The Management Flywheel - Camille Fournier

This resource first appeared in issue #44 on 02 Oct 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

One of the huge challenges for managers - which can be overwhelming for some new managers - is that changing people systems is hard. And all problems are people problems. Fournier points out that managers that try to get out whatever problem their team is facing by saying “We’ll Just Use Technology X” or “We Just Need The Right People” are probably not going to succeed. In her experience, and mine, there’s no big-bang change of people or technology that is going to get a team or an organization out of a rut.

Changing how teams or orgs work isn’t a single-step process; “team’s working well” and “ team isn’t working well” isn’t a big on/off switch. Fournier uses Jim Collins’ analogy - it’s a flywheel. A flywheel can be stopped dead. If you apply some force to it, it’ll spin for a while, but start losing momentum. If you turn your back too long, if you don’t keep strategically applying force, it will slow down dangerously. But you do keep giving it a push, again and again, there’s no single point at which you can say “before this, the flywheel wasn’t really spinning, now it is”, but over time it will have very clearly picked up momentum - and now maybe there’s a few more people helping keep it going.

This can be enormously frustrating for new managers. There’s no single moment where you can just step back and say, “yup, that push sure did it all right, now it’s fixed”. But once you get that flywheel going, jeez, there’s no telling how long it can go with a little nudge here and there.