BUSINESS TIPS

Did you hear about the 5 Areas of Responsibility for Managers?

According to the Obeya

You visualize the five areas of responsibility for managers on the walls of the Obeya!

Introduction & Review

In my last article, I already wrote about some responsibilities of managers in the Obeya. Here are the take-aways from that article:

• Each manager responsible for the development of team members
• Get information at the basis
• Strive for continuous improvement
• Follow the same strategy throughout the company

Missed what the Obeya is all about? Read here.

But there’s more! Read in this article about the five areas of responsibility for managers.

Learn about the five areas of responsibility

Develop strategies

Determine the purpose of the company. Then determine the strategic competencies needed to achieve it.

Examples: Customer satisfaction or information technology

Define a target state that you want to achieve. With regard to customer satisfaction, for example, this could be to continuously collect, evaluate and take into account. One manager is responsible for each strategic competence.

Drive performance

To achieve strategic goals, you need to turn them into individual deliverables. To do this, you use metrics, i.e. measurements, that you compare and relate to each other.

Example: you want to realize the goal of a better profit margin. So you need to capture total production costs in the performance area. These are made up of various supporting metrics. Those are labor costs, parts, factory costs, and more.

Visually illustrate which adjustments you have to make. Example: reduce labor costs to drive down production costs and thereby increase margins.

Creating added value

Managers must decide every day how to create the greatest value for customers. They must consider:

• where does the value creation take place?
• what alternative products are available?
• should the product portfolio be thinned out or expanded?

You can visualize the value creation process in the form of a portfolio funnel. It filters different ideas until they become real product ideas.

Roadmaps and milestones help to coordinate activities and make ideas more concrete.

Act and react

Obstacles are part of everyday work. Discuss them in regular stand-up meetings. Solve problems as quickly as possible.

Use Kanban boards, for example, on which you classify tasks according to the categories “to do”, “in progress” and “done”.

If you encounter deeper problems, start an improvement process.

Solve problems

You need to deeply understand the issues that arise in your day-to-day work. Otherwise, you’re just treating symptoms.

So, together with the team, find out why a problem arises and what the causes are. Then try to eliminate the causes — not just the symptoms.

Conclusion

There are five areas of responsibility for managers. You visualize them on the walls of the Obeya. The five areas are:

1. Develop strategies
2. Drive performance
3. Creating added value
4. Act and react
5. Solve problems

You can sort these five areas of responsibility of a manager as you like. However, there is already a certain hierarchy visible:

Strategy is at the top, followed by value creation and performance. One level lower are action and reaction, as well as problem-solving.

However, this so-called reference model is only a suggestion! Depending on the team working in the Obeya, the visualization may differ from the reference.

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source: Tim Wiegel: “Führen mit Obeya”, Vahlen, ISBN 978–3–8006–6464–1