Why Best Practices Aren’t

Like so many management fads, the use of "best practices" has become the latest hammer looking for a nail. Few consulting tools are more widely abused these days than so-called best practices. Is it any wonder that most banks, supermarkets, airlines, retailers, and consulting firms look astonishingly similar? After all, they’ve been busy copying each other’s best practices for decades.

This month in The Guerrilla Consultant, we look at best practices and implore consultants and clients to rethink the term and the tool.

Comments

[Duane Lamoureux]

Good article, touching on a key idea...clients may be hiring your firm because you think outside of the box (I know mine are). In solving your clients problems "best practices" may be useful as a framework to sharpen some of your ideas after you've begun developing options to meet the client's specific needs.

[Antonio Loffredo]

I totally agree with the concepts given in the article on Best Practices.

Here I would like to treat a different view of the Best Practices approach. It's got to do with the use of it internally, within the company, among its people and its divisions, let's say in internal consultancy.

I am pretty sure that in this case Best Practices can do a very valuable job. The objective is "to align all people in a team to the best performance, enabling reciprocal training and teamwork to innovate".

Of course, every salesperson has got her clients, with specific needs and ideas, but it is also true that looking at colleagues' motivation and attitude can very much add to her own sales arguments, processes and eventually performance.

Things are even more evident in the customer service sector. Though all customers are different and require a personalized approach, doing things in a certain way, working the processes on the business support systems in a flexible and creative way and treating customers with a problem solving attitude can be exchanged and cross-learned.

In the end, best practices can produce very big benefits when adopted internally to grow people and their performance. Even bad practices can be taken as a reference in order to strengthen good ones and learn. Most of all, on the other side, by teaching, though not always being aware of it, people get stronger in their abilities, are more satisfied and rewarded and happier and more productive, and so on and so forth.

It’s all about team work. Best practices cannot make a company a leader in the market. It can help making all people in a company leaders, grow the team and maximise performance and results.

Always open to discuss …

[Tim Laursen]

Great article! I've been telling my management (and anyone else that will listen) this for several years. A "best practice" only works if the context around it are the same or very very similar. Just because one organizational culture can do something one way doesn't mean that any other organization can do it that way too. Usually it makes the adoptive culture worse! The best thing to do is benchmark and put in place simple fixes or enhancements and save the bigger ones until the organization is ready. That may take year or may never implementable. It takes a very innovative culture to be able to use a best practice from another culture