Get Off Your Butt And Start To Manage - For Pete's Sake!!!

I colleague of mine recently sent me a link to the following interesting article: Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers available on the McKinsey Quarterly web page.  They sent it because we had a long talk about my recent efforts to do what we have done for so many of our clients - start our own firm down the path towards becoming a LEAN organization. (more on this later...)

We talked in great length about what constitutes Value to our clients and what constitutes Waste or Muda.  If conventional Lean thinking can apply to a management consulting firm them 80% or more of our effort should turn out to be Waste as defined by our clients.  Needless to say this exercise has quickly turned into a monumental struggle of wills and rock solid beliefs  both among my esteemed colleagues and, of more concern, within my own mind. (again, more on this later...)

Back to the article.  For those of you who do not wish to register as a member of this web page let me simply say that the folks at McKinsey have come up with five interesting causes of lost productivity for knowledge workers.  They are as follows:

1. Physical barriers
2. Technical barriers
3. Social and Cultural barriers
4. Contextual barriers
5. The barrier of time

How you can call "time" a barrier to "time" still has me stumped.  However as I mentioned it does make for interesting academic reading - especially if you are looking to impress your fellow managers around the water cooler.

I am actually not writing to help promote McKinsey's web page.  I am writing to share my response to this article which may or may not be published by McKinsey.  For what they may be worth my two cents were as follows:

All these barriers are great and probably true. But what happened to good old fashioned hands on management? We find the higher the 'tech' the more these people are left to fend for themselves. A common phrase among management in these knowledge areas is "I don't have to manage them - they should know what to do."

This attitude, combined with the staggering complexity in which these knowledge workers exist is the Perfect Storm for lost productivity. In one particular example I have seen actual productivity calculated at just over 12%.  This for an office in the Finance sector with more Armani than a TIFF after hours party. 

Why does everyone feel it is perfectly acceptable to tell a factory worker that they have to complete 100 units by the end of their shift. Yet no one dares tell an engineer or a software developer that they need to complete a certain milestone by the end of the day.

One forgets that the purpose for 'managing' employees in this way is to give them the respect of ensuring that they have everything they need. Just as the factory worker has the opportunity to point out that she is starting to run out of packaging material. So to the engineer can point out that he is still waiting for a critical design document from another department. Why should the engineer lose productive time having to chase down missing information instead of getting on with the task at hand? Because they're more educated?

Give me a break. Management needs to stop looking for the 'silver bullet' - as one person noted. And get out of their offices and start doing their job of actively managing resources.

Thank you for reading.  And please tell me I'm wrong.