Control, managing… Oorah! and…

Control, managing …and accountability

Anybody who’s ever supervised a group who shared responsibility for executing multiple tasks knows the frustration that goes with checking up on their completion and hearing responses like these: “Oh, I was going to do that tomorrow” … or “well that’s really Joe’s job” and the always regrettable, “It wasn’t my responsibility”.

The blame for those replies doesn’t belong to the folks voicing them. Nope: It’s the fault of the manager who didn’t assign those tasks to a specific person for accomplishment on a specific time or day.

And that’s exactly why that sanitation program we could design for our customers is so valuable. If worker #1 is supposed to clean the walk-in box floor every Monday morning before opening, there’s no excuse if it’s not clean before lunch service begins that day.

Similarly those daily tasks like sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor after every meal is pretty easy to check and monitor for execution… or to place blame when it isn’t. Either way that detailed plan that assigns every task to a specific worker, at a set time, gets as close to guaranteeing accomplishment as we’re ever likely to get.

Next up: Balancing that plan’s assignments.

Oorah! and …Making adjustments

There’s a Marine Corps dictum that goes: “No plan survives first contact”. It makes an accurate point. But we’re inclined to only hear its’ superficial message without thinking critically about its’ broader lesson.

If we consider it more carefully, we might just come to realize that taken literally it’s less than unfailingly correct. And yet in a broader sense it’s absolutely on target.

It’s true because the inescapable fact is that once any plan goes into motion, its “target” gets a vote and can have input that we may not be able to control. And because of that reaction the plan likely can’t continue exactly as it was designed.

Take that carefully planned cold call where we posed a labor savings to gain favorable attention. But instead of rejecting it, or asking you to explain how you’d do it, they tell you they really want better results. To borrow another Corp Maxum, we now have to adjust, respond and react.

Of course that shift to proposing better results is one that we can do in our sleep. But it might just as easily have been something that caught us flatfooted. But the fact that we knew to expect our plan to change prepares us to tap dance a bit while we adjust and adapt to that new situation.