Babushka dolls create line of sight

You could learn a lot from a Babushka

Gene Mage

“Boy, I sure wish we could get everyone on the same page,” remarked the busy facility manager. “Why can’t they pull together and get this ship moving?”

After a few more mixed metaphors, the client gets to the point. “Our executive committee publishes a strategic plan that gets updated each year, but nobody outside of the executive suite seems care,” he laments. I feel for him. Most strategy documents end up gathering dust or clogging up landfills.

But it does not have to be that way. What could your organization accomplish if every individual, from top to bottom, could tell you exactly why their job matters to the larger organization? We call that alignment “line of sight”, that is, everyone can “see” how their job matters. Everybody “fits” into the larger picture, like those little nesting Russian Matryoshka dolls.

Matryoshka 1: Representing the well-fed peasant matriarch, the Babushka is large enough to encompass the whole family within her jumbo-sized shell. She symbolizes those common threads that unite an organization. She is the mission, that unifying sense of purpose that everybody works towards. She helps everyone find a shared vision for what that organization aspires to become. She surrounds her brood with shared values, her family culture, those commitments about how they interact with one another and those whom they serve.

Within her sturdy walls reside a few, important guiding decisions. Those “areas of focus”, or “critical success factors,” will, if achieved, ensure the long term success and survival of the family. She listens well to family members and customers before making those decisions. She wins the commitment of her daughters through her love, trust, and loyalty.

Matryoshka 2: Beneath the matriarch rests her many daughters. These daughters are the individual subsidiaries, facilities, operating units, branch offices, and business lines that comprise the larger whole. Each daughter engages in a dialog with the matriarch to ensure that her part of the family contributes as much as possible to each critical success factor.

Matryoshka 3: These are the granddaughters. There are scores of individual departments within each facility or operating unit such as sales and manufacturing, admissions and radiology, research and customer service, who are the smaller family units. Each granddaughter invests hours of quality time coming to an agreement with her mom about what her little part of the family will do to contribute to the organization’s mission.

Matryoshka 4: The great-grand children are those hard-working front-line supervisors. They are charge nurses, department heads, and team leaders. They work hard to equip every employee with the clear expectations, knowledge, skills, resources, support and direction needed to empower their team members to perform at their best. To their team members, these people are, quite literally, the company. Front-line leaders keep the lines of communication open up, down, and sideways, to make sure that every member of their team knows exactly how their job matters to the mission.

Matryoshka 5: These are the individual performers, the nurses, machinists, sales people, and technicians who are getting the job done every day, interacting with customers, and doing the paperwork. They can tell why a well-watered plant makes the lobby look great, which in turn makes patients feel more confident about their care. They can tell you why fully completed paperwork saves the company time and money by preventing re-work.

They take pride in doing quality work not because they think they will get a bonus or fear getting fired, but because they want to be a part of a winning team. They would no sooner break a promise to their team-mates than they would to their dearest friend. Committed, responsible, and self-guided, they need no foreman or task-master looking over their shoulder. They do the same extraordinary work whether anyone is looking or not. And if you stop and ask them how their job matters, they are more than happy to tell you.

Are your Babushkas all lined up?