Processes versus people

Recently, I was at a coaching training with 150 people and we were asked about our professions. I realized that hardly few of us were psychologists, maybe 10%, others, about 30%, had different careers and professions, and the majorities were engineers.

It is not strange, engineers are normally methodical, disciplined and they are always trying to reinvent new processes and systems to improve production. Obviously, it is a personal description, in fact mine, born of my experience working with this kind of profiles. But the discussion is not about engineers’ profiles, they are only the excuse I am using to introduce my topic. 

Processes are important for a company to survive in a complex market, they give the logical order an organization needs to get its RESULTS. They have to be known and understood by all the employees involved, respected and rigorously followed by everyone, so it is necessary to apply a tough discipline because if one part of the process fails, the rest of the team, and the most worrying, customers would be affected by it.

During the last 20 years, the main Companies, especially from the retail industry, have been working in their processes. A big effort has been invested looking for standard methods to save time and resources. I remember, in the nineties, when I worked for an important retail company in Spain that had just started to implant a plan to standardize all work methods.  During one of the meetings that was held to explain this project to all the Company managers, someone explained that if a manager was moved from one store to another, he should find the same processes, the same way to work. This idea, original in that time, is something usual nowadays, no one argues that Companies, no matter the activity; need a uniform  methodology, very important in the case of big companies with an important number of branches.

This focus in the processes and results has made a lot of companies choose managers with a high technical level, great executives who manage the teams towards clear objectives, using the right processes and instructions. Once, during a meeting in another retail company where I worked a few years ago, one manager approached me, very angrily, that he didn’t understand what happened with his sales, they were falling down, and he was doing everything, he was following all the steps in the right way. I asked him about his team, if they had all the processes clear as well as the objectives. “Of course!” He answered me and he added that everyone knew perfectly what to do. Then I asked him how he was sharing the information with his team, how they could know that they were doing the things in the right way. In this case his answer didn’t sound so convincing; he was so focused in the results and in the method that he forgot to maintain basic things such as motivation and communication with his own team. I don’t know, but maybe it was one of the reasons that explained the quality of his results. So what happens with our teams? Could we manage people like another process? Although there are certain processes like timetables, vacation planning and other similar HR issues, the answer is not so simple. The team management is more than a simple process, it is an art.  We can’t forget that behind processes there are people.

The conclusion is that however we have to acknowledge that managing processes and methods is very important for a company, the balance between them and managing people could determinate the future of an organization.

Then it is not a surprise that profiles like engineers, very competent in their own field, are being directed to rather trainings of management abilities to provide them with skills which allow them to lead teams. One way I used to convince my managers that the team could be easily managed was to present it like another process. Yes I know that it’s a contradiction, I said before that management is not a process, but what’s one of the best ways to teach adults? With examples that are directly associated with their reality. In this case, we can present it like a process.

A process, in which is important to respect all the steps, because if we don’t, it will fail, it’s like an engine, if we want to turn it on, we need to use technical roles, we have to apply them in all the cases. It could be the recruitment of our team, orientation program, establishing goals, doing objectives follow up and adjustments, training and evaluating to start again with new goals.

But it isn’t enough; we need to use our management roles, such as motivation, communication and leadership. If the first roles are the key to turn our engine on, the second ones are the oil we need to maintain our engine running in a perfect condition.

What about you? How do you manage your team? Where are you oriented to? Remember that the balance between both variables will lead you to a high performance team.