ReThink Productivity Podcast
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ReThink Productivity Podcast
Chapter 5 - Is my leadership structure right?
Sue and Simon discuss Chapter 5 - How do I balance investing in sales and controlling costs? from their book "Every Second Counts: How to Achieve Business Excellence, Transform Operational Productivity, and Deliver Extraordinary Results."
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. Sue returns to talk about Chapter 5, is my Leadership Structure Right from our book? Every Second Counts, hi, sue. Hi so probably one of the biggest areas of focus, I'd say a lot of shops or units and shapes the kind of colleague and customer experience. So we'll start with the kind of big question then how do I know if I've got my leadership structure right?
Speaker 2:I always kind of start with the question is kind of what do you want your leaders to do? I always kind of start with the question is kind of what do you want your leaders to do? So what your leaders to do absolutely needs to tie back to what's your USP as a business, what you're trying to achieve, what you're trying to deliver for customers, because your leaders need to be set up to help deliver that strategy for you. So that's the first thing. It's kind of leadership doesn't exist in isolation. It's how you set yourself up to deliver your strategy and there's different ways of doing that and it's important that businesses decide how they want to do it.
Speaker 2:So for a lot of organisations, the unit manager whether that's a store, a restaurant, you know a production line in a factory, you know a warehouse manager they're the key person that are making sure things happen the way you want to within the business. And then you get into well, what's the support structure below them, if they need one within that unit, and you can also look at and what's the field structure above that supports them? So, is it an area manager above that supports them? So is it an area manager? Are the you know the sort of um functional support experts, whether that's hr or um the different things. So it's kind of where's you, where's your key bit of leadership, and then what's the support below and above them and how does that all work?
Speaker 2:and clearly they're normally the most expensive roles when you take the kind of and clearly they're normally the most expensive roles, when you take the kind of leadership structure as a chunk in any organisation, when you start to extrapolate that up, yes, and if you end, up with leaders that spend most of their time doing general tasks.
Speaker 1:There's a risk that you've just got yourself an expensive colleague, so it's an interesting point then. So how should each role be spending their time is one of the questions we're posing in the book. Yeah, from experience, I suppose if you cast your mind back 20 years ago, there'd be a real desire that there's lots of things leadership, management, supervisory roles need to be there to do. Fast forward 20 years. I really struggle at times other than probably appraisals, disciplinaries, grievances, etc. The end part of recruitment because a lot of that's been automated or pushed through a kind of systemized process centrally that then drops out the candidates to interview. There's not much left.
Speaker 1:Opening a clothing store 20 years ago was holy. You had to be a keyholder, trained manager, leader. Now we've got colleagues doing it and I'm all for that kind of devolution of responsibility. So it really begs the question and challenge is if you've got lots of leaders and managers, supervisors, whatever they're kind of called, how should they be spending their time? But also a supplementary question which would be interesting to get your view on are the roles differentiated?
Speaker 2:yeah, and that's a big challenge. So I think the the organizations that I see working best have a clear view on exactly what their managers are doing. So if you think kind of the, the unit manager or the line manager, and and often that's they've worked to take out any extra admin. They don't do cash management every day, you know, they've minimized all that and by automation digitizing things again, it can be colleagues that do some of that stuff, so it doesn't have to be managers. So actually where a manager leader can really make a difference is in how they coach the team. So you know, in a sales fit, sales orientated business, you might want them to be the sales coach and if that's the case, you've got to give them the right tools. So have they got live sales information by colleague, by? You know by, so they've got it live and they can have those really good conversations with people. And how is your organization set up so that you know area managers are coaching the store managers? Because if you, if you want your store manager, for example, to be a coach, and yet the area manager system is very checklist, um, have you done this, have you done that, then it's unlikely that your store leaders will be coaches, because people tend to mirror their boss's behavior. So it is about deciding what you want them to do, and in a lot of businesses there isn't actually that much management activity to do all the time, you know, do you really need three leaders on shift, you know? So that's some of the stuff that we can look at with people, and the other piece is then how differentiated roles are.
Speaker 2:So I think historically we've had there might have been, you know, a store lead or a unit manager. You'd have had an assistant manager and you'd have had supervisors as well. Well, again, because of the amount of management tasking that's coming down, how many of those do you need? And what happens is you find that they can all merge, so they're doing the same. So part of the studies that we do is we'll look at, if we do a role study where we shadow in the manager and then we'll shadow an assistant manager, we'll be able to put a number on what proportion of time those roles are spending doing the same things. And if your assistant manager and store manager are doing the same thing for 80% of the time, do you need both of them? Well, you might do if your assistant manager only does that when the manager's not in and you've got long trading hours. But actually, if your assistant manager is just shadowing your store manager, do you need to do it?
Speaker 2:So for roles to work effectively, you need that differentiation and you also have to think about career progression. So I know there's been a trend to get very flat structures and looking at differentiation can push you that way. You then need to think well, actually, if it's a massive jump from being a colleague to being a store manager, how do people make it? But there's you get a challenge with that as well, because often, if people put in those roles and they say that there's kind of stepping stone roles, you then don't want them blocked by somebody that sits in it for 10 years, because it's not a stepping stone. It's then a set place in the structure. So there's never one answer. It's never easy and it ultimately depends what you're trying to achieve as a business and does your leadership structure help you do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you then get down to the kind of challenges of role consistency across different sites boss who's a field manager once a week, once a month? Because that structure has been streamlined, I can pretty much default to my style. So my style might be to be out there with the team, it might be to be in the office and find stuff to do. So consistency matters for a number of reasons, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:yes, and it's an indication of how well, how clear the roles are defined and how well the support works around them. So you know you can get big variation and I talked about cost.
Speaker 1:I think the bit I didn't mention was clearly national living wage for those in the uk is having a big challenge on leadership structures because as we move the hourly rate up and for those that pay, sit on it and pay it or pay deliberately, pay above it all it does is compress the differential between your first level of leadership supervisory.
Speaker 1:So there's lots of instances now where almost a colleague's earning maybe 50p an hour less than the first level of team leader supervisor the team leader supervisor's salaried. So there's a conflict of when I look at the hours I work versus the hours I'm paid, I'd be better off being a colleague. So this whole compression of the gap and then that works to the next level up and the next level up isn't really talked about when we see the headlines of national living ways. It's clearly the good news story for all those that benefit from the circa 10% yearly pay rises, but there is an upward pressure that lots of businesses are really struggling to face into, manage and ultimately lease them back to reviewing the structure yeah, and leadership isn't for everybody.
Speaker 2:You know there will be a lot of people that will look at what their manager has to do and think, well, actually for that pay differential, is that something I want to take on, and that can ultimately make it difficult to to recruit managers, and it can be a challenge yeah, and then in terms of quick wins, as ever, we've got quick wins in this, this chapter, um, some bits around reviewing job specs, job descriptions, so we've all got one.
Speaker 1:Well, we should have at least. Typically they're recruitment tools. So, actually, do we have role profiles that people use day to day? There's some large organizations where they kind of pocket guides, so it shows you what you should be doing in your role and necessarily what you shouldn't be doing, reporting levels in the business. So, you know, is there overlap? As Sue's talked about, the two go into one Field-based roles. Where's the overlap geographically? So again, we've done work where people spend lots of time driving in those roles, but the territories haven't been redefined because people have gone and come in and they're actually spending more time driving past each other.
Speaker 2:We're also seeing quite a variance in field roles at the minute, where some organisations are putting are kind of taking away the functional experts so whether that's kind of loss prevention, risk compliance, hr type roles that historically were often around in in supporting the the field manager some organizations have kind of taken those out.
Speaker 2:So a lot of businesses have gone to a centralized hr function. So you don't have my area hr anymore, you have support from a centralized uh function, for example. So there's some businesses that are going down that route and then kind of haven't always looked at what impact that has on the area manager's job or the field manager's line manager's job. And then you've got other businesses where we've still got those roles but actually if I'm the manager of that unit and I've got my line manager, area manager, whatever telling me one thing, I've got an area coach that tells me something different again you can have conflicts there. So none of these things are easy and it's they're all people-based, but it's about how do you give people the right framework so that they can then work the best way yeah, for some organizations it's a cost-saving thing, for others it's a redeployment.
Speaker 1:So for every x number of leaders I can have y number of colleagues on the floor doing it at the right pay rate, facing customers. So there's no, there's no right or wrong answer, but certainly a big opportunity area to look at. If you've, if you reviewed it. There's, there's organizations on their probably fifth or sixth round of organizational design stroke leadership structure. So a bit like chapter five, just because you've got one doesn't necessarily mean it's right now.
Speaker 2:It may have been right at the time you did it yeah, and I think one of the interesting debates that often comes up within looking at organization design is is where you've got multiple outlets. Is cluster management or not? And kind of businesses have kind of tended to switch between putting it in, taking it out. I think generally it seems to work where you've got places that are within walking distance of each other and I think there can be genuine benefits of sharing resource, sharing expertise. You know, if somebody's got a few spare hours on one site they can send it to somewhere to help, but actually unless they're very quick to get between each other. So somewhere like an airport is classic. You know, if you've got four stores in an airport, to have one manager that operates across all of them works really well. And if you're trying to do it across, you know, and the place is a half an hour apart, that's a different challenge really yeah, yeah, and I think there's even people considering do I need to manage you in every store as well?
Speaker 1:so again, cost climate challenges are pushing people to to that to that stage. So these things are all cyclical. Um, we've seen them come and go, so if you've not had a look at your structure for a while, now is probably a good time to do it.
Speaker 2:Lots of opportunity and the great thing when you have role studies done, so our team come in and shadow people is it gives you a really good evidence base to make decisions from, because it it can be difficult.
Speaker 2:You can ask questionnaires, you can have your own perceptions, but to have an evidence base that says you know, did you know our managers are spending 20 percent of their time answering emails is that what we want them to do? One of the kind of I guess it's a modern scourge of life that's affecting managers as well is multiple communication channels. So when email becomes slow, they might have Yammer or some Teams chat or something like that and actually they become slow. So people then start to use WhatsApp or text around the outside. So you can end up with these multiple communications and we often see field managers that are getting you know they might clear their emails in the morning and then by lunchtime they've had another 50 messages and it's kind of understanding some of that and why it happens can be really help businesses unlock what they're doing, and sometimes adding in extra communication channels might seem like a benefit and there's often downsides to it.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So we'll be back in the next episode with Chapter 6, what Can we Stop Doing to Free Up Our People? Thank you, Sue Bye.
