The Cost of Inconsistent Management Across Departments

Has your business ever been in the situation where a customer gets a delivery date from sales and then Operations hears about this promise from Sales only when the order is overdue? And to top the chaos, your Finance team is waiting for information neither team realised it needed to submit. Each team has been busy, doing their best but at the end of the day, the customer is disappointed as the initial promise has not been delivered.

It’s easy to say this is a communication problem. But if we really look in the mirror, we can say this “reason” is simply an excuse for a poor management workflow in our business. We need to identify:

• How should an effective work process be managed? 
• Who should confirm capacity before commitment?
• Who should own handover?
• Who is responsible for following up when information is missing? 

Management Role and Responsibility.

This is simply a management problem with no clear definition of responsibility. When departments don’t handle have a clear role and responsibility, which is written into a defined work flow, individuals do what they think is best, which unfortunately often results in inconsistent outputs and confusion.   The outcome is delays, duplicated work and unnecessary escalations.  People can work for the same company but have very different views of how to do things. Closing that perception gap is the first thing you need to do if you are to build a high-performing business. 

Management Goes Beyond Process Quality Assurance. 

Defining how to do things and then ensuring things are done that way is a key part of management.   Checking progress, giving instructions and quality control are the tasks of a manager.  While performing these tasks, managers are also valuable supporters and developers of employees. The fine line managers need to travel between micromanagement and allowing the team members to innovate is fundamental in management.  The manager needs to have the full view of how tasks fit together, how the team helps achieve higher-level goals and where its work depends on other departments. This requires a coordinated, disciplined approach within and between teams. The answer lies in giving people clear responsibilities, proper support and authority to deliver. As an  example; if you catch yourself saying to a sales team “improve customer service”, this gives little specific direction to the team but rather opens up a whole lot of individual interpretations of what “improved customer service” might be. The manager needs to provide the guardrails for teams to work within.  In our example, they should agree on how delivery dates will be confirmed, what information operations needs and who updates the customer.  That way you turn the intention into a process. 

Good Management Keeps Things Moving In The Right Direction. 

When employees know what they’re doing, why it matters and how their decisions impact the next person, we get an organisation that delivers on a consistent basis. Inconsistency can ruin many a business and here is how it takes hold.  

Many individual are promoted into managerial roles simply because they’re good at their job. They know the product, they know the customers or have years of technical experience. Those strengths are useful but managing other people requires additional skills as well. Managers need to be developed with managerial skills, not job specific technical skills. If this important step in their personal development plan is overlooked, the individual relies on their own individual personal habits. 

Inconsistent management practices develop: one manager has regular team meetings and follows up on commitments; another assumes silence means everything is okay; one addresses performance issues early; another waits until frustration builds. Over time the organisation learns different versions of what it means to manage. People learn to work around their manager’s preferences and coordination between departments gets harder. Senior leaders might see separate performance problems when in fact the problem is inconsistent management practices. 

The Costs Show Up In Everyday Work.

When ownership is unclear employees chase updates, check instructions and correct preventable mistakes; work can move between departments without anyone owning the end result resulting in lost time and repeated effort. In our delivery example a clear handover could have identified capacity issue before a promise was given to the customer. Once the order is late several people must stop work so that a problem can be solved that could have been prevented. 

Uneven Accountability. 

Employees know when standards are not the same ; if one department always meets deadlines and another doesn’t even bother to follow up on missed ones, then the reliable team will have to pay the price. This can cause resentment and weaken cooperation. Accountability is hard to maintain when people cannot rely on commitments made elsewhere in the business. 

Fairness does not mean that every team has identical targets. It does mean clear expectations, reasonable support and consistent follow-through. 

Pressure On Capable Employees.

Where priorities, delegation and follow-up are weak dependable employees can become the default solution. They pick up unfinished work, fix recurring issues and keep things moving. Their effort may hide the management gap for a while. But an organisation that depends on the same people repeatedly rescuing delivery has a fragile way of working.

Managers need to understand the causes of that pressure: unclear roles, unequal workloads, missing skills or unresolved performance issues.

An Inconsistent Customer Experience. 

Customers are the victims of poor cross departmental coordination; a helpful sales conversation is wasted if delivery fails or an account query goes unanswered. If teams work to different assumptions customers can get conflicting information or have to explain the same issue several times.

To improve that experience managers need to agree how their teams will work together and take responsibility for handovers.

Strategy That Loses Steam.

A company’s mission and vision have to drive daily decisions.  Managers do this by explaining priorities, agreeing responsibilities and reviewing progress. 

If every department interprets the strategy differently people can work hard pulling in competing directions. Consistent management makes teams understand both what they are doing and what shared result they are working towards. 

Shared Standards With Room For Different Styles. 

Managers bring different personalities, experience and strengths to their jobs. They also manage teams of people with different responsibilities; a finance team will not need exactly the same working practices as a sales team. What they all do need is a dependable foundation with clear goals, ownership defined, useful feedback given at the right time, decisions made on time and commitments followed up on. 

An organisation can build that foundation by agreeing some practical expectations for every manager: 

• Clarity: People know what is important to them, what they have to do and how successful they are. 
• Communication: Teams have regular opportunities to review progress, raise concerns and make decisions.
• Accountability: Commitments are recorded, followed up and addressed when missed.
• Coordination: Departments agree on handover checklists and who is responsible for step in the process. 
• Development: Managers give feedback and help employees develop the ability to do things on their own.

The value is in applying these practices consistently. A weekly meeting doesn’t do much if decisions are unclear and nobody follows up.

Consistency Takes Practice.

Start with something that happens repeatedly and affects more than one department: a missed handover, approval delays or repeated customer complaints will tell you where expectations diverge. Gather the relevant managers together and agree what should happen, who is responsible for it and how progress will be checked. 

Next review whether that approach is being used (and if so does it improve the outcome?). This gives management development a purpose. Delegation, feedback, planning and performance conversations become tools to tackle real workplace problems. Management training can teach those tools. Implementation, coaching and accountability get managers to use them consistently (when workloads go up or difficult conversations arise). At ActionCOACH IN2GR8 that combination is central to our approach to management development.

If organisations are thinking about management training in Johannesburg a good question to ask is: How will managers be supported to apply what they learn in their teams? 

The goal is long-term improvement in how work is coordinated; people are supported; commitments are delivered. 

How Consistent Is Management In Your Business?

A good place to start is the work that keeps needing rescuing. Where deadlines slip? Which handovers create friction? Where employees need clearer direction or more reliable follow-up? 

These questions move the conversation from individual frustrations to management practices that can be improved. 

The Management Consistency Scorecard is a starting point for reflection on management strengths and areas where attention may be needed. Use it to start a focused conversation about habits and support that build a more consistent, high-performing team. Take the Management Consistency Scorecard and work out where you want to focus your management development next.

Management Consistency Scorecard. 

Results can be used as a starting point for discussion about management capability or where training, coaching or structured development might be needed (management training).

By Craig Lourens
ActionCOACH
Contact: 07938825709