Blindsided by Basil: Management Training for Agility and Flexibility
Who knew? I pulled out all the basil plants by the roots after the first frost last fall. I swear I did!
And this spring I plant a couple of cayenne and tepin pepper plants, and when I go out to check on them I pull a "weed" coming up...and what's that sweet, heady perfume? The basil is back! It ain't "the king" for nothing, I guess. Except that now it's taken over the plot, growing riotously, crowding out all but the equally aggressive mint.
Oh well, time to replant the peppers somewhere else.
Or as we say in the management trainning biz, "Time to correct the trajectory." Of course, I could go on nurturing the peppers, in their originally assigned place, hacking back the encroaching basil (there's only so much we can do with it in the kitchen!), or I could adapt to pesky, unpredictable, changing conditions by changing my cherished plan.
It was Jerry Murphey who taught me the correct answer to this choice: Revise the plan itself, regardless of your emotional investment in it.
Jerry (check him out on LinkedIn), is the erstwhile management and leadership development czar for Barry Callebaut chocolate - now there's a job, and based in Switzerland to boot! - and he's a big fan of realistic training. When project management was on the agenda, he had his participants (in their dedicated facility, a chateau-y sort of pile on Lake Constance - yeah, I know, crazy, huh?) plot real-world projects, and as the schedules took shape, long trails of Post-It notes festooning the walls of the room, it would become clear that the orginal plan needed to be revised, and revised again and again in smaller and greater ways as new factors came into play - many of them the unpredictable consquences of previous changes to the plan.
"A Chocolate Lover's Guide to Management Development," the presentation Jerry gave at the 2006 conference of the International Society for Performance Improvement (www.ispi.org ) remains a classic - as does his favorite book at the time, Henry Mintzberg's Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. It keeps coming back to those all-important "soft skills": training managers in the ability to recognize game-changing developments and adjust quickly in response is critical to their development as leaders as well as to business success.
Seems self-evident, eh? So, remind me - how long were we in Vietnam, tinkering with and duct-taping strategies that needed a ground-up overhaul? Michael Caine, in the excellent remake of The Quiet American, can only shake his head: How can such sophisticated people, with such resources, not see what's happening? And that was before our big involvement!
Happens all the time in the business world too. Starbucks, anyone? Well, at least they bit the bullet and closed all those stores, many of them new - but developing managers for the specific ability to cut their losses when the trajectory hasn't been corrected in time is a whole 'nother skill for a whole 'nother blog post!
Oh well, lesson learned. To paraphrase Terry Jones in Life of Brian, "Not so much on the basil next time."
But then, next year it'll be something else. I'll just have to deal with it, make that course correction to the trajectory of my precious plans. Sigh!
