Support Services include everyone in the organization who is not on the critical path or managing it. These include Accounting, Human Resources, Legal, etc. Their job is to provide tools and services that enable critical path workers to be more productive in the organization’s competitive and regulatory environment. Some of these services might be to keep the organization out of trouble with the government, ranging from minor regulatory misunderstandings that could result in fines to avoiding deliberate illegal accounting scandals (think Enron, Volkswagen, or Wells Fargo), which can have a big impact on the bottom line. But, for the most part, Support Services are supposed to do just that—support the critical path.
So, what does that mean?
Start by inverting your inclination to think of your discipline as really important all by itself. Stop thinking of yourself as an HR specialist or a lawyer or an accountant. Instead, think about the critical path, how your role supports it, and how your profession can make it better. Adopt the mindset that you are part of the business, not apart from it. Mold everything you do around the most important parts of the critical path. What tools, methods, or insights can you offer to the critical path personnel you work with and so that customers and your organization benefit?
For example, according to Korn/Ferry, the executive recruiting firm, many of the most successful Chief Financial Officers are heavily involved in the operations of the business and often develop strategy alongside the CEO.
“The operational CFO is really coming into prominence,” says Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky. “You have to know accounting, tax, treasury, but you also have to be able to be a full partner and help run the business. You need to be able to look around corners.”
To truly help the critical path, the finance folks need more than the traditional accounting backgrounds in finance. Understanding engineering and business adds valuable layers of necessary perspective. According to Olsavsky, “[The traditional route] is great training for finance and accounting skills, but those people can sometimes be less comfortable in diving deeply into business operations.” Instead, financial professionals need to understand the business from the scientist’s, the production engineer’s, and the salesperson’s perspectives.
Similarly, when Jay Rasulo became Walt Disney Co.’s CFO, he paid particular attention to how his role contributed to the critical path. He described his game plan:
“I wanted to be as actively engaged in executing [CEO Robert Iger’s] strategy as I was in reporting” the financial results it produced, Mr. Rasulo said of his first six months on the job. “It’s knowing the story, making yourself a part of the business so you can be a part of the story.”
Of course, there still are plenty of companies that don’t fully understand the critical path concept and want a traditional, number-crunching finance chief. But the best finance people see their core financial skills simply as the price of entry. They then transcend the traditional role by molding it to the needs of the critical path. They understand and support it so well that that they’re able to inspire and captivate the minds and hearts of their finance employees to do likewise. They’re also able to communicate their critical path enthusiasm to outside investors.
It might be easy for an executive such as a CFO to think about the critical path, but what about a more typical support person?
Caren, a trained technical writer, worked in the documentation department of a large food company. She was proud of her writing skills, having been recruited to the company from a tech firm where she won industry awards for her user manuals that made complex products understandable to non-tech users. She wrote from the perspective of a novice user who could easily be confounded and made timid by geek-talk. Her new job with the food company entailed documenting all the ingredients and processes that went into the new products the company wanted to launch.
However, the food scientists would not cooperate with her. She emailed, visited, and tried to charm them, but the scientists claimed they had no time to sit down with her to talk about their work. When Caren’s efforts failed, she threatened them. She went to her boss and blamed the company for not making the staff take her seriously. But all to no avail. Frustrated, she came to see her job and herself as a joke.
Caren’s (and the company’s) mistake was in viewing and defining her job as lying off the critical path. In theory, her job was useful, even invaluable. In reality, the food scientists could not be bothered to take time from their jobs to help Caren do hers. They saw her not as a partner but as a dead weight, a paper-pushing irritant. She was like a parent who is always after the kids to clean their rooms.
Caren had two options. On the one hand, she could have made a better case—to the food scientists and to herself—that her job WAS on the critical path. After all, someone in the company thought it important enough to hire her to do ingredient and processes documentation. She could ask that person what the company risked if she didn’t get her job done. Could the FDA demand the nutritional list at any time? If the company did not comply, would public embarrassment and possible fines ensue? Or was her job truly unnecessary, a historical legacy that outlived its usefulness?
Alternatively, Caren could have approached the uncooperative food scientists to learn what she might do that would be useful to them. If ingredient documentation was a waste of their time, was there another critical path task that she could do to save them time, make them more productive, or in some other way make their lives easier?
Caren could also learn a lot from accountants, who face similar challenges when trying to get plant managers to give them information for financial reports. Like her, accountants in manufacturing companies are generally not on the critical path. Busy plant managers have more important things to do than collect data for reports that are consumed by upper management. This often leads to a dysfunctional cycle: accountants ask plant managers for data; plant managers drag their feet; accountants complain to upper management; big bosses chastise plant managers; data gets to accountants; report gets written; cycle repeats. It’s like the directions on many shampoo bottles: wash, rinse, repeat. No one says when you stop that cycle.
It wasn’t until the accountants sat down with the plant managers to discuss how to break this cycle that they saw the problem from a different perspective. They were producing nothing that helped the plant managers do their jobs better. Why should the managers hustle to collect the requested data?
The accountants left the meeting with a plan to create timely reports for the plant managers that helped them better manage their critical path. Unlike the accountants’ reports to upper management, these documents were eagerly received and read by the plant managers, and the relationship between the accountants and managers went from being adversarial to harmonious. The plant managers came to understand that the accountants were on their side, and thus became more willing to cooperate on getting the data for the upper management reports in a timely fashion.
Caren and the accountants faced a dilemma that many support people encounter, especially if they are on the regulatory side of support services, such as compliance and safety. They see their role primarily as protecting the organization from any actions that might hurt the organization or its employees. Their role is to limit any actions that could lead to outside investigations, lawsuits, or government reprisals, such as fines. From their vantage point, protecting the institution trumps the critical path.
As we will see in a later chapter, these compliance functions are a cost of doing business in our highly regulated and litigious business environment. While important, they are an addendum to the critical path. Most large companies will instruct each department, both those on the critical path and those playing a supporting role, to identify the goals that will best serve the overall company and then to fight to achieve these goals. Their hope is that this approach will accomplish a productive tension out of which the best solutions will be optimized for the good of all.
A better approach, I think, is for every support department to instead show how their department’s goals both protect the overall company AND improve the critical path.
For example, let’s look at worker safety in natural gas fields. These are hard and dangerous jobs. Installing safety training, equipment, and processes could increase costs and slow down production, which would be bad for the critical path. On the other hand, if done with the critical path in mind, these steps could reduce accidents, which are costly in both human terms and in work stoppages. Taking these measures could also attract the better workers who want to work in a safer environment, thus improving productivity. Gas companies with better safety ratings are more likely to win lucrative drilling rights contracts on government land. In summary, these compliance support functions could and should see themselves as allies with their colleagues on the critical path, not adversaries.
Caren might also take a lesson from Cuba’s famous cigar factories. Despite over 60 years of communist control, Cuba has continued to produce very fine cigars prized throughout the world. The best are still rolled by hand by master rollers who sit at tables all day long sorting, cutting, and rolling tobacco leaves. It is tedious work that requires attention to detail.
For centuries now, the tedium has been made bearable by the “reader” who reads to the master rollers all day long. The reader starts with the morning newspapers, but they don’t take too long. The real treat comes with the novels and their rich storylines, full of colorful characters and plot twists. The readers bring the story to life by speaking all the characters’ lines in different voices, which is no small feat. The job demands narrative skills to capture the pauses, crescendos, and power of the narrative to keep the cigar rollers’ spirits from sagging throughout the day.
The readers’ role is so important to the critical path that the cigar rollers will only work a couple hours in the morning if the reader is absent. In their function as support staff, the readers provide real value to the critical path because the rollers need them to be able to do their work. Without the readers, you do not get high-performing rollers who turn out the best product in the world.
As a support person, what could Caren do to allow the food scientists to do their best work? In your own role as a support person, what can you do that has the same effect on your critical path colleagues that the Cuban readers have on their rollers? What could you provide them that would be so essential that they would complain (and, as an even higher compliment to you, walk off their jobs) if it was no longer provided? Do you provide a “don’t need,” a “nice to have,” or a “have to have” support service to the critical path? What can you do to put your work into the “have to have” category?
Critical Path Action Items
Which of your support departments are adding real value to the critical path?
If yes, what is that value?
If not, how are they getting in the way of the critical path?
How could your support departments add more real value to the critical path?