If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.
Laszlo Bock – Author
Work and process rules are guidelines, tips and tools that can lead to success. Thomas Davenport, author of Thinking for a Living said:
“To treat something as a process is to impose a formal structure on it – to identify its beginning, end, and intermediate steps, to clarify who the customer is for it, to measure it, to take stock of how well it is currently being performed, and ultimately to improve it.”[i]
How are process work rules developed? When I started working, I thought most work rules were defined in policies, procedures, and work instructions. Was I wrong? In reality, these manuals were often used as a doorstop. Much of work consists process, functional, and implicit rules.
- Process rulesare how work gets done in a company. Process rules outline the flow of work, resources, ideas, monies, and other mission critical assets. Process rules are horizontal cutting across vertical silos.
- Functional rules are the rules of the worksilos of the organization. These rules can be functional, service, or location based. For example, engineering, accounting, and finance are each a vertical that may have its own rules.
- Implicit rules are the unwritten rules of work. They can be as common sensical as, demonstrating good etiquette and politeness at work. The list of implicit rules is vast and unknowable unless shared. As well, implicit rules can change from employer to employer and from function to function even within an organization.
Work Lesson Earned: COVID has disrupted many work rules. It’s important for you to understand the disruption specifics of the new normal in your business, career and job. Discover the underlying processes to your work, career, and job. The current world of work has mushy and ambiguous rules. To work and be successful today, it’s critical to know the real and implicit work rules. A few rules are prescriptive and others are implicit. As much as possible, try to decipher and learn them. Ask questions of your work and career. It’s critical if you want to be successful and happy.
[i] Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results From Knowledge Workers, Thomas H. Davenport, 2005.