So… you thought only Humans have mood swings??!! How about exploring the mood swings of Organizations which tend to impact every manager from top to bottom…
Consider these scenarios… I am sure as a manager, each of you would have come across these scenarios at some point in your careers…
A Sr Exec decides that the Technology teams should be built around Centers Of Excellence. He feels that by having central teams, best practices can be implemented easily and resources become more fungible. He gets a go ahead and you start seeing a Testing Center Of Excellence, Development Centers Of Excellence, Infrastructure Center Of Excellence, Production Support CoE etc…. Mode of operation for you, as a manager, would be to engage each of these CoEs and place your resource demand, get your work done and release them back to ‘pool‘.
Few months into this Operating Model, the Sr Exec moves on to a different company or to a different role and you get a new Sr Exec who firmly believes in the opposite. That these Centres Of Excellence adds to layers and layers of Bureaucracy. He questions the process of running from pillar to post to mobilize resources and questions the accountability of the business delivery in this distributed matrix structure…
Guess what happens next? The CoEs gets broken and resources start getting moved back to individual projects or business lines… The best practices, common frameworks, reusable components all gets thrown out of the window… This is a typical centralized vs federated mood swing…
Let’s consider more such scenarios to see if they resonate with you…
A Sr Exec decides to have lean permanent staff strength and heavy presence of vendor staff and decides to go all out spending money to ramp up consultants. He moves on and his successor feels that being vendor-heavy is a big risk and goes all over the place to replace consultants with permanent staff (a permanent vs vendor mood swing)
A Sr Exec feels that every non core software products should be bought and company should only focus on building software pertaining to its core bread-and-butter business. He leaves and his successor feels that millions of dollars are being wasted on 3rd party licences and goes all out building the products in-house (build vs buy).
A Sr Exec decides that the only way of motivating staff is to keep base package minimum and heavy bonuses at the end of year. His successor feels that bonus is a bad culture and decides on having e competitive base package to band minimum bonuses.
These examples could go on and on… The problem is not with one U-turn. Staff generally expects a ‘change‘ when there is movement at the Sr Exec levels. Many employees especially managers equip themselves to deal with changes at the top level which gets eventually trickled down to the bottom line managers. It becomes frustrating when these Sr Exec changes happen frequently and each of them reversing their predecessor’s decision (two U-Turns make a circle!!!).
To be honest, neither the Sr Execs who take the initial decision nor the ones who reverse their predecessor’s decision are wrong. They have deeply built convictions over years of leading successful Operating Models in their own way. In fact, many Sr Execs are hired to drive the change in the opposite direction :).
But, as a manager, you would feel like being stuck to a pendulum, which keeps swinging from one end to another without moving any forward.
You would question the logic of these drastic changes and their reversals. It feels ridiculous to see the money and efforts wasted in the process. However much you are uncomfortable with the frequent changes; at the end of the day, it is you who have to digest the change in order to take your team along the change curve.
So, what options do you have then? Well… quite simply put … the common sense reaction is to either ignore, play-along or capitalize…
You can ignore the changes happening around you as long as it doesn’t impact you or your team. You may yourself be very opinionated about the best way to run a company or a department, but when you are not in the driver’s seat; so all you can do is to just sit back and relax….
When the changes impact you or your team, you can simply play along. ‘You need to me go fully FTEs’? ‘All right Boss, at your service’. ‘Sorry, now you want me to go all consultant Boss’? ‘All right Boss, here you go…. Your wish is my order‘… The company may appreciate ‘Yes‘ men during these changes, and there is nothing wrong in being one as long as you are not wearing a mask while being an ‘Yes’ man…It is impossible in the the long run to be both opinionated and be an ‘Yes’ man.
The third lot are so full of conviction that they seize the opportunity every time there is a change. In fact this lot thrives on changes and grow very fast in the organization with frequent changes. They are mind blowing in terms of their lateral and vertical outreach that one will be left surprised how easily they convince that they are the best suited to implement the change. For this lot, it is neither being opinionated nor about whether the change is good or bad for the team. It is all about getting the best possible outcome for self when these changes happen. This is a rare gem of a quality and if you are one of this lot, hats-off to you.
There is also a final option. To simply step aside of the mayhem and not be party to the Organizational mood swings and be on your own highway…
(published 7th Nov 2015)
