Manager Visibility is Not Enough for Leadership – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1315

Manager Visibility is Not Enough for Leadership – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1315

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1315 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Gustavo Fring

Preamble

This post is based on Harvard Business School Professors Research. Link at the end.

Walking the Floor Is Not Enough: Turning Management Visibility into Real Problem Solving

Management books have long encouraged leaders to "walk the floor." The idea is simple and attractive: senior managers should leave their offices, visit the workplace, talk to employees, observe operations and discover problems firsthand. In pharmaceutical companies, this can mean a plant head walking through production, a sales director accompanying medical representatives, a commercial leader visiting distributors, a quality head observing laboratory operations, or a country manager meeting frontline teams.

There is nothing wrong with visibility. In fact, leaders need to see reality rather than manage entirely through reports and presentations.

But a fascinating study discussed by Harvard Business School professors Anita Tucker and Sara Singer raises a more uncomfortable question: What happens when managers discover problems but do not solve enough of them?

Their research, conducted across hospitals, found that simply identifying problems, and even communicating what management had done, could sometimes worsen employees' perceptions of the organization's improvement climate. The positive effects came when managers took substantive action on the problems employees experienced.

Visibility Creates Expectations

The moment a senior manager asks frontline employees, "What problems are you facing?" something important happens. The employee assumes the question has a purpose.

If a production operator explains that a machine repeatedly causes delays, a medical representative reports an unrealistic reporting process, a quality analyst identifies an inefficient workflow, or a supply-chain manager highlights recurring stock shortages, the employee expects someone to do something.

That is why management visibility creates an implicit contract: "If you ask me about my problems, I expect you to take them seriously." Breaking that expectation can be worse than never asking.

The HBS study found that the hospitals in its sample identified 1,732 safety-related problems. On average, they acted on 67 percent but provided feedback to frontline workers on only 24.5 percent. The research showed that identifying problems without sufficiently addressing them could generate negative sentiment rather than improve the organizational climate.

The lesson for pharma is straightforward: Do not ask for problems merely to demonstrate that management is listening. Ask because management is prepared to act.

The pharmaceutical industry is full of "hidden" problems Pharma is particularly vulnerable to this issue because its operations are highly interconnected.

Consider a manufacturing plant. An operator may know that a particular production step regularly creates delays. The maintenance team may know that equipment downtime is recurring. Quality may know that investigations take too long. Warehouse staff may know that material movement creates unnecessary bottlenecks. Procurement may know that a particular supplier repeatedly creates variability. Individually, each problem may look small. Collectively, they can affect quality, productivity, compliance, cost and supply reliability.

The U.S. FDA makes a similar point from a regulatory perspective. Its recent quality-management work emphasizes that pharmaceutical manufacturers need systems for detecting and investigating deviations, monitoring quality metrics and driving continual improvement, not merely meeting minimum CGMP requirements. This is where management visibility becomes valuable. The senior leader can see the connections that individual departments cannot.

But visibility has value only if it leads to improvement. One of the most useful lessons from Tucker's research is the difference between inspection and curiosity. The distinction is especially important in pharma because employees often operate within complicated systems. A deviation, documentation error or missed target may not simply reflect individual negligence. It may result from inadequate procedures, conflicting priorities, equipment limitations, training gaps, unrealistic timelines or poorly designed processes.

The HBS research found that a hospital where managers heavily emphasized catching technical mistakes did not necessarily improve its organizational climate. Employees interpreted the approach as management failing to understand the complexity of their work.

The objective is not to eliminate accountability. It is to make accountability system-oriented rather than blame-oriented. A person can make an error. A mature organization asks why the system allowed that error to become likely.

The Danger of the Suggestion-box Culture

Many pharmaceutical companies have employee surveys, town halls, engagement surveys, quality reporting systems, complaint systems, CAPA systems and continuous-improvement programs. These mechanisms are valuable. But they can create a dangerous illusion: We have asked employees for their problems, therefore we are improving. Not necessarily.

The HBS research suggests that collecting more problems is not automatically better if the organization lacks the capacity or commitment to address them. The researchers found that solving issues as they arise with substantive action can be more productive than simply generating large inventories of problems.

A company with 500 open improvement initiatives may be less effective than one with 50 initiatives that are actually completed and sustained. The objective should therefore be problem-solving capacity, not problem-collection capacity.

Fix the Small Problems Too

Senior executives naturally gravitate toward big issues. These deserve attention. But the HBS researchers also highlight what they call the "long tail" of less dramatic problems. In complex healthcare environments, numerous smaller infrastructure and process problems can accumulate and create significant consequences. Hundreds of such problems across an organization create organizational friction. The cost becomes enormous.

Management Visibility Should Have a Closed Loop

A useful model for pharmaceutical leaders is:

1. See – Go to where work actually happens.

2. Listen – Ask frontline employees what makes their work difficult.

3. Understand – Separate symptoms from root causes.

4. Prioritize – Do not promise to solve everything. Identify what can and should be addressed.

5. Act – Assign ownership, resources and timelines.

6. Measure – Determine whether the intervention actually improved performance.

7. Communicate – Tell employees what was done—and equally importantly, explain what could not be done and why.

8. Sustain – Ensure that the improvement becomes part of the system rather than disappearing after the manager leaves.

This final step is critical. A temporary improvement is not transformation.

Sum Up

The best senior managers are not necessarily those who identify the most problems. They are the leaders who create an organization capable of solving problems continuously.

That requires empowering middle managers, developing frontline problem-solving skills, using data intelligently and creating a culture in which employees can report problems without fearing blame. It also requires quality and operations systems that convert observations into action. Because employees do not judge leadership by how frequently senior executives visit them. They judge leadership by what happens after the visit.

Concluded.

Disclaimers: Pictures in these blogs are taken from free resources at Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Google. Credit is given where available. If a copyright claim is lodged, we shall remove the picture with appropriate regrets.

For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, any claim is lodged, it will be acknowledged and duly recognized immediately. 

Reference:

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/manager-visibility-no-guarantee-of-fixing-problems