Any chain is just as strong as its weakest link. Any team is just as fast as its slowest member. The speed of any document processing is just as fast as its slowest signatory. The speed of service and sales turnover in a restaurant is just as fast as its slowest personnel – the waiter, the cook, the cashier, or the dishwasher. Any company is just as fast as its slowest department. The slow elements of a company will just drag and slow down everyone else to match their speed. Fast and efficient elements will become inefficient, wasted, and underutilized – working below their capacities.
We need a paradigm shift in rewarding the best performers and punishing the worst. Motivating and rewarding the fast and good ones to make them faster and better will not make the company gain speed. And by demotivating and punishing the slow ones, or the bottlenecks, the company further loses speed. Even if you reward a handful of model employees every month, your brand reputation will still be determined by the great majority of average and below-average employees who will face customers and deliver the customer experience. Don’t use training and junkets as rewards for best performers. Invest your training efforts and budgets on the worst and slowest people to build their capacity if you still want to keep them in the company. Don’t use performance appraisal to reward and punish people. Use it to identify low performers and develop and raise their capability through training and coaching. The only strategic job is HR and OD is to raise everybody’s capabilities to the same high level so no one becomes a bottleneck and weakest link that will drag down company growth.
Focus on understaffed departments instead of overstaffed ones. To gain speed and overtake competition in sales fulfillment, production and customer servicing, put your best people, resources, investments, and technology in your slowest or bottleneck operations and their operators. Identify understaffed departments and right-staff them as soon as possible. An understaffed department, acting as the company bottleneck, will slow down all other departments – even the right-staffed and over-staff departments. In hiring and budgeting for manpower and personnel, give priority to the personnel needs and requirements of bottleneck and understaffed departments or units. Don’t expand your front office if your back office is slow and understaffed. Focus your process improvement and kaizen initiatives on the slowest, most problematic and inefficient departments. Don’t do company-wide kaizen, lean or six-sigma programs and spread your energies and resources. Start first with the bottleneck departments or work stations to get the highest over-all benefits from these improvement programs. Similarly, don’t do company-wide cost cutting and downsizing. Downsizing already lean and understaffed departments can further worsen the problem. This false economy decision can actually increase your over-all costs and most likely also cut your sales. Always remember the principle “Any chain is just as strong as its weakest link” in making decisions, especially investment and expansion decisions.
