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Management by walking around, originally ascribed to HP, is an accepted management technique. It ties closely to the concept of management responsibility and the fact that you can never say “you didn’t know” and still keep your job (any politicians reading this?). I have direct reports across the US, and with increasing globalization coupled with increasing remote working, the “walking around” part is simply impractical for many managers.
The way I have addressed this is to fully leverage collaboration tools to ensure that I have the best visibility in my team. We use our own BoardVantage Portal heavily internally, and it’s a certainly a good fit for my sales organization. I’m going to be blogging more on how my team gets benefit from this, but very much from the management perspective, rather than the traditional product-feature view.
Sales is as much about expectations as results. If I know certain regions are unlikely to reach their forecast early in the quarter, I can still do something about it. Finding out about this in the last week of the quarter makes that virtually impossible. Of course there are no shortage of tools and techniques to help – regular phone calls, web conferences, and in-person account reviews all help, but for me, it’s been something of a revelation to see the power of micro-blogging. I had initially been skeptical of micro-blogging, having looked at handful of tools and quite frankly was bemused by the example content (or lack thereof) in the various demos but, properly used, it can be a life saver. Here are some examples from one of my team:
“Just got the contract signature back from XXXX, and I’ve been told they want to expand the number of users to include all of legal from next month on”
“Working on the YYY RFP, but still waiting on Finance to agree the new SOW terms”
What VP of Sales wouldn’t want to know that? Good news or bad, I want to know what my people are doing, and choose where and when to intervene if appropriate. If you wait for someone to send you an explicit request for help, it’s usually too late.
It’s a two-way street though, and I think it’s equally important my staff have full visibility into my activities. By sharing my calendar, one of my sales managers was able to take advantage of my visit to relatives in Dallas to catch me and take me to see a prospect there. I’m a strong proponent of management by walking around, but I think this slogan needs to be updated for those with remote workers to “management through visibility”. With our BoardVantage Portal I have a tool that gives me that.
