Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Webinar: Too Much To Do, Not Enough Resources
Similar to Webinar: Too Much To Do, Not Enough Resources (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Webinar: Too Much To Do, Not Enough Resources
- 1. Too Much To Do, Not Enough Resources Exploring Matrix Challenges Summer Series
- 2. Cathy has worked with matrixed organizations for more than 10 years, and has helped leaders at all levels of the organization. She consults with senior leadership teams to define horizontal governance structures and create project systems. She is an expert trainer and facilitator who has developed collaborative leadership skills in project management, decision making and innovating business solutions. She also coaches leadership teams on maintaining a new paradigm for managing and leading without authority. Presented by: Cathy Cassidy
- 3. Chat window Chat window © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 3
- 4. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 4 Too much to do, not enough resources EffectsChallengeCauses
- 5. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 5 Committing to do more than you have the resources to execute properly EffectsBehaviorCauses Challenge
- 6. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 6 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehaviorCauses ImmediateRoot Leadership ImmediateRoot Organizational 1 2 3 4 Individual Effects
- 7. They have too many goals/objectives and projects © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 7
- 8. They attempt to succeed at the constant juggling act © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 8
- 9. Hounded by too many people needing their stuff right now! © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 9
- 10. They are overwhelmed and demoralized because they can’t be successful © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 10
- 11. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 11 Individuals Teams Organization Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly BehaviorCauses ImmediateRoot Leadership ImmediateRoot Organizational Effects Individual Effects Team Effects 1 2 3 4 5
- 12. Conflicting priorities among team members © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 12
- 13. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 13 The team cannot plan properly
- 14. Longer cycle times © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 14
- 15. Teams are dysfunctional © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 15
- 16. Cross-functional teams suboptimized © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 16
- 17. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 17 Individuals Teams Organization Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly BehaviorCauses ImmediateRoot Leadership ImmediateRoot Organizational Effects Team Effects 1 2 3 Organizational Effects Individuals Individual Effects
- 18. Suboptimized processes © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 18
- 19. Not all goals or deliverables are achieved & Cannot execute strategy effectively or efficiently © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 19
- 20. Culture of failure © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 20
- 21. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 21 Individuals Teams Organization Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly BehaviorCauses ImmediateRoot Organizational ImmediateRoot Leadership Effects Organizational Effects Team EffectsIndividual Effects
- 22. What have your tried to solve this problem?
- 23. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 23 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehaviorCauses ImmediateRoot Leadership Immediate Organizational Root
- 24. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 24 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehavior ImmediateRoot Organizational Leadership Root Causes 3 2 1
- 25. Culture that doesn’t allow “No” or “Not Now”
- 26. Don’t allow time to plan.
- 27. Commitments are assigned, not negotiated
- 28. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 28 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehavior Causes Leadership Lack of horizontally focused capacity management Believing the myth that we can do everything and don’t need to prioritize Belief that planning is a waste of time Root Immediate
- 29. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 29 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehavior Causes Root Organizational Immediate Leadership Root 3 2 1
- 30. Lack of Cross-functional Governance & Prioritization
- 31. Lack of Portfolio Management
- 32. Resource allocation tied to area/vertical priorities
- 33. Causes © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 33 Committing to do more than you have resources to execute properly Individuals Teams Organization EffectsBehavior Organization operating with functionally- focused culture instead of horizontally- focused Organizational Root Immediate
- 34. The Next Steps © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 34 Team Leader Organizational/Area LeaderTeam Member
- 35. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 35 Questions?
- 36. © 2017, International Matrix Management Institute, LLC 36 Next Webinar: Cross-functional Warfare The Real Causes Behind Silos and Challenges Cooperating Across Functions Thursday, July 20th 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST Register: https://attendee.gototraining.com/r/4206684592243463170 Registration link will also be sent in follow-up email
Editor's Notes
- Jason’s Intro
- Jason’s intro
- Thanks for you joining me today, let we do some quick logistics about the system we’re using today. If during the webinar, you have a question, please use your chat feature to post it. –c- Depending on how you’re logged in, you should have the chat window here or here. We will compile them and respond to them at the end. When I open the floor to questions, you can use the –c- raise hand button so that I know to enable your microphone. Before I get started, I’d like to take a quick assessment of where the audience is related to this challenge. I’m going to put up a quick poll, where do you sit in this scale?
- Our challenge today is a common one and if you're experiencing it, you're not alone. It's found in every type of organization: profit, not for profit, government large or small. Leaders think they know what the causes of the challenge are, but it’s not what you think.
- Before we get to causes, let’s explore this challenge for a minute. It’s really a symptom of the leadership behavior of committing to do more than you have the resources to execute properly. If you’re a leader, I’m wondering if you’re guilty of this – not only for yourself but for your teams. Let’s take a look at the effect of committing to more than you have the resources to execute properly first and then we’ll unveil the real causes for why this behavior occurs.
- There are three categories of effects: -c- the effects on the individual professional/team member or leader, -c- the effects on the team and finally –c- the effects on the whole organization. These are cumulative as we work from the individual to the organization. On the cause side of our diagram, there are –c- root causes and –c- intermediate causes and these can in turn be broken down into two sources of causes: -c- the leadership team and –c- organizational systems. -c- Beginning with the individual effects, I’d like to share four that we’ve seen often.
- Let me ask you a question: How many goals, objectives or projects do you have right now? Do you, like most people have too many? A colleague of mine told me once that she had 10 projects she was working on at once. 10! She was the project leader on 3, a subject matter expert on 4 and a stakeholder on the other 3. She felt overwhelmed and for good reason. Our experience as consultants is that most organizations are significantly overcommitting their resources.
- This results in individuals trying to juggle all the myriad of things that have been thrown at them. Some people may find this fun, but not me. I’m guessing if you signed up for this webinar, you can probably relate.
- When there are too many things to do, not everything can get done and you end up being hounded by everyone who wants their stuff, yesterday! You’re working hard to get everything you need to done; you’ve created a plan that was flowing nicely and then wham! a project leader or someone else calls you or your boss and is hounding you about working on their project?
- What happens to the individual when they have too many goals or projects, are trying to juggle everything on their plate and continue to be hounded by many people? Most people feel overwhelmed and demoralized. Failure becomes the norm. Failure, not because you didn’t accomplish anything, but because so many things just can’t get done or can’t get done properly. No one wants to fail. We all want to be successful at what we do.
- -c- Teams just accumulate the effects that we discussed relative to the individual. And, the first effect or symptom of people having too many commitments is a team that’s not aligned – everyone has got their own set of priorities.
- Here’s Project C and what everyone thinks of as their own priorities. Although project c is on everyone’s list, it is a different priority for every team member. For team member 1 it’s the 3rd priority, number 2 it’s the 2nd, and so on. The priorities of the team members aren’t aligned and so everything is going to take longer. Not just on this project but on all their projects since most likely this is happening across all the teams. This issue of conflicting priorities isn’t only related to having too much to do. It’s also related to not setting cross-functional priorities, but it’s exacerbated when people are overloaded
- When people have too much to do, how eager are they to spend time planning? Our experience has been that it’s one of the first things to be deleted from the list. Trying to get an overloaded team to take the time to plan is near impossible. But what happens if teams don’t invest in planning? There is wasted effort and then rework. Planning isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity but in cultures where everyone has too much to do, it’s hard to get people to actually plan properly.
- Both the first and second symptoms or effects lead to this third one: longer cycle times for the work being done. Longer cycle times means the customer is waiting and waiting for the output. This customer might be external to the organization but more often they are the internal customer – the marketing group that is waiting for an important system upgrade, and they are waiting and waiting and waiting by the time they get it, the marketing need has passed. And, given all these team effects we land up with team’s that are dysfunctional.
- How does team dysfunction show up? Patrick Lecioni laid out 5 dysfunctions of teams which include Inattentive to results, avoiding accountability, a lack of commitment, fear of conflict and absence of trust. And there are other symptoms of a dysfunctional team: Conflict within the team, people disengaged because they have other priorities or because they don't see the goals as realistic, blame and finger pointing, and the list can go on. Regardless of how it shows up, when a team is dysfunctional they are not going to working as effectively or efficiently as possible, and they are not going to be having too much fun.
- The major team impact is suboptimization, meaning it takes them too long to get things done, they waste time and effort, they aren’t as effective as they could be. When a team is optimized, all the team members are aligned, they are working in sync. Because they aren’t overloaded, meaning they are booked at less than 100% of their available capacity, they are able to move forward quickly and achieve their goal. When a team is suboptimized, it takes them longer to achieve their goal.
- All of these team effects in turn have an effect on organizational success When you have suboptimized teams, you have suboptimized cross-functional processes and a suboptimized organization as a whole.
- Now, a sub-optimized process does not mean that everyone isn’t trying to get things done, in fact it often means that areas are focused on running their part of the processes the best they can. In our I Love Lucy example, manufacturing is optimized – they are producing at top speed but packaging can’t keep up. The problem with this is that delivering to customers is a cross-functional process and you can’t optimize each part and get an optimized whole process.
- When there is not enough capacity to achieve what you set out to achieve, you are going to fall short. There is only so much capacity and no more. You have to live within your means. When you overcommit, many of the goals you’ve set don’t get accomplished, and we even accomplish less than we would if we set fewer goals. Why? Because having too much to do suboptimizes processes and creates longer cycles times, as we discussed. So less comes out of the pipeline. You can’t just muscle your way through. Where there is too much to do, there is too much to do. Things don’t get done.
- The accumulation of all these effects is a culture of failure. You’ve set people up to fail by giving them more than they can possibly get done. And people don’t like to fail. How many of you go to work every day hoping to fail? People’s expectations about work are lowered. They don’t go to work expecting To be successful. They are mostly hoping they just won’t drown.
- So now that we have explored the sorry state of ignoring this challenge, what can you do about it?
- Leaders try to solve the problem by training the people who aren’t getting enough done – let’s teach them better time management skills or project management skills. Maybe they need to work together better. But although these are valuable skills to have, they aren’t going to solve the problem.
- We’ve got to get to the immediate and root causes of the problem and fix those. Unfortunately, these are not simple, quick fixes like offering training. They take some real discipline on the part of the leadership team. When talking about the causes, as I said earlier, I’ll be addressing them in two categories: –c- leadership causes - how leaders think and behave that creates the situation for overcommitting and -c- Organizational system causes – how the organization is set up to run.
- Let's talk about Causes that you, individually can do something about - The Leadership Causes.
- The first cause is creating a culture on your teams that doesn’t allow for “no” or “not now”, We teach a technique in one of our Leading in a Matrix workshops called Yes, if. So instead of saying no, you push back by asking for additional resources or a realignment of priorities. If you don't allow your team to push back, you're going to end up with all the effects we just talked about.
- The next cause we talked about when we talked about effects. If you don't require your teams to plan and allocate time for that you are helping to create chaos and confusion during the execution phase. And when teams don’t plan, you don’t have the information you need to make good decisions about what is doable or not. And when you don’t have a plan, you don't really know what your team is going to do. You're flying blind. This is probably one of the most egregious errors leaders make - making commitments for the team before the team has had a chance to vet the request. Is it possible? Can we do it? How long will it take? How much will it cost? Far too often, like all the time, leaders are making commitments before the team has done even high level planning on what is possible. Not only does this create commitments that can't be met, which leads to that loser culture we talked about, but people feel helpless.
- They have no say in their commitments and so how seriously can they really take them? If you think you have an accountability problem with team members, stop and look in the mirror a minute and see if maybe you are making them commit to something they haven't bought into, that they don't think is possible in the timelines predetermined.
- So why do leaders behave in ways that they often know are dysfunctional? Well there are two causes - first there are beliefs that are untrue but still guiding behavior and then there are organizational causes, which we'll get to next. -c- This first belief is probably the worst. The belief that prioritizing means less will get done. I actually worked with a CEO of a business that told me directly – “I agree with 99% of what you are saying, but prioritizing is not possible – everything is important”. This statement immediately told me that the leader believed that priorities to him meant things weren’t going to get worked on and so since in his mind, everything had to get done, he refused to set priorities. Guess what happens if you don't set priorities and you commit more than 100% of your capacity? Someone will prioritize and that's usually the person doing the work, because they only have so much time and they have to figure out how to use that time. So if you don't set it as the leadership team, the people will do it, and each of them will set different priorities and we're back to our team who can't climb to the top of the hill. -c- Next we have the lack of horizontally focused capacity management. This idea of delegating by the boss has been around for more than 60 years. But in this age of cross-functional teams, it's the teams that need to do the planning and determine the capacity needs to be successful. And then, decisions about what is doable or not is based upon that information including the decision to say no or yes, if and not overcommit. -c- And speaking of planning, the belief that planning is a waste of time is another cause of the chaos we discussed earlier. Leaders cut time out of schedules for planning and they cut out contingency time - another no/no. All projects need contingency. Period. Planning, risk assessment and the resultant contingency are essentials if you want your teams and the organization to run smoothly.
- Organizational causes are the hardest ones to address, but also the most powerful drivers of the effects we talked about.
- Prioritization is the province of cross-functional governance councils. Priorities should not be set within individual silos, because that creates the suboptimization we talked about earlier. That creates the members of a team each heading in a different direction. You need a cross-functional body that is setting priorities across the organization. These governance councils as we call them are where the key strategic and operational decisions of the organization are made. If done properly, the entire organization is then aligned and marching forward with the same set of priorities. I'm wondering how many of you have these cross-functional bodies in place who set priorities that override functional priorities? Just raise your hand.
- One of the things these governance teams do is manage the portfolio of products or customers or whatever it is they are accountable for. That portfolio is then prioritized and resources are allocated to it, again cross-functionally. When the organization lacks this type of system, leaders only see their own landscape of work and make decisions based upon that. Portfolio management also requires capacity management, and saying no, not now or yes, if. When you run out of capacity new products or projects or whatever it might be is put on an "Unfunded list", until such time as there are resources to fund it.
- The next cause of the effects we discussed is resource allocation within the vertical silos and tied to the vertical priorities. This happens when vertical leaders are asked to optimize their part of the business over the whole system. This is usually the result of not having cross-functional governance that takes precedence over any vertical management.
- You might have guessed that the root causes of these organizational causes is operating with a functionally focused culture instead of a horizontally focused one. If goal deployment and governance happen primarily in the vertical dimension, if leaders are accountable first for their functional or business unit goals, if leaders are rewarded for what happens in their areas and not in the system as a whole, then you have the root cause of a functionally based operating system– which has the vertical dimension of functions and authority based relationships – running the business versus horizontally focused steering teams - and your operating system may need to be upgraded. This is not a cookie cutter solution since every organization is different with different strategies, teams, etc.
- If you’re a team leader – use collaborative planning methods and tools and don’t make commitments for the team without first planning with them. Planning does not have to a long time – but it is critical. Even if the organization isn't prioritizing cross-functionally you can work with your cross-functional team to identify what is doable given all the work that's happening across the across. This gives you the data to push back and say “yes, if”. If you’re a team member on a team – take the time to go to a planning meeting. Track out all the things you are accountable to deliver and calculate your available capacity then you’ll have the information needed to commit your time to the team. If you are an organizational leader – there are two things you can do: First, you can start to eliminate the causes by bringing your stakeholders together to set priorities and stop putting things into the pipeline when it's already full . Start saying “no”, “not now” or “yes, if” and that can begin immediately. Second, you can take our one-minute matrix assessment Jason spoke about at that start and assess if you have any of the causes I’ve talked about and get some additional recommendations for overcoming them. I’m going to turn this back over to Jason to see what questions we’ve gotten.