The Virtual Walkabout

04/17/2022:

The Virtual Walkabout

There is a management approach -- apparently long since falling out of favor -- called “Walking the Halls”. It is a successor to the management strategy of “Management by Wandering Around” advocated in the 1982 book, “In Search of Excellence”, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman.

I prefer the phrase “walkabout”, because -- like the rite of passage in Australian Aboriginal society -- it captures the key element of committing yourself to a journey whose path is only loosely planned, and to deliberately allow events to unfold, to see what you will see, and to hear what you will hear.

A story I often tell is of an old Executive Director of mine, Dick Barrows, who had a self-administered management policy of randomly sampling a single, active case record every month.

His method was simple and completely random: working off a time and date circled on his desk calendar, Mr. Barrow would step out of his office and grab the first person he saw carrying a case record under their arm. Securing the record from its owner, he would find out the general situation, and what action needed to be accomplished.

Whatever the situation, no matter how simple or complex, Mr. Barrow committed himself to take whatever action was needed to bring that individual case record correctly up to date. This included writing up any necessary case notes and capturing any future action items. He would then return the case record to the worker, with a short review of what he had done and why.

He would answer any questions the worker might have.

Through a small sampling, Dick Barrows, a senior manager, “kept his hand in”. He demonstrated his willingness to leave the cloistered safety of his private office and get his “hands dirty”. He was able, too, to independently gauge the general quality of the case records under his management oversight, the general skill level and competence of his workers and line supervisors, and unobtrusively monitor the flow of his District’s key processes.

But most important, Dick Barrow earned professional respect and trust among his subordinates.

Over the years I have, literally, had hundreds of discussions with peers, managers, and executives on this subject. I have invariably recounted the story of the Dick Barrows’ walkabout. There seems to be general agreement that “walking around” is a useful tool, but few executives and managers seem to believe that they can actually make the time to do it.

The practice that should be in every manager’s and every leader’s “best-practices” playbook seems to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth.

Why this management approach has ostensibly dimmed from the basic management repertoire is debatable. One likely reason is that “soft skills” are minimally emphasized once individuals graduate and enter the workforce. The lessons of academia fade quickly to the hard realities of pleasing your direct report manager and getting ahead with your career.

Be that as it may, at some point in every career, everyone must decide for themselves whether they want to learn how to manage well and how to lead effectively. Dick Barrows’ method may not be the right method for you and your management circumstances, but some other approach will.

As Colin Powell noted in a 2003 leadership lecture, leadership is an intensely personal thing, but -- in the end -- it is all about the art of creating a bond of trust to get, “people to do more than the science of management says is possible”.

The operative word here is “people”. To achieve the goal of leadership, the manager or executive must commit themselves to go well beyond the bare minimum that the science of management and local policy requires. You must commit to the journey.

In the world of 2022 -- the uncertain world of COVID and globally distributed teams -- few can just walk out of their office and grab the first person they see. We would quickly run out of warm bodies. We would skew our sample by fishing from the same small pond. Instead, we need to think about the modern advantage of having a geographically dispersed workforce that is digitally connected. We need to commit ourselves to creating our own, personal, hybrid walkabout that allows us to discover what we cannot achieve by attending numerous managerial meetings and pondering the depths of pie charts and dashboard graphics for magical insight into why things have gone awry.

By venturing out on your own walkabout, perhaps you will see something unexpected and new. And if not, then what is the harm of letting someone who works for you, have a little informal one-on-one time with the boss? Perhaps you will inspire trust and loyalty with someone, as Dick Barrows did with me, and many others with whom I once worked.

© Mark Lefcowitz 2001 - 2024
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