Managerial leadership practices - Basics of RO: Levels of work

Speaker A There was a question earlier on about give a basic explanation of the different levels within requisite. So what is level one, what is level two, what is level three, what is level four, what is level five? Whether you call it levels or whether you call it strata, whatever you want to, it's a different level of work within the organization and it also helps you define work, but also it helps you define capability. So it's a multi useful understanding and it's a foundation of requisite because it's also linked to time span. So Stratified Systems theory, we'll go through this chart quickly. This page, it doesn't have to be quickly. We'll go through it, we'll put on time spans, we'll put on typical type of work and we'll put on what you see as the standard mental processing that you would expect to see in that role for an individual to fill that role. Okay, will that cover basically the need to the group? So always good to start with level one. So level one from a time span point of view, says work starts and every level is broken to three bands. And if you were purely reckless with Elliot, his language is so simplistic, it's low, mid and high. Level one work. Level two, low, mid and high. Level three, low, mid and high. So it's just cascading, but that's the way a pure requisite person would look at it. So level one work, this is another comment here is that 70% of the work in any organization happens in these three levels. Level one, two and three covers 70% of the work. I mean, that's usually what produces the outputs of the products. The upper levels are your oversight for how you do that. Down here, level one, it says people have the accountability to carry out tasks anywhere from one day to one week, exercising their own discretion in completing those tasks. It also has type of work. So one day to one week, one week to one month, one month to three months. So we say level one, our short form version is one day to three months. That's all level one work. And then everyone is divided into land. So one day, one week, one month to three months, you're going to be very prescriptive. In other words, you're either going to follow a menu where someone gives you a computer screen to follow procedure or you're going to be trained to do the work. And it can be broad breadth of knowledge that you require. Here the idea is you're going to follow a procedure. So in my Padlet nuclear power plant, a maintainer, maintaining 17,000 different types of implementation, high level one work, very broad breadth of knowledge. We're always expected A to be fully trained, almost up to six years of training to be fully competent and following procedures. We didn't want our means to be able to be creative. We wanted to follow procedures. So we're now talking about the work. So the work at level one, procedurally driven, prescriptive type of work et, operators, first line supervisors if you want to call it that. Clerical people, custodial people. It's people that have complete work with the tasks and operator than three months in length where they're using your own judgment, completing those tasks. We'll come back a bit when we talk about the individual. Level two work then goes from three months to twelve months divided into three to six to nine to twelve. The typical, what we look at here is diagnostic analytical type work. So now all of a sudden you're doing analysis and the person performing analysis, these people at level 1 may create reports because you've given them the information, they may create a report. These folks here may then will do the analytics of that. They'll look at it, they'll analyze it and they'll make recommendations based on that information here means people may say we've got a problem, we've taken all these readings, we got a problem. Engineering here may come up with some diagnostics and say with that information we want you to do this. So these people come up with the diagnostics, the solutions, the type of diagnostics that they do. Again very important in this area, three to twelve months. It means that we can give them tasks of up to twelve months where they can exercise their own judgment in completing that task. And I know you're going to hear me use that word, exercise your own judgment. But that's the whole idea of how we work more. You have to be accountable for that. You got to be accountable. So it has to be your judgment, your decision making. It's also the first level in the organization that can have a manager. The reason for that is requisite. So you have to have a value adding manager. Therefore workers first level that a manager can reside. Here a time span now goes, you can call it twelve months to 24 months or one to two years, whatever convention you want to use. Equally divided into twelve to 16, 1620 to 20 flow months. Again equally divided from a stratified systems period. The type of work here is building pathways. So now you've got analysis being done. Now you're looking at that analysis and you're going to make decisions and you have built pathways because of this. So that I'm going to make a decision based on that. It's a lot like a Perch diagram or a CPM diagram or a gigantic chart if you're going to do into process mapping. But the whole idea is I'm taking information here in level two it's more like a root cause analysis. Now we're sort of into building pathways. It's also an area where you'll see in organizations where they'll have the type of role of subject matter expert. Somebody that's very knowledgeable in a single skill set or function or capability type thing. And it's the first level that you can be a manager of managers. Again, starting in the bottom, worker, manager, manager of managers. So it's the first level that you can hold the Mor accountabilities. It's also the first level from a requisite point of view that you can have what they call a crossover manager accountability, because a crossover manager has to have the ability to look at work in more than one element and be able to decide to make trade offs. Level four work. Now we're moving up to two years to five years time horizon. So that goes two to three, three to four, four to five. Again, equally divided. This is paramount building. It's usually multifunctional when you look at what type of work it is. It's where you have a multifunctional leader. So here you have a leader over a single stream. Operations, maintenance, marketing, sales, whatever you can think of. We're now at level four, you're multifunctional, you're over multi functions. So marketing and sales, engineering, operations and maintenance, that type of thing. It's a multifunction because you can build parallel pathways now, so you can say I'm going to slow this process down to allow this process to catch up so that we can be successful. You can look farther up. You've got an ability to look and see what the consequences are based on the trend. So you don't have to wait to get to a decision node. You can see the trend is telling me this, therefore I can make a decision. So again, it's like being able to look at a Gantt chart or CPM and coming up with solutions based on at any point in time, not admitting to come to the same result. It's also being accountable for a complete CPM where you have a major project.

Speaker B And you're controlling it.

Speaker A Level five, again, from time span point of view, that was five to ten years. That's a long time span. Six and three quarters, six and three quarters to eight and a quarter, eight and a quarter to ten. It's always equally divided. Again, usually it's a business unit. Typically you're going to see a business unit leader. So in a company this person is going to be in charge. They'll usually have a PNL for the business unit, profit and loss accountability for that particular business unit. So very significant. Again, five to ten years, they're making decisions that can impact five to ten years out in the organization. Now, when we look at capability, so that's just looking at the type of work. So worker, potentially higher skilled worker, manager, manager of managers, department group managers, business unit leaders, looking at tightening as you go up from a requisite point of view, then we look at it and we say, well, what is it from a human capability point of view? Complexity of information processing. And what we say here is that this is declarative type thing. When we think of problem solving, how do we solve problems and at level one, we consider it declarative. I get a fact, I simulate that fact, and then I state it. Based on the information I have today, I'm going to make a decision. So it's very pronounced. I'm very assertive. That's why it's called declarative. So I have some information based on information, I am making a decision. Level two is called cumulative. And now what we're doing is we're compiling information, we're compiling facts. It's a cause and effect. You can think of a cause and effect drawing. So now all of a sudden, I'm taking data. I'm saying like a detective or someone takes this information. I've got some red paint, I've got some skid marks. I can do some analysis. I can come up with some sort of assumption based on that information. Cumulative, I'm accumulating information, type of processing. Level three is called serial. Reason for that is serial pathways, building pathways. Now I can build pathways. I can link events. I can come up with a process, serial mental process. Level four is called parallel. So now I can take many pathways and deal with those pathways and come up and make decisions based on that. So I have the ability to handle multiple pathways simultaneously. And now this is where it always gets interesting. Who knows what level five is? Who knows? Anybody have a guest here at level five?

Speaker B In our case, the president of our unit in Brazil.

Speaker A So president of the unit, okay, so that's the role. And that's good. That's probably a typical role of a president. What am I talking about as we talk here about declarative, cumulative, serial parallel? Because Elliot always does these things to us, right, to make you scratch your head and say, how did you come to that? The trick is that this is declarative. He looks at it as music. It's another octave. And I know nothing about music, so I can have a hard time playing a stereo. But from a requisite point of view with the wave, because each one is an octave, there is actually four levels below this one. So it's also parallel serial declarative. So each octave has that. So at this level here, we now have parallel. Again, I mean, declarative. So this is declarative. And what we see here, what you'll see, and maybe you'll see this in your present, is they're very quick to make decisions. So they have the same attributes as down here. Is that their speech patterns? And that is they're very quick. The difference is that they've been able to act on all these methodologies, and they've already processed that. So they've already processed all this information and they're making their judgments. And they're usually very snap, they're very directive. And what they don't understand is why you don't understand because they're saying, I've already processed. Why can't you not keep up with me? So these folks here process information very well. They have a high level of capability, a high level of problem solving for us folks dealing with them. We have to understand a lot of times you have to reground them. You have to bring them back and say, yes, this is what you said, but this is what your people heard. They have a hard time being very descriptive because it's in sound bites. It comes out in sound bites. From a human capability point of view, from a requisite point of view, is we define roles by looking what is the level of work the organization needs to be successful. So remember, we have our structure and now we say what roles do we need within that structure? So we define it by looking at time span. Now we have a role, now we use capability to fill those roles. So now we look at the individual and what is Sandy's presentation on selection was? Are they capable? Do they have the skills, knowledge? Do they commit and value the work? And if they absence any behavior that's going to impact on them being successful. So this is where you start applying the whole idea of individual capability. So here again, we're looking at the ability to be declarative, cumulative serial parallel declarative. Okay? Now that's probably Human capability, which is about 150 page book, a little bit of requisite, and a time span handbook. So that's three books in about 15 to 20 minutes. But what it is, is saying there is a process, there is a science behind it. And Elliot worked on this and developed it and owned it, probably the Stratified system theory was in place until the mid seventy s. And then working with Catherine Casey, they came up with the idea of complexity of metal processing and how we problem solved and they were able to link the two. And the advantage for us, for you as consultants, is sometimes time span isn't easy to get to. So you can look at things from a complexity point of view, a problem solving point of view, a type of work point of view. So there's two methods at getting at what the work is really at.

Speaker B The critical point this morning about task clarity is that you can establish clarity and tasks at every level of this. And that's why I made the point about finding the verb, because the verb clarification will really help you understand sometimes where the level of work is fitting in the organization as a task is being defined. And so that's part of what Terry and I listen for as we're working with managers throughout the organization in terms of the kinds of ways that they're describing the work through the verb. And so the time span is a very critical piece of it. And most managers know this. They can declare about or they can talk about the amount of time that it should take to get the tasks done. Except when you get to this level, they tend to shortcut the amount of time that very often happens at this level and at this level. And so often what we have to help them with is an understanding as they're chunking or cascading down the work, the amount of time that it may take to get some of these things completed, particularly in strat two and strat three. But that's why we spent so much time with managers getting appropriate tasks defined and using the correct level of verbs. So this to me is the real work of the organization, getting that task clarity and making the real clear knowledge and assignments on the work that must be done at each one of these levels. Which is why the process at this level in particular can sometimes take almost a year because managers, because they're learning a new pathway, one that they may not have experienced before. And that's what you have to give them time to learn.

Speaker A Another thing you'll find when you're doing this work, or if you get a chance to look at an ORC chart, another is this boundary area here between level one and level two. And what happens there is that we use the word manager, supervisor, lead, senior, interchangeably. But there is a from a requisite point of view and from a work point of view, if you study it, there is a discrete difference between work that's happening at level one high and level two. This is where the managerial accountability is. You can get assistance down here. We call them FLMAs, first line Manager assistance. Now, my history in that is that in the organization I was with, they used to be called supervisors. We changed the title to FLMA, did not provide clarity. People were so used to using the word supervisor. So again, we talk about adapting. Sometimes you have to adapt to the local language because supervisor was ingrained. What a supervisor did was they could assign tasks, they could provide feedback into the performance evaluation process. They could give verbal reprimands if you wanted to call it. So they could tell you you're staying late for lunch or leaving early, that type of thing. But when it came to written discipline, that was the manager's role. The other value of the supervisor an FLMA is that on shift work, instead of having a manager in every shift, sometimes you can have a supervisor. It's still the manager's accountability. So the manager can't be there 24, 7168 hours. So you can get by depending on the work with supervisors. Supervisors basically mean you can use a different level of capability to get the work done. It means that the person can be more hands on with the workforce. Because remember, managers get work done through others, so they're delegating work. Here, the manager prepares lists for the supervisor to work from. It says, do this work with these people and sometimes it's even do this work and assign this task to Sally and this task to Joe. And if there's any changes, call me. It's that type of thing. So a lot of times we call people managers that aren't managers, because maybe that's just the way that's the tradition. But in defining the work, you really have to identify the work of the manager. And my other story in that is that when we did this at OPG Ontario Power Generation, we redefined the role as a manager. We gave the people the opportunity to opt in, to select that they wanted that role or not. And we had 15% of the people that had a managerial title. After the work was redefined and clarified as to what the role was, the expectations decided they didn't want to do that type of work, so they didn't lose their job. We found them other roles, either supervisor roles or roles within the organization. But once the work was identified, they said, that's not work. You can get value. We don't want to be a manager. And that's the key, is to be successful. You may go from a managerial role to an individual contributor role, but you, in essence, will actually value one particular role more than another. You'll either like being a manager more, or you'll like being an individual contributor role more. And you will always be more effective in that one that you commit and value. It doesn't mean you can't do the other role. It means you will not be as effective in that other role. And sometimes in our careers, we sort of move horizontally and we have to gain some knowledge. So we take a specialist role or something, and then we come back into a line role. But if you don't value anything, people, if you don't value getting work done through others, you will not be an effective manager. There's nothing that we can do to make you an effective manager.