Mother Earth has so many lessons to teach us. She’s billions of years old and constantly changing thanks to biodiversity and the movement of tectonic plates beneath our feet. Friction between huge masses of planet crust creates mountain ranges, causes heightened volcanic activity, and brings on catastrophic earthquakes. These plates have wreaked havoc and birthed new islands and continents over eons.
Just like our Earth, our companies have similar fault lines that can be harnessed for constructive or destructive purposes. Tension and friction aren’t all bad. If we look closely, we can see natural tensions in relationships between individuals and groups in our businesses. Leveraging tension can create less work for managers and make for a happier, more productive workforce. Let’s take a look at some common production fault lines to learn more.
Also by Henry Clifford: If We Touch It, We Own It
Sales to Design Engineer
The design engineer needs sales to feed them work. Sales wants the design engineer to be more aggressive about soliciting work. That’s a wonderfully tense dynamic. Consider having your salespeople commit to weekly referred business goals for the system designer. In turn, have your system designer publish a publicly visible queue so everyone can see the gap between referred and written business. Because this pending work dashboard is now being reviewed during the sales meeting, now the system designer feels the urgency to write the business as quickly as possible and salespeople feel equally incented to refer as much as possible to square up their commitments.
Sales to Project Manager
When a salesperson excitedly sells a project, diametrically opposed forces emerge. The quick moving rep wants to move on to the next sale and isn’t necessarily detail oriented. The project manager, on the other hand, wants to make sure they’re not signing up for a dumpster fire. In order for this dance to work, the project manager needs to be assertive and manage the aggressive personality traits that go along with being a strong salesperson. A passive project manager, sometimes more oriented around pleasing customers, might have a hard time with this, saying things like “I was never given” or “the salesperson told me to do X.” We call this “victim speak” at Livewire and it’s tough to eliminate. Our antidote to victim speak is to encourage active behaviors like demanding the salespeople schedule a project handoff only when they’ve completed a checklist, including proper documentation and anything else the project manager needs to be successful. In turn, after a few incidents of being turned away for being ill-prepared, the salespeople learn that they need to toe the line.
Design Engineer to Project Manager/Installation
Once again we find ourselves dealing with personality types that may or may not be oriented toward proactively demanding that certain conditions exist before the job proceeds. We’ve had an edict at Livewire for some time that all jobs have connection diagrams and floor plan layouts. Until we got the whole company to buy into this mission, these missed opportunities fell under the “I didn’t ask and he didn’t say” bucket. Insist that your project managers demand proper documentation from the system designer before scheduling the job and watch how quickly things correct themselves.
Project Manager to Installation
While it’s the project manager’s job to set the installation team up for success, the installers are also responsible for advocating for themselves. Too often we’ve heard of situations where the installers ended up working over hours on a job without letting the project manager know, or maybe the project manager didn’t properly walk the installers on the job and ask if they had everything they needed. The antidote here is easier said than done: Measure your project managers using the gap between sold and produced margin. If a job is sold at 45 points, it should be produced at or above the same number. Too often CI businesses see a drop of 10 or more points in the production phase due to missing documentation, poorly trained installers, or bad hiring decisions. Consider creating a self-funding incentive program around sold vs. produced revenue and watch your tension and fault lines work for you.
Also by Henry Clifford: Avoiding Change Order Black Holes
Tension is already running rampant in your business. How will you harness it?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
