Managers spend a day a week on admin tasks
From allocating resources to putting out fires, managers are spending more time on admin tasks than strategically important ones.
Where managers spend their time
Our process is the problem
Mismatched expectations
Businesses pay lip service to the importance of strategic work but the KPIs they more actively track are the easier to measure delivery and financial metrics.
KPIs drive culture so this means managers will get more hands on reviewing and signing off plans, allocating resources, firefighting issues and jumping in to support teams as required.
We've always worked this way!
Why change now?
Because contexts change
Managers used to define how assembly line roles would work and then track the performance of their staff. Output KPIs made sense. With creative work though there are a lot more variables to consider because we are creating new products, rather than repeating existing products.
You can't manage all of the different variables, you need to set the direction and empower the team to deliver.
- Growing dependencies.
- As the number of parallel initiatives increases the interdependencies between teams increase leading to continuous firefighting.
- Scaling alignment.
- As the number of parallel initiatives increases the alignment overhead increases along with them leading to more meetings, more approvals and more overhead.
- Disempowered teams.
- Managers feel disempowered as they are focusing on delivery instead of strategy and the teams feel disempowered because managers are too hands on.