Success can make you slow

“Success can make you slow,” says Kevan Hall, author of Speed Lead – Faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies”.

”Great companies grow; they develop more sophisticated products, attract diverse people and build complicated organization structures – but this complexity eventually makes them slower, more expensive to run and less satisfying to work for.”

Unfortunately, the outside world keeps getting faster and these companies become vulnerable to more nimble competitors – it is tough to stay successful.

A survey of managers working in large successful companies found that, despite all the efforts to make large companies fast and responsive, only 29% thought their company had become faster in the last 5 years. Nearly 50% thought their company had become more expensive to run and only 22% thought it had become more satisfying to work there.

Take the Speed Test yourself at wwww.speedleading.com and get an immediate free benchmark of your results with other companies in our database.

“Speed Lead” is the first book to focus on how to make complex companies faster and easier to run. It is based on the author’s practical experience as a corporate manager and an entrepreneur who has set up and run businesses in Europe and the USA. His consulting and training companies have worked with over 35,000 people in more than 200 of the world’s leading organizations in more than 40 counties over the last 12 years.

Hall believes that some traditional management “sacred cows” are holding us back. “We have taken management beliefs and skills developed for simpler times and stretched them to the limit of their usefulness. People are working harder and harder to apply techniques that either don’t work in these more complex environments, or are just too expensive to be worth doing. The solution is not to work harder but to radically simplify the way people work together.”

“You cannot expect the same management techniques that work in a simple single site business in your own culture to work everywhere in the world in a large, highly complex company”

Speed Lead identifies 4 areas where simpler ways of working can speed up results – Cooperation, Communication. Control and Community

Cooperation – teamwork and meetings have become expensive and difficult to organize in multi-site companies where it is rare to meet face to face. Yet companies still think teams are the answer to everything. This leads to slow decision making and progress at the speed of the most reluctant or least competent team member.

In our survey, managers told us they spent an average of 36% of their time in meetings, of this, they felt they only really needed to be there for 45% of the time. For a typical FTSE100 company this means that there are over 2,300 people employed to do nothing but attend unnecessary meetings.

“There is far too much cooperation going on,” says Hall, “We believe that most of the work done in complex companies does not need team work. Simpler group working or clear individual objectives can get a lot more done. “We have to break decades of trained attachment to teams – teams are a tool not an automatic answer to everything.”

Communication - To take just one example of communication, the average manager in our survey receives 57 emails per day and estimates that 55% of them are unnecessary.

This means that the average FTSE 100 Company pays its staff to write, send, read and delete over 250 million unnecessary emails every year. Some companies;’ internal surveys have estimated that email alone consumes 20% of all staff time.

“Lack of communication is a problem of the past,” says Hall, “the skill today is in learning to disconnect from the mass of trivial communication so we can focus on the small number of important messages we need to do our jobs better.

Control- In simpler, traditional companies, tight management control is one of the keys to success. In complex companies, it can make work grind to a halt. In our survey, 32% of managers thought their companies had too much central control, and 42% thought their company was moving towards even more central control.

Unfortunately, in complex, particularly global companies, no one at the centre has the knowledge and experience to be expert in all local markets, priorities and cultures. Escalation to the centre may sometimes lead to better decisions but it always slows things down and undermines local autonomy.

Hall argues that devolving more control to local operations is essential to prevent delay, cost and dissatisfaction. “The quality revolution in manufacturing has taught us the value of immediate local decision making in driving our waste and delay. In people management, however, we have been going in the opposite direction.

Managers tell us they spend about 80% of their time on the 3 C’s of cooperation, communication and control – and half of this time may be wasted. One reason for this is the lack of a fourh C – Community.

In the past, a sense of community came as a free by-product for companies where everyone was located on the same site, given the choice people prefer to build relationships with people who are similar to them and physically close to them.

Now we work with colleagues we never meet and where all we have in common is a similar email address. Managers remain accountable for success and can easily feel uncomfortable and out of control. Many compensate by increasing control and involvement in a vain attempt to restore their lost feeling of involvement and security.

Hall fears that many companies are still training managers in out of date people management skills, “When I look back on my corporate career and at how the people I meet in Companies today are spending their time it makes me angry. There are many good people, working hard but applying the wrong skills for their new environment, and they are getting frustrated. It’s time to update our skills for a faster and more complex world.”

"Speed Lead - Faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies."

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Books will be shipped as soon as we receive our pre-publication copies in early October.

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