My Mother is an avid gardener. Even in a small place around
our house she plants all sorts of things, flowers, veggies, etc. There are
seasonal plants and then there are perennial plants that have been in the
garden forever. These perennial plants typically are the ones that grow tall
and wide.
I have always loved
the way make their presence felt in the garden, providing shadow in the summer
and breaking winds during the storms. One of the things that I hated was my Mother
cutting these trees. And by cutting I don’t mean from the roots but just
pruning them. Recently, I decided to strongly register my protest with her
regarding her tree pruning activity. It was at that time she explained to me
the criticality of tree pruning activity. After listening to her about the reasons and
process of tree pruning, I couldn't but help think about organizations and the
importance of pruning from a leadership perspective. Like a gardener, a leader must learn and
practice the art and science of pruning talent and associated responsibilities
in his/her organization. Pruning of talent and responsibilities can be done in many
ways.
But before the process can begin, there are a couple of things that a Leader needs to take into account:
- Goals and reasons behind pruning
- Using the right pruning tools
- Pruning timing
Let’s examine some of the pruning opportunities that
typically show up in every organization. This information should provide you with some
basic directional knowledge about organizational talent and responsibilities of pruning.
1.
The Floaters: These are employees who
have been in the organization for a while and have tried their hands on
different roles and associated activities. Their role seems to change every 6
months to a year, in some cases moving from one team to another. Unless as a leader you have a hand in these changes, this is a tell-tell sign of an area
where pruning is needed. It’s best to have a heart to heart conversation in
such situation with the concerned employee to find out the appropriate solution.
2.
The Over Shadowers: These are the
employees who dwarf everyone with their presence in the team, in a negative
manner. It is always good to have mentors who are the guiding post in the
teams. But as Leader, your responsibility is to ensure those same people don’t
start over shadowing junior less experienced team members. The symptoms of over
shadowing are very clearly seen, for example:
- Same team member name appears everywhere (typically when things are going good).
- There are not enough good ideas / innovations coming from the team.
- Team starts losing its diversity, especially in problem solving and operations.
As a leader you should keep getting exposed
to various members from different teams. This will help you in getting better
understanding of ground reality and cut through the political and bureaucratic
mess.
3.
The ‘Single-Point-of-Failure’ Experts (aka
bottlenecks): Everyone loves to be the expert on a particular topic /
product functionality / technology as part of their team. It’s good to have
experts – the ‘Go to Guys’. Having them helps team stay ahead of the curve and
reduce the time it takes to solve the problems. But if you keep hearing the
there are projects that are getting delayed due the fact that your ‘Go to Guy’ has
become the bottleneck or the critical issues is not solved because your ‘Go to
Guy’ is out of office, then it time to think of pruning. In a case like this,
pruning can be done be cross training others on various topics or creating
responsibilities sharing with your ‘Go to Guy’, etc.
4.
The Self-Proclaimed Gatekeepers: These
are a one of the most interesting types of people in the organization. These
people almost always show up as long poles when postmortem is preformed on
projects that have gone south. They typically show up last minute to proclaim
their stake on the approval process for the project to move ahead. It’s OK for
such situations to arise once in a while, but if the occurrence is frequent
then as leader you need to address this situation by fixing the process or
people or both. If not addressed in a timely manner this can cause teams to
feel demoralized and pull down team productivity and output speed.
5.
The Life-Timers: These are employees
who have been in same role for a very long time. More often than not they have
been performing the same job function over a period of time and most of the
time they are very good at performing their job duties. As a leader you,
should be concerned when same type of problems keep coming and are being solved
by the same set of people in the same manner. Irrespective of business impact
that these business problems have, it is critical to examine if such pruning
opportunities can be fixed by more experienced employees or employees from different
business background or by training the life-timers.
This talent and responsibilities pruning activity is an extremely
critical and ongoing process for a leader at any level in the organization. As
the organizations grow and organizations age, the impacts of ignoring pruning
issues can get more chronic. The top leadership should take time and effort to
ensure the other leaders in the organization have tools at their disposal to
identify pruning opportunities and address those opportunities in the timely
manner.
