Hilton Barnett and Associates

Effective Working Relationships

Areas of focus

As you will notice, these individual focus areas all interact with one another.

This is important to keep in mind when trying to find solutions.

Any changes made may have unwanted consequences in other areas. Integrated approaches are recommended.

Structue

Structure

What is it?

How to design the organisation for efficient flows of work across different roles and systems.

Structure is one of the systems for organising work in order to efficiently turn the intention of the organization into reality

So what?

Often structure is not designed with a clear focus on the work that needs to be done to achieve the strategy, or it becomes noisy and cumbersome over time as decisions about roles and teams are made for the wrong reasons.

For example:

failure to deal with capability problems or poor systems

structure conflicts with systems

structure is not fit for new business purpose or context

empire building

adding 'policeman roles' instead of improving culture

not structuring for growth

How to fix this

Design structure around the work that needs to be done and not the individuals.
Create clarity around the work of all of the roles, and how the people in those roles and teams need to interact in order for the work to flow efficiently
‘What is the work and whose work is it?’

Ensure all your systems align with

the intent of the structure.

For example:

Ensure all roles have the required authority to do their work and that the various systems they have to work with are supportive of this.

Each new level of work in an organisation must add value through contributing work of a different complexity.

Ensure that the structure is more than just a chart on the wall or a set of role descriptions. This is achieved by aligning leadership behaviour and systems, and of course,

placing the right people in the role.

Systems

So what?

What is it?

Using systems appropriately to drive the right behaviour, simplify work and improve efficiencies.

We include as systems any way of organising work to get things done.

These could be authorised or unauthorised, productive or counter-productive.

This can range from:

How you run a meeting or how individual performance is measured, through to a complex technical production process.

So what?

Too often in practice they are poorly designed and therefore increase noise, create extra work and drive the wrong behaviour.

This could happen because they are designed in the wrong roles, and in isolation from the context of the end user.

Systems can also be in conflict with each other.

We see this where they require or permit work behaviour that contradicts the requirements of other systems.

Unproductive systems will be bypassed

Unclear systems will lead to obeying whoever

'shouts the loudest'

Unfair systems will cause conflict

How to fix this

Have the right people designing systems

for the right reasons.

We have a methodology to help analyse, design and implement systems effectively.

This includes:

A 20 step process

A method for predicting responses

Guidelines for ensuring people with the right capability, in the right roles within the structure are doing this work.

A matrix to analyse existing systems and their resulting behaviour

Leadership

What is it?

Getting leadership right is about defining and requiring the productive focus of all who have people reporting to them.

These roles are the cornerstone of achieving goals through the work of people.

Behaviour and interactions within and between teams can seriously impact the business.

The ability to understand and influence this is the key work of leadership.

So what?

The selection of people to these roles often ignores the capability required for creating the conditions for sustainable team performance.

Leaders also find they battle against systems, culture and unclear authority to do this work. This usually includes the design of their role, their manager or their KPIs not allowing time or space for leadership work.

HR systems often just add extra work or remove the key influence of the direct relationship

Therefore

We provide:

guides and tools for the work of leaders

programmes for improving leadership & teamwork

advice for systems & structure to support leaders

a coherent approach for integrating systems and leadership to create a culture that sustainably supports the strategy

Symbols

What is it?

We say a picture paints a thousand words, but anything can be a symbol.

Symbols are very meaningful for employees as they either reinforce or contradict existing beliefs about the organisation.

Consciously working with symbols can be a powerful driver of change.

The way a leader behaves can be symbolic of how the organization wants me to behave.

The quality of safety equipment can symbolize how much the business cares for me.

So what?

If we are trying to drive a certain way of working, quality, productivity, safety etc – yet people are constantly faced with symbols that contradict these,

we have little chance of success

If a manager doesn’t do the right things, why would anyone else?

If our systems reward people for production quantity only, then quality and safety will suffer.

If we allow high absenteeism and high overtime it symbolizes a lack of care about productivity.

If systems and leadership behaviour ‘punish’ people for doing the right thing, they won’t do it.

If an abusive man is allowed to continue as a manager it shows we do not really care about gender based violence.

At the very least, these symbols create confusion and perhaps even derision.

Therefore

We help you to identify symbols that are holding the organisation back as well as to think about how you can change these or create new ones to

support the culture you want.

It is important to see these from the point of view of employees (or customers) and not through our own lenses, but it is not always easy to do this if the culture is full of mistrust.

We are skilled at listening to employees and have a simple yet sound process of hearing directly from them. However, to sustain a productive culture requires that all managers are able to work with symbols as part of their everyday leadership work.

Capability

What is it?

How to accurately match people to the type and complexity of work in a role.

Capability describes the full set of requirements for people to be right for a particular role. Being thorough in defining capability and acting consistently on this is often neglected.

Usually lip service is paid to some elements and others, such as narrowly measured performance and technical skills, become the sole focus.

So what?

Whilst it takes work, time and money to get the right people in role, it takes much more to replace the wrong people as does the common option of

working around the problem.

The costs and damage to the business and the people in it – vary from role to role, but there are always costs.

A common mistake is promoting someone who is good at their current job – purely on this basis or because we need to reward them to keep them happy.

This can result in:

Losing our best person in one role and

gaining a poor manager

The person failing to work at the right level and dragging everyone down

We can also ignore poor social process skills and then wonder why there are problems in the team.

In small businesses this problem can become apparent when a founder entrepreneur puts themselves in a manager role as the company grows – they can turn out to be very poor leaders and are reluctant to acknowledge this and let go.

Therefore

We help you define and asses capability for each role, based firmly of the particular work required.

This includes of course defining carefully the work of roles in the structure for efficient flow of work.

We will also look at systems and leadership that can make it seem you have a capability problem

where there is not one.

Work Clarity

What is it?

Providing a consistent message about expectations, including allocating the required resources, especially the authority to do the work.

It is so fundamental that this is often assumed to be clearly in place. Our experience is that there are usually many factors that create confusion and mixed messages – driving work and work behaviour that is the opposite of what is needed.

Symbols discussed above are one of these.

We ask: "where do people get information about what they should be doing and why?

Role descriptions

Contracts

What our boss says and how they react

What other people say

What systems and procedures allow us to do or ask us to do

What gets rewarded and what gets punished

What keeps me out of trouble

What I believe about the values of the organisation

Company policies and goals, but these are often smothered by the rest

So what?

When there are so many influences over what people should do, or are able to do – there is no role clarity.

The result is that people are left to their own devices to make sense of things.

Usually this will mean they follow what ‘shouts the loudest’ what is most likely to work for them or get them into trouble if they do not do it.

This is not a good basis for running a business as it may have nothing to do with purpose or goals of the company and it also gets in the way of teamwork.

Without role clarity (and capability and authority) there is no accountability.

Therefore

We help you identify all the sources of information so you can simplify these into a consistent message that aligns all influences and drives the right behaviour.

This approach will often also lead to a reduction of waste, a more positive culture and

the simplification of systems.

"when your offer is simply a hammer, then you will see every problem as a nail"

What gets measured gets done – measure the right things and measure everything you need doing.

“If only output is measured, the process is hidden. That is a very risky place to be."

Integrating for Performance

In reality these areas are all interdependent and will work together or against each other.

Efficient and sustainable success will require intention and work to align these elements and to integrate them

into all areas of work.

None of this will happen by itself and yet

it is often neglected.

Sustained improvements are unlikely if each area is

managed in isolation.

This commonly occurs in large complex structures or when separate improvement projects engage consultants who narrowly apply their set of tools, with no concept of cohesion.

How it looks:
Working Together

People with the right capability are working within helpful systems that provide required inputs, resources and authority to do the work.

The work is organised in a structure that enables decision making by the right people and an efficient workflow, where each new management level adds a qualitatively different type of work.

Systems, Symbols and Leadership Behaviour provide consistent messages about what work is required.

People are willing and able to turn up at work and give of their best

Working against

The hard work of selecting capable people is avoided due to slow and ineffective systems and

no shared view of required capability.

Systems are poorly designed and managed and extra effort is required to work around these.

There are conflicting messages regarding what people should or should not do.

The structure interferes with effective work across teams and systems conflict with each other.

Managers are not selected for leadership work and neither is there space or time for them to do this work.

All of the above creates a strong symbol that a company does not value its people or their work.

People will disengage and those with capability will find a job where they feel valued.

Improvement

A great deal can be improved by an integrated approach to these systemic issues.

It is even better to anticipate and avoid them. It is not difficult to predict how human behaviour at work will respond to the above two scenarios.

We all hear about the

“benefits of hindsight”. Our approach provides benefits from foresight.

We are a locally based South African company with global experience and associates in Australia, Denmark and the United Kingdom.

You can contact us via any of the following:

Email- Info@hbaleadership.com

Cell:+27 829001452

Or +27 784579317

Or contact us individually using the links in the Who we are section.

Areas of focus

Structure

What is it?

So what?

How to fix this

Integrating for Performance

How it looks: Working Together

Working against

Improvement

Successful businesses are built through the work of their people

How it looks:
Working Together