Craig A. Stevens

The Seven Attributes of Excellent Management May 21, 2009

What does it take to achieve Excellent Management?

By Craig A. Stevens

Excellent Management requires a systemic, repeatable, and balanced approach to mastering seven essential attributes.  These seven attributes are more than just words.  The attributes represent entire concepts embodied in the titles of (1) Leadership, (2) Culture, (3) Customer Focus, (4) Teams, (5) Problem Solving, (6) Continuous Improvement, and (7) Performance Measures.  As a mobile requires perfect balance, so too does Excellent Management within an organization or project.  On a mobile, remove any one piece and the system is out of balance.  Likewise, remove any one of these seven attributes within an organization and the management of the organization or project is out of balance.  Also, as on a mobile, in an organization or project, no one attribute will never work alone. 

Understanding this mobile will help any organization to implement excellent management.  Each of the seven attributes represents major concepts in management theory and process improvement.  Chronological order is important.  Therefore, address the seven attributes of the mobile from the top down, and then left to right.  Remember, balance is important and without any one of these attributes, excellence will be impossible. 

Step 1:  Leadership – Build excellent leadership is the first step to excellent management. 

Excellent leadership is everyone’s job.  To paraphrase one of John Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, “To grow, lead excellent followers.  To have explosive growth, lead excellent leaders.”  Victor Dingus a past Quality Manager at Tennessee Eastman said it this way, “We use to have 14,000 employees, but only 400 were paid to think.  Our goal is to have 14,000 employees paid to think.” 

Step 2:  Culture – Build an effective culture; it is the limiting factor to an organization’s initiatives.   

Culture is the string or cable holds the mobile together.  If one cuts the cable, the mobile falls apart.  Likewise, cut the string of organizational culture and the organization falls apart.  No initiative will work effectively without a willing culture.  In addition, as many strands or cables make up a single string or cable, the same is true of an organization’s culture.  The organizational strands may include:

• Values and ethics.
• Common or diverse languages (including native toughs and learned jargon),
• Subcultures like those found within races, professions, clubs, clicks, gangs, and groups of all kinds.
• Underlining assumptions and mental images or those judgments that relate to who we are and where we have traveled. 
• Group patterns of behavior and habits.
• Company artifacts and symbols (like time cards, personalize parking places, and corner offices or cubicles).
• World View (how one views the world and on what that view is focused or based).

 Step 3:   Customer Focus – Reinforce the fact that everyone’s purpose is to serve customers.

Label the bar of the mobile on which the other elements hang, “Customer Focus.”  With the mobile, the bar is important, without it, there is nothing on which to hang the other elements.  Likewise, in an organization without customer focus there is no clear goal on which to hang the organization’s work.  If you do not have a customer or do not know who your customers are, then you should not have a job.  Customers are the reason behind every job.  Nevertheless, for customers to be number one, they have to come third.  First, leaders have to acknowledge the importance of the customers and then the organization’s culture has to value the customers. 

Step 4:  Teams – Understand people, build them up, and capitalize on teams working together to create the forces required for success. 

A big object that balances three other smaller objects represents the word “Teams” on the mobile.  Teams represent people working together (and individually) to make things happen.  Value, motivate, and reward people and build teams.

Step 5:  Problem Solving – Developing Skills, Core Competencies, and Problem Solving Tools (Six-Sigma, Project Management, Business Analysis, etc.) is what makes people and teams effective.

Your company may have the best leadership, culture, people, and teams in the world but that is not enough.  Without a professionally skilled workforce with the correct core competencies, your company will never be competitive.  In addition, without the correct tools, even the most skilled professionals are ineffective.  An unskilled team gets little done.  To understand this, envision a highly skilled plumber without his toolbox trying to work on your house or a highly skilled football team in a musical.

Step 6:  Continuous Improvement – Master the three phases of change and continuous improvement to stay completive. 

Soon others will make what you do obsolete.  Best case, every product, technology, technique, skill, process, or system is, was, or will be efficient and effective for only a season (some never).  To thrive, it is everyone’s job at your company to be the first at making your own processes, products, services, and systems obsolete.  However, even when you know what and how to change, it is important to know how to manage and implement the change during the three phases of change (before, during, and after). 

 Step 7:  Performance Measures – Master the Seven Steps of Measuring Performance.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure.  This Westbrook Stevens Seven-Step Performance Measure process is a consolidation of the work of over sixty different papers, documents, and books on the subject.

1. Understand the science behind performance measures.  There are many rules related to good metrics.  Understand the rules before you start the process of developing a set for an organization.  For example, processes require a chain of activities. As with any chain, making only one link stronger has little effect on the overall strength of the chain.  Likewise, to make your organization stronger, use a whole systems approach to measuring performance.
2. Understand the goals of the organization.  One should never develop performance measures that do not track back to specific organizational goals (e.g., lower cost, better quality, faster service) that reflect the goals you are trying to achieve.
3. Create a set of criteria (e.g., lower cost, better quality, faster service) that reflect the goals you are trying to achieve.
4. Create the performance indicators (hours worked, number of complaints about a specific subject) related to the criteria that will give a picture of company performance.
5. Collect the data related to the indicators.
6. Analyze the data to determine the performance.
7. Use the data to make a difference.

 As with the Mobile, miss any one performance measuring step and there is no reason to measure.  If you do not know the rules, chances are you will break them and make things worse.  If you measure something not related to a goal, then you are wasting time and money.  If you are never going to use the information, you again are wasting time, money and causing cultural problems.

How Might One Use the Mobile of Excellent Management? 

I use many great writings and theories to paint a picture of excellent management.  Then I facilitate an oral picture of the organization’s current status based on the theories.  We look for gaps, patterns, problems, and root causes.  Then we design an action plan for improvement. 

If an organization disregards any one of these attributes, management effectiveness is incomplete.  For example, to improve continuously requires a team approach to using problem solving tools and techniques.  Without the proper problem solving tools, the teams are ineffective and continuous improvement is not going to happen.  Without performance measures one never knows if things are improving or getting worse.  We might as well go home and work on our house, if our efforts are centered on things other than the customer.  Excellence customer service will never happen in any organization unless the organizational culture allows it and the leaders (everyone) have to understand fully the process so that we all can paint the vision and lead the effort.