Are you creating workflow bottlenecks in your department?
Have you ever taken a hard look at your current processes or policies through an efficiency lens?
How much of your current practice involves having you review deliverables and rubber stamp most decisions? Workflow should be designed to be as efficient as possible, while ensuring quality of the final product.
What happens if your actions towards ensuring quality are inadvertently causing a bottleneck that slows down both projects and staff?
How can you tell if you are creating a bottleneck?
A great way to tell is to see if you are creating bottlenecks is if your subordinates are telling you the granular details of their task progress. Ideally you have an awareness of the projects your team is working on, but you do not need to approve each micro detail. Because your accessibility to them will vary day to day, you inadvertently create a workflow bottleneck to getting tasks done because they are waiting around to ask for your permission before moving on.
If someone needs to ask for permission to do something, the conversation is naturally much longer because they feel that they need to provide details and an explanation of their work to get the sign off.
It’s a different conversation when someone pops by your office or sends a quick email to say that they have completed a milestone and are on to the next task and wanted to keep you in the loop. It’s ideal to get your whole team to this level of confidence and competence in their work.
This impacts your day – you should care
This also impacts your work because your concentration is already tested with frequent interruptions – emails, phone calls, staff stopping by. It’s wonderful to have an open door policy and to be accessible to your staff but additional, ‘just a quick question’ conversations will keep you away from YOUR tasks and priorities.
A middle manager should be guiding their direct reports rather than strictly adhering to a hierarchy. This approach is best for workers who are already knowledgeable in their field and operations, but they need your support in believing that you will back up and trust the decisions that they make.
On the flip side, if they make a mistake, what is the risk? It probably takes less time to correct the mistake than the amount of delay in making a decision if they had been waiting around for your permission based on the likelihood of error in a competent and mentored workforce.
To mitigate the risk that they will make a decision with a negative consequence, ensure that you are both comfortable with the level of responsibility that they are taking on.
Start slowly. Depending on the amount of reluctance from you giving up a task to them taking one on, there will be a transition and a period of trust development.
Make the investment in mentorship
Mentorship is crucial in the development of a robust team. Think about how much smoother your day will go if staff can solve some of their own issues. By teaching your staff, you will be able to head off many interventions on your part down the road because the problem stays small with staff that are adept at handling issues.
It also increases staff morale to be able to handle their own issues. How often is there a win-win in middle management?
What it the staff become overly reliant?
If they are still coming to check in with you about the tasks that you have been given more than you think is necessary, then you still have more work to do. They may feel that they have to keep you constantly updated on their progress. If this is a required step, you could tell them that:
- Keep me in the loop when you have finished X,Y,Z milestones
- Keep me in the loop when you have completely finished
- Schedule time to meet with them to hear about their progress and any outstanding concerns. This can be a time of your choosing to work in with your desired schedule rather than the pop in, ‘can we have a quick chat?’
If they still do not feel that they have the authority to make the decision, they may not be completely ready to take on the task, or they need to be mentored differently.
They also may not be strong enough to have these levels of responsibility. What I had to learn early on in my management career was that not everyone was ambitious with their work ethic and wanted to challenge themselves like I did.
If one of your staff members needs to have their work reviewed, assign a peer reviewer whose work and judgement you trust. The work gets done and you don’t have to directly oversee the entirety of it.
But I NEED to review staff’s work!
Yes, you probably do to some extent. It’s important to be hands on, but you also need to balance with hands off to allow the staff some freedom to grow. If you are the financial authority to sign off a milestone, you need to take a quick look as you are ultimately the most responsible. That being said, in well mentored staff, it should be brief.
That’s great, but I really need to review a poor performer
Are you still not convinced? Try this test, would you give the same freedom to a different staff member on the team? Trust their decision making and time management? You are the reason for the bottleneck, but not the cause of the bottleneck.
If you have a poor performer that you feel that you need to constantly check up on and review their work, then it is time to have a conversation with them.
During this conversation, you need to outline your expectations and how they are not meeting it. Examples are very important here with tangible consequences of having to focus your time on their work. It is very important to prepare for this meeting, doing it on the fly will likely not yield the results that you need. Use this free template to organize before having a difficult conversation.
Ensure that you set up some milestones and goals and communicate with that individual on a regular basis.
Set both yourself and your staff up for success by mentoring them to be able to handle some decisions by themselves to reduce the bottlenecks that occur at your office door. There is an upfront investment of time from yourself to your staff, but after awhile you will be pleasantly surprised how you can keep up with your own projects when you have reduced the interruptions around you.