What Executives Should Consider About… Responsibility Drift

Let’s assume that your company is highly organized and that you and your executive team believe your operations are generally very efficient. Everyone appears to understand their roles and responsibilities within the company and you hear very few complaints about waste.  Still, your company, like others, is facing a tough economy and needs to do more with less.

If you’re already efficient where do you look? Most managers will overlook standard operations and begin an extensive search for things or people they don’t need. That’s the right instinct but the best answer is probably to take another look, with a new perspective, at your day to day operations.

From the day your company first started operations or from the day of your last attempt at streamlining operations, the pieces of your carefully constructed operational puzzle have been drifting apart. The gaps between the pieces are growing larger and some pieces have actually begun to re-shape themselves without your knowledge or approval. It happens everywhere, in almost every organization, and not because your company is maturing or following the market. It happens because the people who work for you will cooperate with each other to rid themselves of job responsibilities they don’t like or to take on responsibilities they like more than those they were given. These minor changes, which sometimes seem harmless and are almost invisible, can slowly but surely undermine your efficiency.

The secretary who hates to answer the phone will recruit the nearest available clerical worker to handle that task for her. The bookkeeper who is insecure about her writing abilities may ask the secretary to not only type but also compose the narratives of her reports. The purchasing agent who hates paperwork will arrange for the receiving department to fill purchase orders on the receiving dock.

We’re not saying that your employees are dishonest or malicious. Even as they sift and sort through their roles and give and take responsibilities they will have the best of intentions to serve the company well. The changes they make will seem logical and innocent to them.

The problem is that the “little” changes and adjustments that make their work lives more comfortable are not always good for the company. They can actually create hidden costs in short cuts, duplication of services or substantial imbalances in the distribution of workloads that eventually create work flow bottlenecks.

Consider the example of a manufacturing company that was surprised to find that four different people in four different departments were soliciting quotes from vendors for the same materials, and that unofficial drawings created by the estimating department sometimes replaced engineering specifications in their manufacturing process, or that quality control managers were issuing purchase orders without the knowledge of the purchasing department.

Nobody intended to create what became a mishmash of disjointed activities, and since no one had asked permission to make the changes they made, it had all taken place below the radar of the company’s upper level managers. Everyone cooperated and no one objected because the “minor adjustments” they made all seemed so innocent.

When it comes time to tighten your belt you may not do as well chasing down the optional or the obvious as you might by looking closely at the ways in which the process of doing work has been quietly evolving. Is the work you’ve so carefully organized being done according to plan? Perhaps it’s time to check.

Next: Known Issue

Tom Aranow is a former CEO who now consults with CEOs and other executives as a Senior Advisor with Harrington Daniels Advisors, LLC. He may be reached at Tom@hdadvisors.com.