Tim Noyce Advies

How do you use GTD to improve management processes in an organisation? How do you ensure that people are working on things that are vital to the company? Something rather exciting has been happening to me in the last few months. End of last year I spent some time working with a department head who had very much “got” GTD, specifically because it had helped him to survive when he found himself doing two demanding jobs at once.

What started out as simply spreading the GTD principles out to his teams, training and coaching them, turned into much, much more.
I had a revelation, but a couple of things had to come together for it to occur. One of those things was my pet peeve: the vagueness of the developmental goals that most organisations set their employees. Anything other than a sales target tends to be worthy but very unclear, leaving even the most motivated no way to “win”. Also, in most organisations, the world changes quickly enough that the SMART goals you set in January make little sense by June, making the end-of-year evaluation round pretty ineffective.

The other insight came from the classic text “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker, in which he describes the importance of setting a clear enough mission for the company and the challenge of getting that mission to actually impact day-to-day working at the operational level.

I was thinking about GTD’s horizons of focus at the time. and I suddenly realized that just as the “conversations” at each horizon define things on the level below, each layer of an organisation can do the same. The responsibility of each layer of management is to interprete accurately what the layer above them is expressing and pass that on as clearly as possible to their subordinates.

When I laid this out for the department head it really matched his vision. He was looking for ways to genuinely empower the smart and motivated people in his teams, to make demonstrable progress on organisational goals and particularly to make management highly transparent.

We went right out and put it into practice: the departmental head boiled the vision his director had given him down into goals and targets specific to his department. His team leaders did the same, answering the goals he set with objectives of their own, customized for the strengths and specialities of their teams.

Then we ran workshops with the teams. The workshops were amazing. The departmental head gave the vision of the directors and showed everyone exactly how he had responded to it. The team leaders were equally transparent and direct, they turned to their teams and said “these are my objectives for the team and this is how I derived them  from the departmental goals.”

Then I gave the teams a pocket introduction to GTD and Natural Planning. Armed with the team-level goals and a Natural Planning boilerplate they split up into groups and the management team and I moved round the groups walking them through the Natural Planning process until we had solid plans and Next Actions.

We got some fabulous feedback, with lots of enthusiasm and engagement. The team members came up with some very effective action plans and everyone had a Next Action they could really get behind. The team leaders were astonished by the responses they got: some very nice quick wins, quality initiatives and solid proposals for cost reductions and process improvement.

The gratifying thing for the team members was that they could go back to their workplaces and actually make things happen, real progress. They could even rigourously prove that what they were doing operationally was exactly aligned with the direction the top management had given. That is rarer than is should be.

OK, I am gushing a bit here, but it was quite startling how much energy was released in these sessions: suddenly the managers were able to set goals that could be understood and tackled: people had a way to win.

I have often seen the work ”empowerment” misused, but when empowerment actually happens it is quite extraordinary how much latent power it releases.