Dear executive leadership. I want to talk to you about the power of decentralized process management. First, let me just say that I’m a big fan. I love the passion you bring to driving value and strategy for your organizations, and your commitment to making a difference in the marketplace.
What really inspires me is the focus that I’ve seen recently on decentralized process management, empowering teams to bring process excellence across the board with less red tape and more active participation. I know that’s hard to scale though, and I understand how many of you have been struggling with that.
I wanted to offer some insights from my time with your teams, in your businesses, watching your organizations wrestle with making it work.
The value of decentralized process management
The value of decentralized process management is letting the power to make operational decisions move down the chain to the people most affected. It empowers them to make changes for the good of the business without massive managerial overheads.
Unfortunately, I know you’ve noticed that a lot of people are getting siloed in their working groups and losing sight of the strategic goals they’re meant to be contributing to. That can lead to misalignment of purpose, inefficiency and issues with compliance, the sort of things good process management is meant to prevent.
I think there’s three key things you could do to unlock the power of decentralized process management to solve these problems and really make it scalable.
1. Communicate your passion
The best thing you can do is communicate your passion for the organization’s values. This is what will shape people’s thinking and set the direction for their understanding of what it is you’re all about. When people know your values and see that they’re real, they can align with them.
If the business isn’t aligned to the strategy, your operations can’t scale decentralized process management. That alignment provides a framework to check decision making against and it’s more robust than any strategy document. Decentralized teams have been freed from cumbersome oversight so don’t try to fence them in. Instead, inspire them with your commitment to the company’s values and by aligning your strategy to those principles. They’ll internalize that and apply it far better than any governance structure.
2. Bring passion to macro processes
Then do the work to reflect that in your business processes. A great process management platform is your friend here, because it will allow you to nest the day-to-day operational processes into larger macro-processes that describe your overall operations. No process exists in isolation and when you can connect the inputs and outputs with the neighboring processes, you create a context that gives every procedure meaning in the strategic sense.
Make sure those processes, both the detail of the operations and the way they fit together in the greater organizational purpose, are visible and accessible. Ensure everyone who needs to can see what they have to do and how it contributes to the overall goals of the business. Help your frontline teams understand where they bring value to your customers, so when they need to make process decisions, they do it from a solid understanding of their context and contributions to the whole.
3. Celebrate process wins
That will equip your teams for continuous improvement with the brakes removed, but only if they know that it’s okay. When teams make breakthroughs in innovative processes that align with the business values, the best thing you can do is celebrate it. Not just within the team that’s seen their workflows improved, but across the organization. Nothing breaks down silos faster than sharing great things happening across departments and divisions.
When teams are brought into the excitement of good things happening in the business, they have a chance to cross-apply the wins they’re seeing, taking inspiration from others and catching some of that passion for the values I was talking about. They’re more inclined to look for their own improvements and catch that unified vision and direction that contributes directly to scalable decentralized process management. Celebrating success with your teams fuels further efforts for great things to happen.
Decentralized process management is real
It ultimately comes down to that passion you bring to the strategic direction of the business. The values and vision that drive you can and will drive your teams, too. When you keep those central ideals in everyone’s front-of-mind, they can’t help but shape their decision-making around them. When you provide the tools to capture comprehensive processes that show your people where they fit in the journey to customer value, they will align their efforts with that path. When you celebrate each of those steps in the right direction, you foster courage and enthusiasm to take more.
That’s how you scale decentralized process management and that’s how continuous improvement becomes part of the DNA of an organization. Decentralized process management isn’t some impossible dream. I’ve seen it happening and I’m excited to see it happen in your organization too.