LSW#18 🤔Do You MBWA?
How MBWA can be more potent than an MBA
A warm welcome to new subscribers! In case you are looking for my HBR 100 best reads link, it’s at the bottom of this post. If you found me through my article on framing and psychological safety, I covered another angle on framing in last week’s edition that you might find interesting.
Now, on to this week’s topic.
Managing by Wandering Around
If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people do not realize they have one in the first place.
—W. EDWARDS DEMING
What makes for an effective manager/leader? That’s the question I am constantly asking myself and others. One strategy is Charlie Munger’s idea of being intelligent by avoiding stupidity. Along the same lines, you can be a more effective by avoiding the common pitfall of being disconnected from realities on the ground.
Consider this photo from 1862:
It’s President Abraham Lincoln on the frontlines during the US Civil War. He was practicing MBWA aka managing by walking around. As simplistic as that sounds, it’s effective and can have profound effects if practiced diligently and sincerely.
But simple doesn’t mean easy. The default is for managers to end up operating in a bubble that’s disconnected from their team’s experience. You need to actively work against this tendency. Here’s how David Packard —one of the founders of HP where MBWA originated —puts it:
Managers must be sure that their people clearly understand the objectives and specific goals of their division or department… . It is also essential that the manager have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the work of his or her group. This brings up the debate that has been carried on by businesspeople for many years. Some say good managers can manage anything; they can manage well without really knowing what they are trying to manage. It’s the management skills that count.
I don’t argue that the job can’t be done that way, but I do argue strongly that the best job can be done when the manager has a genuine and thorough understanding of the work. I don’t see how managers can even understand what standards to observe, what performance to require, and how to measure results unless they understand in some detail the specific nature of the work they are trying to supervise. We have held closely to this philosophy at HP and I hope will continue to do so.
We have a technique at HP for helping managers and supervisors know their people and understand the work their people are doing, while at the same time making themselves more visible and accessible to their people. It’s called MBWA— “management by walking around.”
— David Packard in The HP Way
Packard, talks about it as a “technique”, which I am allergic to, but MBWA can be a key part of your philosophy and practice.
Most managers recognize the very real risk of being in a bubble. That’s why most of them have “open door” policies. But in practice, it never gets done or simply doesn’t work. Why?
I examined this in a closer look at the practice of MBWA and some common pitfalls:
What exactly is MBWA
How to NOT to do it (many managers try it but end up doing worse)
Why most folks fail to implement
Why it’s vital to effective leadership
Reflection questions to get better at it
Click the link below to go to the full article:
The Reverse MBWA
MBWA is usually mentioned in the context of leadership. But it’s equally effective bottom-up as well, or in other words “managing-up”.
A big mistake people make in careers is to think that if they just put their heads down and do a great job, results will automatically follow, or in other words “My work should speak for itself”. Unfortunately it doesn’t.
You will have to make it sing. And one way to do so effectively is by “wandering around” both within and outside your organization, literally and metaphorically.
What does this look like in practice?
Get comfortable having casual “non-agenda” conversations not just with your manager and peers, but also with teams you don’t directly work with.
How well do you know teams and managers outside your organizational purview?
Be ok with the discomfort of not knowing where the conversation might lead, and the anxiety that comes with “showing up without an agenda”.
Please note, the meaning of the term “casual conversations” is more clear in my full article.
I realize this sounds awfully close to “networking” and “schmoozing”, but it goes deeper than that. Networking feels cheap and dirty because people become objects and means to our ends. MBWA done well is the opposite of that.
Also consider the fact that conversations are the basic building blocks of organizations. By “creating” a new conversation you are participating in what can be called the conversations of the organization.
A common pushback against this is introversion. But even introverts are ok with one-on-one conversations. And that’s all it takes.
Leader’s Library
📒Book
This week’s reading recommendation is the 1982 classic In Search of Excellence. For a quick summary, check out my short post: Still In Search of Excellence.
In Search of Excellence spawned the business bestseller category and popularized the notion of MBWA. It’s been panned and criticized over the years, but is still worth the read. At the time of its writing it was ground breaking for its radical ideas.
Over the years there's been a steady stream of books and practitioners that delve into any one of the many aspects discussed in the book. What is pathetic is that some of its best ideas are still not in common practice more than 40 years later.
📚HBR 100 best reads
I created a resource for my clients which you might find useful. It collects 100 of the best articles Harvard Business Review has ever published. Click the link below to access the spreadsheet. Let me know what you think of the list and if I missed any important ones.
A request
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That's it for this edition. Thanks for reading!
– Sheril Mathews