Watch out for chokepoints!
Waiting for no reason
The other day at lunch I stood in line for a long while to collect a meal that had already been boxed up for me. Money in hand, I had to stand there, just waiting for a chance to pay. Three people ahead of me, and a growing number behind me, waited too.
It got me thinking about the chokepoints that afflict our business lives.
The manager, who had been running one of the two cash registers, left his station to help the other cashier, a rookie, with a tricky — but, from what I could tell, trivial — problem with ringing up an order. It was one of those things where the difference between a la carte or the package deal means a difference in 75 cents. Yet the resolution of it dragged on . . . and on . . . and ON, all while the line backed up.
At the front end of the line, other workers kept dishing up food, contributing to the backlog. At least a couple of the folks I saw working have rung me up before, so one of them might have been drafted to run the second register for a few minutes to clear the backlog. But no.
The manager is a good guy, always affable, and he apologized wholeheartedly both to the woman who was shorted 75 cents (she seemed more bemused than upset by the whole thing), and to me for the delay when it finally came my turn to pay. I didn’t mind the apology, but I would have liked it better if the manager had instead simply addressed the chokepoint when it arose.
Look around you.
Unless you’re unlike most people I’ve ever met, there are chokepoints in your working environment, too. Consider this starter menu of choices:
- You have to jump through needless hoops to do something routine (ordering office supplies? filing timecards? booking a conference room?).
- You mean to get right to work in the morning, but it takes you an hour to hack through your inbox.
- Budgets or goals or performance reviews or whatever always run late.
- Gatekeepers in your company exert too much control over access to resources.
- You cannot do anything without holding eight meetings first.
- Key players won’t make decisions, even when their delay mucks up the works for everyone else.
- . . .
Even good companies have chokepoints. So do good employees. But great ones ferret them out and get rid of them systematically.
The boss at the place I got lunch is a good manager, but not a great one. A great one wouldn’t let the line pile up at a chokepoint like that.
Q.E.D.
Turn the spotlight on yourself.
What little tweaks could you make — today, this week, this month — that would free up the flow around your chokepoints? (Don’t eschew little tweaks because they’re little; they can add up fast.)
If you got your team together to talk about chokepoints, do you think the conversation would uncover surprises? Or would everybody pretty much agree on, say, the three worst chokepoints that impede the group’s work?
Either way, are you willing to address the chokepoints, for yourself, your team, your company?
What are your chokepoints?
~
Related:
- Jon Swanson: There is always something.
~
Photo by Charlie, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Category: Customer service, ManagementIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
5 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Tim, is this related anyway to red tape or bureaucracy of a company? Because I believe that there is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy that a lot of us face when trying to make things happen at our jobs.
Granted, scheduling things like a conference room is something that shouldn’t take long to do, but there are times when simply getting things accomplished is harder than it should be just to “follow protocol” or “process”. So I can see chokepoints being all over the place that would take an army to change.
And I am also finding out here at my company that because systems have been in place so long, people want to avoid change, even if it’s means a change for the better. So it’s a vicious cycle at times too.
Absolutely it’s related to red tape, Rusty — and in fact I cut a reference to bureaucracy that I had put in my original post.
Ideally, organizations diversify and specialize separate functions — that is, they create bureaucracies — for better efficiency. And it works: it doesn’t make sense to have your top salesperson and your top accounts-receivable clerk sharing each other’s duties.
But it’s also human nature to protect turf, and it’s in the nature of organizations, best I can tell, to develop points of friction — or chokepoints.
More on this in a follow-up post.
[...] I called them “chokepoints” the other day, but we also call them “bottlenecks” or “hangups” or “roadblock” or “pains in the a**.” [...]
[...] Getting Rid Of Chokepoints Tim Walker at Business Insight Zone has an article titled; Watch out for chokepoints! [...]
[...] Insidious Disease Last week I wrote a post referencing Tim Walkers Watch out for chokepoints! In that post I wrote that IT can be a key bottleneck in those [...]