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OUR BEST IDEAS, QUICK AND CURATED | AUGUST 26, 2022
Edited by Barbara Tierney Senior Editor, New York
This week, how to un-master the art of being pointlessly busy. Plus, how CFOs can rebrand themselves as innovation allies, and Tech for Execs on paying down technical debt.
Busy bodies. The slow season is coming to a close for many of us, and that means the busy season is about to begin. And being busy is good—unless it’s not. One article that senior partner Aaron De Smet and colleagues published back in January that continues to resonate with McKinsey readers poses a simple question: “If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?”
Energy drain. In our efforts to connect across our organizations, we’re drowning in real-time virtual-interaction technology, from Zoom to Slack to Teams, plus group texting, WeChat, WhatsApp, and everything in between. But while interacting is easy, value-creating collaboration is not. Every minute spent on low-quality engagement takes away from more important activities that create forward momentum, however you define it.
Telling versus delegating. Many organizations struggle to find ways to identify and pursue solutions. Bureaucracies and micromanagement (often part of “busy work”) slow down a company’s response to the market and to customers, preventing leaders from focusing on strategic priorities. They also make employees unaccountable and lacking in responsibility, leading not just to inefficiencies but also to workers feeling undervalued and disengaged. McKinsey research suggests that empowering employees and spending more time on high-quality coaching interactions are the way to go.
The empowerment mindset. To instill this dynamism in a culture, leaders can role-model mindsets and behavior that promote empowerment; managers can role-model, communicate, and build the coaching skills they want to see. In particular, managers and employees will need significant support to get comfortable with failure. To accommodate and even celebrate setbacks as a necessary step on the way to success, organizations can focus on reworking performance-management, investment, and training processes and structures.
Decision-making responsibilities, too, are obviously crucial, but they’re different from empowerment. Many organizations don’t delineate who gives input and who ultimately makes the decisions. Role clarity allows employees to navigate their jobs more easily, speeds up decision making, and can lead teams to be more customer focused, for example. To make this shift, leaders have to ensure that everyone is crystal clear about who has a voice and who has the actual power to vote or veto. This is harder than it sounds, but there is life after death by committee.
Mind melds. You have built a great team of skilled people who trust one another. They feel empowered. You have clarified roles. Yet meetings are still often unfocused and unproductive. To turn this workhorse of the modern organization into something you look forward to, not dread, ask these three questions: Should we even be meeting at all? What is this meeting for, anyway? And what is everyone’s role? These questions offer the meeting-challenged—from the C-suite to the smallest sales office—a way to help ensure that the session produces better business decisions.
OFF THE CHARTS
Reducing power sector emissions is key to most decarbonization pathways. On a grid that is primarily powered by fossil fuels, carbon emissions can be at their highest during peak load times, when fossil-fuel-powered auxiliary stations come online to meet sharp increases in demand. Our analysis shows that, for a typical North American grid, heat pumps powered by renewables could produce significantly lower emissions than those from other common heating methods.
PODCAST
Where do companies stand with return-to-office mandates? Can companies even issue them successfully, given the resistance by many employees? In this episode of the McKinsey Talks Talent podcast, McKinsey experts discuss the office space of the future—including what workers want, what employers need, and how workplaces will need to change accordingly. “Some work needs to be done together, but not a spurious mandate—not a ‘We’re back in charge now’ orientation,” says Bill Schaninger, a senior partner and talent leader. “I think that’s a fool’s errand and will continue to destroy your value proposition.”
More on McKinsey.com
How CFOs can rebrand themselves as innovation allies | When it comes to the innovation process, research shows that many business unit leaders view the CFO and the finance team as obstacles, not allies. To change that perception, CFOs can take these five actions.
The strong job market isn’t benefiting all Americans | Many respondents to McKinsey’s latest American Opportunity Survey say that limited opportunities and a lack of skills are keeping them on the sidelines of the tightest labor market in 50 years.
Digging into global food security challenges | Geopolitical and climatic events are affecting the food system’s resilience. Here’s what happened this year, what may come next year, potential consequences, and considerations that may mitigate the impact.
TecH for execs
Our experts serve up a periodic look at the technology concepts leaders need to understand to help their organizations grow and thrive in the digital age.
What it is. Technical debt is the price your business pays—literally—for writing bad code, deferring maintenance, or increasing the complexity of your IT systems through trade-offs, lack of investment, or a focus on short-term solutions. Each of these actions makes developing any future technology products or services more time consuming and expensive. It’s as if you were to take your car to a mechanic who did the bare minimum to keep your car running each time and ignored the more fundamental issues with your car. Then every time you bring your car in for servicing, it becomes more and more expensive because of all the issues that were ignored earlier.
Why it’s important. For any business that relies on technology to compete, technical debt is a silent stifler of innovation and progress. The bigger your technical debt, the more it acts as an anchor slowing down your technical advances. According to almost a third of the chief information officers we have surveyed, 20 percent of their technology budgets that are ostensibly dedicated to new products are diverted to resolving issues related to tech debt. They also estimate that tech debt amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the value of their entire technology estate (before depreciation). For larger organizations, this translates into hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid debt, and it’s not getting any better; tech debt continues to rise in most of the organizations we examined.
Paying down your tech debt frees up tech dollars to go to business priorities, and has some big upsides for your people, too. We have found that actively managing tech debt can free up engineers to spend as much as 50 percent more of their time on work that directly supports business goals. Less maintenance, more productivity.
Where does technical debt live? That’s a good question, and one that many tech leaders have difficulty answering because the tech debt that lurks in systems is obvious only once work on it is needed. But some telltale signs include rising costs and numbers of people focused on doing maintenance work (often on legacy systems) and increasing delays and costs in developing new technology products and solutions.
What you can do about it. One of the reasons technical debt is so debilitating is that few companies know the extent of it or what parts of their IT stack are causing it. So a good place to start is to identify where your tech debt lives and measure its size, though get ready for a potential shock. One large North American bank learned that its more than 1,000 systems and applications together generated over $2 billion in tech-debt costs. Other successful actions we’ve seen include putting a cash value on the tech debt generated by each application (or providing discounts when tech debt is removed) so everyone understands the true cost of the decision, or reserving fixed team capacity to tackle tech debt. These actions create real incentives for teams to focus on the big technology picture and help make tech debt an integral part of decision making on tech.
What technology concepts would you like us to help explain next? Let us know.
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