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Porus P. Munshi

In any organisation, for effective management, one needs to focus on three key areas: consistency, reliability and simplicity.

There are really some pretty simple rules in managing and they revolve around three fundamental concepts: Consistency, Reliability and Simplicity.

Consistency is following the team's rules and that of the organisation's and saying and doing the same thing. In other words, walking the talk.

Reliability is building up a perception of dependability through consistence. Reliability usually follows from consistency.

Simplicity is constantly simplifying rules and processes. Making things simple is not easy. It requires hard work.

Let's examine each of these in more depth. One of the most frustrating experiences for a subordinate - and the most demotivating, is to have a boss who is inconsistent. Productivity can drop and intense dissatisfaction can creep in. To illustrate, there was a sales manager in a large organisation, who was in charge of a region with fantastic potential. His predecessor had broken national sales records with that region and his successor also did the same. But this man never really got anywhere even though the company persisted with him for a long time and gave him a long rope. But after three or more years, it became clear that he had to be shifted.

This chap really got nowhere because his sales force was extremely demotivated. And they were demotivated because of his extremely inconsistent behaviour. He would give some instructions one day, change them the next day, say something else on the third day, and change it again a couple of days later. For an outside consultant, it became very clear very fast that he had to either change his dysfunctional behaviour or leave. Unfortunately, he couldn't change his behaviour.

The manager who replaced him quickly brought order by giving only a few instructions and giving them over and over again.

To drive change, to drive progress, one needs to be consistent. This may sound like a paradox - be consistent in order to change; but it's a fundamental truth. The reason Jack Welch was so effective at driving organisational change and transformation so many times was because he took only one new idea at a time and constantly and continuously repeated it over and over again to whomever he met. Noel Tichy, in his book, `Change your destiny or someone else will', says that Welch's simple most important quality was persistence. He would hammer away at one idea day in and day out until even a monolithic organisation like GE would begin to turn around to the new idea.

This is something that can really be done at every level. Take a few ideas at a time and be consistent in their implementation. See them through to completion. Walk the talk.

Reliability comes in when a manager is consistent in what he says and does. Reliability needs to be established right away. Nothing shakes reliability so much as inconsistency and once a manager's subordinates get the impression that he's unreliable, his effectiveness will come down sharply.

The key test for reliability is whether or not you do what you say you'll do. If a person makes too many promises either because he doesn't want to say no or because he has an inaccurate estimate of either his competency or the time required for a task, he will soon come to be perceived as being unreliable.

One person I had to deal with in an MNC was extremely unreliable. He would make promise after promise to do certain tasks or keep certain information ready and organised but nothing would ever happen. Things came to such a pass that he was considered to be reliable only in his unreliability. Finally matters came to a head and I had to ask his superior to either assign someone else or to let me deal with this person's subordinate who was extremely reliable and consistent. The subordinate was assigned and this really meant that he could take decisions over his unreliable boss' head. Very soon the unreliable boss was shifted. People perceived as unreliable can never really move very fast or climb very high in a quick-moving result-oriented organisation.

The third key to effective management is simplicity. Most effective managers I know seem to keep only three or less simple rules for themselves and their team. Maybe one focuses on punctuality, another on quality, another on teamwork and helping each other, yet another on measurable results, and so on. They never give their teams more than three rules to follow. And they consistently follow the rules themselves.

Simplicity is also the ability to cut through the clutter and to constantly reframe to make things simpler. Every single process, every instruction and communication can be made simpler. Unfortunately, most managers often don't take the time and effort to make things simple. And it really takes a lot of time and effort to make things simple. There's a story about a famous person who once wrote a long note to his subordinate with instructions for him to follow in his absence. At the end of the note, he added a postscript apologising to his subordinate, "I'm sorry for writing you such a long note. I didn't have time to make it a short one."

Welch's famous Work Out program was an exercise in institutionalising simplicity. Anything extraneous, anything complex had to go if a good reason couldn't be found for its existence.

To sum up, for effective management, one needs to focus on three key areas: consistency, reliability and simplicity. If this is done on a regular basis throughout the organisation, it cannot but help become a peak-performing organisation with top class man-managers.

The author is a Chennai-based HR consultant. He can be reached at porusmun@hotmail.com

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