Managing Stability

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Managing Stability Managing Change

• HDCS 4393/4394 InternshipDr. Shirley Ezell

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Myths

• 1. There ought to be significant distinctions
  between managers who manage what appears to be
  stable systems and those who can cope effectively
  with change.
• 2. Only line managers with product
  responsibilities can assume general management
  like responsibilities with management
  interrelationships among functions, and balancing
  and trading off among various activities, with
  bottom line results that measure effectiveness.
• 3. So-called self-managing autonomous groups or
  teams require little external leadership.

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Intervention

• What Are 3 Kinds of Managerial Interventions?
• 1. Systems Maintenance (Maintaining work)
• 2. Adaptation
• 3. Consequential Change

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Intervention (Cont.)

• In Systems Maintenance good managers spend
  significant time identifying causes of system
  malfunctioning.
  They look at quality,
  service,
  integrated whole ,
  efficiency,
  and even safety.

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Systems Maintenance

• When customers complain about late delivery,
  changes in tooling take too long, new employees
  make too many errors or quality defects in the
  products, the manager can take the following
  steps
• 1. Manager can work with sophisticated technology
  with all interfaces designed and fine tuned to
  company needs and collect real time data.
• 2. Manager can look for ways to improve system
  continually.
• 3.One can always use training or
  retraining or staff development.
• 4. In contrast, less effective managers
  are passive until some plan or budget
  deviation forces them to take
  action.

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Change is Required to Get Stability

• Good managers will be finding ways in which their
  systems have subpart performance, or can improve
  performance with regularity.
• All managers need to be change agents.
• The response required for failure is adaptation.

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Managers are not Islands unto Themselves

• If quality and performance and service are to
  remain at high level, such external changes
  require internal adaptations. And they are very
  similar in terms of leadership energy and skill.

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A Line Managers Struggle

• There are many lessons to be learned from Kay
  Cohens experience in this chapter.
• Kay managed a relatively self-contained unit that
  produced a variety of glues and adhesives for
  other manufacturers. She was relatively new on
  the job and knew that some of her fellow managers
  questioned whether a woman could
  make it on the manufacturing side of
  the business.

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Beginning to Plan for Change

• As she put her plans and budgets together for
  1991, she realized that she could improve
  performance. Her sales revenues depended on the
  divisions marketing department, and most of her
  raw materials were purchased in small quantities
  from large chemical companies. This gave her
  little room to maneuver on price, however she
  knew that her employees worked as an effective
  team, morale was high and quality was excellent.

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Beginning to Plan for Change (Cont.)

• Improvement Kay realized that she depended on
  an internal source for unique solvents that were
  used to make about ½ of her custom glue.
  Unfortunately she was a small customer and she
  frequently had to wait days for a delivery
  from Process Chemicals (PC). This hurt her fast
  turnaround for her customers.

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Managers Must Do Their Homework

• In her research she found a small company Dill
  Chemicals that had some new equipment that could
  be used to produce relatively small quantities of
  materials. She then undertook an extensive
  investigation to find who sold and serviced the
  equipment. 15 calls later she decided that Dill
  was a good company. She flies to Chicago to
  interview the company and after further analysis
  finds that for an investment of 450,000 she
  would have a ROI close to 20.

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Managers Must Do Their Homework (Cont.)

• Kay has a preliminary discussion with her boss
  Mike Graflin. She made a presentation and he said
  he would think about it. He also suggested she
  contact Jim Travis an engineer in the corporate
  staff technology group before going any further
  with Dill.

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Developing Relationships

• She received a slot with Jim Travis to present
  her ideas to the committee and then realized she
  needed to talk to marketing, to prepare a
  detailed report. In addition she needed to talk
  to an old friend in the finance group since she
  had never gone through the process of all the
  paperwork required for the purchase of equipment.

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Developing Relationships (Cont.)

• She books a flight to see Travis and prepared a
  compact summary version of her proposal. He
  thought she had done a good job on her research
  with Dill but felt it would be wasteful to use
  the equipment for more than mundane solvents.
• Kay agrees to start out for the first 6 months
  splitting the sourcing but felt the trial might
  prove that she could get rid of the PC connection.

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Change Process Takes Time

• He also suggested that she see Phyllis Cyzak
  because she was an expert on maintenance and that
  she was to send Travis a copy of her response.
• Kay returns to talk to her contact in finance,
  who says go back to the drawing board to sure
  that you can justify and increase ROI to 25.

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Change Process Takes Time (Cont.)

• She makes her contact with marketing, talks with
  Chris Doppi of PC who is angry and invites him to
  lunch. He is not cooperative but Kay realized
  that by this time she has her boss on her side.
  Just as she is making progress she finds out that
  Chris Doppi of PC is spreading rumors suggesting
  that Dill Co. is having problems.

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Managers Need Team Support

• Kay immediately puts together a task force. This
  works because they develop a loyalty to Kay and
  even bring in new equipment on a weekend to make
  the deal happen. Kay finally gets the equipment
  and problems emerge. Then employees begin to get
  headaches from fumes coming from the Dill
  equipment. Once again, Kay must find a solution
  to another problem. How does this case end?

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What Can Be Learned From This Case?

• Many decisions require managers to spend effort
  skill, and persistence in working the
  organization to introduce change.
• Small technical details often make a critical
  difference and there are many compromises. Change
  opens a Pandoras box of problems, many trivial
  but each threatening performance.
• One has to wonder how many managers would go
  thorough all the trials and details, and meetings
  and spend the energy in the full measure of this
  case by Kay?

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Working Managers

• The important lesson is that Working Managers
  dont seek to insert ready-made, consultant
  solutions. They recognize that in order to work
  well, any fix must be fully integrated into the
  routines of the organization.

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General Managers vs Functional Managers Is The
Leadership Different?

• General Managers have to develop those leadership
  skills associated with balancing and trading off
  or optimizing the contribution of each of the key
  functions necessary for completed work.
• Although functional managers usually arent
  profit centers they are more likely cost centers.
  They obviously dont control a wide range of
  other functions, and their challenges can be
  quite similar to general managers.

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General Managers vs Functional Managers Is The
Leadership Different?

• It is often asserted that functional managers
  cannot be real leaders because they dont have
  profit performance measures.
• There are however many measures for functional
  managers to use including service, quality, cost
  savings, innovativeness. These all can be
  measured and their contributions can be as
  important as profit.

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Do Self-Managing Groups Need Managing?

• In self-managing groups the group itself can
  handle materials requisitions, negotiations with
  human resources, quality control department and
  even selection of new employees. But this does
  not eliminate their need for management and a
  manager with leadership skills.
• Managers have a role in working with autonomous
  groups. The manager has critical
  role in negotiating with external
  groups whose routines contradict or
  interfere with the work of
  the autonomous units.

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Do Self-Managing Groups Need Managing? (Cont.)

• The greater the self-managing capability of the
  work group, the more the managers focus shifts
  to developing a strategy for the future,
  negotiating for new resources and new technology
  and getting final approval from higher management.

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Managers asWorking Leaders

• In summary, management in modern
  change-oriented and competition-pressured
  organizations requires leadership skills to
  routinize, to adapt, and to introduce change. And
  both functional managers and managers of
  autonomous groups can't get an exemption.
• Management and Leadership are synonymous in the
  contemporary world.