In a series of 4 articles, I would cover about the traditional ways that most of us adapt to deploy targets to our teams, pros & cons, live cases and introduce ‘Catch-ball’ technique of policy deployment that is used of deploying targets which is several notches about traditional methods.
First in this series, I m talking about traditional ways of deploying metrics. Here are two scenarios that I commonly come across where people are really puzzled about deploying goals to teams.
Scenario 1 is an example of Vertical deployment of targets to one’s direct reports and scenario 2 is Horizontal deployment, where there is shared ownership of targets, inter-dependencies, etc. between different departments.
Traditionally, vertical deployment of targets has not been a problem due to concentration of power and controllership with the functional head. Mostly Top-down approach is used, but rarely Bottom-up approach is also used.
Read my articles ‘Matsushita example of Top-down approach to deploy targets’ & ‘Bando example of Bottom-up approach to deploy targets’ where they are interesting live cases to read.
Both these approaches have their own pros & cons. Lets review the most important ones.
We all know that top-down is the single most commonly used method to deploy targets today.
Bottom-up most of the time, sounds impractical and an ideal-case.
In my experience, ‘Catch-ball’ technique which is used in Hoshin-Kanri is much more effective method to deploy goals. It takes a mid-way approach between top-down and bottom-up, but at the same time it doesn’t compromise on the ownership, timeliness and success rate.
More importantly, in an increasingly matrix-driven culture, deploying goals to peers (cross-functional) for shared accountability can only be addressed by Catch-ball technique. Traditional methods of Top-down and Bottom-up down have least impacts.
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