| Get
Out of Your Own Way
By Steve Klinkerman
Strategies and technologies can
be duplicated, making the quality of organizational decisions
a key competitive factor.
Can companies truly differentiate themselves
through distinctive strategies and technological mastery?
A lot of effort is based on that premise. But insight
and expertise aren't sufficient in a national market populated
by more than 10,000 financial services providers. Companies
scoring singular successes don't get far before being
copied — competitors will rip off your strategy,
recreate your technology and even hire away your brain
trust.
What ultimately distinguishes market
leaders, then, is the quality of the nervous system and
the connective tissue. The banking industry, for example,
is steadily moving in the direction of employing fewer
people who are more highly trained and who use technology
to handle higher workloads. Each person is making more
decisions, and each decision has more impact.
Throw in an intensely competitive market
and a feverish pace of technological change, and you have
a situation where the entire organization must demonstrate
cohesion, not just an elite group of executives. Unless
people come together, there is no way that the corporation
is going to deliver integrated customer service, cope
with a rapid development cycle for products and services,
manage the complexities of e-commerce and capitalize on
information technology.
This reality forces managers and workers
to confront their own interpersonal effectiveness. There's
no hiding behind skills or rank. To the degree that people
can't collaborate to make timely, high-quality decisions
on crucial matters affecting the customer and the organization,
their individual contributions are diminished, and their
projects are compromised.
Driving home the point, one-fourth of
the managers and workers responding to a survey by management
consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe Inc., Princeton, N.J., said
decision delays by senior management "often" cause their
organizations to forfeit opportunities; another 50% said
that "sometimes" is the case. More than 60% said their
business units sometimes miss opportunities because of
delays in making and implementing decisions; another 10%
said that often is the case.
In explaining these delays, the 818
respondents cited factors such as the need to obtain multiple
approvals, organizational politics, changing priorities,
lack of consensus on decision purposes, divergent approaches,
fear of mistakes and coordinative difficulties (see chart).
There was little difference in responses between the 479
managers and 339 workers participating in the survey,
which included a variety of industries.
The respondents said that when they
were hurried, they did a poor job of sharing information
(46%), failed to involve the right people (38%), failed
to achieve consensus on what was to be accomplished (27%),
failed to obtain enough information (22%), did not gain
sufficient commitment prior to implementation (21%), and
did not consider enough options before deciding (17%).
What to do? One response is to elevate
awareness of the issues surrounding organizational decisions,
for example through third-party evaluations and survey
feedback from employees and customers. Another is to clear
political and structural roadblocks. Yet another is to
provide training and tools so that people can take tangible
steps to improve individual and collective decision-making.
Ultimately, people will have to change
their attitudes to improve the speed and quality of organizational
decisions. That makes the issue all the more slippery
to deal with. But there's little choice. After all, decisions
form the intellectual transmission of the organization.
If the gears don't mesh, the vehicle's not going anywhere.
Mr. Klinkerman is
editor-in-chief of Banking Strategies.
Copyright © 2003 by Banking
Strategies, published by BAI.
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