Far too often, I hear the complaint, “We don’t have enough people!” They use it as an excuse to explain why they can’t get things done or when they don’t do them at all.
Unfortunately, many managers believe they need more people because the work they require their people to do is not getting done. It’s a logical argument, but they automatically default to blaming “personnel levels” without much thought to other areas and certainly without self-reflection. This excuse removes them and their people’s capabilities from the equation.
This is the “checkers” level of management. One should strive to achieve the “chess” level of management. See an excellent article on this subject here.
The real challenges:
Poor prioritization: Do your people know what the highest priorities are? I have worked in many organizations that do not prioritize the tasks their people are supposed to complete. This causes significant problems.
I rarely see them prioritize administrative, operational, or developmental tasks. The problem with this is that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Personnel development gets the same importance as updating an office memo.
What ends up happening is managers prioritize only the things that will get them in trouble with the boss, which leaves much to be desired in many areas.
The solution is to be deliberate about the priorities of the organization. If you don’t want people guessing, you must clarify where the focus should be.
Poor Leadership: You charge the organization’s leadership team with providing vision and inspiration to achieve goals. If the leadership has failed to provide clear goals, how can there be inspired, employees? There needs to be deliberate communication among the organization’s leaders to address the vision and inspiration.
Without vision and inspiration, you have managers. Managers are great, but organizations will struggle with change, innovation, and motivation without leaders.
No creativity: Your team needs to be creative when problem-solving. There is an underlying issue when things aren’t getting done, or we do them poorly. It could be training, it could be discipline, it could be equipment, it could be technology, and it could be a lack of people. The point is to utilize your people as best as possible. If you are only filling personnel gaps with random people without regard to their skills or how they complement the rest of the team, you will lose.
This story’s moral is to address low workforce levels only after looking at the other possibilities first. Hiring more people into an already mediocre organization only continues the mediocrity.
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Thank you Zachary for sharing your wisdom. Excellent insight here on how to avoid incurring extra cost by doing more with what you have. To keep the dialog going, I would like to expand on your three challenges. Where there’s a lack of safety, creativity, proactivity, productivity etc., there’s a lack of values, integrity, ethics, respect etc., meaning there’s a lack of leadership at many levels, namely the top level. This obstacle is next to impossible to overcome due to the fact that the Manager in Disguise at the top of the dysfunction will never accept responsibility for the issues which require more employees to manage. When you find employees delivering the “bare minimum tactic” to keep their jobs, you’ll find that safety, creativity, proactivity, productivity etc. is purposely driven down to influence the data and put a spotlight on poor management. This tactic is used as a last resort because it hurts the most and is usually used after all other attempts to get management’s attention have failed.
Robert, I agree the “leader” at the top will rarely take responsibility. It can be very disheartening for the rest of the team when those type of managers are in charge. My current organization suffers from a lack of direction. I think the managers at the top mean well, but the organizational norms make it very difficult to navigate change. Ego and ambition outweigh risk. The risk of culture change.
Thats GREEDership, not Leadership. These types of stories are all too common. Their the reason I wrote my book MANAGERS IN DISGUISE-LEADERS IN DISGUST. Pulling the curtain back on poor management.
Beautiful article.