Pull support beats push support
A basic principle of high performance cultures is teaching people problem solving. That means, over time, helping them grow their ability to solve a wider range of relevant customer problems on their own.
There are lots of reasons why this is important. Of course we want individuals to learn and grow, because that’s part of living a full and rich human life - and because when our people are learning and growing, the organisation is learning and growing too. Our ability to learn, collectively, is what governs our ability to compete, in the long term, as the world around us changes.
We also want to reduce delays. The more people can do on their own, without having to stop and wait for help or approval from someone else, the more smoothly work can flow through the system. The more smoothly work flows, the more value gets delivered over a given period of time.
But there will be times when people get stuck, inevitably. There will be a problem that they encounter for the first time and just can’t get their head around. Or a problem they have seen before that requires highly specialised expertise to solve. In that case we need to build in a provision for pull support.
Pull support means that the work is not taken away from the person who was doing it.
They do not hand over the work to someone else (the ‘push support’ approach). Someone else comes to them to help them do it. This keeps the flow of work going - and remember that it is a smooth flow of work that dictates the amount of value that we can we produce with the resources that we have.
The implication of this is that managers need to be able to be interrupted. They need to have time available in their day, routinely, to help their reports when they are stuck. And to see such help not as ‘taking them away from their job’ but as a core part of their work. Because each interruption is a chance to help someone learn to do something new for themselves.
