STRATEGY SESSIONS  #14

MORE ON CONTROLS

by Dr. Steve Payne

Effective management of personal lives and careers involves more than just developing and enacting plans or strategies.   It requires forms of self-control.  We need various controls to monitor and correct the execution of our plans or strategies.  Some of these controls we apply without almost any conscious thought or implicitly, while other controls need explicit thought and application.

There are different types of controls that check and balance our actions or behavior.  One type of controls comes from social/cultural norms or values systems surrounding and influencing us.  Since almost everyone has some need for belonging and social acceptance, we learn and often follow these norms and values.  We might prefer to behave one way, but we often modify or change our behavior in order to avoid social criticism or censure.   

Another form of controls tends to be more rule-based or legal, and it extends from our participation, citizenship, or membership in organizations or political entities.  To preserve our organizational status and its benefits, we adapt, at least somewhat and sometimes, to their laws, rules, policies, or dictates.  Again, we might prefer certain actions, but we recognize possible penalties or sanctions for such behavior and act in a modified or different way.  

There are also market-based or financial controls.  Although we might want to engage in certain activities, most of us know doing so carries certain financial or market risks that seem too high.  For example, we might want to spend and live well beyond our paychecks, but we check our behaviors somewhat and try to balance our budgets in certain ways to avoid an eventual financial meltdown.  Our career or life strategy, and its execution, can need adjustment or complete rethinking at some point due to its encountering heavier financial costs or lower financial revenues than we expected, its running afoul of some legal or organizational barrier, or its violating a social or moral norm.   

We should choose strategic controls on a basic cost-benefit basis.  By that I mean, the controls chosen should seem to produce more benefits, in saving us from these financial costs, legal or political problems, or social/moral embarrassments, than the costs, time, and trouble that we spend creating and applying these controls.

Controls can be built into our strategies.  These can be as simple as planned checks on a weekly or monthly basis to see if a strategy or its execution is producing what appears to be normal or good progress toward our eventual goals.  If our strategy has several distinct parts or stages to it, we might place some form of control check directly after or before each of these stages to monitor costs/benefits provided or time taken to arrive at that point.  If these control checks indicate excessive costs relative to benefits or time requirements, we probably need to reassess or fine-tune our strategies or our execution of these. 

Control systems used in manufacturing and many businesses can be pervasive, complex and exacting due to significant competition from others and low profit margins.  There is often a very low tolerance for negligence and mistakes and great attention is placed on identifying and correcting these shortcomings 

 

Personal control approaches for assessing career and life strategies would seem to demand at least a little more explicit attention than many people admit to providing.   To avoid personal biases, we might benefit at times from having someone else who could be more objective than we can be to do these control checks and alert us timely to planning or implementation problems.