Think back over the last three years. Have you ever spotted a chance to do something valuable for your company--a project that would really shake things up-- but for whatever reason, you did not pursue it? Perhaps you just could not get started, or maybe you did begin the project, but then gave up when you hit the first big roadblock.
If this has happened to you, you are by no means an exception. In fact, in our research we have found that such inaction is indeed the rule. Despite all their knowledge and competence, despite their influence and the resources they have at their disposal, most managers spend their time making the inevitable happen - instead of putting their energy into making those exceptional things happen that create a company's future. Faced with an opportunity to achieve something significant, beyond their routine day-to-day tasks, most managers simply do not grab it.
Why? These executives usually offer "good reasons"--a nay-saying boss or a tight budget. But that is rarely the whole story. Rather, the reason most managers fail lies within the managers themselves. Consider the following case.
Laura McCormick had just landed the most challenging role of her career. IBG, a $7 billion conglomerate, had acquired her employer, Delta Technologies, a telecommunications supplier--and appointed her, at 33, one of two instructors in IBG's much-touted total quality program. Who better than Laura to do the job? Energetic, enthusiastic, and articulate, she had risen quickly in her seven years at Delta. Tim Dermott, her boss and mentor as well as Delta's engineering Vice President, valued Laura enough to nominate her for this highly visible position.
Tim had ulterior motives. His relationship with Alan Sartora, Delta's Vice President of Operations and newly appointed head of the total quality program, reflected a long-standing divide between Delta engineering and operations. Their managerial styles differed as well; Alan deemed Tim "too soft and undemanding" of his people and not sensitive enough to Delta's cost pressures. Alan valued fire-fighting types like Sam Butler, a manager from the factory floor, whom Alan installed as the other instructor.
Now leading the total quality project, Alan was clearly positioning himself for Delta's CEO role. Having sought the total quality appointment himself, Tim wanted someone on the project who could do the job without undoing their relationship. Laura fit the bill.
Early in her new position, however, Laura began to stall. Having squabbled with Sam Butler before, Laura considered him entirely unsuitable for teaching and avoided him whenever possible. Despite the uninspiring three-week instructor training session, their first program teaching together went well: Laura liked the instruction materials, and she found the participants enthusiastic, voicing a range of ideas for improving the company.
She quickly discovered that, while the program encouraged employee empowerment, senior managers usually ignored or stigmatized workers who asked for changes. Even a straightforward improvement project that she considered a "quick win" for the total quality program got stuck. Despite Laura's constant pushing, nothing happened for over four months. "By the time we solved the problem, the bureaucratic hurdles had killed the enthusiasm, and we had nothing to celebrate," she said. A series of such incidents left Laura doubting whether any of the company's senior managers, including Alan, really wanted change.
In the midst of these doubts, Delta's president, Dave Croft--with whom Tim and Laura had been closely aligned--retired, and IBG announced that Alan would replace him. Alan further consolidated his power by dividing engineering in two, giving Tim Dermott the smaller piece--in effect, demoting Tim.
Still, for three months Laura pushed on, running one program after another, attending meetings, tackling problems that cropped up, and spending hours each day answering emails and returning phone calls. Laura felt that she was constantly busy, working overtime for total quality, yet there were no clear "big wins" for the project. Instead, three rounds of lay-offs ensued, each more severe than the last. Employee morale was dipping, and Delta was heading for its first quarterly loss. "I was lying to employees, creating false hopes, and raising expectations," Laura said. "All while the organization was actually going in the opposite direction."
When Laura finally asked to relinquish the teaching role, Alan responded, "People like you. You have credibility, and you are good. I do not want to lose you." But Laura had already read the writing on the wall. Tim was powerless; Dave Croft was gone; senior management was noncommittal. Laura polished her resume and resigned a month later.
How does a competent, high-potential manager like Laura end up failing at such an important assignment? What, exactly, kept her from making total quality a real success?
Laura's story is in no way special. Everyone has probably experienced or witnessed hundreds, maybe thousands of such instances in companies around the world. We have all been in a situation where, no matter what we tried, bureaucracy and budget constraints stifled our efforts at change. We have all seen how political one-upmanship can often take precedence over creating real, lasting improvement. No doubt, the conflict between Alan and Tim politicized the environment. Clearly, the organizational systems and processes were not ready for total quality, especially when senior management was not pushing for a change. Total quality was the rhetoric; Laura was caught between the rhetoric and the organizational reality.
But is that the full story? What could have happened, for example, if instead of avoiding contact with Sam, Laura had tried to build a great relationship with him from the beginning? Sam, clearly, was in Alan's good books. Perhaps the two of them could have begun to bridge the gap between Alan and Tim. But more to the point, although Laura kept very busy running programs, she did not appear to spend much time really thinking about the total quality project overall or developing a clear vision of what she wanted it to look like. In fact, she seemed surprised when problems surfaced. What if, instead of gradually withdrawing her energy from the project, she had anticipated problems and possible solutions? Rather than blaming management, what would have happened had she asked herself about her own role in the project's failures?
Laura was not passive, stupid, or lazy. On the contrary, her days--like most managers'-- were a constant stream of meetings, conference calls, emails, voicemails, pages, and so on, with no time to think.
That is precisely the problem. By its very nature, the manager's job leaves little room for reflection. The result? Contrary to what we might hope to hear, managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with the organization's most crucial issues. After all, those problems usually require a "big picture" perspective--which means reflection, systematic planning, or creative thinking, and above all, time. Instead, operational activities requiring more "immediate" attention squeeze important problems out. Daily routines, superficial behaviors, poorly prioritized or unfocused tasks act like leeches on managers' capacities--making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem in large companies.
How does this happen? How do smart, talented executives end up losing valuable time and energy, rather than acting in truly productive ways? Situational factors rarely account entirely for this lack of purposeful, goal-directed action-taking. In fact, as a rule, managers' jobs provide sufficient scope and freedom to act - as Laura's position clearly did. Yet relatively few managers are aware that they are free to take action, and of those who are, few deliberately exploit their action-taking opportunities. Instead, they get lost in the stream of their own activities and spend their time making the inevitable happen--rather than actively making happen what really could achieve results.
The problem for these executives, then, is not a lack of knowledge or even resources. Laura, for example, had all the training she needed to make total quality work--and Alan made it clear to her that he was behind her all the way. The real problem is that even though Laura and executives like her know what to do, they simply do not do those things. Instead they spend their time spinning their wheels, as Laura did, attending meetings and responding to every little query and problem--anything but accomplishing the mission with which they were charged in the first place.
Yet their success as managers depends on meeting their goals. "Management was, is, and always will be the same thing: the art of getting things done," wrote Bob Eccles and Nitin Nohria, both Professors in the Harvard Business School, in their celebrated book Beyond the Hype. "And to get things done, managers must act themselves and mobilize collective action on the part of others." The gap between knowledge and action, however, stretches wide--and few managers seem able to cross it.
None of this is news, of course. We are not the first to identify the kind of behavior that Laura exhibited--"active nonaction," as we call it--as a managerial hazard. Researchers such as Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton have studied it. Lamenting what they describe as the pervasive corporate "knowing-doing gap," Pfeffer and Sutton ask, "Why do so much education and training, management consulting, and business research and so many books and articles produce so little change in what managers and organizations actually do?... Why [does] knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fail to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge?" Managers, too, have long complained about the problem of active nonaction but have not fully understood the underlying dynamics.
What can managers like Laura do to become more purposeful in their work? How can senior leaders like Alan shape organizations in which they--and others--feel freer to take action? This book will examine the hows and whys of active nonaction, based on our ten-year research into the behavior of busy managers at nearly a dozen large companies. (See Appendix for details of our research.) More important, it will show leaders how to improve not only their own effectiveness but also that of their managers--and help everyone in the organization move toward more consistently purposeful action.
1 In many examples used throughout this book, the names have been changed or otherwise disguised.
Adapted from A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower, Achieve Results, and Stop Wasting Time by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. Copyright 2004 Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. All rights reserved.
Laura's story has been adapted from HBS case "John Smither: change agent" prepared by Susan Rosegrant under the supervision of Professor Todd Jick (1990)
See Robert G. Eccles and Nitin Nohria, Beyond the Hype (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992): 39.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap (Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 2000): 4.
