The management by wandering around strategy exposes a manager to information that .

The operations manager, working for one of my clients, called to ask me to investigate an issue they were experiencing with one of their processes that recurred everyday. I went over there and started conversing with various employees involved in the affected process. Here is a conversation I had with one particular employee:

Me: “Good morning, Selena. Do you open any spreadsheets when you get here in the morning for any reason?”

Selena, proudly: “Why, yes. I am actually doing that right now. I check every order in this spreadsheet for fraud each day before we send them off to shipping.”

Me: “Hmm. Does that file happen to be on the H drive in the folder called ‘UPS Shipping Key’?

Selena, curiosity peaked: “Yes, the file has the same name, too. How did you know?”

Me: “Well Selena, it turns out that when you open that file in the morning, you accidentally change the format and the shipping team prints 189 black stop signs on their shipping labels instead of 189 shipping labels with customer addresses on them.”

Selena, chagrined: “Oh no!”

I came to know about Management By Walking Around when my new business partner, Stephen Sendar, told me, ‘This is why I want to work with you. You don’t have or need an MBA. You have an MBwA, and you know how to use it!” The above conversation with ‘Selena’ is a classic (and real) example of how using an MBwA approach can fix a problem that otherwise contributes to a many-hands-on-deck, brute-force attack on your payroll just to keep your ship afloat. 

Surprisingly, this was a huge and costly issue that had gone on for several months! The operations manager had floated this problem up the chain of command, only to be rebuffed by department managers who were too busy ‘doing their jobs’. Not one of them bothered to walk over to the shipping department (80 paces away from their desk) and ask, in person, “How can I help?”

Fortunately, it ended with a simple phone call from an operations manager asking me, “Can you come see why this is happening?”, followed by my visit, in which I asked the shipping crew, “What did you just do? What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? And what do you have to do to fix it?”

We, literally, fixed this problem with 30 minutes of ‘discovery’ and 30 minutes of ‘Selena training’, showing her how to copy csv files that she could use without affecting the format of the one we did not want her to open.

(The fact that Selena was performing an unnecessary manual task on thousands of orders per month - a task that was already being performed quite excellently by their credit card processing company - is a song for another symphony. We fixed that particular issue a few days later!)

Now granted, I also had the systemic, technical and architectural knowledge to know that shipping systems often work off of keyed files that are usually excel spreadsheets in some form or another. I also knew where to look in order to confirm this. So it was just a matter of time (less than one hour) for me to find out where the problem was occurring and fix it. Poor Selena was just doing her job, and she was doing it well. She was just given the wrong job and never knew she was costing the company thousands of dollars a week!

What is MBwA?

According to the web, the term and activity can be traced to Hewlett-Packard in the 70s, and it was used by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman in their book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies. 

MBwA was originally applied by them as a means of boosting morale within their company and ended up being included into the culture of their organization. Tom Peters considered the technique as the core element of excellent leadership. 

Peters and Waterman noticed that successful companies had CEOs and managers who spent much of their time in the field instead of sitting in their offices - and that those leaders were more aware of the operations and were better able to solve problems.

Also, let us just go straight to Wikipedia:

“Management by walking around refers to a style of business management which involves managers wandering around, in an unstructured manner, through the workplace(s), at random, to check with employees, equipment, or on the status of ongoing work. The emphasis is on the word wandering as an unplanned movement within a workplace, rather than a plan where employees expect a visit from managers at more systematic, pre-approved or scheduled times.

The expected benefit is that a manager, by random sampling of events or employee discussions, is more likely to facilitate improvements to the morale, sense of organizational purpose, productivity and total quality management of the organization, as compared to remaining in a specific office area and waiting for employees, or the delivery of status reports, to arrive there, as events warrant in the workplace.”

Our description: MBwA is a communication style that should be used at all levels of management to gain insights into a company's functions. It is an unstructured approach, which involves direct participation by leaders in the work-related affairs of their employees. 

In MBwA practice, managers spend a significant amount of their time making informal visits to the work area, asking questions and listening to the employees. It helps in collecting qualitative information and gaining useful insights. 

Why is MBwA important?

• MBwA brings you into contact with more people, more information and more ideas.
• It reduces or eliminates the likelihood that your direct reports will be reporting to you their biased interpretation of how well things are or are not going, in spite of a reality that might be otherwise.
• You are more likely to catch challenges early and fix them before they become monsters.
• MBwA builds trust and relationships with staff by showing that you have an active interest in them.

How to practice it for the benefit of the organization?

Overall, you need to create a situation where MBwA is an effective method and part of an overall management strategy - not a distraction. If you simply walk around and engage in conversation, you are forgetting the key takeaway of the strategy: information.

It is our recommendation that MBwA is:

• Implemented as a regular activity
• Has a purpose
• Has a plan

With the correct purpose and plan, managers and leaders can gain:

• Clarity: Identify early warning signs before a disaster strikes
• Control: Clearly communicate what must be done and verify progress
• Efficiency: Ensure the use of best practices

Where can it go wrong?

Done improperly, MBwA can be perceived as micro-managing. It can cause disturbance, as you are stepping in on someone’s schedule, and if you do it too often, the employee’s ability to do actual work might suffer.

The unstructured nature means you could talk to employees without gaining any new insight into the organization’s operations. These insights can be random and would not help the pressing problems of the organization.

MBwA cannot work well every time and in every organization. 

In our experience, though, when you start hearing grumbling inside your company grapevine that something is off, few activities are more successful than engaging your MBwA in collaborative mode in order to identify the issue and help fix it.

About Steve Rice

Steve Rice is not an international best-selling author... or a popular keynote speaker... or a famous futurist... or a top 5 this... or a top 5 that... He is, though, the founder of Dotcomjungle, SR Consulting and The Globally Conscious Leader on LinkedIn.

He is a strategic business & technology advisor to owners and executives of privately held CPG companies. He shows them how to make wise marketing and technology decisions. With his team at Dotcomjungle, he implements those wise marketing and technology decisions that result in sustained growth and profitability.

Those who work with him will tell you that his ability to absorb information about brands, strategies, technologies and results, then impart their context and opportunities in simple language, has proven invaluable to, and extremely profitable for, executives and the companies they work for.

#management #leadership #mentoringmatters

What is the purpose of the management by walking around strategy?

What is the meaning of management by wandering around?

What are the three activities of management by walking around?

What is MBWA and why is it important?