By Daniel Murray
When failure is not an option, hope is a terrible strategy. Shouting leads to shutdown and doing the work yourself just burns you out. While Kanban walls and daily scums are useful tools, it is the human skill of people leadership, grounded in empathy and understanding that is the real path to driving productivity.
In my past life as a management consultant, I led large-scale programs of work within the world’s most expensive Bank and saw many great projects end in failure despite expert planning. This is hardly new, McKinsey reports that major IT projects overshoot budgets by 45% and deliver 56% less value than forecast. It isn’t just IT either, this is mirrored in many other industries where wonderful powerpoint presentations and well drafted blueprints show a simple path but end in expensive disappointment. It is a consistent worry for the executive teams I work with in my consulting today. So, why does it go so wrong?
The central issue is the false belief that people operate like machines. I remember the day I sat in front of a massive screen looking at a beautifully detailed Gantt chart and project plan. The architect of this plan was showing it off like a proud father. With its colour-coded workstreams and neatly aligned resource tables, it looked part artwork and part blueprint for success.
However, I stared at a table of names and numbers with concern. It said FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) and displayed the people allocated to the project over the 6 month period. As I looked at the names and pictured their faces, something struck me. I couldn’t shake a single question from my mind: “What if they don’t want to do the work?” I asked this of the project manager but he had no useful reply. This was a predictable risk we were seemingly ignoring.
While we track machines with sensors and algorithms, we still seem to treat people as fixed assets. FTE counts like 0.5 or 1.0 suggest predictability, but we all know human productivity doesn’t work that way. One week, a team member might go above and beyond. The next, stress or conflict could cause them to shut down. We know this not only from others, but from our own experiences. Yet this beautiful plan dismissed this variability. It treated humans like robots. If we can’t understand and manage how people are feeling about their work, are we just leaving this massive variability to chance?
Let’s run the numbers
Imagine Bill is fully allocated to the project. We are planning on 1.0 daily output, 5 days a week for 6 months. Let’s call that 120 days of output. What happens if Bill is disengaged? Based on Gallup’s research, disengagement can reduce productivity by around 18%. This might look like an hour or so across the day scrolling Facebook, shopping on Amazon or taking an extended coffee break. This means Bill delivers just 98.4 days of output. Where do these additional days come from? Who picks them up?
This is where the snowball effect really kicks in, because as timelines slip and milestones fail to be met, Managers ask for more engaged workers to pick up the slack. This extra work builds resentment which often translates to lower engagement and productivity. This isn’t about numbers alone, this is about people. How we treat them really matters.
Why Leadership Matters
While we could look at time-in-motion tracking or other tools that track the productivity of workers, I fear the micromanagement will compound, not reduce the feelings of dissatisfaction. The real key here is Leadership.
Not the corner-office kind, but leadership as the active service of helping other people to bring their best to their work.
We assume that job descriptions and status meetings are enough. They’re not. We don’t just need to monitor the numbers and tick the boxes. We need leaders embedded in teams who actively build trust, inspire confidence and help people to adapt to challenges in real time. We need leaders who care about the people and serve them to perform.
When it gets hard, get close and curious
When pressure mounts, Managers in many organisations reduce work to tasks and people to numbers in spreadsheets, eroding the very meaning and relationships that sustain performance. If we want to lead teams to success in today’s complex world, we must rethink how we treat people.
Empathic leaders get closer to the people who are struggling. Get out of the spreadsheets and project plans, instead have conversations with the people. Don’t focus exclusively on tasks, ask them how they are feeling. Explore what might be causing them any tensions. Share with them that while you don’t have all the answers, you are there to help them. This honest support must be demonstrated with authenticity. It is not enough to shoot them an email to check-in or say your door is always open. You need to close the gap.
Too many managers I’ve worked with will complain that they don’t have time to speak to their people, but real leaders know that this is a cornerstone of the work. Some try to pick up the extra work themselves or manage expectations with a focus on external stakeholders, but empathic leaders know that the real solution to driving up productivity and delivering great results lies in the messy and challenging work of building engagement within their teams.
When failure is not an option, hope is a terrible strategy. Delegation can lead to frustration. Shouting leads to shutdown and doing the work yourself just burns you out. While Kanban walls and daily scums are useful tools, it is the human skill of people leadership, grounded in trust, empathy and understanding that is the real path to driving productivity and organisational success.
Daniel Murray
