It’s fascinating to watch people try to create a calm spot in the middle of an ocean during a hurricane. They are standing there with their hat flying away, hair blowing around, wind drowning out their voice, boat tossing around – while trying to direct people that the solution to fixing the situation is to always step with your left foot first. You stand there trying to understand why they care about which foot you step off first with because the entire boat could go down any second.
Processes require other processes in order to work. Just because another well run company does something one way doesn’t mean that you can do the same. Your core processes and controls impact your ability to implement and control more detailed processes across the business. You can’t put a process in place to measure group profitability if you don’t have strong business financial controls. You can’t measure employee performance if you can’t measure project performance. You can’t hope to get firm approvals at the start of a project if you allow exceptions 6 months later regardless of what’s on paper.
It should go without saying that you can’t ask your people to fix problems that you yourself create and have no desire to change your own behavior. Sadly I come across scenarios way too often where bosses expect their employees to solve problems without actually allowing them to influence behavior up the ladder. You can’t solve a problem if the troublemakers aren’t going to be controlled – it should be common sense.