Management by walking about

tauringhuang.

Sep 8th 2008
From Economist.com

This is a style of management commonly referred to as MBWA. It is variously lengthened to management by wandering about or management by walking around. MBWA usually involves the following:

• Managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromptu discussions. (MBWA frequently goes together with an open-door management policy.)

• Individuals forming networks of acquaintances throughout their organisations.

• Lots of opportunities for chatting over coffee or lunch, or in the corridors.

• Managers getting away from their desks and starting to talk to individual employees. The idea is that they should learn about problems and concerns at first hand. At the same time they should teach employees new methods to manage particular problems. The communication goes both ways.

One of the main benefits of MBWA was recognised by W. Edwards Deming, who once wrote:

“If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don’t realise they have one in the first place.”
The difficulty with MBWA is that (certainly at first) employees suspect it is an excuse for managers to spy and interfere unnecessarily. This suspicion usually falls away if the walkabouts occur regularly, and if everyone can see their benefits.

MBWA has been found to be particularly helpful when an organisation is under exceptional stress; for instance, after a significant corporate reorganisation has been announced or when a takeover is about to take place. It is no good practising MBWA for the first time on such occasions, however. It has to have become a regular practice before the stress arises.

By the turn of the century it did not seem extraordinary that managers should manage by walking about. The technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them to both walk about and stay in touch at the same time. But in the 1950s many white-collar managers turned their offices into fortresses from which they rarely emerged. Edicts were sent out to the blue-collar workforce whom they rarely met face-to-face. The outside world filtered through via a secretary who, traditionally, sat like a guard dog in front of their (usually closed) office door. Even in the 1980s such practices were not uncommon, as demonstrated in the film “Nine to Five”.

tauringhuang.

MBWA was popularised by becoming an important part of “The H-P Way”, the open style of management pioneered by Bill Hewlett and Bill Packard, the two founders of the eponymous computer company. Many of the practices of The H-P Way became widely copied by corporations throughout the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The idea received a further boost when Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote that top managers in their “excellent” companies believed in management by walking about. In his second book, “A Passion for Excellence”, Peters said that he saw “managing by wandering about” as the basis of leadership and excellence. Peters called MBWA the “technology of the obvious”. As leaders and managers wander about, he said that at least three things should be going on:

• They should be listening to what people are saying.

• They should be using the opportunity to transmit the company’s values face to face.

• They should be prepared and able to give people on-the-spot help.

Further reading
Peters, T. and Austin, N., “A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference”, Collins, 1985