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Woodrow H. Sears
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Table of Contents
Preface .............................................................................. vii Introduction ..................................................................... Part One: Rediscovering the Manager in the Middle Chapter 1: Preparing to Master Your Job ................... Monkeying Around with Some Powerful Concepts... Managing Your Job .................................................... Where have all the jobs gone? .................................... The Moment of Commitment ..................................... Chapter 2: Remembering Six Sigma ............................. If You Cant Measure It.......................................... Show them the numbers! ............................................ The Managers Real Role ........................................... What numbers? ........................................................... Chapter 3: Overcoming Fear in the Workplace........... Managers as Enforcers................................................ Coming to Grips with Trust Issues ............................. Create the Right Environment .................................... Cultural Jujitsu............................................................ Chapter 4: Working with Others ................................... A Diversity of Opinions.............................................. Group Dynamics......................................................... Working with Volunteers ........................................... Your Manager is Part of the Group ............................ In Closing................................................................ 3 4 5 7 9 11 15 17 20 23 25 28 30 33 34 37 37 39 48 50 56 xi
Chapter 6: Setting Goals and Standards....................... The Importance of Vision........................................... Aligning Forces and Energies for Success ................. What business are you in? .......................................... Raising the Bar ........................................................... Standards, Behavior, and Job Mastery ....................... Chapter 7: Planning Work and Scheduling Resources ....................................................................... Mapping Your Work Processes .................................. Work-Flow Planning .................................................. Getting Started ............................................................ Scheduling .................................................................. Estimating and Budgeting .......................................... Chapter 8: Managing Time and Prioritizing ................ Is not managing time the real problem? ..................... Making the Most of Your Time.................................. Closing in on Priorities ............................................... Priorities and Sequencing ...........................................
65 65 67 69 73 76 79 79 83 85 87 90 93 94 96 101 101
Conclusion ........................................................................ 105 Recommended Reading .................................................. 109 About the Author............................................................. 111
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Preface
This book was written to achieve two purposes: First, I wanted to present the idea that mastering the managers job involves more than simply writing reports, building teams, and reaching productivity quotas. It requires ways of thinking that focus on the present and the near future, your team members and clients, your manager, and your company. Mastering your job as a manager also requires a comprehensive understanding not only of the technologies involved in your work, but also of every action taken by your employees, from the time a sale is made to the time when a product or service is delivered to the customer or client. In a way, its like playing four or five chess games simultaneously. These ideas are not usually covered in supervisory or managerial training courses. We have slipped quietly out of the post-industrial era into something entirely new in the march of civilization: a fastemerging international culture based on knowledge. This expanding knowledge culture must be managed carefully. In this new knowledge economy, fewer and fewer people will be hired to perform routine, repetitive tasks that havent yet been taken over by machines. Therefore, every employee has to be a thinker as much as a doer, a problem-solver as well as an individual who can manipulate parts and pieces according to a prescribed pattern. The manager must provide a nurturing corporate home for each employee, support them as they refine their skills, and keep them goal-focused. These activities require familiarity and competence across a broad band of managerial areas, including the often-overlooked areas of group dynamics and team functioning. This guide will provide an overview of such considerations.
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My second purpose for writing the book is to familiarize readers with some tools, techniques, and behavioral strategies used by those individuals who have truly mastered the art. Mastering, a word thats not commonly used in the field of management, was chosen to highlight the extra effort and the intentionality characteristic of top managers. If the people who work for you like you, they will give you a lot of latitude to make mistakes. But rather than rely on the charm school approach to being a manager, what if you could work the hard issues and still win? Hard fundamentals lead the list of competencies needed for managerial success: goal setting, prioritizing, planning, scheduling (few people realize that they really are different processes), and that old specter, time management. These competencies pretty well frame the managers job. But theres another issue behind this guide and its title. Researcher Scott Parry interviewed nearly 100,000 managers during the late 1990s as part of a major effort to define which competencies individuals must possess for managerial success. Unlike other researchers, Parry didnt try to scratch up all the obscure competencies he could find. Instead, he wisely chose to synthesize and simplify, identifying only three sets of skills critical to mastering the managers job: 1. Setting Goals and Standards 2. Planning and Scheduling Work 3. Managing Time and Prioritizing Even now, there are people who believe that if you can perform satisfactorily in a role at work, you will be effective in managing others who do that same kind of work and perform the same kinds of tasks. That assumption, like so many others we make about what anyone can do, has not held up.
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Preface
The old ideas about management and managing were based on military-style command and control techniques that no longer work. Times have changed. Some managers still seek success by applying extra energy and time, but extra effort does not automatically lead to supervisory or managerial success. The more closely you examine the managers job, the more obvious it is that what you see is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to skills and knowledge. Being able to talk coherently about the simplest planning model (plan-doevaluate) is not the same as being able to create a credible and detailed plan for doing work that involves many people, significant resources, and a number of interdependencies. This guide will point the way to developing those competencies, and help identify areas where you will need further input and practice. Mastering the job of manager in an increasingly complex business environment will require a lot of judgment regarding the kind of help you look for. Frankly, many good professional development programs have all but disappeared from the market because they were priced out of reach of most corporate training budgets. The amount of time away from work, in addition to expenses for travel, lodging, meals, and tuition, made those programs economically unjustifiable. Generally, the longer the trainings duration, the lower will be the probability of a positive return on your companys investment. Contrary to what you might think, longer programs are not necessarily better, because participants vary widely in terms of skill level and need for formal training. But perhaps more importantly, you cant solve performance problems simply by sending people away to get fixed.
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Total quality management (TQM) was all the rage in the 1980s. A colleague working for a major airline told a mutual friend that the president of the company banned all training that he had not personally approved. TQM was being embraced as if no one in the airline knew how to do their jobs (regardless of length of time with the airline)until, that is, they were put through extensive and expensive off-site seminars. Nothing in this book will divert you from your work for hours or days. Everything Im suggesting will be an extension of your normal managerial tasks and duties. There is a bias to the book, however: I personally believe that workers at all levels must be given more autonomy, and managers must be proactive about involving direct reports in as many decisions as possible. But not all at once! Part of your success strategy will be to phase in participation so that it feels natural to all involved. It certainly should never feel like some kind of gimmick to get people to work harder. Reading through this book is no substitute for participating in competence-building training, but familiarity with the concepts and basic ideas provided here will help any training you decide to take stick and enable you to more quickly begin to perform at a higher levelthat is, more profitably. Yes, it still comes down to making money for the company. Those who do it best are those who manage resources with precision and who are quick-witted problem solvers, manipulating situational variables in ways that minimize losses and maximize profits. This is key: Get the people who report to you to focus on goals while they create value for the company every day. Most of the tools you need for skill acquisition and mastery of the managers job are in the pages that follow.
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Introduction
In preparing to write this book, I spent some time remembering mentors who contributed greatly to my understanding of what management is and what managers ought to do. Specifically, I remembered them in their roles as trainers and coaches, and wondered what they would say to this generations managers. Would they be talking about the same themes today that were popular decades ago, when keypunch operators entered data on paper tape or cardswhen we were standing with one foot in the industrial age and the other in the post-industrial age? Im sure you know this already, but organizations and technologies have changed beyond anything we might have imagined a couple of decades ago. But the job of managing people, as my colleagues see it, is still as much an authoritarian muddle as it was back then. Technology has provided the means to access and share tons of information about individual employees and their experience and credentials, but all that detail is still no substitute for empathetic conversations between managers and direct reports. In fact, all that information can fool us into thinking that we dont have to dig into the details of individual performance or look at performance in situation-specific terms. Highly specific information about work performance is easier to come by in environments that are being managed at a serious level of detail. In the past decade, some amazing managerial breakthroughs have occurred in such settings. One result has been an enhanced awareness that people at work need information and numbers beyond anything my own mentors might have imagined. This guide will present the
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subject of numbers as a way to tell stories, to explain to your people what numbers mean, and to get into this nontraditional approach to staff development as an extension of what youre already doing. Along the way, youll be encouraged to think about the cultural and social setting in which you work and the resulting behavioral dynamics as a natural extension of how you apply your managerial competencies. In the pages that follow, you will find a go do it level of information about three competencies: setting goals and standards; planning and scheduling; and managing time and prioritizing. Admittedly, self-study is not always as effective as participating in a seminar, but if you read this guide carefully and discuss its contents with colleagues, you will have a better understanding of these competencies, and youll find yourself with renewed confidence to act on them. My experience has enabled me to simplify some of the underlying concepts and to remove the intellectual clutter that often gets in the way of real people acquiring useful information. What you will find in the following pages is useful information and ideas that will allow you to perform with more precision, whether youre a new manager or an old hand. Incorporate the ideas that follow into your own philosophy. Youll be surprised by the things you begin see, and how quickly you are able to reach the elusive goal of mastering the managers job.
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Chapter 1
Preparing to Master Your Job
hirty years ago, training courses for managers and supervisors frequently included an exercise called The Man in the Middle. People seemed to identify with the idea that they worked in a sea of often-conflicting pressures. The facilitator would begin the exercise by writing the word manager in a circle in the center of a flipchart sheet. Then, participants were encouraged to name the pressures they were under, which the trainer would record along with an arrow zeroing in on the man in the middle. For some participants, the key issues were disagreeable: learning to use computers, worrying about hiring minorities, dealing with unrealistic deadlines, and so on. For others, it was basic laments such as being overworked and underpaid or not getting enough respect from subordinates and managers. The more thoughtful participants identified demands from customers and other departments to which they had to respond without time to plan how to manage the interruptions in existing schedules. There were a number of directions a trainer could take at that point. The one I preferred was to divide all the pressures into two lists: Things the participants could control or influence, and things that the participants could not control. Of course, the list of forces that could not be controlled or anticipated was the longest. It seemed that the participants saw themselves as powerless, vulnerable to forces they could not control. What a sad thought: Coming to work every day knowing that you were expected to focus on administrative trivia instead of leadership, and on compliance issues rather
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than on ingenuity and invention. These managers always spoke of their long hours, their lost weekends, and the thankless tasks they had to take care of just to keep up with the workload.
for help. Totally misunderstanding his role, the manager took the monkeys off their backs and then accepted them as his own. He worked nights and weekends while his trusted subordinates played golf. To change the picture, the manager had to become more competent in delegating, coaching, counseling, and using performance appraisals. It was a funny and effective presentation that made powerful points in memorable ways. Onckens consulting firm survived, and somewhere out there today, someone else is telling the story about inviting the monkeys to climb onto your back until you learn how to return them to their rightful owners.
the company meeting the press, but the managers in the middle are the true role models and the muscle of management. The corporation will be as strong as they are.
Workers will never be more effective than managers permit them to be.
That brings us to the essence of the managers job. The late Peter Drucker, probably the most widely quoted management guru of them all, predicted that by the 1990s, American managers would have rediscovered what we taught the Japanese after World War II: People are a resource, not a cost. The Japanese got the message, and we lost it. Despite all his accurate projections, Drucker missed on that one: Instead of celebrating workers and their contributions, organizations in the 1990s were notorious for their people-dumping through downsizing, right-sizing, restructuring, reengineering, outsourcing, and wholesale layoffs. Worse, it seems to be continuing: From 2000 to 2003, more than 100,000 industrial jobs were lost in the Detroit area alone. Ford expects to lay off another 6,000 workers by the end of 2007, General Motors 20,000, and Volkswagen 30,000. Such wholesale job cuts are said to be based on major dollar losses and structural inefficiencies. Maybe theres nothing workers and work groups can do about it, but is it possible that there was a time when workers could have made a difference? That managers, shaping the performance of the people they supervised, could have made a difference? Can managers and workers ever become more effective, productive, and profitable? Managers still stand as men and women in the middle, between jobs for themselves
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and their people, and layoffs. The managers burden is greater than ever.
2. Show people some numbers: sales-per-person, revenues per-unit-per-week, revenues against targets, and so on. 3. Ask for input and suggestions, and answer all questions. 4. Develop an action plan (involve the workers). 5. Implement the action plan. 6. Reward compliance, and coach anyone who needs it. 7. Recognize small successes. 8. Continue the rewards, and get rid of people who cant or wont comply. 9. Give workers information about their performance on an ongoing basis. Work with them on ways to improve, and continue to ask for their input. 10. Hold special events to celebrate targets met. 11. Dont stop. This seems a lot like a prescription for a perpetual motion machine, doesnt it? Actually, its a remedial scheme to allow managers to recover from productivity shortfalls and to produce the numbers that lead to short-term profits and returnson-investment that will please investors. Yes, its a strategy for pushing workers to conform to requirements, but because you ask for their input, they might be for the first time ever getting an opportunity to participate in shaping the work they do. Still, its yet another piece of evidence that many American companies are stuck in ineffective ways of dealing with employees.
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Suppose that by some flash of insight or other conversion experience your company decides to make a dramatic change in the ways it deals with employees in order to become more inclusive. Would the managers go along, or would they feel threatened if the apparent balance of power is shifted in the direction of employees? Often, the greatest resistance to change comes from the people in the middlethat is, those who have learned how to cope with things as they are. Senior managers will have to help them confront their fears about losing control or losing face and show them how to grow beyond such concerns.
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sort of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, Raising in ones favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethes couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream, you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Remember, non-supervisory employees want to survive and succeed on the job just as much as you.
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Chapter 2
Remembering Six Sigma
astering the managers job begins with measurement knowing how long it takes and how much it costs to perform all your teams tasks. Six Sigma, which we will talk about in this chapter, was first used in statistics to refer to six standard deviations away from the norm. It is the de facto standard for quality and managerial excellence. There are six steps managers can take to get started in that direction, which we will talk about in this chapter. But first, how did Six Sigma come into the managers lexicon? Through the daring of the senior management in a company famous for its innovations, at a time when it found itself stalled at the dawn of a new technological era. If you dont know already, the company is Motorola. To regain its leadership position in the high-tech world, Motorola went beyond Six Sigma, adopting Plus Six Sigma as its performance standard. Motorola University was created to train employees in those principles; all managers, including the CEO, had to participate in Six Sigma training. Once that standard was institutionalized within the company, Motorola required all its vendorscompanies providing parts or pieces for Motorola productsto also participate in Motorola Universitys training courses, so they would be able to replicate the quality program and results in their respective organizations. Motorola management realized that you cant produce Plus Six Sigma products with components that dont meet the same standards. (Motorola University also established itself as a provider of services outside its subcontractor net11
work, and that was how I got to participate in a one-day briefing at the Phoenix, Arizona facility.) And what is the standard? Statistically, Plus Six Sigma means six standard deviations to the right of the median point. In manufacturing and production, it means that you can produce 1,000,000 units with no more than 3.4 defects. For management and administration, it means analyzing and failureproofing all processes so that a comparable level of certainty is achieved. A number of other companies adopted the Six Sigma standard, including GE under Jack Welch. Today, there are consulting firms competing with Motorola University to get your companys productivity and performance up to the Plus Six Sigma standard. A lot of information about this managerial concept is now in the public domain. This is important, because much of what you need to master your job is in the logical foundational elements of Plus Six Sigma:
Steps to Achieving Plus Six Sigma
1. Identify the product you create or the service you provide. 2. Identify the customers for your product or service, and determine what they consider important. 3. Identify your needs (to provide the product/service so that it satisfies the customer). 4. Define the process for doing the work. 5. Mistake-proof the process, and eliminate wasted effort. 6. Ensure continuous improvement by measuring, analyzing, and controlling the improved process.
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Whether your goal is Six Sigma or a less-demanding level of precision, this simple set of steps makes a lot of sense. If you are involved with a long run of products or ongoing services, stop what youre doing and do the following: 1. Examine the product or service as though its still in the proposal stage. With your co-workers, analyze its benefits and shortcomings. Why is the product or service necessary? What is its benefit? What makes it a good value for the price? Is your product or service something you are proud to be associated with? Something that you would want your mother or others you care about to have? If not, how can you get serious about doing something that has no meaning for you and that you cant believe in? 2. When you identify your customers, do you really understand their needs and wants and what they consider most important? Who actually makes the purchasing decisions? Whats important to that individual or group? How well do you know your client organizations and where they plan to be in a year? And do you know how their businesses might change in that period of time? 3. Is your company doing everything it can for its clients and customers, as well as possible? Is it possible to give your customers more value without raising the price? What do your co-workers think? What if you asked your clients or customers for their input? What would you do if you were able to reduce production costs? Would you pass the savings along to your clients? Or put the added value on your bottom line? Maybe there are things you can do to enhance the value of your product or service and create greater value for your customers.
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4. When was the last time you examined the workflow? Has your company adopted new technologies elsewhere that could be used in your functional group? Are there ways to shorten the production process that would yield quicker turn-around and more profit, or more service to clients without additional costs? If you were to begin anew, would you make the product in some new, more cost-effective way? Could you reconfigure your product or service now? 5. As a part of your analysis, try to identify areas where mistakes are frequent, areas where rework is required too often, and areas where the process can be smoothed and accelerated. If your processes havent been scrutinized closely for more than a year, there is a high probability that improvements are there, just waiting to be madeif only someone would look for them. 6. Do you measure everything, including how long it takes for your process to convert raw input into a product or service? If you dont measure, you cant know whether or not youre performing as well as you planned. The hardest pill for most managers to swallow is continuous process monitoring: Its relatively easy to get early improvements of ten percent or so, but getting the next five percent is a lot harder. Then, when most of the fat has been cut away from your processes, getting further reductions one percent or less is even more difficult. It requires real managerial discipline and the support of workers to continue the push for improvements. It demonstrates serious intent to manage, even when improvements are down to fractions of a percent and measurement and analysis continue just the same.
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One manufacturers representative wanted to sell an entirely new police communication system to a Texas city. I met with the mayor and the police chief, community leadersanyone who was interested, he recounted. And everyone was! But no sale. It took me eight months to discover the real decision maker, an about-to-retire captain on the midnight watch. He bought the system. Think about this mans experience for a minute, and what you can learn from it.
A friend who has an MBA is the maintenance superintendent in a company whose name you would recognize. His wife wondered why someone of his status had to work so often at night and on weekends. I was intrigued myself. So I asked him to tell me what he does. How does your day start and how do you spend your time? I asked. Well, the first thing I do is get a cup of coffee, he replied. Okay, then what? Then I go to my bosss meeting. Your boss is a vice president? My boss is VP of production. And how long does that meeting last? Sometimes the meeting lasts until noon. How can a vice president spend four hours with a bunch of down-line managers? Well, he doesnt always attend. Sometimes he has to go to his bosss meeting. And what do you and the others do when he goes to his bosss meeting? Then we wait for him to get back and give us the word. And what are your supervisors doing while youre waiting for the word? Oh, theyre waiting for me to come back and give them the word!
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What do you and your colleagues talk about while youre waiting for your boss to come back from his bosss meeting? We talk about football, hunting, stuff like that.
This is a bright man who is caught in an organizational culture that approves of working overtime (and paying for it), but puts no premium on analysis, improvement, controlling costs, or improving processes. Again, this is an honest recounting of the conversation, so can you imagine anywhere in that entire corporate system that theres anyone who focuses on competitiveness, customer needs and satisfaction, process, and performance improvement? Perhaps the imperatives that matter are socialthat is, going along to get along, being conversant about football, basketball, and baseball, and having a repertoire of titillating stories. Somewhere out there, across oceans or south of the border, there are people who never talk about frivolities at work. They work for a pittance for ten or more hours a day, and make products that Americans used to make. And perhaps the saddest thing of all is that when you remind American workers of such inequities, they just get angry at how unfair it is that all those overseas people are taking their jobs away. Being a victim is easier when you have somebody to blame.
problem: The majority of employees have no real understanding of the economics of their workplace. They do not see a clear link between their daily activities and the companys survivability, nor the link between having and acting on that kind of economic acumen and globalization. To win as a managerthat is, to master the jobyou have to close that knowledge gap. The individuals who work for you must see how their efforts connect to the ability of your corporate parent to provide all of you with job security. When you begin to look at the managers job through such a lens, it will change how you approach your job and think about the organization and its employees. Youll begin to: Share the tasks. The ham-fisted, bull-of-the-woods boss has been replaced by men and women who know how to use computers and take courses at night to complete advanced degree programs. The effective manager needs a full repertoire of technical and interpersonal skills, and the discipline of academic work can help you acquire them. Even so, many educated managers are blind to the opportunity they have to delegate some of their tasks to team members. But more than that, they fail to see that the numbers associated with their work tell stories. If the manager shares those stories with coworkers, important learning is taking place. Worker curiosity about their roles in the stories will evolve. Think about management as a process. Management is not a one-person job. Yes, one person has the title and has to sign off on documents, but when management is viewed as an ongoing, daily process that affects everyone and everything, there will be plenty of opportunities to involve others in collecting data, monitoring work in process, and using all these activities as teaching tools. Management should not be a
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secret process (though salary information may need to be kept confidential). Look at your organization. Is it just a place where you were able to get a job? A stopping-off point on the way to your ultimate job? No matter. Why not turn your stay there into a teaching/learning experience? Why not use your managerial competencies to involve others and tap into their experiences so you can collectively serve your organization more fully? And have more fun doing your job? Look at the people who report to you. Are they just doing a job? Just basically hanging out, indifferent about their responsibilities? Are they married, do they have kids, do they have aspirations to advance in the organization? Do they bowl or teach Sunday School? Are they active in civic clubs, PTAs, Scouts? What are their talents? Who do they know, and what do they know that might be useful to your group and your job as manager? How much effort on your part would it take to pull them together so they will pull together for you? Involve and train your people. Participation takes more time than simply giving orders, at least initially. Some people dont want to be anything other than a worker with no additional responsibilities. But what if you pretend that you and your co-workers are going to be together for a long time? Wouldnt it be more fun to see how fully you can involve them, and to watch individuals blossom? What have you got to lose? Numbers are your storytelling tools, and when you begin to relate the numbers you collect to the real work people do, youll be surprised at how quickly they will want to know more. Most people want to be good at what they do and to be
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part of a winning team. Youll be surprised at the extent to which even a really ragged group can improveif, that is, the manager wants to involve them, include them, partner with them. But that requires a focus other than control. Lets return to our discussion of the manager-in-themiddle exercise. Most of the participants attended these seminars without thinking about learning goals or what they would do differently back on the job. This suggests that the people to whom they reported had no expectations either, and that no one discussed learning or performance improvements with them when the training authorization was signed. They didnt expect anyone to sit down with them on their return and ask what they learned from the seminar and how it could be applied in the organization. In such circumstances, theres zero chance of a return on the companys investment in training. But the individuals involved are victims, too: They were offered new ways to demonstrate their capabilities, but were not required to approach their managers to show and tell better, faster, and cheaper ways to get work accomplished.
schedule? If schedules slip, do managers find out soon enough so they can maintain the end date? Does work move smoothly, without emergency overtime or other unplanned effort? Managing Costs. Are resources being expended as planned? Are elements of the work taking as long as planned? Will the work be completed on budget? Do resources have to be diverted from other tasks so that work can be finished on schedule and within budget? Do workers reflect concern for cost containment in their activities? Managing Quality. Are products or services meeting predetermined quality and quantity commitments? If there are discrepancies, how soon does the manager find out, so remedial action can be taken? Where do the workers fit in? Theyre resources. Depending on their skill levels and competencies, theyre valuable resources that contribute significantly to meeting targets for schedule, cost, and quality. But the fact remains that theyre just resources at the managers disposal, to be used well or used poorly. How these resources are used will determine how effectively people work and the extent to which they are committed to supporting their manager in meeting the managers targets. The fact that people are resources does not diminish them in any way. Neither does it mean that they shouldnt be involved in making decisions that affect them or get an opportunity to make decisions for or against the manager, or even to do more work or less work, depending on how theyre used and the feeling-tone or nature of their relationships with the manager. If they have positive relationships with the manager, they tend to work better and smarter.
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If they have negative feelings toward the manager, they can be predicted to do less than their best. Nearly fifty years ago, Frederic Herzberg proved that motivation revolves around how workers are used and how they are treated. Used refers to the work they are given to do. Treated refers to working conditions, pay, and other socalled hygiene factors. Herzbergs research led him to several important conclusions, which he used as the basis of what he called his motivation/hygiene theory: 1. The things that motivate people are not opposites of things that demotivate. 2. The #1 thing that satisfies people is being able to do meaningful work, not the pay they receive. 3. The #1 dissatisfier is being treated disrespectfully. 4. Workers will deliver 10 to 15 percent more productivity if managers dont make them angry. These are powerful arguments for involving people in the decisions that affect them, for giving them a chance to have a voice in how they (and their talents and energies) will be used. If managers accept this view, theyre likely to find their management styles revolutionized in ways that will lead them to higher levels of performance and effectiveness. To manage in this way presents the manager with an array of tools and opportunities for discovering truly creative and innovative ways to accomplish assigned tasks. Otherwise, managers will be limited to using only whats in the motivators failureprone bag of tricks. Motivation is an attempt to substitute your needs for theirs, buying compliance with social pressure, kind words, or
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What numbers?
Throughout this chapter, weve been talking about the importance of numbers and measuring. Where do numbers come from? Measuring schedule, cost, quality. The results of those measurements tell the story of group effectiveness and the accuracy of estimates. The more frequently you measure, the more accurate your projections will be for pending work. Regular measurements allow you to analyze trends and make evaluation discussions more useful. How close did we come to our projections? Where did we miss them and by how much? Why? These how and why questions are essential for continuous performance improvement on the part of any group doing any kind of work. You conduct periodic evaluations on job completions, dont you? American corporations and managers did not learn to value their workers as Peter Drucker predicted they would. Maybe by the second decade of this new century.
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Chapter 3
Overcoming Fear in the Workplace
he degree of trust that exists between workers and their managers plays a critical role in managerial effectiveness. This chapter looks at two powerful energies, polar opposites that predict much about productivity and other work outcomes: fear and trust. Several colleagues and I, working at a plant nestled in the mountains west of Washington, D.C., encountered the most laid back assortment of managers in our collective experience. It was not clear whether the low energy that characterized our meetings with them individually or in groups reflected their normal pace, or whether it was calculated to serve as a kind of passive resistance. Truthfully, it was like meeting with a group of good ol boys sitting on the porch of a back-country store. We were never obstructed in our datacollection efforts, but no information was ever volunteered to us, with the exception of a few occasions when someone would mumble, He aint going to like this. The he turned out to be the plant manager. He was away at various corporate meetings, so we hadnt had a chance to meet him until it was time to present our preliminary report. I was literally only minutes into our presentation when the plant manager, red in the face and screaming obscenities, jumped up from his chair, flailing his arms, and turned on me. What are you trying to do? he screamed in my face. Get me fired? I explained that our report represented raw data and had not been formatted as a formal report. I told him that the
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content was what the three of us found, and explained how we interpreted what we had seen and heard. However, I added, we could write any kind of fiction he wanted. But what we also saw in that moment were the expressions on the faces of the three good ol boy managers. They showed no surprise. Obviously, they had seen this performance before, because they worked for a man who didnt want to hear anything about problems and would not approve any actions that could be construed as remedial. Theres always a reason for behavior, and there was a reason for the plant managers over-the-top behavior: We discovered that he was a highly-educated professional who had been banished to that back-water plant after being blamed for the circumstances that led to a major industrial accident. He was desperate to avoid any further taint of malfeasance. Everyone in that plant was affected by his fear and the rages that erupted when that fear was triggered. Now the behavior of the managers we had interviewed made sense. Rather than being backwoods bumblers, they were trying to survive and keep their jobs, doing what they could to step gingerly between their bosss rages and the consultants, whose findings were certain to trigger another uncontrolled outburst. Fear like that can contaminate entire organizations, but it is more common in the workplace than you think. Everyone is vulnerable to job loss these days, and the higher up you are, the more visible and vulnerable you become. When were threatened, were programmed biologically to fight or to take flight. When flight (running away) is not an acceptable option, fight behavior (rages, firings, dishonesty, passivity, aggression, and so on) results.
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Let me give you an example of passivity as a fight response. Theres a foundry in Eastern Europe full of skilled technicians trained by the Soviets. The foundry was unable to compete economically, so their plant was selected to be saved by a gang of consultants paid by the U.S. government. The consultants strategy was a classic slash-and-burn turnaround, straight from the playbook of corporate raiders (of whom Sunbeams Chainsaw Al Dunlap was a colorful icon). The trouble was that they couldnt get the plant manager to go along with their plan. I offered to meet with him, and was escorted in by a competent translator. We had a cordial meeting in his office. I would ask a question such as, Do you have another way to protect this company, other than the one being proposed by the consultants? He would respond by talking about how beautiful the surrounding forest is in the spring, and the wild boar that could be hunted in autumn. The next day, I engaged the translator to send a letter to the plant manager. I told him that I was aware that he had not wanted to answer my questions, but perhaps we could share a cup of coffee and just talk like a couple of guys with a common interest. I received an invitation by return mail. The story that emerged made me feel embarrassed at the aggressive, one-strategy behavior of the U.S.-paid consultants. The plant manager explained why he was resisting the proposed plan. I did that in another plant. I sold off all the excess stock and old equipment and fired 300 workers. The plant manager looked away, then returned eye contact and said, One night after that, when my wife and children were at home alone, someone drove by and sprayed the house with
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a machine gun. Thank God, my family wasnt hurt, but Im not going to do that a second time. Once again, I learned how much you can discover if you just talk with people instead of trying to sell them something. The consultants were not happy to have their strategy rebuffed, and they werent happy that I obstructed their campaign. But in due course, another strategy was devised, and the foundry and its staff survived. From these recollections, its possible to abstract some general statements:
Punishment of any kind is a regressive tool, and managers should eliminate it from their behavioral repertoires. The dynamics of trust and mistrust between workers and managers are powerful determinants in how effective any manager can be. In the wake of punishing managers, some work environments will not be conducive to productivity, so some social reengineering may be required.
Managers as Enforcers
While its not politically correct to highlight it, enforcement is a shadow element in every managers job, including the need to get rid of people who cant, wont, or dont perform. With the emphasis on short-term returns on investment, some managers may not feel that they have the luxury of developmental time for individuals whose performance is marginal. Such a feeling is unlikely to be hidden from employees.
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What does a mistake represent to you, as a manager? Do you treat it as an opportunity for coaching, for mutual discovery, for strengthening a relationship, for competency development? Or does an employees error elicit from you a rebuke or a flash of anger, and embarrassment for everyone around? If you respond in any of these last three ways, you send a powerful message to workers: You dont want to make a mistake in this company! That kind of message will put everyone on notice that they had better pay attention to the work they do and do it perfectly, or there will be consequences. Is that a message you want to send? Definitely dont send this one, either: That youre scared, too. That you worry about what your manager will say if anyone fails on your watch. Why should a mistake, an error, a small failure be so upsetting? A scared manager cant command much respect and confidence, nor get people in gear to work toward higher performance. No manager wants to encourage carelessness, but the reality is that overemphasizing the costs of making a mistake leads to a loss of productivity because workers will perform routine tasks at a slower rate, just to be careful. Weve all had experiences with the over-cautious clerks who demand far more documentation than is necessary or who take far too much time with each customer while six or seven others in line seethe with frustration. Employees who are fearful of making a mistake can have a profoundly negative impact on any groups productivity. They can slow the pace of work so imperceptibly that managers cant see it until the numbers come in.
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What it comes down to, most of the time, is that workers dont trust their managers. This causes them to be guarded with each other and with outsiders. They also withhold information from managers (like you!) because they arent sure what youll do with the information they shareand they think it might come back to them in some punitive manner. Workers in such circumstances know that they have little ability to influence what happens to them on the job, so the best way to protect themselves is to withhold information from you because they wont be punished. They withhold their commitment to the organization to demonstrate that they do not trust you. Its a cycle of mistrust, and once this pattern is set, its difficult to break. Only the manager can break the cycle of mistrust and create a new culture in which workers consider themselves part of a team. They should feel comfortable communicating with each member of the team, including the manager, knowing that they have input into decisions that affect them and into what happens to them on the job. When they see that their manager truly considers them colleagues capable of making major contributions, they will feel free to commit to you, to the job, and to the company. In organizations in which every worker is committed to their managers, to their tasks, and to the company, success is a high probability, and trust is reinforced.
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Trust
Open Communication
Ability to Influence
Turning mistrust into trust is critical, but it is not a onetime event, and it wont be easy. In fact, it must be an ongoing effort. Keep in mind that you arent the first boss most of your workers have had; their experiences might be with managers who have taken advantage of or abused them, and those memories arent going to be erased. They will be alert for any sign that you are pushing them back into the mistrust cycle. That might be the last thing on your mind, but people who have been mistreated wont give you complete trust until you build a strong pattern of trust and respect. Develop a routine of positive reinforcement to keep your people tuned up for commitment to you, to each other, to the work youre all doing, and to the company that employs all of you.
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If you intend to master your job as a manager, you will have to achieve these key results, but they will elude you until you confront the issue of trust and do things to overwhelm the culture of fear.
Cultural Jujitsu
A common element in self-defense is to turn the opponents force against him. Why not use the same strategy to overwhelm the culture of fear? Turn that negative energy to positive by shifting the emphasis from failure avoidance to expectations of success, from fear to fun. Heres how to get started: Say a major piece of work for your unit is coming up, something that happens monthly or quarterly. Get your people together around a flipchart and ask, How long is it going to take us to get this project out? (Write down the date.) Whats the longest its ever taken? (Write down the number of days.) Whats the fastest its ever been done? (Write it down.) Now, looking at these numbers, you continue, whats your best guess of the actual number of days its going to take this time, and why? This creates the opportunity for team members to express opinions, to give reasons, and to disagree with each other. Thats a pretty good approximation of dialogue. You can use the same approach when there is a new task. With new work, team members experiences can be highlighted as they argue about duration and resources, and begin
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thinking about the work they will have to do. The next logical step, of course, is to get them to plot their estimate with a plan and a schedule that highlights points at which the schedule is most likely to slip, and why. As team members then move to neutralize the problematic points in the schedule, their commitment to meet or beat their own estimate is being reinforced. Probabilities? Success! The next mandatory step is for the manager to host or to initiate a celebration. There is a cynical saying that circulates in everyones organization these days: No good deed goes unpunished. That attitude has to be eliminated so that employees new and tenured, young and old know that good deeds, good work, exceptional efforts, and noteworthy support will be appreciated and rewarded in some tangible way. Without fail! If you allow good work and exceptional performance to go unnoted, you will soon see less of it. How good does it have to be to be rewarded? How about every time actual completions come in ahead of schedule and below budget! Celebratory coffee and cake breaks are cheap rewards, but they are absolutely necessary to keep the success machine in operation. When theres been a big breakthrough in the numbers (and thats what this is all about), a bigger, better celebration is required. Belt buckles, ball caps, dinner or ball-game tickets, letters of commendation, barbeques in the bosss backyard for team members and families (or a park if you live in an apartment), and so on. Use your imagination. But dont forget to ask what the people who do the work would like. Some people dont want to go to a motorcycle race or a heavy-metal concert. Or a Mahler concert, either.
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This is about energizing people at work and turning them into high-performance teams. But trust me: if you dont believe in your people and cant get the kinds of excitement and enthusiasm you want them to feel, you will not win with them. You might not fail in a literal sense, but you wont winjust like most of the managers you know havent won, becoming instead just caretakers of functions that someone, sooner or later, will outsource. At a not-too-high level of abstraction, an organization is an energy-exchange system. And more to the point, that energy is not self-renewing. There have to be people designated to crank up the volume and keep the energy flowing people who engage workers in a continuing contest with the numbers to keep the shops open and everybodys jobs secure. Maybe no one ever explained it that way, managerreader, but this is what the managers job is all about. Everything else is just an administrative footnote.
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Chapter 4
Working with Others
nce you have identified the outcomes you want to achieve, its time to consider the setting in which you are working. The trust issues discussed in the previous chapter are on the surface. What lies beneath them, however, is a swirling mass of currents deriving from recent and past history, individual performance and ability, and the volatile issues of ethnicity, gender, education, and culture. The manager must exert some control over these factors by not allowing them to rise to the surface in an out-ofcontrol and destructive manner. Diversity issues operate in every social setting, so its hard not to be aware of them. The challenge is to be attentive to potential problems and to channel the associated energy constructively to achieve positive outcomes. Job mastery requires more than simple awareness; it requires interpersonal acuity that will enable you to work with and counsel individuals when contentious issues arise, and to help them re-focus on the groups purpose, targets, and goals. When workers are performing their jobs well, theres less chance of disruption. Remember: Success is a prerequisite to security, and secure people have less need to be divisive.
A Diversity of Opinions
The issue seems to be one of what secure means. It does not mean preferential treatment, nor acceptance of requests to be treated in ways that are extra-ordinary. Having been married to an equal employment opportunity officer for the U.S.
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government, having spent hundreds of hours discussing rights, abuses, and remedial strategies (and all this following years of conducting civil rights workshops), I find myself with a bias: Specifically, that diversity protection is a divisive force in corporate life. It is important only when managers fail to provide clarity about roles, responsibilities, and standard-based expectations and are not even-handed in dealing with individuals and the issues that individuality creates. In the same way that its said that companies deserve the unions they get, companies get the diversity troubles they deserve (if only by ignoring ineptitude or malicious behavior on the part of some managers). Corporate emphasis on creating workforce diversity and giving special dispensations in order to meet diversity targets is divisive and inefficient. These things serve small groups of special-interest-seekers, and do little to enhance the strengths and capabilities of the corporation. HR managers in particular should look for knowledge, skills, and abilities and scrupulously keep their personal biases out of all hiring and promoting transactions. Diversity in the population is a fact, and it is also a fact that competencies are not evenly distributed within any population. Common sense, intelligence, fairness, and discretion are what you need to make sure that every applicant has a fair chance. If, that is, you are committed to the success of your organization. Because of my experiences, a friend asked me to meet with two women who were writing a book on diversity. That was in 1992, and their book has done very well, probably because they ignored my counsel to write about universal performance standards, giving everyone a level playing field, and teaching managers how to maintain a focus on performance. (My perspective was and is that the problem was not
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created by bigotry and bias, but by managers.) Federal, state, and local legislation has gone about as far as possible in providing employees with security from discrimination, leaving a corps of diversity specialists in well-paid roles who need a constituency for their work. Their work actually comes from managers who create the constituencies by being unfair, insensitive, or ignorant of labor and employment laws. Dont be one of them. Make certain you know your companys diversity staff, and dont be shy about using those staff-level individuals as resources. While they are in place to represent all employees, the hard facts are that their roles are shaped to provide counsel to managers and to assist in quelling outbreaks of emotionally-charged episodes. Make certain you know how to protect yourself and your staff from unfortunate episodes. Some of the information that follows probably will be helpful, but do remember: If you mishandle these issues and become a central figure in an embarrassing episode, you might find yourself all alone, out on a limb.
Group Dynamics
A vast amount of research has been done on how we behave in groups, and particularly in work groups. It might not have been a large part of your academic preparation, but no other area of our lives seems to have been so thoroughly researched. Even so, we tend to ignore all that valuable information and allow people in pivotal organizational roles to blunder along, churning up ineffective performance and excessive costs. You can blame this on going along to get along or on managerial ignorance regarding organizations as social systems, but when a manager alienates his or her group, removing the unpopular manager doesnt always solve
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the problem. Sometimes, the behaviors and attitudes necessary to put up with an ineffective boss become part of a groups norms, and those behaviors are likely to be carried forward when a new manager takes over. Even an imperfect status quo has staying power.
Mastery of the managers job means managing the dynamics of the group.
Philip Harris, author of Managing the Knowledge Culture (2005), identified ten dimensions of group life that lend themselves to analysis. Harris asserts that its a foolish manager who charges in to make changes in a group without first doing a lot of headwork and homework about the group, its history, and its members. Harriss ten dimensions are: Group background, participation patterns, communication patterns, cohesion, atmosphere, standards, procedures, goals, leadership, and alignment. In the next few pages, well show their relevance to job mastery. Group background. Some teams will come to you with a reputation for being marginal producers or difficult to manage, or for disagreeing among themselves, or otherwise causing interpersonal problems that escalate to involve managers of their own and other teams. But such teams can be turned around. A team I once worked with played a key role in a Canadian refinery, but its members were so fractious, so aggressive, and so profane that no one else wanted to work with them. The members of the team were smart, clever, and colorful, representing a half-dozen different cultures. So, given my experience in conflict resolution, I was assigned to
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work with them. Their turnaround came in a surprising way I showed them a more-effective and more personally satisfying way to view their role: Instead of thinking their job was to be on call to handle emergency repairs, they were told that their redefined role was to prevent or reduce the numbers of unscheduled outages that interrupt production. One role description was reactive, and the other proactive. Almost overnight, they made the transition from being somewhatdemonic emergency technicians to being almost-friendly internal consultants whose expertise was appreciated by the managers with whom they interfaced. Both these new consultants and their clients had to go through a period of trying on new ways of interacting with others. There will always be a transitional period, but until someone analyzed the groups history, considered the backgrounds and skills of its members, and acknowledged its contributions, the chances were good that the company would fire them all and form a new teamwhich would have been an enormous waste of talent. They just needed a little re-concepting and a small amount of skill-building to overcome their reputation. Group participation patterns. Someone skilled at observing groups can sit through a meeting and produce a map of interactions that reveals, often with startling accuracy, how the group works, who the play-makers and the reluctant participants are, which participants are alert and which ones are signaling boredom and disinterest. Sometimes the mostverbal people have the least to say thats worth hearing, while others who have to be coaxed to speak sometimes contribute the most. Effective managers learn to read the signs and orchestrate the performance of the group for maximum
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effect. When a group turns into a team, the manager will have people to help keep the group working well. This is a great indicator that the groups abilities and other strengths are important elements in achieving its goals. When managers are able to work with team members and their individual patterns of participation to bring about this kind of awareness, job mastery is close at hand. Group communication patterns. Again, a skilled observer can note who speaks to whom, who doesnt speak at all, who is not spoken to, and who speaks most often. These observations are particularly important when a group is in the start-up mode: Everyone should have a chance to speak and to be heard quickly, and those who are shy or reticent should be encouraged to speak and participate during group formation. Participation is a learned activity, easier for some than for others. Effective managers pay attention to the participation styles of individuals around the table in order to find the best way to get them to feel part of the team. As teams develop, team members often assume responsibility for gate keeping that is, for seeing that everyone has an opportunity to participate. Their willingness to do this will depend on the extent to which the manager encourages and rewards participation. But until this ability is developed, theres nothing wrong with the manager asking for input from individuals. It might take this form: Dave, you used to work in maintenance. What is the best way for us to approach them to get a higher level of support? It makes sense to ask people who know. And theres this reality: If you dont ask, you dont get!
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Group cohesion. Some groups are tight and cliquey, with a lot of in-jokes and non-verbal communication. Other groups are not nearly so bonded to one another, yet are just as effective. Such differences can depend on variables such as age, time with the company, national origin, personal style, and even religion. One manager told me that he once worked for a well-known company that, back then, didnt hire Roman Catholics, and that he and the few other Catholics hired for their specialist skills often had to share the same table in the companys cafeteria. Of course, what matters is how well group members support one another when working against short deadlines and the pressure is on. A good manager knows immediately when a group is not working together as well as it should; this kind of manager will get them to talk about this right away, asking each member for their input on why there are road blocks. Members are encouraged to share ideas on how they can pull together more effectively. You can be sure that they have answers for both questions. Maybe you as manager have some ideas, but youll get more and faster results by letting the answers come from them. Group atmosphere. Are people in the group generally open and friendly? Cool and remote? Sometimes hostile to each other and outsiders? Some groups create an unapproachable atmosphere when their members get too close, too bonded, and too self-protective. The power of the group to close out others diminishes the groups value as a unit of production. The manager has to use a good bit of skill and political capital with the group to get members to consider their behavior. Sometimes its even necessary to remove those informal leaders who benefit from being exclusionary. The personal43
ization of my team and our team can lead to stringent qualifying tests for new members, or outright rejection. A Navy SEAL officer was my escort while on a consulting assignment in Puerto Rico. We stopped by the base so he could greet some comrades. All conversation stopped when I entered the room. My escort had brief conversations with his colleagues, and after one drink, we left. As soon as I was out of the room, I could hear their conversations resume. My escort said, Dont take it personally. Thats how we are. But Ive encountered the same insider vs. outsider behavior among physicians, firefighters, and electric utility crews, with xenophobic attitudes as obvious as a barbed wire fence. Subcultures are not always the most constructive or productive, and some managers are afraid to confront them. Life at work should not be a life-or-death situation that requires such harsh boundaries! You must be prepared to use any number of interventions to modify group behavior. If you are confronted with an especially difficult situation and you are a new manager, I advise you to get counsel or intervention support from a qualified third party. Its not an act of cowardice, and its no time for an ego contest. The meter is running, and the real issues are performance and productivity. Group standards. Do they look sharp and smell good, or have group members adopted a dress code more fitting for an outlaw motorcycle gang? One team leader I encountered at a California refinery, who used to be a Marine Corps drill instructor, contrived to get matching red jackets for everyone on his team. As a former Marine, I thought that was a good move toward team discipline. Nevertheless, while they were recognizable and a bit exclusionary in their social behavior, I
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was disappointed to find that when their work was subjected to analysis, this team performed rather poorly. Looking good might be desirable, but it certainly isnt sufficient. There should be standards for attire, work habits, punctuality, and communication. Inheriting a strong group thats been together for several years does not necessarily mean that you wont have to make major changes in the way people look or behave while theyre on the job and representing the company. (If safety gear is required on the job, are workers sent home if they show up without proper equipment? If they arent, youre going to find other casual attitudes toward performance and compliance.) An effective manager knows how to get the teams standards aligned to meet current performance expectations. Group procedures. Some groups or teams have highly regimented procedures for everything they do routinely. Consider the crew on a fire truck: Their roles have been defined to support specialization in the use of the trucks equipment. Whether theyre working quickly in the face of a fire or more leisurely after the emergency, returning tools and equipment to the trucks many compartments and coiling the hose are all routines perfected through practice. By contrast, teams whose roles are not so neatly defined by the equipment they use usually gather to consider the task, when someone will say, What do you think? Where do we start? After a discussion of options, the group eases into a procedure that everyone accepts. If procedures are important, the manager might have to help the team develop the discipline for self-direction and show people how to shape or reshape procedures to fit current tasks. Sometimes, all thats really needed is permission, stated explicitly.
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Group goals. One of a managers key jobs is to align personal and group goals with corporate goals so that everyone can work together to achieve a small collection of goals. Its a nice ideal, but its sometimes difficult to achieve because teams do have their drawbacks. They tend to be competitive more than collaborative, and sometimes that puts teamwork in opposition to corporate goals. This is one of the reasons why its so important to focus on goals, and why its necessary for managers to pay attention to the goal-striving of teams. In truth, work can be repetitive and boring; a dull workday brightens up considerably with a little oneupmanship that embarrasses another team. Teams and welltrained work groups are powerful social mechanisms, but the manager needs to keep that power focused. Group leadership. This is a perennial problem for managers, because even though the team or group reports to a manager, it is not unheard of for competition to arise between a teams leaders and the designated manager. It might be subtle at first, but team members will soon sense the struggle. If it becomes a contest, a senior manager or someone else in authority will have to step in, and someone will lose. Sometimes strong teams with strong leaders can defeat a managereven a good one. I observed something like this in the Marine Corps. A fellow candidate in the officer candidate school, a handsome and almost charismatic young man, had obvious leadership qualities and was someone to whom people just naturally gravitated. Only 44 percent of the candidates who began that class were commissioned, but that young man was the first one to be removed from consideration. The drill instructors didnt want anyone who could compete with them for atten46
tion! Something similar was played out in a small northern California bank I did some project management work for. The new president, an outsider, found himself with an embittered senior manager who had expected to become president and who had the allegiance of most of the other managers. At the second executive staff meeting, the bitter man was absent. The president said, You will notice that Larry is not with us. I was elected president of this bank by the board of directors, and I will succeed in that role with or without your support. But it will be more fun for all of us if its with your support. And thats how it turned out. They had fun, they made money, and they turned a local bank into a regional competitor that produced big rewards for stockholdersonce competition within the management team was resolved. Group alignments. Team members (and people in general) can be fluid in their allegiances. This is apparent in workplaces when, say, formerly isolated members are suddenly brought into one clique or another during lunch breaks. Like teenage infatuations, these cliques usually dont last. Stability in productive groups comes with success as leadership problems get resolved and the emphasis shifts from being noticed to being effective. Any group with two or more informal leaders is fortunate: If the group drifts off task and the goal focus slips, one of the leaders will inevitably notice and get everyone back on track. The effective manager is always aware that this is happening, but he or she doesnt get involved; it should be enough to tell the teams informal leaders what is going on. Groups often work out alignment problems by themselves.
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All ten of these factors must be addressed if you truly want to master the job of manager, as effective managers will readily tell you. The more authoritarian your management style, however, the less likely it is that you will be troubled by the way the group interactsbut this presents a dilemma because unless you deal with the groups interactions, you will not achieve the productivity of which your people are capable. A successful manager deals with messy people problems! Managers who understand people know that there will be small interruptions on the long climb to record performance. Fish were the last to discover water, and managers all too often are the last to discover that we all exist and work and succeed in a sea of social dynamics.
Joe droned on and on. After the second blocking episode, I pointed out what Joe was doing to the group and told them that they were behaving as though they were powerless. Despite my comments, the committee members and I all were stunned to see Joe raise his right hand, forefinger pointed to the ceiling, and begin to preach again: But God said. Before he could proceed with another sermonette, I interrupted. Joe, your need to be in control is killing this group. Please do everyone a favor. Stay on the subject, or leave. Joe was startled, but when he looked around and found no support from his friends, he left. Half the people in the room wanted to chase Joe, but I asked them to remain seated for a few minutes so we could take a look at what they had just experienced. It was odd to me that among a dozen accomplished business people and civic leaders, no one had felt free to ask Joe to stop monopolizing so that they, collectively, could be effective. I asked them to consider that fact and what it predicted about their ability to be successful as a community. Then I called for a coffee break and sat in the back of the room for the rest of the evening. Several months later, there was a groundbreaking celebration for the new parish house. Removing Joe as an obstacle was uncomfortable for committee members, steeped as they were in religious principles about tolerance and inclusion. But getting Joe out of their way set them free to achieve their goal. Their release was made possible by a classic intervention. The technique is there for you to find in the literature or in an academic course or training program; do a little research and add it to your toolkit. If you want to test some of your leadership skills, there are many volunteer and non-governmental organizations that could use you as a consultant. Take advantage of the opportu49
nity to look at group interaction and hone your skills in a place where your career isnt on the line. Of particular interest (and a bit of a challenge) is the fact that volunteers generally dont respond to authority very well. Instead of giving orders, you will probably have to learn to work with peopleeven the difficult ones (trust me on this). It will be a humbling but important learning experience.
can figure out what he or she wants from you or help solve a continuing problem or do something that will give your boss a political boost, you will earn your managers support and be free to engage in the developmental activities that produce the results you were hired to achieve. New managers dont usually get this piece of advice, but its wise counsel! It may be the key to your ability to get the other success-producing ideas in this guide to work for you. Here are a couple of suggestions: Maybe your boss has a strong commitment to equal employment issues and making sure that minority employees get fair treatment. If so, it might be an opportunity to do some strategic positioning so that one of your own minority employees gets to lead a special, highprofile project team or otherwise demonstrate his or her competencies. Choosing one person among several for a special assignment generally involves subjective decisions, and knowing whats important to your boss is one of the factors that will have to be considered. And then, its not immoral to make a decision that you know will please your boss. Suppose your boss is passionate about cost-reduction. Figure out ways to demonstrate that your team is saving money for the company. Or maybe your boss is a fiend about punctuality: You could consider holding five-minute stand-up meetings that begin first thing in the morning. That way, your people are not only at work on time, but already into their work. Consider holding a brief meeting each morning that covers what didnt happen yesterday that should have; what wont happen today that was scheduled; and whats the plan to get back on schedule and budget.
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This not only starts the day with a sharp task focus, but it will keep everyones eye on schedules, costs, and quality. One federal government manager in San Francisco actually had several stand-up tables, such as you might see in a coffee shop, installed in his office for early morning coffee and brief discussions about schedules, problems, and opportunities. A Canadian manager I worked with sometimes held his staff meetings in a room without chairs. His meetings were always short.
Remember, the managers job is just a role someone has to fill, so put some panache into it, and get noticed!
If you watch and listen to your manager, you will be able to identify his or her hot buttons. Pictures on the office wall or the bosss desk tell you something about their interests. If conversations are peppered with golf or football analogies, that will tell you something else. If the boss is a fitness freak or an avid bicyclist, youve discovered a gold mine of ways to please. Once you know your bosss interests, look for related magazine articles to pass along. Attach a note that says something like, In case you didnt see this and initial it not every day, but often enough to let the boss know that youre an unusually thoughtful person. After some time, the boss will start to think of you as a particularly observant and reliable individual. That can only be to your benefit. Not everyone will like these suggestions, but the reality is that there are a lot of competent people who do their jobs well enough who never get promoted. Nothing suggested here is dishonest, dishonorable, or sleazy; its just a matter of paying
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attention to the people who are important in your life (one of whom certainly is your boss). Remember, no matter how good you are in your role, other people will decide whether or not you get more money or get promoted or are otherwise recognized. It makes sense to make it easy for those people to see why youre deserving. And now a word about getting along with the people you work with in your job as a manager. Beyond your direct reports, there is a complex network of relationships you need to create and maintain, and your initiative here is really important. People who are well-liked seem to have more career success than those who arent. This is not to say that being popular is more important than being effective, but if you can be both popular and competent, why not? Getting along with people at every level is far more important in corporate advancement than we give it credit for. It might make a lot of difference in how your career plays out. Yes, youre in a paid role, but youre expected to perform in a highly social environment in which interpersonal skills are no less important than your technical skills. Dont underestimate the power of savoir faire, good manners, sincerity, and being thoughtful and considerate. It will keep you afloat in the wash of office society. Now, how well do you know the following people, and what have you done for them lately? Office administrator. Most often, this is a woman, but whoever is in this role knows where all the gold is buried. You really need to have an active and positive relationship with her. Begin with cordial greetings and be sure to express appreciation for even routine distribution of office informa53
tion. When appropriate, provide compliments. Dont waste her time, but let her know that shes prominent on your radar screen. [Note: If youre a guy, you probably have a lot to learn about paying attention to the people around youhair styles, hair color, new clothes, engagement rings, no rings, black eyes, broken arms, a new limp, vacations, illnesses, marriages, babies. Theres a story behind each of these, and most people are willing to share theirs with you or at least will appreciate the fact that you noticed. That appreciation often results in a positive return to you, sometimes when you least expect it and when it will really pay off.] HR manager. If you arent in HR, theres a lot you dont know about laws and company policies regarding selecting, disciplining, promoting, firing, and rewarding your direct reports. Why make a potentially costly mistake when information you may need is available, a phone call or short walk away? IT manager. Self-explanatory. Diversity manager. This is an important person in your professional life, since there are so many ways to get dirty in this arena. If you hear any suggestion of inappropriate behavior among members of your staff, its a good idea to invite the diversity manager to make a presentation at a staff meeting or a meeting you convene for that express purpose. The presentation does not have to be about alleged wrongdoing on anyones part, but an occasional brief refresher
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course on rules and roles can prevent a rumor from becoming a responsibility that you must handle. Maintenance manager. Most office air conditioning and heating systems can be tweaked to resolve complaints that its too cold or too hot, or theres not enough fresh air. Taking care of your people includes responding to such issues, and generally thats not something you can or should do yourself. Managers in other functional groups. There are always opportunities for cooperation and mutual support (sometimes for advancement, but always for information about whats going on in the larger organization). Over time, you create a resource network of people with skills and knowledge you dont have who can help you. Also, you become more valuable to your manager when you have problem-solving or information resources. Such referrals often lead to jobenriching temporary assignments for yourself and others. Skilled individuals across the organization. Regardless of their hierarchical level, its always beneficial to know smart people. Maybe you connect because of outside interests (biking, hiking, etc.) or because you worked together on a project team, but the more people you know and the more people who know you, the more likely you are to hear things of value and the more likely you will get specialized help when you need it. And do remember that out-of-channels information can sometimes give you a competitive edge; many times, its the unexpected call from someone in your network that provides you with a breakthrough opportunity. But also keep in mind this question: Why should anyone give you a heads-up call? It really depends on whether or not you have earned it.
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Depending on your organization and the nature of the work you do, there may be others you need to know. But keep in mind that your organization is a social system, a neighborhood, a community of people with a common economic interest: The more people you know and the more you know about the company and its work, the more valuable you become as your leadership potential is enriched by your knowledge.
In Closing
The significance of two of my own life lessons was confirmed one day at lunch when I was interviewing the general manager of one of Americas finest hotels. The first lesson is that people are always important. Heres the way this fine hotel manager put it: This is an equal opportunity environment. Every employee has an equal opportunity to displease a guest and drive revenue out of the house. No employee and no task is unimportant. The second lesson is that no detail is too small to be overlooked. If you choose to overlook it, you erode your standards. As we walked the few meters from his office to the dining room, this same hotel manager spotted a handprint on the glass door into the lobby, some twenty meters away, and dispatched a bellman to clean it. Then, as we were seated by the hostess, he suggested that she change her apron as there was a small spot down in one corner. And while youre at it, he said, theres a smudge on that mirror over there. Could you find someone to take care of that? I had to look carefully to see the offending spots, both on the apron and on the mirror.
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With the exception of a medical setting, I have never experienced managing at such a high level of detail. But as much as the detail was a surprise, I was equally impressed by the fact that my host spotted these discrepancies while escorting and chatting with me. That takes a practiced eye and a level of vigilance that can come only from keeping the standards his hotel must meet constantly in the front of his mind. For some of our guests, he said, our best room may represent a reduction in the quality of their life, and at our rates, guests should not be confronted with substandard performance. We got through the lunch without his mentioning further discrepancies. Intentional or not, he made a powerful impression about the importance of managing at high levels of detail. A similar story came from a friend who, as a high school dropout, was fortunate to be hired as a busboy in one of San Franciscos most prestigious restaurants. My first lesson, he remembered, was learning how to set a table, and it took weeks for me to be able to set the entire dining room without something in my performance being criticized, some misalignment of a knife, a fork, or a glass. Im not talking about inches, he said. Im talking millimeters! My friend learned and succeeded, and was hired away when he was twenty-one into an impressive and lucrative corporate role. But his success in the restaurant and in subsequent roles began, he said, the day he learned to set a table to his mentors satisfaction. The really important point Im trying to make in these stories if you want to master your job as a manager is not the importance of discipline, as impressive as that is, but that there are managers who insist that standards be observed in all things and at all times. Your job in
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such situations is never secure until performance routinely complies with really precise standards. I can only imagine that where you work it would be difficult to discipline employees to perform against those stringent standards. But isnt that what the companies that have adopted the Six Sigma standard are doing? Getting people to perform at previously unimagined standards, and to do it routinely? If everyone understands that Six Sigma performance represents job security and works with and for managers who know the standards and are involved in compliance, maybe it wont be so difficult. All the stuff about treating people well and building trust is just foundation material. Once those concepts are in place, you can really start managing. In Part Two, we will focus more tightly on the tools and skills required to permit you to manage at increasingly precise levels of detail, and indeed to master the managers job.
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Chapter 5
The Whole Ball of Wax
or every individual who becomes a manager and gets promoted up the corporate ladder, there are countless others who dont get the opportunity because one or several key competencies are missing or are not reflected in their performance. The managers role is complex, as we will illustrate in this short chapter. Managers must possess a host of competencies, as well as the technical skills specific to their professional or academic discipline. Several years ago, a client and I were trying to find a way to make the point to his managers that there is much more to management than timekeeping and task completion. Our notes turned into sketches and a final graphic illustration encompassing nearly forty subjects. Thats a lot of major and subordinate competencies for anyone to master! Its almost intimidating, until you realize that there are a lot of interconnections among the elements. Knowing about one thing leads you to having to know (or wanting to know) more about something else within the circle. Pretty soon, you find yourself working on every element because you understand the role each one plays in managing effectively. There are a lot of factors critical or related to your success that do not appear within the ball of wax in our illustration, such as organizational politics, your own political sensitivity and skill, career development for larger roles or work in global organizations, and current events that can impact your industry or organization. And dont forget the psychology of motivation and commitment, interactions
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within and between groups, and the important observations that can be made through the filters provided by cultural anthropology. Then, when you think about the global economy, there are a host of cross-cultural issues to consider, too. So, mastering the job of manager isnt a quick fix: Its a process that you will have to shape. The best strategy might be to take on the subject in bite-sized increments. Over time, you will find yourself having flashes of awareness that you are developing new managerial competencies; you will become more sure-footed, more knowledgeable, more effective, more intuitive, and more confident about the actions and decisions youll be making.
WHAT BUSINESS ARE WE IN?
EX PE HIP CT RS MISSION /IN E F S D I SP N P A A EC TE NC LE S T I N A LP IO T L C STRATEGIC PLANNING A A NN ING T A S R GET CO TIVE S S U J EC ON DIS & C NSEL CTI ION) OB N OA I C N A T Routine Replication S CHI G IP S D IA LI NG ME of Processes and AL N (RE O Procedures for Profit
REPETITIVE TASKS
& NS T ISIOEMEN C E D OLV INV FUN CT
SERVICE REQUEST
KSAOs
ETHICS
IES ILIT SIB RE N ION PO & A WARD S RES WA ROLES S RDS PLA IN G T NNI E G NG BUD SCHEDULING
W DIA OR G R KF AM LO W
IN RA
G IN
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One thing to consider in particular: Every organization needs people with different and specific competencies to help shape the organization and to work together to create and sustain a stable, healthy environment needed to master any job. As you consider The Whole Ball of Wax, think about your colleagues in other areas of the organization and the skills and competencies they must have to be effective in their roles. Try to see how they complement your own abilities and how you can help one another collaborate more effectively. Lets look at some of the terms used in the illustration: What business are we in? This is the most important question a manager can ask. People who have worked in the same place for many years do not respond the same way to that question. They tend to respond by saying what they do, such as accounting or purchasing, instead of, say, Were in the business of providing services to medical rehabilitation and custodial institutions. Whats your organizations mission statement? Its really difficult to build an effective organization until everyone knows, understands, and agrees with the mission statement. Service request refers to the form used to request service. It is analogous to a sales order, providing specifics about the kind of service requested and its level of urgency. As service requests are retired, they can be used to record worker time expended, materials used, and costs. When the same or a similar repair or action (routine maintenance) is required, that information, recorded in a work package, will be valuable in scheduling and budgeting.
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Manage performance, not people. This is a key concept: If you try to manage people, you cannot oversee the activities of more than a few (seven subordinates is said to be the optimum span of control). But if you manage the performance of individuals and groups by collecting and analyzing information, you can manage the activities of many people. Consider the manager of a department store who gets information each morning about the previous days performance of thirty or more departments (automotive, lingerie, white goods, shoes, etc.). This management by exception allows the manager to zero in on those departments and managers where targets are not being met. Most department managers do not need daily supervision, but the senior manager must make sure contacts with department managers or other employees are positive more often than corrective, adversarial, biased, or negative. Knowledge, skills, and abilities. These characteristics needed for competent performance are the know and knowhow to do competencies used to define requirements for specific jobs or positions. Competencies are increasingly the currency of job security and advancement, though defining them is still a work in progress in many organizations. Repetitive tasks. Some part of all work is routine, and it is those repetitive tasks that give managers an opportunity to demonstrate that routines can be performed in the most costeffective manner, with time required and costs involved declining with subsequent repetitions. Further, for more effective utilization of resources (scheduling), its necessary to know all the details about the tasks within your work processes. This is knowledge that takes time to acquireusually
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months. They might appear to be a deadening influence, but repetitive routines are required for organizational effectiveness and stability. Such routines are the binding agents of organizations, the matrix that supports the money-making activities with which most readers of this guide are associated. The tasks and responsibilities seem intimidating, but they can be grouped into three chief managerial competencies. Here they are again:
Setting Goals and Standards Planning Work and Scheduling Resources Managing Time and Prioritizing
The rest of the book will focus on these three competencies. Keep in mind that these competencies are considered significant and extremely important because nearly 100,000 managers in some of Americas largest and best-known companies identified them as being the most important parts of the managers job.
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Chapter 6
Setting Goals and Standards
efore we delve into the weighty subject of goal-setting, consider these few words about standards: Standards make excellence possible and attainable. They put the steel into goals. The higher the standards, the more evident the competence of organizations and workers becomes. When Motorola determined back in the mid-1980s that it could not remain a world-class competitor unless it elevated its manufacturing standards, it reversed its fortunes and launched a quality and management revolution. It was a bold move, based on the vision of Motorolas president at the time, Bob Galvin. Consider such popular advertising claims as world leader in its class and #1 in our industry. What do these slogans communicate? To employees, such terms represent job security and the possibility of higher take-home pay or expanded benefits. To consumers, such terms imply that the product is of undeniable quality. Thats the power of brandsthey can promise quality. What images are invoked by the names Sony, Kleenex, Timex, Rolex, Armani, and Adidas?
point. But the word goal is seriously misused: Its frequently attached to such trivial and short-term outcomes as completing a report or compiling project costs. To cast goals in a more appropriate context, consider this illustration:
Goal #1
Objective A
Objective B
Objective C
Target
Target
Target
Target
Target
Target
Goals sit at the top of a hierarchy of achievements, accomplishments, or completions. When the organization establishes a goal, it must then define the steps that have to be taken to achieve the goal, and then set up a structure so that progress can be monitored on a regular basis. The departments and divisions within the organization must be vectored toward or aligned with the goal. Division A will have specific objectives to work toward, as will Divisions B and C. Thus, all the steps toward achieving the goal can be covered. The goal is a somewhat broad intention. The steps toward achievement can be considered objectivesspecific to-do lists of accomplishments that together allow you to reach the goal. Then, for each objective, there are subordinate collections of work that have to be performed: targets. Targets are
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near-term assignmentspoints at which smaller increments of work will be completed. Objectives and targets are milestones in a project plan. In terms of time, goals might be a year or two ahead, objectives 6 to 12 months ahead, and targets up to 90 days. But even if you say, Our goal for this year is youll need to set some intermediate points between now and twelve months ahead so you can assess progress, realign resources, and make sure teams and individuals are all focused on the goal. But more importantly, you need some places where you can stop the action long enough to tell the people doing the work how well or how poorly theyre progressing. A year is a long time to wait for feedback, and feedback at that late date is essentially useless as a basis for learning or improvement. (Remember this the next time you hear annual performance reviews being discussed, and you will understand why workers have always resented them.) Periodic checks or reviews of progress are absolutely necessary to support serious goal-seeking. They can help you identify errors or mistakes that will be costly or impossible to remedy further along in the process.
having them compete with core-business goals for managements attention. Goals, objectives, and targets all must be tangible, achievable, and measurable. Think in terms of whats to be done, how much or how many, and when the results will be seen. Here are some examples:
Reduce lost-time accidents to no more than one per quarter, beginning immediately. Increase customer sales calls from 5 per day to 8 per day throughout each week of the fall quarter. Reduce cost-per-unit from 25 cents to 21 cents within the next 90 days with no loss in quality or quantity. Reduce customer complaints from 19 per month to no more than 5 per month within the next 60 days. Reduce sick days in this division by at least 15 percent over the next six months. Provide a year-end dividend of at least 33 cents per share for all Class A shareholders.
Each of these statements of intent can serve as a goal or an objective. Even the year-end-dividend can be an objective used to demonstrate a positive result from restructuring. Likewise, to turn any of these statements of intent into a reality will require specific actions, efforts, and results by designated individuals or groups, and if results are not realized, individuals should be held accountable. Objectives tend to be interlinked as you move down through the organization. Here are statements that suggest such linking:
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Sales cannot exceed the amount that can be produced. Receipt of products cannot be guaranteed without first reviewing existing commitments and inventories. On-time, cost-effective deliveries to customers cannot be maintained without strict attention to vehicle maintenance requirements and driver retention programs. Productivity goals cannot be met unless equipment maintenance schedules are adhered to and vendor deliveries are managed. Rigorous attention to scheduling, controlling, and anticipating all resource variables must be made a priority.
several pages, and may include bullet points or other attention-getting devices. The development of such a statement is a worthwhile exercise: It provides focus, and brings to light interesting misperceptions of functions and roles. I was working at one point in my career with the racially mixed staff of a citys low-income housing department. They had an acrimonious relationship with the city council, which the staff attributed to racism among council members. However, it turned out that the entire staff, from the director down to clerical workers, were so focused on the citizens they served that they never realized that their primary client was the city council. This amazing oversight was discovered when I assisted them in developing a map of their divisions workflow. When the group proudly presented their work-flow map (the first time they had ever participated in such a process) and described their work step by step, I asked the question that changed their perception of what they did, why, and for whom: Wheres the city council in your map? What followed was a subtle discussion of how city governments are organized. Their department was finally put in a proper perspective. Even the most reluctant of them had to admit that they helped create the hostile relationship with the city council. Therefore, when they crafted their mission statement, they defined themselves as representatives of the city (and by implication, the city council) in delivering their services. Let me assure you that these were cause-oriented people who envisioned themselves as doing really important work on behalf of disadvantaged clients. But as is so often the case with true believers, their sense of themselves and their mission became distorted. In a similar case, I worked one
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summer with a group of dedicated educators, preparing them for their new roles as aides to classroom teachers in mainstreaming or integrating severely handicapped children into ordinary classrooms. After watching and listening to them for several days, I gave them an exercise to perform individually, and then I compiled their responses. The task?
Rate yourself and your mission among the other ten employee groups in the school.
The result? They ranked themselves second only to the school principal! We had reached a point at which some serious learning could take place. I asked them this question:
How do you think youre going to be received by teachers, psychologists, assistant principals, and others in the system whose support you must have in order to succeed, if you think of yourselves and your roles as more important than theirs?
You cannot hold such self-perceptions without communicating them, and that will kill the program. Perhaps these are extreme examples, but I am including them here to suggest to you the importance of missions to the success of individuals, programs, and organizations. Here are some mission statements to consider if you havent already drafted your own: A municipally-owned electric utility: To provide reliable, cost-effective electric service to our customer/owners. An up-market hotel: To serve our customers and guests in a manner consistent with the highest quality of life.
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The U. S. Central Intelligence Agency: We are the eyes and ears of the nation and at times its hidden hand. We accomplish this mission by:
Collecting the intelligence that matters. Providing relevant, timely, and objective allsource analysis. Conducting covert action at the direction of the President to preempt threats or achieve United States policy objectives.
As you can see, companies and institutions use different styles in crafting mission statements explaining why they exist and what their roles and purposes are. Mission statements are almost always framed and displayed throughout the organization to help employees remember what business they are in, and many even have their mission statement printed on wallet-sized cards that employees can carry. But a caution: Dont underestimate how difficult it is to develop a mission statement. Be sure to involve representative employees in the drafting process; they not only bring input from across the organization, but they also legitimize the mission statement for those who were not involved. Once the mission statement has been drafted and agreed upon, top management has to go out there and promote it as well as see that it is included in every public relations and marketing document. Otherwise, its just a slogan. The mission statement should be a performance driver.
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All work is measurable against established standards. No work or worker is less important than any other. Everyone knows that recognition comes to those who earn it.
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When each individual is a necessary part of the whole, when the failed performance of one jeopardizes the success of the rest, and when there is no one on the company payroll who does not have useful and meaningful work to do (however menial it might seem), bosses and workers can sit down over coffee or a beer and solve problems. This is recognition that there are realistic divisions of labor, talent, skills, abilities, knowledge, and an understanding of the street value of ones own bag of tricks. At this point, its possible to abstract some principles regarding standards:
The work of the organizationserving customers or clientsis the first priority. Everything else is secondary. Its necessary to use a correct-it-here-and-now approach to get people to maintain performance standards. When performance standards are clearly defined, anyone who has necessary qualifications and wants to learn and perform can do so. Every employee must not only know how to do things, but why they should be done. Standards can be maintained if every worker knows the organizations business, market, and preferred customers AND makes sure that every action and every decision reflects these things.
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Deviation from standards can be discovered quickly when work is managed at high levels of detail. Maintaining standards requires 100% utilization of resources for cost-effective performance. Reward those who model the standards of behavior you want to see replicated by all employees.
We live in a world of standards, but too often theyre implied rather than expressed. Lets use so-called Casual Fridays as an example. Some people will fall short of meeting even relaxed standards if they dont have written or stated guidelines that describe appropriate attire. But even when standards are posted, sometimes theyre ignored. Its the managers job to deal with those situations. In the egalitarian traditions that have contributed so much to American life, there is generous support for the underdog and for the loyal but never-quite-successful employee. Sometimes managers overlook performance deficiencies because of the dogged effort that almost produces satisfactory (up-to-standard) performance. Such compassion is commendable, but its misplaced. Theres no room in contemporary organizations for people who cannot performthat is, who do not meet established standards, consistently and without great effort. When fully satisfactory performance cannot be depended upon, your organization loses the confidence that goals will be achieved without a last-minute scramble for recovery. Thats hard on workers and managers, but also damages the organizations reputation. Standards are your criteria for performance. They separate okay from not good enough, and thus provide ways for managers to discuss marginal performance with direct
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reports. Often more implicit than explicit, standards define the cultures of organizations and work groups. Years ago, the standard attire for IBMs male employees was a dark suit, white shirt, and a conservative tie. Even the handicapped men who distributed interoffice mail wore suits and ties. This visible sign of conformity existed within a context of cultural identifiers, from cars and homes to entire neighborhoods associated with ones place in the hierarchy (not unlike the social stratification often associated with military organizations). Today, such conformity is alluded to in statements of corporate values or standards about the things we believe and the ways we treat employees, clients/customers, and our host communities.
spot outsiders in any group is to look at behavior (including manner of dress) that does not conform to local practice. In a work setting, learning how to fit in and contribute should not be a guessing game! Delay in bringing new people fully into a work group is a waste of resources; managers need to make sure necessary standards are in place and adhered to regarding new employee orientation and anything else thats important. In an ideal environment, standards and rules would be constructed along the lines that anything not prohibited is permitted. Most organizations have not achieved that ideal, however. In the meantime, its useful to remember that most people perform best in situations of relatively high structurethat is, where people agree on routines that can be easily mastered for repetitive activities and on making sure there is no What do I do next? uncertainty to frustrate new workers. It does not mean denying or limiting decisionmaking prerogatives. (Quite the opposite is intended.) However, if youre going to involve others in making decisions that affect them, make sure the decisions are substantive and that they draw on participants work experience and intelligence. Mastering the managers job means, in large measure, making it easy for members of work groups to do the right things in the right ways at the right times. Begin improving performance by setting clear goals, creating clear standards for performance, and making sure everyone gets it. Then coach people, especially new hires, and measure progress. The next chapters will outline the remaining two competencies you must master if you want to master the managers job.
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Chapter 7
Planning Work and Scheduling Resources
lanning work and scheduling resources are surely the backbone competencies of management, because a manager is responsible for organizing people to do things in some kind of systematic, predictable way. Thats what planning is supposed to offeran orderly sequence of activities that will allow tasks to be completed at a designated time. Too often, planning takes a back seat to action, despite the fact that intelligent action requires that you have a map before you can plan a trip. Thats why one of the first things a manager should do when taking over a new group is to map its work processes, and to confirm the maps accuracy with the people who actually do the work. Then, and arguably only then, planning pays predictable dividends.
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panys primary business: removing hydrocarbon contamination from ground water and soil. What may be of most interest to you is that I have no understanding of soil mechanics or hydrogeology, but I did have some experience with mapping, and I was lucky to enlist the support of two really sharp geologists/project managers. The problem I set out to solve emerged after clients started complaining that reports prepared in different offices of the same company did not conform to a single standard. Of course, defensive project managers said the cause was the fact that eight or nine different remediation techniques were being used in site clean-ups and there were many local variables, which made a standard report impossible. Still, I knew there was a solution, so I undertook this small project on my own initiative (which is why the original mapping was done in my home on a Saturday morning.) Im including these details with the hope that my experience encourages you to replicate these steps to solve problems where you work. As I read project reports, visited remediation sites, and listened to conversations among the technicians, I became aware of three important facts: 1. The choice of techniques to be used to separate hydrocarbons from soil or water did not influence the basic steps in managing a remediation project. 2. There was no standard protocol for managing projects within the company, so project managers did what theyd seen others do. 3. Therefore, non-standard reports to clients was a logical result. (Note: Reports verifying return to safe use levels of water or soil was the product of the com80
panys work. Reports were legal documents, required by local governments to justify issuing permits to develop previously-contaminated property.) The next step was to present my ideas to people who understood the mechanics and science of the work. That was done over lunch on a Friday. We created the map the next morning. The rest of the story is described above. There are some important points in this discussion about the mapping process and the subsequent impact: 1. Anyone who knows the work, with a little help from friends, can do such mapping in hours. 2. Its necessary to have your map validated by others who know the work and the organization. 3. Your map proves that you understand the work to be accomplished and have defined the way the work will proceed, from start to completion. 4. Your map is a powerful signal that you are serious about managing the work, not just the workers. 5. If there are project delays, you can pinpoint the place(s) in the workflow where the delays occurred. If skill gaps are involved, you can provide shortinterval remedial training (or make corrections if theres a structural or information-sharing problem). 6. If someone suggests subsequent work-process modifications, those changes can be considered in terms of impact on the total flow.
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7. The map provides a way to orient new people to how the groups work is done, explains how each person fits into the flow, and how delays at any point in the flow can impact the scheduled completion date. 8. It facilitates planning and scheduling, because youll want to continuously monitor the duration of each activity and the time required to make decisions in order to make sure that workers are getting the work done effectively. Further, if work is delayed because decisions are not being made on time or because theres a political or a competence problem, youll be able to address the problem immediately. 9. The work-flow diagram will help you make sure that no steps are overlooked when you begin planning, scheduling, and budgeting new projects. 10. Mapping and planning should be done at a high level of detail. The more steps or activities you include, the more detail youll need. The more visible your work processes become, the greater your ability to monitor and improve times and costs associated with each task and sub-task. 11. It will be easier to ensure that no steps in the process are overlooked when planning, scheduling, and budgeting for new projects (and this does happen, as will be illustrated below). Pitifully few managers take time to do this kind of planning, yet it practically assures success at mastering the managers job.
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Work-Flow Planning
Now that weve made a case for mapping your organizations work flow, lets delve into more detail about the process, beginning with a simple definition: A plan is a description of the steps to be taken to get from one point to another, from here and now to there and then. A plan should be an ideal representation of how you want things to be. Lay out the work the way it ought to happen, even when you know that the ideal plan isnt going to work, so you dont overlook anything. Plan like you mean it! (When you have to change your plan, theres another process that kicks in at that point. Its called scheduling.) A plan can be written, but thats cumbersome. Better it should be a kind of map or chart that shows the activities/steps in relationship to each other. Better still is a sequence of activities connected across a page, with a timeline across the bottom of the page so you can see time and activities together. (The famous Gantt chart, invented about 1905, was important because it used horizontal lines to show times alongside a vertical list of activities. This was the first time that tasks and times were demonstrated on the same piece of paper.) Gantt charts are still used and are considered generally effective. Look at charts and graphs in publications and check your software programs for sample project-task lists. A planning document is most helpful when it depicts a left-to-right network of two or more chains of activities constrained by fencesthat is, points at which no further work can be done until activities on the constrained chains have been completed. It will look like this:
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B A C Time / / / / / D
This small graph shows several things: 1. Neither activity B nor C can begin until Activity A is complete. 2. Activities B and C can start at the same time. 3. Activity B does not have to start at the same time as Activity C, which takes twice as long. Therefore, B can start when C is fifty percent complete. (The extra time B has is called float since the activity can float along to permit optimal resource scheduling, just as long as it completes at the same time or sooner than Activity C). 4. Activity D cannot begin until both Activities B and C are complete. 5. The chain A, C, D is the critical path (the shortest path through the network). This approach to planning, known as the precedence method, is used universally because its really straightforward, and the logic is compellingly simple. In their relationship to one another, activities can relate to other activities in only one of three ways: Some activities must precede other
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activities (A must precede activities B and C); some activities must follow other activities (D must follow activities B and C); or some activities can be in process at the same time (B and C can go on concurrently). Thats it! Thats all the options there are, whether youre dealing with 30 activities, 300 activities, or 3,000 activities. Paperwork projects, power plant projects, new product introductionsthe logic is the same. Want to plan a wedding? The logic is the same, even in project-management software programs. (For more information on this approach to planning, track down the Mulvaney book listed under Recommended Reading in the back of the book.)
Getting Started
One of the easiest approaches to creating a workflow diagram is to use flipchart paper and Post-it notes. Its a good way to allow others to participate in crafting the plan, because if theres discussion about more-logical steps, the sticky notes can be rearranged. Instead of arguing in abstract terms, you can say, Look, if we do it this way, we can save time and make three other steps unnecessary. This is participation at its besthands on and people off their butts and on their feet, involved! Other than being able to move them around on flipchart paper, whats so magic about sticky notes? They can represent cards printed in this format, and they are easily replaced if you want different text.
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Activity #:
Resource:
Activity description:
Duration:
Person hours:
Imagine that every one of the sticky notes is formatted this way:
Top left: Activity number (your numbering convention, or assigned by computer) Top right: Resource (Who will do the work? Carpenters? Programmers?) Center: Activity description (a simple task description of about four or five words) Lower right: Number of resource hours Lower left: Duration (How long will this activity take, start-to-complete?)
With this kind of information, you can manage. If you intend to put your plan on a computer using project-management software, this is the information that the computer needs (minus the activity numberthe computer will assign it). Some elements of all jobs have been done so often they are routine, so be sure you know how long routine tasks take, who can do them, and how much they cost. Effective
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managers want to know that every activity in the workflow is being done better, faster, and cheaper. Are the numbers accurate? Will they get better? Tracking the results allows you to find out. Sticky notes can be a planning managers best friend. A desk top or conference table can become an instant planning board, with a network created in minutes that converts hardto-follow abstractions to a picture of task relationships. Networks for repetitive activities or maintenance procedures can be stored in the computer to reflect changes from the most recent replication and be there ready to use when a task needs to be replicated or a piece of equipment crashes or comes up for routine service. A sailing friend came up with a clever application: He writes on separate cards each step involved in pulling his boat out of the water and winterizing it. Then, he laminates each card, punches a hole in the top-left corner, and puts them all on a steel ring. When fall decommissioning time comes, he follows the cards. In the spring when the boat goes back into the water, he follows the cards in reverse. When there are a lot of important details and procedures to follow, this is a good way to avoid costly errors. Theres a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that comes up every so often: If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I would spend six hours sharpening my axe. That means preparation and planning. (Have you heard of the Six Ps? Prior planning prevents pathetically poor performance.) Save yourself a lot of grief and pay attention to this: Plan first and fully. Then schedule. Do you know what a schedule is? Its a plan expressed in time. Therefore, if you do a halfhearted job of planning, you will end up with a schedule that you cannot maintain. Thats why most over-busy managers are busy cleaning up work others should have done.
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Scheduling
Regardless of your plan, the thing that really determines when work gets done is resource availability. Sometimes the people and the equipment you need just arent available. When they are, sometimes it makes more sense to use them someplace else. As the saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men have to give way to larger realities, to facts that didnt exist when the plan was being drafted. Life happens. A key players parent dies and hes gone for five days. A colleagues child is seriously ill and shes out for several days at a critical point in the project. The company picnic was scheduled for today, but theres a tornado warning. This is why its important to have a good back-up plan or someone who really knows how to scramble to use available resources to the best advantage. That person could be the manager, but more likely it will be a very experienced worker who has a knack for scheduling. (Some say that planning is a science, but scheduling is an art. Skilful scheduling can extend resource utilization by as much as twenty percent without causing anyone to work overly hard or work overtime.) A new manager who hasnt really mastered the work flow and doesnt know the primary and back-up skills of all staff members and who isnt keeping up with the progress of all work in the shop is not in a position to optimize available resources.
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Which tasks are involved What kinds of skills are needed People who possess those skills that are needed to get the work done Materials and equipment needed Lead times for getting materials and equipment Dates when resources are needed Availability Whether or not it is useful to double-up a resource (and which ones) and/or reduce activity duration Which workers can be pulled off other jobs (if necessary) Stop-points if work has to be interrupted If there are budget impacts, how you will be able to cover them When a piece of equipment is scheduled for maintenance Which materials will be available when, and which materials will be difficult to get or will be delayed
Most of the people Ive met who are best at this dont have a college degree, but they all have years of experience (generally in several functional departments). As I watch them work, I suspect that they possess deep knowledge about the tasks for each job, including allowable durations and costs. They also seem to have a kind of intuitive ability for arranging tasks in ways that allow people to get surprising amounts of work done in a normal, unhurried manner.
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One of the secrets of effective scheduling is to force tasks to early closure and then report each closure immediately. Then, people and equipment can be shifted to another task. In much the same way that your computer begins to choke down when you have too many programs running at the same time, work groups begin to slow down when too many tasks are left open or unfinished, waiting for something or someone. Tasks left open tend to end up causing further delays; this consumes resources, which impacts costs as well as productivity. The time to get input from your co-workers is during the planning process. In fact, it presents a great training opportunity for your staff: What if you not only allow them to participate in planning, but also get them to do the scheduling? Thats learning in real time! Scheduling is like almost everything else in the managers job: You dont have to do it yourselfyou just have to see that its done. And the more eyes, the better. It seems something always gets overlooked when one busy person tries to remember and do everything himself. Heres a classic example of a scheduling failure: Power plants have a turbine deck, from which turbines that generate electricity can be serviced. Above the turbine deck is an overhead crane that travels the length of the building. To perform major maintenance, the heavy steel jacket that covers the turbine must be removed, requiring the overhead crane. If you fail to schedule the crane in advance, it might be tied up somewhere else. In one turbine overhaul I observed, 45 contract technicians, each being billed at $100 per hour or more, stood on the turbine deck for over an hour waiting for the crane. On a project as expensive as an overhaul, $5,000 or so is not a lot of money. But $5,000 is a huge penalty for a small oversightfailing to schedule the overhead crane.
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Chapter 8
Managing Time and Prioritizing
his chapter on time management is about using common sense at work. Compare time management to the parental edict to do your homework before watching TV or playing computer games. Maybe a twelve-year-old cant always be expected to appreciate the priorities associated with that parental edict, and maybe he or she will think its just another authoritarian gesture. But in an intelligent organization, whether a family or a for-profit corporation, priorities must be respected and served. And by the reckoning of management gurus and researchers, understanding and responding to priorities is a corporate soft spot in all kinds of organizations. Performance deficits often get stuck with the generic causelabel of poor time management. As you might infer from these introductory comments, Im not a fan of time-management training as a corporate expenditure, for one simple reason: Believing that working adults cannot come to grips with priorities and thus need time-management training as a source of discipline is just a step away from treating them like the 12-year-old who cant get why algebra homework is more important than TV. And isnt that whats happened in many organizations? Let me suggest a correlation for you to consider: The more authoritarian the organization, as defined by low levels of participation, the greater the need for time-management training.
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Employees need task-completion structure, and its a managers responsibility to provide it. Lack of attention to detail. If details cause frustration, many people will avoid tasks that are detailed and put them off until later. Why do we procrastinate? Because the task is something we dont want to do, dont like to do, dont get any reward for doing, or dont get punished if we dont do it. Maybe the task seems useless, and we just get angry when we have to deal with nonsense. This reluctance to perform can only be resolved on-site, not in a training room. If we hear, We fill out this form because the boss wants it! well do it first and dispense with it. Failing to prioritize. Before a manager concludes that an employee is not prioritizing, he needs to step into the employees shoes for a minute. What, exactly, are we supposed to do first? Which order/request from someone senior are we to honor? The first directive? The second order? Or the most-recent request for a right-now response? And what does right now mean? Does it mean when youve finished your current task? Or does it mean, Stop everything and serve me now? Some people are not very flexible and have difficulty with multiple or seemingly-conflicting requests, but a good manager should know how to work with all his or her employees strengths and weaknesses. Problems related to productivity. If productivity is the problem, it will not be solved by talking about time management. Thats only a symptom, and treating symptoms generally allows problems to get worse. The manager should be
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looking and listening more closely in order to identify why people arent productive. Heres my point: Managers need to address any failure to produce desired results, and to understand that the majority of employees do perform up to standardif theres a standard they understand and accept. In my experience, failure to perform as the manager expects is directly linked to the managers attitude and approach; that is, if people at work respect their manager, work gets done. When you and I dont respect a manager, its probably because he or she doesnt respect us! In that situation, if there are other problems like those mentioned above that we cant resolve ourselves, we arent going to tell the manager. You know the response: Thats not my job! And if its a fact that people arent working up to standard, rewarding them with time off to go to a timemanagement class hardly seems like an effective strategy.
collector, working overtime and weekends doing things others wont do. Stay out of others job responsibilities to keep roles clear at work. When you do the work others should be doing, youre doing what theyre paid to do, but youre also rewarding them for ignoring their responsibilities. Worse still, managers who do the work of others usually are doing things compensated at a much lower level. Job descriptions can and will change, and sometimes quite rapidly. Be sure that the changes in your responsibilities are documented and formalized, perhaps with a signature from your manager. 2. Delegate. Dont do anything that someone else can do. Learn to delegate tasks to direct reports who will learn from the experience, or delegate to people who have special expertise and are happy to help you. You need time to coach, counsel, think, and plan, and this is one way to get it. 3. Find the courage to ask for help. Many managers are reluctant to ask for help, and end up spending hours on tasks others could have handled in minutes. Organizations are full of people with specialized expertise; use them. Be clear about the help you need, and ask for help early on, so that your work gets into the helper's work schedule without creating a crunch for either of you. And be sure to express appreciation in some tangible way thats reflective of the interests of your helper. Maybe its an article of interest, a used book, a bottle of wine, or just lunch in the company cafeteria. But do something that suggests that
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you have made an effort to reciprocate in some small way. (This is important. See the next item.) 4. Build your own support system. Once you've mastered the art of asking for help, it's natural to extend the process to develop a broad range of resource relationships. People love to be asked for advice, but do your part: Don't ask for help until you have packaged everything theyll need to help you. Be prepared to reciprocate, and when asked to do so, dont hesitate to say yes. This kind of informal networking makes a lot of sense. 5. Block out your day. The routines of most jobs can be divided into three categories: morning work, afternoon work, and homework. Interoffice mail and other routines will take time to deal with, so don't fight the system. Most morning work can be done in an hour, so do it right away. Afternoon chores can be left to last, leaving a six-hour hole to be filled with high-energy activity. Whatever the pattern, formalize it and allow yourself enough time to complete and close each task. If you take public transportation, use commute time for planning and scheduling. 6. Don't apologize if youre busy. Much productive time gets chewed up with impromptu visits from colleagues in which the main agenda is office gossip or non-work activities. The people who generally organize the office football pools are not the high achievers! If someone stops by to chat, dont be afraid to say, Im really busy right now. Can we talk later, maybe at five oclock? Maybe you can get a
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Do not disturb sign for you door, like you see in hotels. Your managers should disturb you, of course, but the sign might keep away the pesky hall walkers. Remember, theyre not just stealing work time theyre also stealing your peace of mind by preventing you from closing tasks and getting them off your mind. 7. Cancel every meeting you can. Meetings can burn up incredible numbers of hours. The problem with meetings is that they involve too many people who don't have the data or authority to do anything about problems being discussed. Don't use meetings to solve problems. Instead, use them to identify problems, and then to assign responsibilities and due dates. (That's do-able in 15 minutes or less.) Then, if a problem needs immediate attention, stay with the few individuals who have relevant information and involvement, and let the rest return to work. Dont make others waste their time listening to discussions of issues with which they are not involved. Set time limits for meetings, and stay within the schedule. Start on time, end on time. Earn a reputation for being a tough meeting manager; it might be more important than you imagine (and its one sure place to demonstrate time management.) Remember this, too: Meetings arent cheap. Multiply the average salary of participants by the number of participants by the duration of the meeting, and add 10 or 15 minutes transit time on both ends of the meeting. The meter is running faster than you think!
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8. Give everyone a chance to succeed. The first and greatest managerial responsibility is to make sure everyone knows what he or she is expected to do, and what constitutes satisfactory performance for each task. Most people can perform successfully if they know these two things, but in truth, many people dont have that kind of certainty, and so they continuously look over their shoulders for a signal from the boss that theyre doing okay. Even the people who cut grass along roadways have more independence than most office workersthey at least know what theyre supposed to do and how much grass they have to cut. They know when its cut enough, and when it looks okay. Shouldnt office workers have the same security in knowing whats okay and what isnt? Not knowing wastes time and limits productivity. Give them the information they need to succeed. 9. Quit taking each other to lunch. Use lunch hours for learning or selling. Meet a customer, read a book, sleep if you can't readanything but waste time with cronies rehashing office gossip. Set up a brown bag study program with colleagues to improve skills. Exercise or do something else thats constructive, rather than sag into the discontent that rehashing office gossip feeds. 10. Remember that you have to manage only three things, regardless of organizational level, industry, or technology: schedule (Will work be performed within the allotted time?); cost (Will work be completed within budget?); and quality (Will the completed
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work meet technical specifications?). When it comes to people, manage data about their performance and resolve any performance problems when they arise. This will save a lot of time. If you have people who need your close attention, wean them away from close supervision or remove them. But if you need people to be dependent on you, thats a disaster waiting to happen. Such chains of mutual dependency do exist, but theyre always problematic. A final suggestion that pertains to most of these tips: Use checklists. Why risk looking stupid, careless, or disorganized? A clipboard or electronic device will help you create checklists to cover all routine or promised results. Lists are a manager's best tool. Airline pilots use them before, during, and after every flight. When details matter (like lowering the landing gear on descent), checklists go a long way toward preventing disaster. To err is human, but to make an easily preventable mistake is inexcusable.
Closing in on Priorities
Let me call your attention to something you may not have noticed: One priority in your organizationand across the countryshould be to come to grips with low morale. As long ago as 1976, longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer warned that we were in a period of low morale, and were still in it. Look at the time-management issues we just talked about: low morale, low self-esteem, and lack of respect almost jump off the pages! Writing in his wonderful book In Our Time, Hoffer said the only antidote is esprit de corps, bringing to mind the U.S. Marines and their motto, Semper Fideles, always faithful. Given todays prevailing attitudes,
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that might not be the imagery many want to adopt, but there are a host of corporate and civic issues that will not be resolved as long as low morale is an impediment. However, Hoffer offered something hopeful: You and I and others who are capable of enthusiasm have unparalleled opportunities to be influential, to be leaders, to make a difference in how we work with others and infuse them with our positive energy. Its really up to us, because as Hoffer read the recent past and probable future, this is not going to be an era of great galvanizing leaders anywhere in the world. His insights from thirty years ago seem to have been prescient. Many times the boss, too, is without a clear idea of priorities and is dancing as fast as possible to please an even more senior manager who is working by whimsy, rather than by plan or schedule.
Schedules drive cost. The quicker something must be done in the usual organizational setting, the more it will cost. If the schedule slips, there are limited ways to regain the original schedule. You can spend more by paying overtime or pulling people off other work. You can modify quality/quantity criteria by delivering fewer items than scheduled, or reduce the qualitative specifications. You can go to the client and apologize, and hope that he or she will accept a change order. If cost is the priority and the original estimate proves inadequate, you can either allow the schedule to slip, change the quality/quantity criteria, go back to the client with a change order, or accept the associated costs. If quality is prime and non-negotiable, as it would be in a medical or pharmaceutical setting, both schedule and cost have to yield to quality. If resources have to be diverted from other tasks in order to meet a commitment, do not bury or hide the additional costs in order to avoid blame. Eventually, resource expenditures will have to be accounted for. If theres dishonesty, it will have to be dealt with in some way (i.e., you will have to hold someone accountable, or you will have to bury the costs and allow dishonest accounting to go unreported).
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Never interrupt work in progress until you have brought it to a natural stopping point and locked down all the parts and pieces. Then, when work is resumed, you wont lose more time looking for and recovering loose pieces.
Lack of managerial respect for priorities and failure to respond to their internal drivers (agreeing on schedule, cost, and quality as primary, secondary, or tertiary) is confusing to workers. The financial sleight-of-hand that follows leads to disbelief in any of the posted numbers; no one is sure what anything costs, so they have less commitment to efforts at cost-effectiveness. Understanding priorities, in the manner described above, is necessary in the quest for profits. But so is the support and commitment of workers, and these are negotiable qualities. Workers are not stupid, and theyll respond in kind to the way they are treated by managers. They can be misled by managerial smokescreens a couple of times, but pretty soon theyll realize that someone is fudging. If schedules, costs, and quality dont matter to managers, or if managers dont partner with workers to set and meet those performance targets, why should workers care? Morale and organizational performance are casualties. How do you break such a cycle? One honest and disciplined manager at a time.
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Conclusion
astering the Managers Job was written with one objective in mind: To offer ideas that you can implement independently, without asking anyones permission. All organizations are full of constraints and reasons why you must not do anything outside the boundaries of daily routine. Its always easier to stay inside the box of local customs and practices than to experiment with new ideas and new ways of getting work done. If you have to ask permission to be a more participative manager or to be more inclusive of others when youre making decisions, or you need permission to hold stand-up meetings at 8:00 a.m., the chances are good that you wont do these thingswhy risk hearing the word no? Workers in fear-based organizations are afraid to go along with participative management because they have learned long ago that its safer to keep their heads down and avoid being noticed. If you want to master the managers job, however, you dont have to master the status quo. With a little effort and persistence, you should be able to show your colleagues how to distinguish themselves as outstanding performers and contributors without their having to ask for permission. The suggestions for job mastery offered in this pocket guide are presented as natural extensions of things you should be doing as a manager: Becoming more inclusive; providing growth opportunities and pushing people to take them; setting targets and measuring results; giving supportive feedback; celebrating when people try something new and succeed; and studying the examples provided by the countrys best managers, as well as examples set by people in your own organization.
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Conclusion
The three core management competencies that came out of Scott Parrys research are essential for success in mastering the managers job. However, there are two things that managers commonly overlook: ethics and simple honesty. Unfortunately, these values are not part of daily operations in many organizations. There are few things at work more discouraging than hearing your manager lie to co-workers or clients or customers. Thats truly poisonous to relationships, respect for the leadership, and for moraleand its not a rare occurrence. White lies to cover mistakes, late deliveries, failure to get awards or rewards for deserving employees (Sorry, Fred, they just didnt go for it when Fred knows no effort was made), and so on. Small stuff? Not really. Beneath the headline-grabbing misbehavior of large corporations and their leaders and the sweatshops that exploit illegal immigrants in nearly every large city in the country, there are countless daily violations perpetrated against the interests of individuals and groups in companies large and small. This is not a new phenomenon, but there are those who say the situation is improving. A major step in that direction was taken when Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale collaborated to write The Power of Ethical Management in 1988. Their small, easy-to-read book became the basis for discussions of ethics in staff meetings and training rooms of hundreds of organizations. The authors came up with a simple and comprehensive way to assess proposed actions and decisions. The Blanchard and Peale Ethics Check consists of just three questions:
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1. Is it legal? 2. Is it balanced and fair to all? 3. How will it make me feel about myself if my family and friends find out? Perhaps its just coincidence, but since that book was published, many companies have added to their mission statements a code of ethics and set of statements of belief. But even before 1988, Rotary International was sending out its own ethical message on ballpoint pens:
Four-Way Test of the Things We Think, Say, or Do:
Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all involved? Will it build GOODWILL and better friendships? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
Either of these useful screens for managerial decisions and actions can help prevent you from doing something that might be perceived as racist, sexist, or otherwise dishonest. Believe it or not, both Machiavelli and Attila the Hun have been touted as management theorists in recent books. Its unlikely that any contemporary manager could be held up as a role model for using tyrannical tactics that put others at a disadvantage. Today, even an isolated incident is likely to result in litigation against the manager and the company. This has repercussions beyond reputation, affecting morale, productivity, and profitability, in that order.
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Conclusion
We talked earlier about Bob Galvin of Motorola, who possibly more than any other individual was responsible for bringing an entirely new focus on quality and management into the public domain. An early convert to participative management in the 1960s, Galvin was a believer in scrupulous honesty; he once admitted that Motorola was doing a poor job of manufacturing management. He was a manager who truly mastered his job. Successful managers who have become public figures have a lot to teach us. It might be interesting to collect information on such leaders and compare their styles, contributions, and philosophies. If you have friends or colleagues who want to take job mastery to the logical next step, consider studying the achievements and advice of these super-managers. It would be a great theme for a series of brown-bag lunches. As you travel along the road to mastering the managers job, youll see that helping others learn is just a natural extension of your other duties. To return one last time to that most basic managerial duty, planning, consider the words of a contemporary industrialist-turned-consultant, Sir John Harvey-Jones, former chairman and CEO of ICI in the U.K.:
Planning is an unnatural process; its more fun to do nothing. Sometimes, the nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
Mastering the managers job is possible. You just have to decide to do it.
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Recommended Reading
Blanchard, Kenneth and Norman Vincent Peale. The Power of Ethical Management. 1988. New York: William Morrow and Co. This book provides a platform for talking about some of organizational lifes most compelling issues. Harris, Philip R. Managing the Knowledge Culture: A Guide for Human Resource Professionals and Managers in the 21st Century Workplace. 2005. Amherst, Massachusetts: HRD Press, Inc. This is a resource-rich book, useful for managers, HR and training professionals, and students. Add it to your library. Herzberg, Frederic. The Managerial Choice: To Be Efficient and to Be Human. 1976. New York: Dow-Jones-Irwin. This is a powerful and still-relevant voice in releasing human potential, with a surprising and thoroughly validated model. Hoffer, Eric. In Our Time. 1976. New York: Harper and Row. Maybe the last philosopher unafraid to be politically incorrect in public and in print. Hoffer was an unapologetic advocate of the integrity and innate wisdom of working people. McGregor, Douglas. The Human Side of Enterprise. 1985. (Twenty-fifth anniversary printing). New York: McGrawHill/Irwin. The original text was published in 1960, but is still fundamental in discussing management styles and methods.
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Motorola University. Participants manual for a one-day briefing on Six Sigma at the Phoenix, Arizona facility (taken from SSG PG-11-1 6/15/88). As presented and currently, Six Sigma is the standard for quality and organizational excellence. Mulvaney, John. Analysis Bar Charting: A Simplified Critical Path Analysis Technique. 1989. Bethesda, Maryland: Management Planning and Control Systems. This small, easy-to-read manual is a planning master work. Murray, W. H. The Scottish Himalayan Expedition. 1951. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. Perhaps this is remembered most for its insight into commitment. Oncken, William. Monkey Business: Are You Controlling Events, or Are Events Controlling You? 2000. Provo, Utah: Executive Excellence Publishing. An innovative tutorial, now reaching a third generation of managers, but still fresh. Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. 1990. New York: Doubleday. This author has been widely quoted and studied for his innovative ideas on achieving organizational potential. Stack, Jack (with Bo Burlingame). The Great Game of Business. 1994. New York: Doubleday/Currency. This is the most useful book on management and organization Ive ever read. A decade later, the authors released A Stake in the Outcome (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2003), to validate their achievements. Read them both. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Mission statement, posted April 25, 2005 at http://www.cia.gov/information/ mission.html.
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