Limited office interaction, unclear business plans, and overly structured communication can prevent employees from understanding the firm’s big picture.
I hear a lot of AEC firm owners and top-level managers complaining that their people cannot “see the big picture” when it comes to what the firm is trying to accomplish.
While I certainly understand that frustration, it’s usually not that difficult to see WHY that is the case. More is within control of management than they think. Here are some of their practices that are contributing to the “lack of big picture thinking” problem:
- Everyone is not in the office. Yes, I understand all of the benefits of remote work. No commute time, easier to have a life, yada yada yada. Those things are all true. However, there are also some big negatives that may outweigh those benefits for telecommuting employees. One of them is they are cut off from management and their peers. They also don’t see and meet the clients coming and going. They don’t get drafted to come into a meeting they weren’t scheduled to be in. They don’t hear the chatter and see how other people work. They don’t feel the energy and the hum of the workplace. If they work from home all day is there any wonder they don’t see the bigger picture of what they and the firm are trying to do?
- The office layout itself works against this. Just getting everyone together isn’t enough. If the managers are all in private offices with their doors shut and the worker bees are all in cubicles, the two may never meet. That’s not good! And once again – yes – I understand that pretty much everyone would prefer a private office over being in an open workspace. But what is best for building culture and understanding and connections between people? Isolating workers from management? I think not.
- The business plan isn’t known, and if it is, it isn’t substantive. So many companies do their business plans and then don’t share them with everyone in the firm. Or, they share only little pieces of their plan. So how can you expect people to see the big picture? On top of it, the majority of plans I see for AEC firms are so filled with jargon, buzzwords, and unsubstantive “values” statements, how could any intelligent person not think they were BS? Clean up and simplify your plans, and then share them and talk about them with everyone in the business. Paint the picture for how achieving those goals and that grand vision is going to help improve the life of the individual employees in the business. Connect the dots!
- The top leaders don’t believe in the vision nor see their jobs as selling everyone else. AEC firms are usually owned and run by highly intelligent people who each want to do things the way they want to do them. They don’t always agree on direction. And then on top of that, even if they do (agree on direction), they may have some rigid ideas about what their responsibility is (or isn’t) for selling everyone else on that direction. It’s a problem. The CEO has to get all of their managers to embrace the plan and then go sell it. Any cynicism or outdated thinking about roles has to be confronted!
- The place is too structured and stratified, and the middle- and lower-level managers are over-relied upon to communicate the vision. Some top-level firm managers have the dysfunctional idea that they only need to communicate with the people who report to them and then those people have to pass things on to those who are their direct reports – instead of top management communicating directly with everyone at all levels. Have you ever played the game “telephone,” where someone whispers something in the ear of one person, who in turn passes it on to the next person, and so on? Once the message goes through 10 or 20 people it is usually completely distorted. Stop thinking your managers are doing an effective job passing things down, especially when it comes to the big picture of what the firm is trying to accomplish. Too much is at stake to rely on them.
- There’s too much measuring and reporting at the micro or unit level versus the overall firm performance. AEC firms really tend to do this. Project financial performance is overly scrutinized versus how the firm does on all work for any given client. Individual geographic office location performance is measured versus how the firm performs in market sectors across all offices. Individual staff utilization is the primary measure of contribution without considering the overall revenue generated by a given team. Bonuses are based on individual performance. None of these practices encourages cooperation nor big picture thinking about how the overall company is performing.
ALL of these things are why, over the long haul, I prefer using the ownership carrot over all other motivators to promote big picture thinking. Creating value in the company stock or ownership interest takes a relentless focus on overall firm growth and profitability. And that’s the “big picture” right there!
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.
