When Management By Walking Around Fails

Anita Tucker and Sara Singer of Harvard Business School have conducted a fascinating new study about how leaders interact with workers on the front lines.  They examined efforts to improve quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in hospitals.   The scholars conducted a field study of 56 work areas from 19 randomly selected hospitals and compared the results to 138 work areas in 48 randomly selected control hospitals. They examined an approach called Leadership WalkRounds™ which they describe as "a program of [senior managers] visiting the organization's front-lines to observe and talk with employees while they do their work."  They found that employee perceptions of performance improvement dropped after implementation of the WalkRounds™-based program. The scholars argue that,

"The study provides a cautionary tale that visits by senior managers to the front-lines of the organization will not necessarily increase staff perceptions of performance improvement.  Failure to meet expectations, once raised, can negatively impact organizational climate. Unless such programs are implemented with authentic motivation to identify and resolve issues, they may yield a negative return on the money invested."

Should we be surprised by the findings?   I'm not so sure.  While I've written about executives who effectively engage the front line workers in their organizations, I've also seen many cases where such efforts are counterproductive.  What goes wrong when executives visit with front-line workers?  Here are a few pitfalls that I have seen:

1.   Sometimes, employees perceive the visit as an "inspection" rather than a genuine effort to solicit input and ideas from workers.

2.  Workers perceive that managers have already made up their mind on certain issues, and therefore, that the executives are not genuinely listening and considering their views.   In other words, workers conclude that they aren't being given a legitimate opportunity to influence decisions.  

3.  Senior managers spend too much time talking and not enough time listening.  They focus on communicating messages to the front lines, rather than soliciting feedback.  

4.  Workers change their behavior because of the presence of senior managers. Therefore, managers do not get a sense of what's really going on in the organization. 

5.  Executives fail to follow up in a timely manner on employee ideas or questions.  

Paul Levy's New Book: Lessons about Leadership from the Executive Suite... and the Soccer Field

As many of my readers know, I'm the co-author of a multi-media case study and a Harvard Business Review article about Paul Levy's turnaround of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  Paul took the helm in January 2002, when the hospital was in dire straits.  As CEO, he helped the hospital return to profitability, after years of losses.  Prior to his tenure at the BIDMC, Levy served as Executive Dean for Administration at Harvard Medical School, where he was responsible for administrative, budgetary, and facility issues.  He also served as Executive Director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, where he led the "Boston Harbor Cleanup," one of the largest pollution control projects in the country.  Levy also writes a popular blog titled "Not Running a Hospital." 

Levy now has written a terrific new book, which I highly recommend.  The book - Goal Play! Leadership Lessons from the Soccer Field - weaves together anecdotes from his twenty years of youth soccer coaching with his experiences as a chief executive.  Levy uses examples from these disparate settings to illustrate his theories of effective leadership.   This book is not the usual fluff that we read in books that try to apply lessons from sports to business.  Levy offers concrete lessons that can be applied by leaders in many different kinds of organizations.  He illustrates his ideas with anecdotes from soccer, but then shows you those ideas in action in the executive suite.   Along the way, he describes the effective actions of other executives too, rather than simply drawing on his personal stories.

Levy describes how you can be a supportive and transparent leader.  However, he also describes how to make the tough calls required to improve organizational performance.   Levy's book and his experiences show that making tough decisions doesn't mean simply dictating plans to the troops in your organization and ordering them to follow you.   How can you be supportive and empowering, yet still move quickly and get results?  That's the question Levy seeks to answer in this book.