Overview

The purpose of this blog post series is to provide a conceptual framework and a set of tools that can dramatically improve your performance as a leader. No matter where you are in your organization, from construction crew or design/engineering team member, a foreman or project manager to corporate executive, new operations best practices driven by lean and progressive design-build, require us to rethink leadership.

Objective

Welcome to this seventh post where we present more of what you need to know to become a High-Performance Leader! In this post we move from the definition and identification of different types of project stakeholders to how we organize and staff project teams.

High Performance Leadership: The Structure of Stakeholder Engagement

Welcome back to this High-Performance Leadership Blog Series. If you have not read Posts 1-6 yet, please consider doing so. They will set the stage for this discussion.

In Post #6, we discussed the importance of identifying and engaging everyone who has a stake in project decisions and implementation efforts. Failure to involve a broad range of different stakeholders and involve them in the right way, at the right time, results in disputes and rework. In this post we discuss how to structure teams and using the different team member roles from Post #6 to support high-performance projects.

The traditional project management approach assumes that decisions should be made by top managers in each of the various trade and technical/managerial disciplines. When decisions affect others, as they almost always do, we assume that senior leaders will use their expertise to sell others on their ideas. However, decisions made in siloed areas of technical expertise cannot anticipate either the effects on others, or benefit from the experience held in the other “silos”. Not only do we miss out on the good ideas of others, but we may also build resistance to our ideas and feel pressured to water them down to get buy-in. Here’s why:

When we have what we think is a great idea, if it involves others, we must sell them on our idea. Our ideas are often “solutions” to some situation (problem) we want to change. Usually, the other people have their own perspectives on what the problem is, or don’t think a problem exists at all. As you work to get buy-in, your idea may get degraded by compromises and accommodations. Even when you get one stakeholder “sold”, they need to sell others that they work with, and those folks need to sell still others. This is time consuming and rarely value-adding. There is a better way.

If we rotate the graphic on the left 90 degrees, we notice that it is the same configuration as the typical top-down organization chart on the right. Those of us who have worked in large organizations have likely experienced directives from top leadership that got diluted or lost as they worked their way down through the organization and across departments. We know that implementation of an organization-wide initiative, such as adoption of Lean, requires top level commitment. It also requires multi-level, multi-discipline championship and engagement. Cross discipline, multi-level teams, properly implemented, create buy-in and improve decision quality. Proper stakeholder selection and agreement on team roles are essential.

Doyle and Straus (Founders of Interaction Associates) developed the concept of “Parallel Process Architecture”. It works rather like representative democracy. Large groups of stakeholders are represented by someone who is either at their level in the organization or in their department / trade. These representative members form a cross-functional team that works “in parallel” with the regular org structure to solve problems, plan, design, lead continuous improvement efforts, etc. If an Electrical Superintendent is appointed to the team, they need to represent the needs and views of other project superintendents as well as their trade expertise. The role goes beyond attendance at a weekly meeting. This important role requires that team members be respected and trusted by the stakeholders they represent – not just the most expendable person. The roles and responsibilities need to be defined, agreed and supported.

The team structure above is a standard LCI depiction. Senior Leadership provides guidance and the resources necessary for team and individual team member success. Team Leaders should be just as curious about the progress, needs and successes of their project teams as Project Superintendents are about work progress when they are on a Gemba Walk. Core Team Members must be experts in team processes as well as technical content efforts. Usually, the leaders of the work cluster teams are the bulk of Core Team membership. Decision-making should be pushed as low into the organization structure as possible, with clear processes to resolve conflicts. Readers may want to refer to Post #6 in this series for a detailed description of types of team roles and responsibilities.

Work Clusters should have overlapping membership where each person is a member of more than one Work Cluster and acts as a liaison between teams to coordinate how each team’s decisions affect other teams. Below is a depiction of innovation Team structure using Target Value Delivery during the Design Phase. Note the overlaps and the implied responsibility of the Team Leaders to coordinate design innovation and issue resolution across all teams.

High Performance Leaders need great facilitation skills. Additionally, they need great problem solving and decision management skills. Innovation may require participants to rethink a pet design solution or installation practice. The goal must be to avoid optimization of any subsystem that creates sub-optimization of the whole production system. Instead of “devalue engineering”, we must focus on the creation of “elegant solutions” – solutions where the most important elements of innovative ideas are combined to enhance, rather than diminish, overall value realization. In other words, “Win/Win” decision making.

In our next post, we will take a dive into a range of decision-making options, any of which can be used to create Win/Win decisions when applied to the correct circumstance. Look for Post #8 in this High-Performance Leadership series, coming soon.