability into the future.
Sustainers are those people who make sure what the innovators have already established continues to run smoothly.
So what’s the problem?
Well, when people lose sight of the big picture, they become myopic.
Sustainers are tasked to dot the i’s and cross the t’s but if they become myopic they will forget why they are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in the first place. Dotting and crossing become the goal rather than being a way to achieve the actual objective. Many Sustainers continue to dutifully dot and cross when the objective for doing so has vanished long ago.
When myopic, a Sustainer will view any change to “the way things are done” as a threat. Thus, they tend to view Innovators as disruptive rule-breakers who get their thrills by trashing and destroying a perfectly good status quo. Fraternizing with, let alone cooperating with, such outlaws is out of the question.
The job of Innovators is to constantly look for ways to make things better, of course. But they are also continually prowling for better things to do. Change is their name. Often really big change. To get such changes sustainably implemented, they will work closely with the Sustainers to shake out the kinks and get everything running smoothly again in the new direction.
If Innovators become myopic, however, they’ll act more like a bull in a china shop than trustworthy guides into the future. They’ll become geeks who are drunk on change for change’s sake. Their lust for change will blind them to organizational needs and objectives. Instead of valued partners, they’ll view Sustainers as old-fashioned stick-in-the-muds who just get in the way. They will mock them and scorn them.
Things might not be that bad in your organization but it likely suffers from some of the symptoms. One common problem is putting the wrong type of person into a position. Roles that require innovation will be useless if assigned to a Sustainer. And putting an Innovator in charge of managing routine operations will cause a lot of stress for everybody.
Thus, Growth Engineering focuses on harmonizing and resonating the Yin and Yang between Sustainers and Innovators—making them an awesome partnership that drives synergies and exponential growth.
Continuous improvement is doing things better. Continuous improvement is the act of always looking for and thinking of ways to make incremental improvements. This is done in a systematic and methodical way that is built into operations. It is supported by the problem-solving discipline.
Innovation is doing better things. Innovation is the act of purposefully exploring and discovering significantly new and different ways of doing things to solve difficult problems or unlock new possibilities. This is done in a systematic and methodical way that is built into operations. It is supported by the problem-solving discipline.
What does a Growth Engine involve? (Part 3: Disciplines).
