Page 172 - Managing Change in Organizations

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The context of leadership
3 Design systems to support action.
4 Focus on the manageable.
5 Develop skills in people.
By setting the overall ‘values’ of the organization they provide ideas to people
about the issues that are important and the priorities to pursue. I spent some con-
siderable time working with the top management team of a large, international
process engineering group (International Engineering). The work focused on the
development and implementations of new corporate strategies. One of the key
values that the chief executive emphasized throughout is that of ‘delivered serv-
ice’. The company delivers a high-quality engineering service in a range of indus-
tries and in a variety of forms. All too many senior staff saw the company as
producing engineering structures. The chief executive was doing two things here:
first, he was opening up the definition of ‘the business we are in’; second, he was
setting new values. Value of technically optimal design was replaced by the value
of high-quality engineering service. One leads us to develop sophisticated engi-
neering solutions, the other to combine technical with commercial factors in
delivering a service on time, to cost and appropriate to the client’s needs.
Top managers support problem solving and risk because it is from these that
innovation is born. Innovation requires risk taking, but most fundamentally it is
driven by commercially defined needs. The innovator is the manager who can
translate the creative idea into commercial or organizational reality. Possessing
perhaps some of the attributes of the ‘dreamer’, first and foremost the individual
is the ‘mandarin’ (Kingston, 1977). Such people solve problems, obtain resources
and support, achieve action. They get things done.
Top managers can design systems to support action. Reward and appraisal sys-
tems can focus on and support action. Corporate strategy formulation can be
designed to encourage and achieve action. I once spent a day with the project
manager of a large offshore development (installed value £800 million) only to
observe that this manager spent two hours ‘signing off’ expense claims. On ask-
ing about this I discovered that he ‘approved’ all expense claims, roughly 700
each day. Was this system designed to support action?

We can focus on the manageable. We cannot change everything overnight. So
let us focus on the issues we can deal with, which give us some scope for
improvement. A company facing losses this year and next will probably be best
advised to focus on rationalization, the use of resources, cost, cash flow and the
like. The development of costly technology centres might attract rather less
attention in the short term. Of course, this is not to say that the latter are not
needed but, rather, that in the circumstances the survival of the company seems
to demand a different approach.
Finally, we come to development of skills in people. Ultimately, in all compa-
nies people are a limiting resource. Development, improvement, performance,
managerial succession all depend on people: development of people to engage in
problem solving, to be willing to take measured risks (i.e. to assess the risks and
take them consciously), and to achieve action, focused on improvement. All this
combined with appraisal and feedback can contribute to the effectiveness of the
business.

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