Undocumented Features

UF Postings Past: Is This Job Yours?

January 20, 2008 – 4:52 pm

Are there business problems in your company that no one owns? I am willing to be that there is. You may not be able to identify it, but it is there somewhere. If it isn’t, your company is probably in trouble. If there is any creativity at all insude your company, then someone eventually is going to think of something new, something that no one has thought of before, and therefore that does not fit into the current structure of responsibilities within the company. What happens then? Does your company even have a policy for dealing with such things? Where is the “suggestion box”? Or the “risk box”? Or even the “WTF” box?

New ideas need owners. New problems need owners. These problems do not always fit into your existing structure. Do you have a way of dealing with these problems in your company? Is not, then you are not alone. I personally have worked for and with a number of companies that do not have a well-defined method of doing this. The bigger the company, usually, the fewer methods to bubble up ideas and problems from the lower levels.

There is a good reason for this phenomena. Usually, people in upper management are bombarded with ideas as is. They get ideas from their direct reports, from their managers, from their customers, from vendors, from all over the place. They can’t act on all of these things. They therefore insulate themselves. Departments organize themselves into tightly-knit specialized groups, and ideas from one group on how to improve another group are often ignored as coming from “non-experts”.

The thing is, this is horrible for your company. Yes, there is no way that you can act on every idea that happens in your company. Yes, many of the ideas will possibly be junk, as often lower-level employees have ideas that do not take in the entire picture. That does not change that it is vital to catch these ideas and hear them. Your lowest level employees are facing tactical problems on a daily basis. This daily exposure often will reveal patterns of issues to them that are not visible from above. You need a way of hearing about these problems and ideas, and more importantly, of finding someone and making it their job to fix these problems. At the very least, someone needs to explain what is really going on to the lower level employees.

Trapping small problems that occur en masse can be a boon to your company in many ways. It shows your employees and customers that you hear them. It gains you efficiencies. It can save you money. It also avoids a worse trap though, and that trap is powerlessness in your employees. Make your lower-level workers feel unheard, and they will begin to feel powerless. They will begin to feel like upper management doesn’t care, so they don’t need to care either. They will let the problems go unchecked. They will become unmotivated, and it will hurt your company’s bottom line.

Customers, on the other hand, will be anything but powerless. Customers can always find another vendor who will hear their problems if you won’t.

For that matter, so will your best employees. Want to see them working for the competition?

Part of management’s job is to manage. Unheard and unowned problems are, simply put, unmanaged. If you do not manage your business, you won’t be in business long. Create a process for capturing lower-level input. Make it real. Find a way for things that need to be done to get to a committee of management with the knowledge to recognize the right people to own the problem and the authority to get the right people to do so. You will be surprised how much just solving the problems you have hiding quietly in the corners near the copy machines and around the water coolers of your business will improve your bottom line and your company morale.

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