- Posted by jbehrendt on December 16, 2009
As you may know, part of my job as management consultant is to be a nonexecutive board member of several companies, supporting the executive directors in all matters related to accounting, finance, restructuring, and strategy development. But the distinction between nonexecutive and executive starts to blur when you become involved with the companies customers, since they do not care that much about your formal title when there is work to be done.
Last week I had one full day dedicated to this "non"-executive board work for my second company, nexum bogazici. Although I handed over daily duties to my partners already one year ago, only being chairman of the company for now, some of the customers like to see me involved into large projects at least on steering committee level, so at least in this case, some operative duties remain for me as well.
At 6 o'clock in the morning, we travelled with a team of three (CEO, partner for IT services, and me) to Munich for a 3-hour steering committee meeting with one of nexum's main customers. The main purpose of the meeting was to analyze if a crisis that erupted two months ago was settled, and if nexum has taken sufficient measures to allow a continuation of the cooperation. Although we had worked hard in nexum to remove all problems, and to improve especially in the area of project management, some items were still not fully settled, and it was an open question if nexum's customer would be willing to continue the cooperation, and to assign another big project to nexum for the following year.
Since this crisis started, I made weekly meetings with the project and account managers for this project to follow up progress, and to enforce strict project management rules, therefore i had at least some information what was going on. However, it is impossible to catch up with all necessary details if already four different sub-project managers, plus one project manager, plus one account manager deal with the project every day, and you are forced to become superficial. The trick is to be able to judge where you can be superficial, trusting that no problem or discussion will arise, and where you have to drill down into details. This is the main problem not only managers but consultants face every day - you need to know everything that is relevant, you need to keep control of the relevant issues that can influence the future of your or your customers company, but you do not have enough time to deal with all the things going on in that environment.
One necessary, but not sufficient condition is to become highly organized and efficient in your daily work. Never forget an ongoing conversation or task, follow up the tasks you have assigned to your team on a regular basis, make sure you dictate the content of your calendar, and you reserve sufficient time without disturbance by visitors, phone calls, or continous email checking to be able to work concentrated on issues that require concentration, etc., etc. - all this is taught in several general management or time management seminars. But, as said, this is only a necessary condition, since even with an efficiency ten times as high as the one of the team around you, you cannot duplicate all of them. The only way to overcome the regular information and work overload is to make qualitative, meaningful decisions on what you need to follow up, and what not, whom and what you need to control, and to which extent, which decisons you reserve for yourself and which one you can delegate, etc. The typical errors of managers and consultants are either overdoing control, getting to much involved into details, and loosing track of the "big picture" as well as of strategic issues, or, alternatively, to leave to much to managers without properly guiding and controlling them. For a management consultant, there is an additional problem: to give value-adding advice to decisionmakers but not to make the decisions yourself. This, to be frank, is the hardest part when you have been a manager yourself - do not start to act as if you are the manager yourself. On the other hand, without thinking like a manager, and without knowing the details of managerial work, your advice is very often useless, not adding any value for the decisonmakers - you do not speak their language.
Well, the problems with this customer were sufficiently solved, and nexum got the big jobs for the next year, so both the nexum team and me were successful this time. In one of my next blogs, I will talk more about the issues of management. In the meantime, considering we are approaching new year and christmas pretty fast, I wish you all a happy new year, and, in case it applies to you, merry christmas - talk to you in the new year. All the best for the new year!