Recently in engineering managment Category

Managing by walking around is a critical skill for managers at every level in any modern organization. To learn more, visit the blog Rational Supervision entry of 30 May 2010.

In my last blog entry, I talked about the notion of "doing what you do best, and leaving the rest for someone else," and how important it is for people in general, but especially for anyone attempting a complex, technology-based project, such as building a website. I got onto that kick by listening to readers who complemented the design of this blog, and were interested in how I achieved it. Most seemed to be hoping for advice they could use to improve the quality of their own blogs.

That led me to thinking about some of the many simple techniques engineering managers need to learn in order to effectively lead the project teams that are so important, nowadays. Another critical skill for managers, which is illustrated in my latest novel Red is called "managing by walking around." Popularized by Tom Peters in the early 1980s, it is a management technique that has been applied by effective leaders from time immemorial. The most effective leaders interact with their workers - the people who actually produce a company's value added - on a regular, one-to-one basis, and they go to their workers, rather than somehow expecting the workers to come to them.

In Red, the technique is introduced during a conversation between the main character, Red McKenna, and her stepfather, Mark Shipton, who is CEO of a multi-billion-dollar corporation:

"Managing by walking around," Mark explained, "is more of a management philosophy than a set of techniques. It starts from the observation that, while holed up in your office, what you are doing is writing memo after memo, and creating report after report. The people who work for you then have to stop whatever useful thing they're doing to read your memos, and reports. While they're doing that, they can't be doing any useful work."

"Managing by walking around gets you up out of your office, so you can't be writing endless memos that interfere with your employees working. Instead, you go around making brief visits here, and there, just to see how things are going. If you find a problem, fix it as quickly as you can, then get your ass out of there. If you find things going along swimmingly, give some encouragement, and get your ass out even faster. You minimize your interferance, apply your efforts only where they're needed, and keep your crew heads-down working, doing what you really want them to do."

Red's mentor, Doc, later points out a second reason managing by walking around is important: " ... while you're managing-by-walking-around, take a look in their eyes to see if someone's having a problem. That's what's so important about face-to-face visits. ... Once in a while you have to check to see what's going on behind the eyes. ... If some guy's got a colicy kid, it'll affect his performance, but be a temporary problem. If he's heading for divorce, it can mess with his mind, big time ...."

This is especially important for supervising knowledge workers. Engineers, scientists, and other people tasked with creating intellectual property, need clear heads and focused imaginations to produce what companies need them to produce. If someone's mind dwells on personal problems while they're hanging parts on a conveyor leading up to a paint booth, so what? They aren't using much of their brains for their task, anyway. If an engineer, on the other hand, is thinking about their kid's trouble at school, it will definitely interfere with analyzing test data, for example, or imagining the gas flow through a turbine engine.

A third reason managing by walking around is important is that it's the best way for a supervisor to know what's actually happening on the shop floor. Having various metrics piped to a computer on your desk is useful, but doesn't hold a candle to going out there to look around.

The best, most comprehensive metrics consist of only a few kilobytes of data. Your eyes, ears, and noses - even your sense of touch - produce thousands of times more data per second when you step out to the shop floor.

Think of it as the difference between a thumbnail image, and a video clip. The thumbnail image can give you a vague idea of generally what you're getting yourself into by clicking on it. You click on it, however, and download the video clip in order to get the full experience. No thumbnail can provide the richness of that experience.

To take that analogy further, think about how many times you've clicked on a thumbnail, only to find that document delivered was either horribly disappointing, or wildly more than you'd expected. The same happens when you use business metrics as an initial guide, but then go out to see actual conditions for yourself. In most cases, the reality is either far better or far worse than you expected based on the terse summary supplied by business metrics.

This is going to have to be a short post, sans image because I'm running out of work time, today. Before I dive into what I want to write about, however, I want to thank my loyal fans, who've put up with my website going "dark" for several months while I consolidated my move to Florida. Especially, all of you who've jumped in to add your comments so quickly after I started posting again, and opened the site up for comments. The hard part has been to keep up with all of your kind words.

What I want to talk about today is a little saying I picked up in MBA school, although I do not remember exactly where it originated: "Do what you do best, and let somebody else do the rest."

This saying came up in answer to multiple commenters complementing my blog site, and wondering how I managed it.

The short answer is that I didn't. I'm a writer. What I write about is mostly technology, but I also tell a few stories, crack a few jokes, and even cover some news items.That's what I do best, and have been doing it long enough so I can claim to be an expert.

Although I know how to create a website, and have done so many times, it's not what I do best. Other people can do a much better job in less time than me. So, what I do is hire them to do what they do best -- design websites.

Since I'm trying to drum up interest in my latest novel, Red, and the principle of doing what you do best is a major theme in it, I'm going to be flagrantly self-promoting and refer to it.

The main character, Red McKenna, is on a quest to find her long-lost father. Her initial idea is to just drive to the last place she knows for sure he was, and look. That gets her about 250 miles (out of a couple of thousand) before she ends up stranded by the side of the road.

She does finally succeed in her quest, but not without the aid of over a dozen experts who each contribute a little bit to her reaching her goal, from the mechanic who fixes her car, to the SEAL team that finally springs the trap to catch the bad guy. Part way through the project, she admits: "When I first started out, I thought I could do it on my own, but I couldn't....I didn't realize how big it was until I started working on the details."

What she ends up doing is managing the project, not doing it all herself. She's the one who wants to find her father, but she really doesn't have the skills to complete all of the tasks her quest involves. What saves her bacon is hooking up with her mentor, Doc, who does know how to handle the thousands of details that any project involves. He knows to identify those details, then find an expert to do each one right.

So, when you decide you want to build your website, or repair your car's transmission, or any of the thousands of things that people living in a technological society need to do, start by asking if it's in your area of expertise.

We all have our area of expertise, which is a small island surrounded by an ocean of stuff we're really not competent to do on our own. If what you want to do is in your area of expertise, have at it. If not, go find somebody who can do it better. Then get them to do it.

A final example: I'm in the process of publishing a sequel to Red entitled Vengeance Is Mine! One of the most expensive parts of publishing a novel is getting cover art.

I'm supposed to have some talent as an artist. In fact, my mother once told me she expected me to grow up to be a graphic artist, not a writer. I can -- in fact I did -- rough out a cover for the new book that cost me nothing.

I'm not planning to use it, however. I know that there are people out there whom I can pay to put together a much better, more attractive, and more compelling cover than I can. I'm going to end up paying them to do it because I'm not conceited enough to think I can do a better job than somebody who does it day-in and day-out for a living.

Just as I did for Red, I expect to rough out a concept, which I'll hand off to a professional graphic artist, who will do a much better job executing the finished product than I could.