Thursday, January 26, 2017

To Managers of Enthusiastic Employees: Give Them a Chance

I often joke that if I could harness the energy of young children and sell it on e-Bay, I’d be the richest person in the world.  So why is it, then, that some managers squelch the enthusiasm of their employees who offer to drive internal improvement efforts?  Why not give them a chance, within reason, to prove themselves and their ideas?

The other week, I had the unique opportunity to meet with a young woman early in her career who was seeking advice for how to convince her manager that she should be able to expand the process improvement ideas she had implemented in her own work to the rest of the group.  She described that she had reduced a roughly 2-day manufacturing prep process down to 20 minutes, and believed that she could standardize her methods throughout the facility.  ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘that sounds terrific!’

As our conversation unfolded, we discovered that she needed to collect some baseline data on the current process duration, then data on her method.  She then needed to translate that into the cost savings of saved time, which in a business that is growing like hers, could mean delaying the hire of additional employees and saving overhead expense.   We also discussed how she would need to estimate a basic timeline and hours for her implementation efforts, and how she would need to be able to do all of that while still completing her regular responsibilities.  She was willing to do the extra work to improve the process independent of additional compensation, so that should be a non-issue for her manager.

After spending an hour together and coming up with a plan, this woman went back to her workplace and proceeded to pitch her idea, complete with the need for data collection and implementation plan development, to her management.  She let me know how that went a week later.  Apparently while her work is exemplary and management is very happy with her performance, they do not want her to step outside her “box” (my word), and take on this extra challenge.

Sigh.

Do they not realize that companies pay consultants big bucks to do exactly what she wants to do, essentially for “free”?  As long as she is still completing her regular responsibilities on time and with the high level of quality with which she apparently already does her work, why shouldn’t she be given a chance to make this improvement impact?

Now I recognize that I do not know the entire scenario, context, or organizational culture involved.   However, this incident has brought up a few memories for me of the growing-more-distant-every-day-past J when I was just beginning my career.  I recall stepping “outside the box” in factory training and encouraging my small group to perform a skit, rather than just write on a flip-chart, when explaining how photolithography worked.  They were highly skeptical, but agreed to do it.  Later the Trainer told me that he had never before seen such a creative explanation, and went on to describe our skit as an example to all his future training sessions.  That was a good result.

Then there was the time when I offered to take on doing the ergonomic assessments for my Process Engineering group on top of my regular responsibilities.  My mentor thought that I couldn’t handle “more work” and discouraged me, but fortunately our mutual manager disagreed and allowed me to do it, which I did while easily managing workloads.  I was even selected to perform the assessment for the then Plant Manager (it took all of five minutes, and was the highlight of my career to date at that time!).  Again, ultimately a good result, but a bit more challenging to get there.


Along the way, however, there have been some other  managers who did not allow me to try new ideas or make changes.  They would say things like “No, you can’t do that,” “No, we won’t try that here,” “No, that’s too different,” “No, that will never work.”  Sometimes I never got a good reason, sometimes it made sense, but overall looking back, it seems to me that if companies are not just paying lip-service to wanting to improve, they would take full advantage of what an enthusiastic employee offers to do!  If the employee has the desire and the energy, harness that stuff right up; it’s worth more than anything which can be bought on e-Bay.

Let me tell you, Managers of Enthusiastic Employees:  If you find yourself consistently saying “No” to people who want to try new things, fewer and fewer good employees will be working for you sooner or later.  Give them a chance, even if it means allowing them to change the practices that you yourself put in place back in the day, because if you don’t – the good employees will eventually leave your company and do something for someone else who appreciates them. 


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