I’m an exec in a public organisation, overseeing a branch that’s just finished some policy work mostly outsourced to a consulting firm.
But now it’s over, I’ve had one of my direct reports reach out to me, concerned. Not because of the work: the project was successful. They pointed out that while the work was successful, they felt like it was a missed opportunity for them to build some important skills and knowledge.
After they spoke to me, I considered why this work had to be outsourced to a consulting firm in the first place.
Because it had to be. There’s just no capacity to handle it in-house.
The management layers of our organisation have been peeled back so much over time that us managers are stretched pretty far with the amount of direct reports we have. Which is all in the name of “efficiency of management”: the idea was to strip out all the extra layers and make it simpler for reporting and getting work signed off.
Unfortunately this just means my bandwidth for letting my team try to sink their teeth into some interesting work that will teach them a lot is virtually non-existent. There was just no capacity for me to wholly take on all the work involved in the recent policy project, because my existing workload kept me too busy to coach and support my team on the extra work.
So off to the consultants the work went. And so too the learning opportunity that my staff pointed out that they’d lost.
The worst part is it will continue to happen over and over too. Nothing is likely to change, so resorting to consultants again is inevitable.
I learned years ago that management is about maximising what one can put out based on the various inputs one has. Somehow our organisation has come to see management efficiency as meaning just having less management, but that comes at a concerning cost for the future.
