Time,
Talent and Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s
Productive Power – Michael C. Mankins and Eric Garton (Harvard Business Review
Press)
You’ve probably seen it posted on an office wall or on
the back of a tractor trailer or some other highly visible location; the reads
something like, “Our people are our
biggest/most important/best/strongest asset. That line has been used in
some variation of the form by any number of businesses in a wide array of
industries – to the point where it has moved beyond cliché to become utterly
meaningless.
For many of the companies posting this phrase it raises
the question – who are they trying to convince? Their customers, their
employees or themselves? The striking thing that many businesses are slow to
realize, is that, that simple statement is absolutely true and the companies
that live up to that statement are at an immediate strategic advantage over
those who don’t grasp that reality.
Recently I have spent time working through a series of
books dealing with employee engagement and the advantages companies that
recognize this most important business tenant have in a competitive market
place. During a break in a group session with an executive coach I asked the
coach what the best book he had encountered on the subject and without
hesitation he recommended Time, Talent
and Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive
Power, by a pair of Bain and Company business consultants Michael C.
Mankins and Eric Garton.
While most recognize the value of employee engagement
to the businesses bottom line, I think that Mankins and Garton separate from
the pack by demonstrating how a company can effectively engage their teams and move beyond doing for the sake
of doing. They make the clear cut case that for most companies the scarcest of
resources across the board are time talent and energy.
The pair spell out strategies for tracking things like
meetings and communications strategies on eliminating wasted time and draining
energy so that the team can focus on execution. They spell out how to strike a
balance between autonomy and eliminating back and spirit breaking bureaucracy and
micromanagement. Nothing will drive your best people to the exit faster.
I found the section of the book that focused on operational models and how nothing can stop execution dead in its tracks faster than the operational decision making process. Decision making can cause operational inertia that can be difficult if not impossible to overcome. Mankins and Garton make the case that leaders have to closely monitor and streamline the approval process to keep the execution train moving forward.
