Is Doing it Alone Your Best Answer?

In Jake's situation, it was clear he needed to involve others. But it's not often such a clear-cut decision. Involving other people takes time. There's an inherent "hassle factor" when you get more cooks in the kitchen. How will it impact the quality of the work you do? Are you going to have to make too many concessions to keep people satisfied that their voices are being heard? Is your invitation for others to get involved the first step down a slippery slope where every decision becomes a never-ending debate? Your track record of including others may have left a bad taste in your mouth.

Given these possible headaches, it's important to decide whether it makes sense to involve others before getting clear on what kind of involvement you might need. We recommend you start with a tool we call the Return on Involvement Assessment Tool. It can help you decide from the get-go whether to involve other people in what you're up to.

ROI is business shorthand for return on investment. It's a standard way of assessing the potential value of a financial transaction. The ROI calculation answers the question, "Is this work worthwhile from a financial perspective?" Initiatives with higher returns on investment are allocated time, money, and other resources. Initiatives with lower ROIs get put on hold or are scrapped.

This traditional definition of ROI doesn't deal with the additional question, "Does it make sense to involve others in this work?" To answer that question, effective involvers supplement the traditional return on investment analysis with a return on involvement analysis. This second type of ROI focuses on whether an involvement-based approach makes sense for what you need to get done. A high return on involvement means you'll see a big payoff in quality, commitment, and productivity from engaging others. A lower return on involvement means you may do the work better alone or with only a few others.

You can see the Return on Involvement Assessment Tool in Figure 1.1.

Your Own Capability

• Could you complete the work on your own? Would tackling it alone compromise the quality of your work?

How Others Would Feel About Joining You

• Are others likely to see the work as a good investment of their time and energy? Will they be excited to join this effort? Would they feel left out or even resentful if you did not include them?

How Others Could Add Value to Your Efforts

• What benefits could result from involving others in this work?

What It Will Take to Involve Others

• How difficult will it be to get others involved in this work? How much time and energy will be needed to keep them involved?

Overall Assessment

• How would the benefits from involving others compare to the costs needed to involve them?

• Based on your answers to these questions, does it make sense to involve others?

Figure 1.1: THE RETURN ON INVOLVEMENT ASSESSMENT TOOL

An engineering manager we know road-tested the Return on Involvement Assessment Tool. He used it in approaching a project to reduce the cycle time it took to make revisions to engineering drawings. Let's follow his line of thinking through his answers to the tool's questions in Figure 1.2.

Reducing the Cycle Time to Make Revisions to Engineering Drawings

Your Own Capability

• Could you complete the work on your own? Would tackling it alone compromise the quality of your work?

  • Engineering Manager Response: I could complete this project on my own with confidence because I have intimate knowledge of where breakdowns occur and how to fix them.

How Others Would Feel About Joining You

• Are others likely to see the work as a good investment of their time and energy? Will they be excited to join this effort? Would they feel left out or even resentful if you did not include them?

  • Engineering Manager Response: This is a high priority project for the entire engineering organization and for our internal customers, the production organization. A lot of people have a big stake in getting these revisions done faster and would like to help make it happen.

How Others Could Add Value to Your Efforts

• What benefits could result from involving others in this work?

  • Engineering Manager Response: I could get this project done on my own, but it would be better to involve others. Together we would probably find more ways to get these revisions done faster. From past experience, I'm sure it will be easier to get these changes implemented if I let more people get involved.

What It Will Take to Involve Others

• How difficult will it be to get others involved in this work? How much time and energy will be needed to keep them involved?

  • Engineering Manager Response: Since this is such a critical project, I don't think I will have much trouble getting other people signed up to work on it. I think if we thought it through on the front end, we could develop a plan that would make it pretty easy to keep them involved to see the job through.

Overall Assessment

• How would the benefits from involving others compare to the costs needed to involve them?

  • Engineering Manager Response: By involving people from the very beginning, I won't have to spend time convincing them of solutions that I developed. I will also have the benefit of their ideas and as a result the solution will be better.

• Based on your answers to these questions, does it make sense to involve others?

  • Engineering Manager Response: Absolutely.

Figure 1.2: THE RETURN ON INVOLVEMENT ASSESSMENT TOOL EXAMPLE

Now it's your turn. Think of some project or initiative where you might be wondering about whether it makes sense to involve others. Then use the Return on Involvement Assessment Tool to get clearer about whether you should involve others or not.