Management By Wandering Around (MBWA)

The Olympics are on! I love watching every athlete who makes it there and seeing how they each carry their excellence and achievement. Each athlete is an individual, and these games really drive that home. Watching them perform, it is easy to forget all that it took to get them there. But we all know it took a lot of practice, blood, sweat, tears – and did I say practice? – to get there. I want to talk about “practice” this week.

I am new yoga student. As intolerable as it can be to listen to new students gush about the benefits of yoga or any other activity, there is something to be said about the journey that brings you to a humbling realization that your own practice is never going to be perfect. Yoga, I am learning, is about working on your own capacity incrementally. I’d like to propose that the same can be said for leadership.

Leadership practice starts early on. You don’t all of a sudden get a job that makes you a leader. You develop leadership skills and styles over time. That’s the fun part! But the best part is that you never really reach a point where it gets boring because you know it all.

Many years ago, I worked as a CEO with a First Nations organization in Eastern Canada. During my orientation, my coach (someone who’d been the CEO for the same organization) recommended that I spend some time walking around the administrative office to get to know people, and for them to get to know me. At first I took his advice literally, and then later, I took different travel paths in this very large building so I could see folks I would otherwise never encounter. It was great to get to know folks outside of meetings, to laugh, chit chat, and all that. The change agenda for this organization was daunting, and I’m convinced the relationships I cultivated by walking around helped move this along.

Through the years I’ve maintained a degree of closeness with staff, but because of my various roles, my focus has been working with organizational leaders. Recently, I had the opportunity to dive a little deeper. On two occasions this week, I’ve been able to shadow frontline folks as they carry out their everyday activities. And was that ever an eye opener for me. Let me explain.

As with many healthcare organizations, ours has embraced the LEAN methodology . Management practices associated with LEAN encourage a strong link between the senior decision-makers in the organization and the front-line service providers. There is a belief that improvements can only be made when those leading the change involve frontline staff (because they really know what’s going on) and with leaders who really understand the business processes. This is also basic bread and butter in solid change management practices.

Today, I’m here to say that I’m realizing that even the management practices in LEAN must be achieved incrementally. In researching the origins of LEAN and leadership, I came across something I used to know, but forgot: managing by wandering around (MBWA) introduced years ago by Tom Peters. Intended to get all of us out of the office, especially because every manager from a CEO to a program coordinator can lead by example, MBWA is all about getting us out of the office and into the real world of work.

Personally, I don’t mind telling you that I let this slip a bit in the past few years, but after the past few weeks of being back in the trenches, I’ve already booked my next few frontline tours. Then, I hope that when I’m ready to apply more fidelity to my LEAN management practice, I will have a solid place from which to start.

Below are the Twelve Guiding Principles for MBWA:

Do it to everyone

Do it as often as you can

Go by yourself

Don’t circumvent subordinate managers

Ask questions

Watch and listen

Share your dreams with them

Try out their work

Bring good news

Have fun

Catch them in the act of doing something right

Don’t be critical

Click here to read a short article on MBWA including the definitions of the Twelve Guiding Principles listed above. Isn’t it great that our leadership practice allows us to keep learning every day? Have an enlightening week in your practice - leadership, yoga, or otherwise.