Lean By Design
Lean by Design delves into the dynamic world of biotech, pharma, and life sciences, focusing on operational excellence through effective workflow and process optimization. Join hosts Oscar Gonzalez and Lawrence Wong as they engage with industry leaders who share their insights, innovative strategies, and real-world experiences in transforming complex challenges into streamlined, efficient solutions. Through thought-provoking conversations, you’ll gain practical tips and inspiration to drive continuous improvement and success in your organization. Produced by Sigma Lab Consulting, Lean by Design empowers you to enhance productivity and innovation, one process at a time. Listen on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lean By Design
0202. When Everyone’s Rowing, But the Boat Isn’t Moving
Have you ever watched a rowing team give it their all only to spin in circles? That’s exactly how we feel when our teams pour in effort without clear roles and responsibilities.
In this episode of Lean by Design, we explore how vague decision‐making and overlapping tasks quietly drain momentum, leading to missed deadlines and frustrated teams. We’ll share how defining ownership, fostering psychological safety, and using simple digital tools can align everyone’s efforts so your boat actually moves forward.
Join us to learn how clarity of roles can transform your team’s productivity and make the journey more rewarding for everyone.
Ready to assess your organization’s efficiency? Connect with us at leanbydesign@sigmalabconsulting.com to uncover high-impact improvement opportunities. 🚀
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we're back with another episode of lean by design podcast. I'm your host, oscar, and my co-host here, lawrence, and we want to talk to everyone here today about something that we think resonates with a lot of us and, uh, in our experiences through not just in biopharma, but in many organizations in many different industries. Now, the reason why we want to touch on this topic is because there's such a real challenge that is often overlooked when you think about how to become more efficient in an organization or how you really get people to rally around a central cause to improve the way that you're working within your organizations and your ability to execute those projects, and that, as plain and unsexy as it may be, are the clarity of the roles and responsibilities at an organization. These are often overlooked, but what can't be overlooked is their critical positioning as a root of many organizational issues, many operational issues. Whether you're in strategy or in execution, the clarity in these areas is essential for alignment, progress and purpose, and that sense of purpose that you want your employees to have.
Speaker 1:So, lawrence, this is something I think that a lot of folks can resonate with. Why don't we take these things and let's break them down into each component? We talk about the roles, the accountabilities and the responsibilities. So let's start off with the roles what do you see as being that? What do you see as roles at an organization? And let's go from there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think this is one of those things where, if it's not clear what the roles, accountability and responsibilities are, people really complain about.
Speaker 2:But when it's going well, like nobody says a word, everybody knows what people are doing. Um, so I think when we talk about roles, it's it's in my, you know definition of it is is more looking at the the person's job or title within the organization and what that role is within an org chart, and then if you look at accountability, that's more of what is the outcome that person is ultimately responsible for. It should be a very short phrase or sentence, and then responsibilities are more. These are the things that I have to do and I'm expected to carry out, and so those you know. When you look at roles, accountability and responsibilities, that should be very clear, especially when you have a large group of people trying to move forward on any project initiative. And if it's not clear, you end up in a situation where there's a lot of friction in what you're trying to do and that really hinders your collaboration and any sort of progress you're trying to make.
Speaker 1:It does. It absolutely does, you know. I would want to expand your definition a little bit further, especially in the space where you have smaller organizations, where I think that there is a lot of assumptions as to what the roles, responsibilities and accountability layers are in an organization that is starting out. And well, why is that? Well, you have a lot of. You got to wear a lot of hats, so you know what you find yourself is that in smaller organizations you may find that that job title or position are far removed from the role a particular person is playing in a specific project. You know they may have a role of, like, a senior director of strategy and development and their role in a given project is as a research lead, because of their background, because of their ability to navigate sort of the science and its progress towards those goals for that portfolio. So you know, just expanding into that a little bit, there are, I think, multiple instances in our experiences within an organization that the roles are going to change and the accountability is going to change and the responsibilities are going to change.
Speaker 1:I think where we fail and we can talk we're going to talk a little bit more about this is the confusion. You know, we don't put things down, we don't really convey the messaging and in many cases we are mixing the definitions of what a role and responsibility are and the accountabilities are. We will find more higher level strategic sort of. You know, this person is responsible for the study plan, this person is responsible for developing the strategy toward X. But when you look at the workflow for that particular project, where does it say the strategy needs to come in? Where does it say you have to deliver on a strategy proposal? Where does it say it doesn't, it doesn't. So what you're left with is just sort of these functional experts, these SME experts that have a responsibility for strategy but they never actually are responsible for presenting a well-thought-out strategy. It's more of like this person is to help your strategy during the project, the program.
Speaker 1:So I think in a lot of ways you end up finding just sort of this mixed bag of understandings, and that mixed bag really lends into that confusion, which confusion is going to just amplify the friction, and that friction is going to be really what slows down the organization. It's really going to slow down your portfolio. We said it before, as everyone is rowing, everyone is doing something, but the boat is not moving, you're not making any progress, and that's a theme that we're going to talk about throughout this episode, so I'm excited to dig in. So what do you think about? Like? Well, what is the problem? Like, what really is the problem? Is it that we don't have things written down? Is it that we don't have the right people in the right spaces? How would you describe this issue, primarily in biopharma, of a lack of clarity in roles, accountability, responsibilities?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. The problem I think it's good to frame it in two different areas. So what you described before about at teams as they grow, you have people that wear multiple hats, because when you're small you have to do a lot of things. But if you're joining an established team with a framework that's set up, it can be confusing on that end as well, right? So let's start with when you're growing a team. So you may have a few people doing a number of things, and as you're growing the team, people get welcomed into the team and they're expected to do certain things that contribute to the whatever project, and so if you don't have any of that stuff written down, you can very easily be stepping on each other's toes and you don't know who's responsible for what and who's accountable for what. So there's a lot of overlap with some of the work that's being done and essentially wasting a lot of time doing the same things or maybe not doing the things that you're supposed to do.
Speaker 2:Now, if you go on the other end of it, when you do have a large team that's already established, I think people tend to assume that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing, and so the problem then becomes well, I don't know what I'm doing because I'm new, and so you kind of have to figure out how you fit into this organization. And so, again, if you don't have anything written down or some sort of visual representation of where people sit amongst these projects, it can result in a lot of. Let's just say, some of the red flags are poor communication or silo and having to miss deadlines, and people get frustrated, right, right, they like very low morale, people burn out. Those are the things that I think come up when you have such a problem. But you know, in your experience I think you're you've been more exposed to teams that are smaller and they're trying to grow.
Speaker 2:I think on my end of it, I see larger groups where there's, you know, 30 or so people and you're joining into this. It's essentially a village and everybody's working and everybody's doing it. You know their own thing, and it just gets confusing from that end as well. So you know, what do you think on the I would say, the growth side of things, what that looks like.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think when you're looking, when you're looking at growing teams and you know there is a part of it that is related to how an organization has decided to push an asset, in some cases you may have a central team that is going to carry that project all the way through the entire process. In other ways, what you're starting to see is sort of like these little factories, where there's a given purpose or function in a phase of development that the team needs to accomplish and that particular phase requires certain team members is you may have people, like a project or program, lead that sort of carry the project into each area of development, each phase of development, where the team sort of cycles in. There's more earlier scientists in the front end that are, you know, really trying to get these assets and these questions answered early to see if it has legs to moving. You know moving down the line and then as it progresses, you start to get others that are in the discovery and then as you get down to, you know, finding a development candidate, then you start to do these IND enabling studies. You're really focused on toxicities. You're really focused on your ability to scale CMC. You know you are looking toward what's going to happen in the clinic. So the composition of your team changes as well. And I think you pose a really interesting point where, in a smaller team, where just everybody's sort of kind of looking at each other in a larger team, you're coming in and you see people just getting at it working. Now it's funny because that view, what you see, might actually create this idea that everyone knows what is going on. In reality, people understand the role that they need to be doing the activities that they need to be doing, to be doing the activities that they need to be doing. But in those scenarios there is a layer that you need to understand what your team is doing. You cannot just be paying attention to what your own work is. You're all working toward a shared goal and if you have no idea what anybody else is doing, no matter how perfect your work is, it's going to falter. You know if we take, no matter how perfect your work is, it's going to falter. You know if we take. You know this.
Speaker 1:In my history I used to row, I rowed at Virginia Commonwealth University for a couple of semesters while I was there and I learned a lot. And it really is, when you take into consideration a cruise show. It's very thin, it's very long and you have a set of eight grown men in there. This is a heavy boat and you are roughly four inches from the edge of the water. You're very low in the water and you have somebody either in the front or the back of the boat, depending how it's built that's steering and calling out where people are in relation to you, because when you're rowing, your back is toward the finish line, so you do not see, because of the way that the boat moves and the way that you actually row a boat, you are using your tools and you are working with eight people. Now, the amount of synchronicity that you need to successfully row a crew show and to be good at it with eight grown men that are, you know, pushing 200 plus pounds, like and you want this to float on water and move like it's on glass you have to be so in tuned with the rest of your team. You have your uh, the, the person that sits all the way in the front. Uh, is is referred to as the stroke and you are following their pace and if you're throwing your body weight too much, they can't maintain the pace that they need to get you to move down and to last, if you have short races, your pace may be faster. If you have longer races, you need to have a little bit more stamina. So it just it goes to show that this idea of everybody rowing and the boat not moving is something I think that we see in a lot of places where you know, we sort of understand our role.
Speaker 1:I was hired as a scientist, or I was hired as a chemist. I was hired, as you know, a project manager. But what are you actually responsible for performing? What are you actually responsible for turning in? And it doesn't just start at the project level. Leadership and that layer needs to also impose what their expectations are, because you may be doing great science, you may be making great progress, but if it's not in line or in tune with what the organization is looking for, you're just going to have more rework, you're just going to have to put more hours to conduct the right experiments or to develop the right strategy that your leadership is looking for. So you know there's so many challenges and I think we can talk about sort of these problems and what they do at an organization, especially from the side of progress and how it slows things down when everyone on the team and those that are working, those second level stakeholders that are working with those on the team, the criticality for everybody to be in line with at this point for this project, at this phase of development, what is everybody's role? What are we doing? What are we responsible for? Providing the team that can continue to progress? The assets.
Speaker 1:So what does that look like?
Speaker 1:How can you tell when it's a little bit easier? It's a little bit easier in a boat because, let me tell you, if you're not paying attention and you're just sort of looking around and you're not really focused in the boat, when somebody slides up in their seat and the edge of that oar that's a 15-foot oar in the water has the pressure from the boat moving and you happen to slide back at the wrong time, the edge of that oar is actually going to stab you right in the back and that is the most painful thing. And you're in the is actually going to stab you right in the back and that is the most painful thing. And you're in the middle of the water and you're in the middle of a race and you're not supposed to stop. So how do we identify these?
Speaker 1:These things may not be as obvious in projects or in facilities, but what do those things look like? What are those? What are some of those red flags that we could say you know what? Like, we need to sit down and make sure for this next month. Everybody knows exactly what they need to be doing. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Using the analogy of rowing, there's there's a very high level of coordination that you have to have with. You know, not only the person in front of you or in the back of you, but also the person that's directing where the boat is supposed to be going. And so I look at this and think about it in a couple ways. One is you know, like, before you even get on the boat, we all have to know what are we doing this for? And and the person that's even on the team, like who are you and what are you doing? So there's really understanding the game what game are you playing and why are you playing it? And then, who are the players in this game? Right? So the people that are on your team and why they're in it. So when we talk about red flags, it's the opposite of that, right, like people don't know what anybody's doing. And so there's communication. People are kind of doing things themselves, and if you can imagine somebody getting onto the boat not knowing the person in front of them or behind them, you're not going anywhere, you're going to be rowing, but the person in back of you and in front of you, they're going to immediately turn around and go. What the hell are you doing? And that creates a lot of friction, right? So there's, there's going to be frustration around the, the whole experience of being a part of something that is is working towards a goal, but not everybody maybe understands what the goal is.
Speaker 2:Um, and if you extrapolate this out to you know, on the facility side, a common thing that happens is having to redo the work because you didn't know that so-and-so was supposed to show up and maybe replace a gasket here, or they were supposed to calibrate a certain instrument, and then you're having to come back to the same piece of equipment over and over again to say did we do everything that we're supposed to do?
Speaker 2:But there was no planning and scheduling ahead of time to understand what you know what the goal was, and so I think there's a lot of things that can present themselves as red flags and they will look differently amongst R&D versus facilities, but I think the number one thing that I've seen across many different projects is communication is definitely the key. And then, second, is really not using digital tools to enhance that communication, right, if you're solely relying on somebody walking up to you and telling you oh, this is what I do and this is what I'm responsible for. People are just going to forget and they're not going to be able to see how they fit into this whole puzzle. Right, right, and so those are the two things that I see is communication and being able to use technology to really enhance that communication.
Speaker 1:I think those are great areas to look into. I think what is challenging I mean when you think about sort of what these symptoms look like and what their impact is I think a lot of what we deal with and what we experience in building efficiencies and process improvement is that a lot of these symptoms they're sort of silent killers. Improvement is that a lot of these symptoms they're sort of silent killers. You're not going to notice a breakdown in communication day to day. It's sort of this accumulation. You know, when we talk about like missed deadlines and well like, in some places they may be super strict with deadlines on projects. In other organizations they may be a little bit more like okay, let's just make sure it doesn't go too far over. You know, because what I find in earlier organizations is that there's a level of the unknown that you're going to find in R&D and some of that depends on the science, some of that depends on the technology, some of that depends on your ability to take new technology to work on your project and actually fully understand it and be able to sort of vet that and move forward from there. I think when you talk about, just even at its core, communication, there's a lot to that. There's a lot to how we communicate, when we communicate who we communicate to, when we communicate who we communicate to, and thinking about how we can each become leaders within our own projects. I mean, we're going to talk about some of those fixes and root causes in just a bit, but I think when we think, when we look into the communication aspect of it, it's like it doesn't happen. You know we push everything to occurring at a scheduled team project call but, as we know, when we go in there, it's all about updates who's got what? What happened? We have another meeting coming up. Give me something that I need to go to this next meeting for. And rarely do we stop to go. Okay, are we on track? Who is doing what? When are you doing it? And sometimes it takes a strong project or program manager that can really influence that, because it can be intimidating when you come into a new team and everybody's moving around and you're just sort of like well, I got introduced and I know this person works in that department or that department in that department and I know this person works with acquiring chemicals to run our experiments. These people work on running research experiments.
Speaker 1:Sure, in general, we understand what people do, but do we actually know how they do or what their input is? What is the data, what is going into their space and what are we going to get from them that help us out along this journey? I would venture to say that there's a lot of folks out there that don't really know what their colleagues do, like actually do, at the organization, and I would challenge those folks to be curious about what the people are doing around you and you may find that some of the stuff that they're doing is going to enhance that communication, because you now have another way to communicate with the people on your team and you now recognize where a colleague's output may turn into your input, because at some point we're not all doing work at the same time toward the same goal. It's sort of a combination of handoffs throughout the duration of a product, a life cycle. So, the more that we can understand of the people around us, these symptoms that we see where we're missing deadlines, we're not talking to each other, the decisions are unclear.
Speaker 1:We go into a meeting to make a decision and we come out and you hear people in the hallway what did we decide on? Was that? Is that what you heard? I heard this let's go talk to the project manager and then the project manager is doing the same thing. We kind of. I guess we'll follow up next week or in the next meeting two weeks later. You know, these are sort of those slow killers of progress that we see, because in the moment we don't find them to be so critical that we don't want to address it.
Speaker 1:We find the critical things to be the things that we would eventually present to leadership, and that is not. That is incorrect. That is not the way things are going. You need to make sure that you have your ducks in a row. Your team knows what's going on, like. Those things are important to focus on too, to spend time in those team meetings, not just presenting data. Presenting data. Presenting data. Present a plan. Talk to the team. Who's doing what, who's responsible for what. You email it to this person. I want you to write the first draft. You go over here. We're going to sit down and have a powwow set, whatever it is, but that communication needs to be sound, and in a lot of cases it's not. So why does this happen? Who's at fault? Is it the teams? Is it leadership? Is it a mix?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've touched upon the point about leadership having a really large role in this, because they're really establishing the different, I would say, parts of the team and there's a lot of hiring decisions that stem from leadership. And then you also talked about some of the fixes, right. So if you are in a place where people are being introduced, they should know who's who, what people do and why is it that I even got hired for the team, right? And so I think that, like a lot of business problems, it stems from leadership and, like they say, the fish rots from the head down, and so it's really their responsibility to kind of establish what it is that roles and responsibilities and accountability looks like, right. So I think having the communication aspect is going to be key. But, like you said, there's incorrect ways and there are correct ways of going through.
Speaker 2:About communication, right, because communication quality can really lack if you're not really strategic about it.
Speaker 2:And so when we talk about ways to improve that, I think visual representations always help, right. I think visual representations always help right. And then having a process for introducing new members or people that are even off-boarding, bringing up that discussion of okay, what does this look like to the team as a whole, when somebody new comes in, when somebody leaves, and then keeping that in mind and having it transparent and available for people that maybe they forgot or maybe they need a refresher, or just having something there so that, even if you weren't a part of the team, you know what they do and so you could ask them about certain aspects of your role or some other project that you need an update on. And, I think, to kind of bring this to reality, do you have any real-world stories of something that happened related to roles and responsibilities that really was terrible in the beginning and then somehow they figured a way out and they established what that should look like going forward to really make progress on a particular project.
Speaker 1:I think what I've seen in sort of more recent and I would almost say trending, is that when we talk about roles and responsibilities within our organizations, we're sort of creating, trying to create like a blanket, like canvas of this is what is expected in almost a strategic sense. Now the problem that I see where this becomes an issue but translating that strategy into an action or into a task, so where we may say that your role is strategy in here, or your role is developing the science, or your role is management of the team, or your role is working in the chemistry, et cetera, et cetera. When you then go look at your responsibilities, you want to see a clear distinction and I don't see that very often what we see traditionally. When you say, okay, let's start to create roles and responsibilities, you'll find sometimes you'll find a matrix which can be very useful. It's very challenging when you have teams that the composition changes. And the other part that's difficult there is that when you have sort of a lot of these roles and responsibilities that don't exist where they belong, because you don't have that employee, you don't have that subject matter expert, so they sort of kind of get bulked into somebody else's work that they may not be as familiar with, but it has become their responsibility. So you know, we talked about it before where the responsibilities are a measure of like those tasks, like what do you actually need to do. And I think in order for this we'll go back to sort of that root cause there has to be really super clear guidance from leadership of what is expected of that team as they reach these different decisions.
Speaker 1:Who are the decision makers within the team? Within the team, the function, the department, who are the ones that can make the decisions? It's not just who can spend the money, it's who can actually make decisions on a project or program level or make decisions on behalf of the program as the subject matter expert. Who has that capability? And then, what are the expectations that leadership has, that the governance has, in order to make the decisions? What are the expectations that you're going to be delivering, what are the activities that need to occur in order to come with that deliverable, and who are the people responsible?
Speaker 1:The accountable people will almost always end up being like a program manager, project or portfolio level manager, because they're sort of that hub in the spokes of the wheels. They're right there at the center, sort of keeping an eye on everything, but it's so critical for folks to have that knowledge and understanding. So what I'm seeing happen most often is this sort of misunderstanding of what a role and a responsibility is and a lack of recognition that when you join a new organization, that organization is going to have its way of working. There is this sort of I guess, blanketed thought that as people come into the organization, if they are, of you know, a director, senior director, you know, maybe even a VP level, that they already know how the system works, but they don't, because you can see how complex technology is making projects now. They are very, very different from company to company, which means the expectations, the goals, the activities, the roles and the responsibilities are also different regardless of what organization or what domain of science you're working in. So I think that there is a space here where leadership can take a step back and ensure that there is alignment across the organization as the portfolio progresses.
Speaker 1:These are the expectations, these are the things that we need in order for us to make the right decisions, and these are the people that should be involved in those decisions. And these things don't happen overnight. They don't. They're going to take time because a strategy needs to be developed to build that map for roles and responsibilities. What ends up happening are those extra few days, just an extra few days, just an extra few days. You add up all those days and losses and you're talking weeks over the course of a program.
Speaker 1:Why, well, we didn't make a decision last time, so we waited for the next meeting because everybody was busy. It doesn't mean that you're busy with the right work. It doesn't mean you're busy in the right way. It doesn't mean you guys know what you're actually working toward or what you have to accomplish.
Speaker 1:What I have seen to your point is earlier teams developing like a document like here's a little bit of the history of this program and they sort of keep it refreshed so that as new people come into the team, they now have something that they can use to ingest oh, we did this and then we changed, and then we went here and then we jumped into the next phase, et cetera, et cetera. So they can sort of see the progression of things that were happening or were planned and how they changed, and then they might be able to have a better understanding of where they fit into this part of the project. So I've seen that be pretty successful with onboarding folks. But again we got to have clarity from the top so that the teams understand the things they need to do to hit the marks, hit the targets that they're supposed to.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you're more emphasizing when somebody gets onboarded, that they should, that there should be some sort of process where they get introduced to the community or whatever the team right. And so I think I'm going to push back and say why did you hire the role if you didn't know what they were going to do when they showed up?
Speaker 1:there's a lot of folks that don't.
Speaker 2:There's a lot Like to say this is the thing, right, like people will hire bodies, right, and this is a whole thing that we saw on LinkedIn. And if you're not clear about why you need the role and what they're accountable for and what their responsibility is, you shouldn't hire the person. Why would you do that? That blows my mind that people will skip the step just because, oh, we got additional funding, so let's build the team. You hire a bunch of people and then nobody knows what they're doing and it's like well, maybe you shouldn't have hired the people. You should have figured out what they were supposed to do first and then fill the roles, right, I don't know. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1:You know. I think that what, what is you know? You sort of fall into the chicken and the egg. We don't know if this early project work is going to progress, but if it does progress, we need to hire. We need to hire fast, Not necessarily that we know what exactly people are going to do. We want to hire somebody that is experienced in this area, that will know what we need to do as well. So therein lies a little bit. This is why sometimes in earlier companies, all of a sudden you look and you're like why is it so top-heavy, why are there so many leaders? Well, one method of onboarding teams and functions is to get somebody that has more experience, that might be a little bit more higher level, maybe a VP, maybe a senior director, if you don't want to spend the capital, but then that that person has inherent knowledge of the process you know from, for drug development device, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And I think where the challenge comes in is that look at all these companies now, all of the people that have started these. You know, in a majority of these companies these are very, very intelligent people. But they're coming. They're also coming in from organizations that are very large, that have already had functions, already had departments, ingrained in how they've developed over the last 30 years, and they go into a new startup and guess what? They have never been in a startup phase. They have never been in a startup phase. They have never been in a startup mentality. They have never been experienced in building a company, because that's ultimately what you're doing in a small scale. You are building a company. Even if you're just a program manager, you're hiring number 25. That is a baby of a company. You are involved in the building of this to be able to expand and scale, and you can't scale without having any of these things clarified or managed. You should know, you need to know. You need to develop these understandings and if you don't know, ask. You have to get the right expertise to come in to say, well, if this is what you're trying to do, you actually don't need somebody that does this. You need to get the right expertise to come in to say, well, if this is what you're trying to do, you actually don't need somebody that does this. You need people that do these things because of what's going to come later on. But I think instead we go okay, we need, you know, we need five of these, we need four of these, we need six of these. And you sort of plop them in together and say start the project, this is what we need at the end of it.
Speaker 1:But there's no real guidance of who's doing what. Who's in charge, who's making decisions Not just the decisions in the governance, decisions in the program team. Who can make a decision here to say we're not going to do that experiment, we're going to do that experiment, and that's going to be a different timeline, that's going to be a different costing, that's going to be a different timeline, that's going to be a different costing. That's going to be a different set of team members working on it. Who gets the ability to do that?
Speaker 1:I think these are really critical things that start to stagnate the discussions in a meeting and if you don't have a strong program manager, that's like okay, guys, cut the crap. Who's doing what? This is a lot of great words, this is a great strategy. Are you doing that? And then, all of a sudden, you see people in the room get quiet because no one actually knows who is going to take on something. Who is going to start doing the research? Who is going to develop the plan? Who's going to review the plan? Do they need to get it approved? Is that even in the approval process? So there's all these things that we need to consider, and we see that very much early on, that we're all coming from different backgrounds, different cultures, different methodologies. Our experience is not indicative of our ability to function where there is no structure, where there is no guidance, and that comes from leadership.
Speaker 2:I get the balance right Of there's certain things that or resources that you need in order to be able to scale the team or progress the project, because you need that expertise and experience. But at the same time you know there's there's the balance of you're running a business, and so when you inflate the amount of people on your team, you destroy the runway that you have. And then now we see all these headlines of people getting laid off because there probably was no strategy when they were small for that hiring right, and it creates a cycle of we don't know what we need, but let's just hire a bunch of people to figure it out. Turns out we don't need that many people. Now we're going to lay them all off and it's just a dangerous game to play because you end up seeing companies that close their doors or assets that become unsuccessful. And so again to your point leadership being clear about what it is that we need and why do we need it. And if there are questions to be asked that require resources to come in, then maybe don't jump into hiring the entire team at first, but hire really the people that are going to be leading those work streams right and then having that conversation further to slowly develop that strategy.
Speaker 2:If you're just hiring a bunch of people because you think that you need all these bodies to do all this work, then you end up in a situation where people are get confused. They don't know who's doing what. Who's making decisions, where is this being logged? The governance structure is all screwed up. It looks like a crazy spider web, um, and you know that's. It's just, uh, not something that people want to be a part of, because they don't know when they come in.
Speaker 1:That's not fun. That's not fun to work in an environment that you look around and you go everyone's doing work, but secretly in the back of your mind you're like I don't know that.
Speaker 2:If anybody really knows what the other person's doing, yeah, and this shows up on. You know, we always see the LinkedIn thing with the celebration, with the little cupcake saying, oh, I'm so excited that I joined this organization, but there's, you never see the. What the hell did I just walk into.
Speaker 1:Right, right, we put on a very good show and, and you know, there's a great store window and all the free coffee and the cappuccino machine and the cold brew keg that they have in the like that stuff is amazing. It's so cool, I got all this stuff. And then you go in there and you're like wait, we don't. We don't have this stuff like written out, we don't. I don't have anybody that can help explain it to me. That's why we hired you. It builds, it builds it. Just it continues to build. So you know, I think that there's a very important role here, not just from the leadership perspective, you know, I think it's. I can see the challenge where you're running and we hear it all the time. We're flying, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying, we're building the tracks while we're running the train. The problem that I see is that in 2025, the train. The problem that I see is that in 2025, folks are working with a compass. They have an idea of a general direction that they want to go, but it's not to the level of a GPS that will tell you that have integrated systems that will tell you when you're off course, because you can go North in a plane. You can end up in Canada, you can end up in Greenland, you could probably end up somewhere in Europe if you're taking a different you know a little bit of a different path going towards North. You know, if you think about it, I always wonder when you're, when you're, when you're looking up at a star and you say, wow, that one looks like it's right above me, how far off are you really at pinpointing that? That's sort of what it looks like. We see a star way out there, but we have no other measure to help us recognize. Are we really going in the right direction? And these are things that you have to establish, that GPS in your organization in order for the folks below to be confident in the things that they're doing, in the directions that they're going in, in the decisions that they're making that don't go all the way up. You know one of the things that they asked Obama what's one of the hardest things about being the president? You are making the hard decisions. All the other decisions are being made before they get to you. The same with governances. Most of these other decisions that are not important enough to go to governance are being made at the team level.
Speaker 1:So if that path, if that roadway for, like, where they need to go by, when, how, who's involved if those things are not outlined, you're going to find a lot of folks that are sort of well, I just kept trying to improve this one thing when, eventually, you have to progress your work, you could do science all day, every day, trying to improve something, and that's probably more of like academic research, like you're trying to really dig and find something. When you're trying to build an asset, you have a timeline. You're going to have to hit it within this amount of time. If not, we got to scrap that and go for this other direction. So I think it's really important, as there's a responsibility for the people when they go into an organization or people that are already in the organization.
Speaker 1:You got to speak up. You got to ask yourself what are the things in general that I should be doing here? And then let me think about this project versus that project, versus that project. What are people expecting me to deliver? And the thing is, no one's really going to tell you anything To your point.
Speaker 1:When things are being done, when things are moving well, no one says anything about anything. When things are moving. Well, no one says anything about anything. Maybe you'll get like a hashtag kudos on LinkedIn, but you're not really going to have any Because the reality of it is most folks around you do not know. I've been in a really great. I've had really great experiences that I've been able to get closer to the people that I've been working with, because I've just been a little bit curious. Show me what you're doing, oh, and then this takes care of that. And then how do you know that this is ready for X, y, z? Oh, you're connected with them. Oh, that's oh, I didn't know they had that information. Now you have another contact. Now you have another branch of your team to go to for information.
Speaker 1:We want to talk about transparency. Like I hear transparency all the time. We want to increase transparency, increase transparency, increase transparency. You have to communicate. To do that, you have to communicate with your team, you have to communicate with your leadership. You have to communicate with your leadership. You have to communicate with your managers and your middle management. Communication, communication, communication. So, lawrence, when everyone's rowing and the boat is not moving, what do we do? How do we go into this thinking? I want to make sure that I am providing value to this organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, to kind of ground the plane on this conversation, I think what I take away from what you just talked about is there's, from a leadership perspective, what you're trying to do is make sure that you're adjusting the speed and accuracy of the entire team so that you can hit a timeline, and so these roles and responsibilities is a mechanism you can use to operate faster and to hit that goal that you're after.
Speaker 2:And so how do you structure the setup of those roles and responsibilities right?
Speaker 2:So I think there's a lot of tools that we can talk about as far as making it transparent, such as Smartsheet or any sort of work management tool where you can actually view like a project roster, and having you know different columns to really display how teams are interconnected.
Speaker 2:So that's, you know, one way of really using a digital tool to show that. And then the other part, which is, I think, probably the real difference maker here, is leadership needs to be connected to what is actually happening in reality, because if you're not, then you're essentially hiring for the wrong things and you're not understanding the things that are really making your team slow in the decisions they have to make, and so really just talk to the people that are on your team and to understand. You know we hired people for this sort of effort, and so I want to get a better understanding of where our gaps are and what's working well with you, what's not working well with you, and really establishing that communication so that you can adjust your decision-making, which, in turn, you can hire better for that speed and accuracy against hitting your timeline.
Speaker 1:What you just said really drives home the messaging of also creating a safe space to allow for trust to flow. You may find folks that are like you, just got to listen to leadership. But if leadership is not creating a safe space, guess what they're going to get from the rest of the team. They're going to get filtered BS that will not show up until it's too late. You're going to have data that's sort of construed a certain way. I'll give you an example we used to present way back when we would present sort of how close we were to hitting our enrollment target and the green, being in the green, was like 95%. But if you know anything like from month to month, but if you know anything about statistics 0.95, you're looking at 0.95 times 0.95 times 0.95. It's not additive, you have to multiply them. And then what happens? You were actually way off by month, six or seven than you would have been. So this perception that we're in the green because we're above 95%, above 92%, whatever you determine at your organization, is a perception of just like, oh, we're doing great, it is great. But the fact of the matter is you didn't hit your enrollment goal for that for that month. And when you continue to that. When you compound that, you end up six months later. You end up being a total of, although you've hit 95%. I mean, what is? I don't even have my calculator with me with me, but you're essentially going to look at it and go, oh, we're actually only 85% toward our enrollment goal by this time, which is not something anybody wants to see.
Speaker 1:So you need to make sure that we're creating, as leaders, that we are creating this safe space that I want to know. It's not for me to react to. If anything, I might take it in and go, okay, what do you think we should do about it? How would you progress this? That is how we empower our teams and our leaders and our managers that are in the teams to make the right decisions. They can come to us to have the candid conversation and then say, okay, what do you? People don't come to us. They're not coming to us to get an answer. There's so many tools out there now that can just spit out a generic answer.
Speaker 1:So, again, I just wanted to really, really, really impress upon the importance of leadership and creating this space that people actually want to show you when there's something that is might be yellow on the status indicator or might even be red, but I want to preface this with a certain thing. I don't want you to see red and think that there's a fire alarm. If there's a fire alarm, you're going to get a phone call, you're going to get an email, you're going to get a text message, you're probably going to get a random meeting request that shows up tomorrow, in the next two hours, whatever. Recognize that if there really is a big, big problem, that's going to become priority when it does happen.
Speaker 1:But you need to create this. You need to establish the space where you can continue to empower your teams by delivering guidance, direction as part of your strategy. Not just we're going to be the best company, we're going to approach this disease and we're going to be the pioneers here and the pioneers there. But what does that mean? What does that mean for people that are doing the work? How can you help them, with that big, flowery strategy, develop the things to execute on and have those aligned roles, responsibilities and those line of communications?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was. That was beautifully said and I think the message is let's stop having pizza parties and have these tough conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or forget it. Man, have the tough conversation with some pizza. I could do some pizza right now. So no one likes rowing when the boat isn't moving and take it from me. It's very exhausting and I think we still see that in this industry and other industries. So there's a role for everyone here a role for leaders, a role for middle managers and there's a role for folks that are part of the project team or part of that department or function. A lot of things that can be done, and I think that the healthy ones recognize that and work towards that. They're not perfect, but they work towards it, and I think that's what we can ask for. All right, lawrence, we'll catch you on the next episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bye, guys.
