Sometimes We Just Need a Kick in the Ask

There are going to be times when you need to get out of the office and do a little management by wandering around. This is when you need to ask questions about why certain things have always been done that way. There is an old story that goes like this and will help with this point.

There was a couple that had been married for a good while and the wife’s family was coming over for a reunion in the near future. While planning the reunion the husband volunteered to do the cooking so his wife could visit more with the family. She thought that was so nice and when the day came the family was in the living room, front yard, back yard, and basement. About 10:30 am the wife decided to check on how the food was coming along. She asked the husband and he said everything is fine.

She said, “Do you have the potatoes on?”

“Yes.”

“Beans?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have the roast on?”

“Yes.”

“Did you cut the end off the roast?”

“What?”

“We always cut the end off the roast!”

“Why?”

“Because my momma always cut the end off the roast!”

“Mom’s in the living room. Let’s go ask her why.”

They went into the living room to find out.

“Momma, why did you always cut the end off the roast?”

Momma replied, “We always cut the end off the roast.”

“Why?”

“Because my Momma always cut the end off the roast.”

“Well Grandma isn’t here, but we’ve gone this far. Let’s call her!” the husband said.

Grandma answered the phone and he asked her,

“Why did you always cut the end off the roast?”

“Because my roasting pan was too short.”

When I was asked to run the health care laundry, they had a tradition of using the pounds of laundry washed per operator hour worked as a standard for measuring labor costs. This is an industry wide standard as I found out. Months went by and they let the plant manager do the calculation, which comes from counters on the equipment as gathered by the chief of maintenance and the hours worked as gathered by the accountant. I was trying to figure out why we had no cash flow since we were supposedly running within 10% of the national average pounds per operator hour. I went about the old fashioned way of measuring labor cost, which is take the total dollars in payroll including taxes and benefits and divide it by sales dollars. To my surprise the industry average PPOH or pounds per operator hour was 95 and we were supposedly about 85 PPOH. But when I looked at the industry survey averages put out annually the average labor cost was 52% of sales. To my surprise we were running up to 80% of sales in labor cost in dollars. I dug in a little deeper and found out that no one was actually doing the calculation and that it was just being made up. The company had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the credit was drying up because of slow pay due to no cash flow.

I terminated the plant manager and promoted two production workers who showed potential to production supervisors and gave them two clipboards. I told them, “I want you to walk around and watch people doing their job and write down anything questionable you see, or just write down anything.” The workers would perceive that we were on top of what was going on and begin to produce at a higher level. Sure enough, we took about four weeks and had the payroll back down to the 50% of sales level and the cash was coming in. This is called managing by influence. I highly recommend Managing by Influence by Kenneth and Linda Schatz. It will really empower you and open your eyes. You have to be wary of anytime they tell you this is how we have always done it.

Important Concept: We have all heard of management by wandering around or MBWA. I suggest that unless you ask questions and demand logical and provable answers, you will just get a line of crap and a hope that you will go away dazzled. We need to be kicked out of our offices and go around observing and asking questions until we understand what is going on. You will be amazed at the respect you will get and the results will get better fast. Think of it like IQ or Intelligence Quotient only your AQ or Asking Quotient or the speed at which you can learn to ask specific pertinent questions.