BioSistemika: The fountain of youth / how to increase productivity

In many companies, productivity grows too slowly because of bad leadership. Especially the middle management (MM) – they are the chiefs of sales, marketing, production, development, and support - they should be the driving force of productivity but are often its bottleneck.

In the G8 group of Technology Park Ljubljana we have a company that has succeeded in unleashing the MM from the chains. It is a young company named BioSistemika. They develop solutions for laboratories and pharmaceutical R&D and are present in more than 100 countries worldwide. Biosistemika is managed by Roswita Hrastnik and Klemen Zupančič. They are fighters with high growth-goals, which means productivity is in the center of their strategy.

Funnily enough, growth of companies often outpaces the growth of its MMs. And if MMs cannot grow fast enough, it means they are slowing down the company. Usually they start as simple employees who have been promoted into coordination of their department and then kept getting more and more people. Just think about yourself for a moment – how much have you grown in the recent years, and how much has your company grown? Did you change at all? For most of us our organizations grew much faster than we did, and this gap must be fixed. We need to be upgraded from simple coordinators into real managers – into our real role. What is this role?

“Doing things right”

I will borrow the words of Borut Potocnik, one of our trainers in the TopTech Management Program, where we train G8 leaders for this role - including three MMs from BioSistemika.

The big picture (bottom up) looks about like this:

• Top management: Doing right things (strategy)
• Middle management: Doing things right (tactics)
• Production: Doing things (operations)

MM must ensure that production works in an increasingly efficient manner. Every day/month/year with higher efficiency. If MMs do not think about improvements, then they are simply not middle-management - they are just operations.

MMs are the glue of the company. Together they know all team members, from top to bottom. They know all the fuckups and all successes of the company. When united they can lift a mountain and carry it to the other side… but most often top management blocks them in this ability.

Dodgeball

The most common mistake of top management is to force the MMs to do all the operational work while also expecting them to work on strategies with their left hand, as if they were Mozart. Simply put: If you tell someone to be 20% strategic and 80% operations, they will end up being 100% operations and 0% strategic. You cannot have one foot in heaven and the other one in hell.

As I said earlier, a usual career path of MMs is that they were operations and then advanced up. They got promoted into heaven, but funny enough they went straight to hell. I am not exaggerating. From above they are constantly beaten by the top management, and from below they are roasted by their former colleagues. It is hard being a middle manager. All the bad news and stress from above must be digested by your own bile, because if you pass it on to your team you will ruin it. Ordinary employees can be forgiven 100 mistakes. Managers not even 1 mistake.

Sonja Klopcic, another of the best trainers from TopTech said: “The task of a manager is to lead people, and NOT to be operational.” When you understand this, you know how to set boundaries for your MMs. Of course, you can never eliminate operations completely from their workload (or yours), but their focus must be “doing things right…. and becoming better at it every day”. To lead people, MMs need to master at least three leadership styles, because not all people are led equally. Some are best less soft, others hard …

BioSistemika was forced to quickly establish their MMs and send them through this wormhole. This are many obstacles on this way. The first is that many employees do not have leadership potential – they turn from being great professionals into bad managers. Deep in their hearts they want to go back down again but it would be a humiliation to go down, so they persist. You must recognize this and let them go back, otherwise the whole company is suffering their inefficiencies. Just make sure you do this in a decent way.

Secondly, those who show leadership potential must be supported and trained quickly to take on their new role. If you do not develop the potential, it will remain just a potential forever.

Third you must find out which leaders are the ‘moons’, and which are the ‘suns’. There is a big difference: the sun shines by itself but the moon only shines when there is a sun next to it - eg a powerful CEO. If the sun is gone, they lose their light. Sorry to say but moons are quite useless and even dangerous. You need suns to have a strong company. And in our program, we have put together these sun-MMs from different companies and made them work on improvements of their departments. When they were done and they presented the outcomes to their CEOs, the CEOs applauded. That is the kind of a team that can take on the world.

BioSistemika has decided to constantly train their MMs and keep them closely linked upwards and downwards. Strategic and middle management are increasing productivity together and with it the competitiveness of the company. In our group of MMs, they were the smallest company, but the rest of TopTech learned a lot from them. Do you also want to be that kind of global technology case? If yes, start developing your MMs.