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Aaron Dignan had a nice little 2016 post titled "New Years Resolutions for the Organization". In it he outlines 5 resolutions organizations could/should take advantage of. I was particularly interested in number 3: Ditch Executive Reviews.
Ditch executive reviews. We have noticed a disturbing trend lately — one where employees view a meeting with senior management AS AN ACTUAL MILESTONE for their project. Not a technical breakthrough. Not an initial shipment. Not a new retail partner. A meeting. A meeting where someone who has less visibility than they do (but hopefully more experience) can influence the fate of their most important project. This signals two problems: first, that the organization still believes in command-and-control decision making, and second, that employees have become so immersed in it they’ve assimilated it as reality. Instead of perpetuating this phenomenon, try asking your teams to work transparently, using tools like Trello and Slack, and share their learnings and metrics regularly (weekly?) in a public place — not just for management, but for everyone. You’ll be amazed what happens next. Not chaos, but true social accountability and a lot more progress. Your job as a leader is no longer about deciding… it’s about making (and protecting) the space for healthy self-organization.
This was particularly interesting to me for two reasons: One, I'm an executive and would love to be able to get away from these and two, the relationship between platforms like Percolate, Slack, Asana, etc. and the ability to make this happen. What I mean by the latter is that the transparency created by workflow tools and platforms allows for a more streamlined way of working. Because I can monitor the entire progress of a project (at Percolate we use Percolate to manage the product development process as well), ideally we can skip the big presentation (and more important the reveal) at the end. Instead, both managers and team members can contribute throughout the life of the project. What's more, if they don't contribute that is on them, not on the person who didn't present the final plan. Obviously there are challenges with keeping up with every moving piece, but that's kind of the point -- keeping up with every moving piece is a fool's game and the only way to be successful within the organization is to distribute decision-making and trust teams to work independently.