As Published in Business 2 Business , June 2006

Competent Chaos: Creating High Performance Teams

By Ira S Wolfe

Where manufacturing managers rush to improve productivity, they often find themselves lunging full force into a brick wall called quality.  When sales managers are directed to increase sales, they find themselves at odds with manufacturing.  Even non-profit social agencies get into the act: finding new and creative ways to raise money without losing sight of the mission, or worse, holding back services because resources aren’t available.

These internal battles aren’t new.  But the fighting is intensifying and the frequency is increasing.  Global competition is driving manufacturers to produce more with less while increasing value with zero tolerance for effects.  Newer and newer technologies and rapidly changing consumer behaviors put unprecedented pressure on salespeople to close more sales, even when manufacturing is trying to build the plane while it is moving down the runway.  In some cases, organizations are actually lifting off while they’re still locating all the parts!  With the pace of business increasing, available resources tightening, and key employee turnover the norm rather than exception, no organization with a pulse isn’t feeling the pressure.

What I’m about to tell you won’t necessarily bring peace and harmony to your workplace.  It will however get everyone on the same page working for the same cause and moving in the same direction.  Welcome to the world of “competent chaos.”

Competent chaos?  That sounds oxy-moronic!  You likely have got this picture of someone in mind who is absolutely the best there is at screwing things up and turning any event into mayhem. 

You’re probably thinking: he can’t be really serious about saying competent chaos is a viable solution to simultaneously improving productivity and quality. But think again, I’m dead serious.  It happens every day in organizations that are growing and thriving in today’s economy.

The paradox between competence and chaos hit me during a recent visit to a client: a pharmaceutical plant.  The company is on a crusade: quality matters.  Every place you turn, you see posters, banners, and boards promoting quality, quality, quality.  At the same time, superintendents, managers and supervisors spend several hours a day in meetings trying to reduce a backlog that has termination of contracts by several very big clients written all over it. To make matters worse, sales orders are going through the roof, only increasing backorders.

If it is sounds like chaos, you’re right. At first glance, it seems easy to blame manufacturing for the backlogs but you might not want to rush to judgment.  While orders are late and backlogs are the norm, the number of dosages shipped daily has doubled within the past year. Manufacturing, at least on the surface, is doing their part.

I’ve been working with this client for nearly three years. Initially I was retained to help build a succession management model.  With rapid growth anticipated and a doubling in the size of the workforce planned, senior management recognized they needed to move some managers up the ladder and find competent replacements.  Well, one thing led to another and I found myself setting top performer benchmarks for nearly every salaried and hourly position in the plant.  Over the past two years, promotions have been made and replacements found.  Several hundred new employees have been hired and as I mentioned earlier production has more than doubled. 

What we succeeded at doing was creating high-performance teams within each department: sales, manufacturing, quality.  What we failed to do was keep an eye on the strategic goal of higher production, more profits.  Despite each department initially exceeding their goals, future and sustained improvements stalled.   Manufacturing and quality got caught in a Catch-22.  When production goals were met, quality incident reports increased. When quality improved, production crashed.

But mistakes do happen, especially when production is consistently asked to produce more and more in less time. Where a single mistake out of 10 million might mean bonus time in some industries, it could be the difference between life and death in pharma. 

For every incident no matter how little, an investigation follows.  Lines are shut down, shipments are delayed, and millions of tablets ready for delivery are removed from packages.  This takes time and resources that can’t be recovered.  Tons of raw materials are wasted.  Employees are required to work overtime. Expenses go up and morale goes down.  

Manufacturing blames quality assurance for unrealistic standards.  Quality blames manufacturing for carelessness.  Sales blames both for not fulfilling what they sold.

In reality everyone was doing their jobs exceedingly well -  in a vacuum. Sales were up, production was up, and compliance was up. The only party not satisfied was the customer. The cause: competent chaos.

Despite senior management’s call to “get it fixed now” and “find the right people,” the  problem wasn’t a lack of talent.  It was the old-time favorite, a failure to communicate.  In setting ambitious departmental goals and making a concerted effort to put the right people in the right positions, management succeeded.  In linking departmental and individual contributions to the corporate goal of more productivity, higher profits and zero-defects, management failed. The best people were hired and promoted and just doing their jobs.  Their performance and rewards however were linked to goals that when achieved didn’t necessarily contribute toward the bottom line.  

The missing piece was what I’d call “interdependence”.  Interdependence requires communicating how individual or department contributions help achieve corporate goals.  Linking people to corporate strategy points employees in the direction the organization needs them to go instead of expending a lot of energy bumping into one another in a state of chaos.  Manufacturing needed quality assurance’s help to keep the line up and running and free of defects, while quality needed manufacturing to help assure high volumes met strict compliance standards.

Turning mediocre performance into competence requires an analysis of the critical skills of a job or set of jobs in relation to the goals of the organization. This holds true whether you employ two workers or hundreds, whether you’re self-employed or working for a Fortune 100. But for a competency model to be useful and accepted within the organization there must be:

1. Alignment with the business strategy.  Begin by identifying key strategic and growth goals and clearly articulating them.

 2. Involvement of key stakeholders.  Invite a minimum of four and no more than eight subject matter experts to a “strategic success” meeting. 

3. Identify mission-critical responsibilities. List the most crucial responsibilities of each job in a straightforward and  easy to understand manner.  It is important to make sure the specificity and functionality of each responsibility defines: (a) what behavior or action you can see the employee do when fulfilling this responsibility and (b) how you will measure success?

4. Create competency model.  Using a strategy-focused job competency library, narrow down the list of critical core competencies to no fewer than three and no more than ten.  The final model should include only the skills that are absolutely necessary to do the job. 

5. Evaluate potential and measure performance.  Knowing the skills you’re looking for is the beginning, not the end game, of talent management.  Evaluating potential for new employees is best done through the use of a structured behavioral interview and five-factor personality assessments.  Measuring on the job performance is best accomplished through observation and 360-degree feedback.

6. Continued refinement as the work environment changes.  As job responsibilities change, workloads increase, or the pace hastens, check and re-check the job-relatedness of the responsibilities and the potential of the employee to keep up.

Ira S Wolfe is founder of Success Performance Solutions.  He developed CriteriaOne: The Whole Person Approach to hiring and succession management and is a certified Strategic Success Model consultant.  He can be reached at success@super-solutions.com or 717.291.4640.