Tools and process do not fix human problems

“I don’t know who’s busy with what”,
“Too much time is spent on the wrong things”,
“I don’t understand the priorities”,
“The deadlines are always missed”,
“The requests get lost”.

Does this sound familiar? These statements are heard from time to time, usually from the senior management. They are often followed by “I need a tool to solve this”, “I need weekly reports on the progress”, “So how do you manage…this?” or “The team needs detailed instructions”.

Having the right tools helps, but only to certain extent. For some reason, many completely forget about the human element. Do you have transparency, good communication, shared goals and trust between everyone? Is everyone genuinely interested in what’s going around them, besides their own tasks?

A friend once asked for advice on the best chat tool for their team. I wanted to suggest Slack immediately, but instead asked why he was looking for it. It appeared that colleagues often forgot to answer messages and were reluctant to participate in the discussions. They were using Skype and he blamed the technology. But the problem here lies in the communication culture.

Tools won’t allow you to see who’s doing what unless the team makes their work visible. Detailed instructions do not reveal what’s important, in fact they hide the big picture and make it impossible to prioritize things correctly. “Managing” people by pushing them doesn’t help to meet the deadlines, but rather makes people hide the real problems and come up with excuses. As to the reports, you are either involved in the process and thus aware of what’s going on, or you are busy with other stuff and thus don’t need the small details.

If you don’t want to get to the root cause of the performance problems, don’t want to keep an open mind and consider difficult changes, don’t want to make an effort to dig into people’s side of the problem and you hope for a silver bullet instead, don’t expect significant improvements. Right tools and rigid processes are important for scaling, but the problems mentioned are solved with the right approach and culture human-wise.