My wife broke her leg recently so I’ve been doing all the driving and grocery shopping. She is able to use a wheeled stool to get around the kitchen and cook again which she is very grateful for – as am I – so her menus inform what I’m to get at the store.
One night at dinner she said to me, “The chicken stock makes the rice too salty”. I’ve been married long enough to know there was more to that statement than met the ears.
“Oh,” I said, “Did I buy the wrong kind of stock?” She nodded. “Should I have bought the low-sodium kind?” She nodded again. “But it didn’t say that on the list.” I said, more by way of explanation than self-defense.
Her response to me is the reason you should be interested in this post. She said “It never occurred to me that there was any other kind.” Never occurred to her. Never?
Of course she KNOWS there are other kinds of chicken stock. It’s just that this is the kind she’s used for so long that the others are not part of her conscious thinking anymore.
To be an effective shopping manager, she needs to think differently than she does as an effective shopper.
It’s the same reason we’re eating lots of mushrooms this week. She prints a list from the grocery chain website. The list said “ Mushrooms are on sale – 3 boxes for $5” and it didn’t say “We only need one box.” But I digress.
This is actually a pain in the ass for her. And I sympathize. She’s frustrated with having to spell all that stuff out. And frustrated when I call from the store asking about what I’m sure she considers stupid details. And she’s more frustrated because when she shops, she does make a list but also makes a lot of decisions and changes on the fly. These are triggered by what she sees on the shelf. And it ties into what she’s got coupons for and even changes her plans of what to cook. This is all very hard to translate into instructions for someone else to follow. Even someone as smart and motivated (did I say rich and good looking?) as I am.
The truth is, in our case it’s just not worth it for her to become a better shopping manager. We’ll muddle through and she should be driving again in a month or so. But in your case, if you want to free yourself from performing a function AND you want someone to do it as well (or better) than you, you have to become a better manager. Here are some tips:
1. Use details. Lots of details. A manager (or delegator) has to think differently than a doer. List the specifics of the outcome you really want – even the minutia that should be obvious. And consider the context of the decisions you’d make if you were doing the job. Then make those explicit. This is one reason it helps to write things down. It’s harder to be vague on paper.
2. Allow more time than you think it should take. You won’t be good at explaining everything right away and the other person will need some time to learn how you think. The more nuanced the job is, and the more experienced you are the more time it will take. Schedule some time for review and ongoing training. Schedule it before the deadlines are due so you have time to correct mistakes and omissions.
3. Use Verbs. Too often we give someone a list of To Do items that includes only nouns. When your list says “Conference Topics” it may not be obvious what you want them to do about Conference Topics. Do you want that person to suggest topics for the upcoming conference? Do you want them to interview others about what topic they’d like to see? Are you giving this person the authority to decide on the topics or just to recommend? The answer lies in verbs.
Jason Fried says that the office is a lousy place to get work done because of 2 things: Managers & Meetings.
If that’s true, then you’re not doing it right. And, of course a lot of people aren’t doing it right – that’s what keeps my blog in business. I’ll tackle the meetings bit here and leave the manager problem for another post.
Most people don’t do their work in a vacuum. They need collaboration and communication (C&C) with others. Let’s say you have 5 people on a team who need to organize their work together. Let’s add a sixth person – the manager – who needs to know how the team is doing, if there’s anything she can do to help any of them (that’s her job after all) AND she needs to provide direction and connection with other teams in the organization.
That’s a lot of C&C. If all those people reach out to one another willy-nilly whenever the impulse strikes that’s a lot of interruptions. No wonder Jason wants to get away from the office.
But there is another solution. Figure out which parts of all that C&C can be scheduled and organized. It won’t make the problem go away, but it will diminish it. Hopefully to the point where the down side of the interruption is out weighed by the benefits of C&C. So if you’ve got a scheduled and organized way to collaborate and communicate, what do you have but a meeting?!?!?
I agree that most meetings are a waste of time. But that’s because they aren’t done right. Appropriate meetings not only save time, but encourage all kinds of good things like synergy, morale, camaraderie, sharing of ideas – in short, team work. But the idea of abolishing meetings because of this problem is like abolishing food because people are obese. You just have to do it right.
[Ricardo Semler goes so far as to make all meetings optional. His point is if you're planning the meeting it's your job to make it enticing enough that people want to come (and want to pay attention instead of playing with their iphones). This is pretty extreme and only works when all other aspects of the company culture are aligned with it. But it's an interesting approach. ]
If doing meetings this way sounds like a lot of work – well yeah. That’s why no bumper sticker says “I’d rather be running a meeting.” But (as Jason points out in the video) meetings are expensive. A one hour meeting with 10 people is really a ten hour meeting. And if you add up the salaries of all those people and account for the interruptions the meeting causes before they get back into the flow of their work – you’ll jump out of your skin. If you’re going to spend that much money / time / etc isn’t it worth it to do it right? That’s why you get paid the big bucks.
UPDATE: Seth Godin and I are aligned in starting the new year with better meetings.
If the answer is NEVER then you’re doing it wrong.
Seriously. Check this out:
Time Management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defence, and 6+ peer-reviews papers. And finishes by 5:30pm.
You see you can’t really manage time. You can’t save it, spend it or do anything with it or to it. You have the same 24 hours a day that Bill Gates, and your cat have.
What you can manage is yourself and what you do or don’t do WITHIN the time you have. It’s a great article. Click and read it if you haven’t already.
The title of this post is a play on the title of one of the best business books I know: Up The Organization by Robert Townsend. Townsend was president of Avis Car Rental in its prime and has some witty and insightful things about how companies (mostly big ones) should operate. The book has been revised and reprinted, but if you can find an out of print copy of his sequel Further Up the Organization, I recommend that one.
That’s reaction some entrepreneurs have. They don’t need no stinkin’ organization. They just tell people what to do. Then they scream and curse when it doesn’t get done right. But whenever you have two or more people working toward a common goal, you have an actual organization, whether you like it or not.
The trick to developing a growing, thriving organization is to push as much responsibility as possible down the organization.
The more things that are handled as close as possible to where the work is done, the more people at the top have time and resources to do more strategic things. But this is hard to do.
Why? Because the people at the top often have more experience and ability. At least we say that’s the reason. Yes, they often are more competent. But the reason it’s hard to push that competence down the organization is that people who are good at what they do have what’s called “unconscious competence”. Remember when you learned to drive a car? Remember the focus it took? You were developing competence – consciously. At some point you got so good you could drive and talk and listen to the radio, AND think about something else. You became unconscious of the movements needed to maintain speed, steer, put on the blinker etc. That’s unconscious competence.
Probably the person down in your organization, the one who should be given some responsibility, is not unconsciously competent. And if you just told them to do something they wouldn’t do it right. They wouldn’t get what you wanted done. It may not be that they can’t do the job, just that they need training, mentoring, oversight (aka management) to be able to execute that responsibility as well as it needs to be done. And that takes time and effort.
But more than time and effort it takes you being able to explain what you do well, and how you do it. That’s what trips most of us up. When we are so good that we are unconsciously competent, we can’t always explain to another person how it should be done. And so, we can’t figure out how to push some responsibility down to someone else. And we have to keep it ourselves. But that limits the growth of the company.
There are many: Checklists, Work Flows, Management Training, Mentoring, etc. “The Exercise of the Elves” is one of my favorites. They all take a skill set that is often quite different from the skill of actually doing the work. This is one reason many small companies stay small. They aren’t willing to invest in that skill. Big companies are. They hire people to do these things, or they bring in consultants [shameless plug] or both. Companies that aren’t willing to do this are forced to keep responsibility at the top and keep their organizations small.
But if you want to get out of the engine room and into the wheelhouse; if you want to take your company to new places; in short, if you want to function more like the CEO and less like the General Manager, it’s a skill you need to bring on board.
Think for a minute about what would happen if your employees were better motivated.
Would there be fewer problems at work?
Would you get to spend your time doing different things? What kind of things?
Would it mean more money in your pocket? How much?
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that what motivates you is different from what motivates most people. That’s why you’re an entrepreneur and they are not. You probably will be surprised to learn (as I was) that much of we think we know about motivating people is wrong. Would it be worth 10 minutes and 48 seconds of your time to learn to do it better? Check out this video.
If you have more time, read the book
“What’s new since we talked last?” I asked. “Meetings,” she said. “I’m doing one-on-ones with my people, like we talked about.”
She is a client. Her company makes web sites and on-line products for a specialized industry. They’ve got a reputation for high end work, solid market penetration and about a dozen employees. She is the primary sales person and has the most common complaint I hear from business owners: “I can’t find good employees”
The meetings were going well. She was staying on track, learning what people were up against, and heading off complications before they became actual problems. The words were very positive, but her tone was not.
“So?” I asked.
“All these meetings. They’re keeping me from my real work.”
But she was wrong about that. What a small company has in common with a small child is despite their size, they still need all of the parts. So even small companies need three levels of management, someone to do collections, to analyse the numbers, and all that stuff big companies have whole departments for. But being small you don’t need them all full time. So people wear multiple hats. And when that happens, you tend to wear the hats you’re best at or enjoy the most. So my client loves sales and coming up with new product ideas.
Because she’s done a good job in those areas, the company needs more production capacity, and better coordination. So now she must consider management to be her “real job”. By focusing on this (not exclusively but predominantly) she’ll enable others to do more with fewer problems. That’s the real job of building a company. When problems decrease, and productivity improves, she’ll be able to wear this hat a little less and put on another a bit more.
One-on-one’s: Great management tool.
Have one with each of your direct reports.
Meet weekly at the same time for 30 minutes. Never reschedule. It’s that important – it is your real job.
Prepare. They should and you should too.
Don’t solve problems. Or train. Some of that may happen. But if you can’t fit it into 30 minutes along with the other stuff, then you need a separate meeting for training or problem solving.
It’s a time for you to share certain things and learn certain other things. Generally the same kinds of things each week (maybe even in the same order depending on your style) which makes it easy for each of you to prepare.
What to share. Anything the other person must know to do their job better. That’s your role as manager: to help them do their job better. Maybe share what’s happening in other departments so they can interact better. Maybe it’s feedback of how they really made a difference. Share what they can expect from you and the rest of the company; both before the next one-on-one and longer term. You prepare by keeping a notebook around all week and jotting down stuff that you’ll need to share with each person. Then spend a few minutes pulling it together before the one-on-one.
What you should learn. Status: what happened since last time and how that compares to what you expected. Why there’s a difference. What problems they are running into. Their opinions on things. Insights you don’t know about because you don’t live at their desk. Over time, you’ll get a sense of who they are as a person: what motivates them, what puts them off. You’ll get a feel for what they do well and where their limitations are. Make notes about this.
Written take-aways: What each of you will do before the next meeting based. This becomes the status for next week’s meeting. Notes you can use for their annual review. They should take away your impressions of how they’re doing so nothing (I repeat nothing) in their review is a surprise. If it is, you’re not doing it right, but that’s another column.
Trust (in both directions) is a non written take-away.
Beware: You’ll think you don’t have time. But it reduces time spent on interruptions and problem solving. And it’s your real job.
Takeaway:
[tags]management, CEO skills, entrepreneur, small business owner [/tags]
Probably Never. When you’re on a winding road with lots of potholes and a strong wind, you grip the wheel tighter. But even on a smooth highway, you can’t just let go of the wheel and start typing on your Blackberry.
So what does this mean to you? The number one complaint I hear from entrepreneurs about employees is that employees just don’t get it. What I think that means is that entrepreneurs just don’t get it.
Get what? Get that their job is to keep employees moving in the right direction. If the employees knew how to “get it” or what the “right direction” is they’d be working for themselves right now. The reason yours are working for you is that they need that constant reminder of where the company’s heading.
Obviously when things are tough you’ve really got to keep a grip on the wheel. But just because things are going well doesn’t mean you can go “hands off”.
To switch analogies – it’s how you coach a winning sports team.
It’s hard to build a sports dynasty because winning players have a tendency to feel they’ve made it and then slack off. The coach needs to keep them moving forward just as hard.
Takeaways:
First image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/bob406/487249298/
Second image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/19783530@N00/1779549245/
[tags] Entrepreneur, manager, CEO, Small business [/tags]
Animal trainers have a saying “It’s never the animal’s fault” Because animals don’t speak, trainers need to find non-English methods to communicate what they want. If the animal doesn’t perform, they try to find a better way to communicate, they don’t blame the animal. It helps to take this approach with employees: if they don’t do what you want, think of how you can change what you’re communicating, how you’re following up, what incentives you’re using to reward results.
Most people react to that last sentence with something like: “But they’re people not animals and they do speak English and what’s more they’re adults. They SHOULD be able to do what I say.” So true. So true, and yet so remarkably ineffective.
Whenever you find yourself using the word SHOULD with another person in a fit of frustration take it as a sign to change your behavior not theirs. Your behavior is the only one you can control anyway unless the other person is small enough that you can pick them up. You can influence others not control them and only by changing your behavior.
I was talking to a client today who runs a small office: himself and four others. He’s so mad a two of them that he’s thinking of making it an even smaller office: himself and two others. And he’s got a right to be mad. They did some really stupid stuff recently. And so he’s upset with what they SHOULD be doing differently.
Taking my own advice about the SHOULD word, we looked at how he was communicating, and realized that he was not being much of a manger. If employees didn’t get it right the first time he said something, he never followed up. When it wasn’t done right, he either did it himself or let it go undone. Of his four people; one of them usually gets it – she’s been with him for decades. The others do most of their jobs right most of the time, but not always. And the company’s in a tough market right now. He’s been asking them to do different things to move the business forward. And for the most part they don’t. They stick with what they’ve always done and even though it’s slow and they don’t have as much work as they can handle, they don’t do the extra stuff.
Of course they SHOULD; but there’s that word again. So we talked about what he could do differently as a manager – what level of detail he needed to explain his request and how often he needed to follow up, and what incentives or consequences he could put in place.
And we talked about if he even wanted to bother. It would be much simpler to cut back and only have two employees. I still don’t know the answer to that one yet – he’s going to think about it.
If I may change analogies, let me tell you that when I was single and I lived alone, I never cooked. As much as I loved to eat, the cooking part was not something I wanted to spend the time doing or learn how to do well. After I got divorced I cooked, because I wanted the kids and me to have dinner time together. But I still didn’t put a lot of time into learning the nuts and bolts of cooking. I got a few meals down, and could follow a recipe or three and it was good enough. Now I’m married to a wonderful cook. She loves to eat as much as I do – maybe more. But she’s willing to actually be a cook. Not only can she follow a recipe, she can augment or even invent one. And her technique is outstanding. Of course she puts a lot of time into it, and she loves it. So why am I telling you this?
The situation with most entrepreneurs is they want to eat really well but they don’t want to learn the nuts and bolts of cooking. By that I mean they want the benefits of a well managed workforce, but don’t want to learn the techniques of managing, or put the time in to actually do the work of being a manager.
Here’s what it takes to manage: Direction, Support and Monitoring.
Here’s what too many entrepreneurs think is management:
For direction, they provide the vaguest set of directions in the fewest words, almost never written. “Hey, somebody just called from the Framus company about our account – handle if for me will ya?”
For support they never figure out what the employee needs and give it to them. Instead they expect people to get it done with stuff that costs less than it did last time. And what they do provide only shows up if the employee asks for it – hounds may be a better word than asks.
As for monitoring? They don’t check back till after the deadline’s passed and they get real mad if it isn’t done right.
A better manager handles it this way:
1. Direction. First you have to know what results you want. You have to describe them in terms of deliverables or behaviors (not attitudes). Think of what would happen if aliens flew their UFO into your facility at night and did the employee’s job perfectly. What would be different when you came to work in the morning? That’s what you need to describe to the employee. Until you can describe these results in detail, don’t try to manage anyone, spend your time describing results.
2. Support. Your next job as manager is to provide the employee with everything they need to do their job. This includes training, facilities, tools and equipment, time, reasonable expectaions and other people to provide the parts that they can’t do. Motivation and recognition is also part of support. Different people need various amounts at different stages in a given job.
3. Monitor. Employees should know how they will be monitored. If you did a good job giving direction they’ll be able to monitor themselves and come to the same conclusions you do about their performance. But you need to do it more frequently than you think – especially when you’ve given someone a new assignment with changes their routine or they’re doing something they’ve never done before. You need to see how they’re doing in time to make changes and corrections and give more support before the stuff hist the fan. That way you can both be successful.
Takeaways:
[Tags] Management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur, small business, manager [/tags]
I got the blue plastic tub for free and turned it into a garbage can because it used to hold car wash soap so I didn’t want to use it for a compost bin and we turned the old garbage can into a compost bin. Do you know how much money they want for a compost bin?!?!? But I digress.
So the first time I used the blue tub for garbage it they refused to take it. I asked around and someone said it was over the limit. “What was the limit?” I asked and was told “It has to be able to be lifted easily.” A very logical limit. Also a very stupid one. Can you imagine the arguments and even law suits the city would get into if their limit was so vaguely defined? They’d have arguments from customers, from sanitation workers, from people who didn’t get hired as sanitation workers and even from their workers comp insurance company.
So I looked it up. The rules are: Can no larger than 42 gallons weighing less than 60 pounds, the garbage has to be bagged and the lid of the can cannot be hinged. My can violated 3 of those rule. I didn’t do my job. And the sanitation workers just didn’t take it. No fuming or yelling, no covering for my lack of performance. They just did their job and moved on. I’ve seen them be lenient about the hinged lids and also about the no bagging rule many times in the neighborhood which I appreciate, but I don’t begrudge them their decision to enforce the rules in my case.
Why am I telling you this?
This blog is supposed to be about business – your business – not my garbage problems. The point is that I’m familiar with too many business where the performance standards (rules if you will) are vague, even if they are logical. Things like “able to be lifted easily” which begs the question by whom? And how easily? For the record, I’m a middle aged, overweight guy who doesn’t work out and even I can lift that blue can easily, but I don’t want do to their job.
And so there is a lot of confusion and frustration in the work place about whether someone is doing their job properly. My garbage man and I have no such disagreement. My job is to put the trash out by 6AM on Wednesdays, bagged in a can less than 42 gallons weighing less than 60 pounds and his job is to take it away. The end.
Takeaways:
[tags] entrepreneur, small business, CEO, Management [/tags]
This post is not about what you think. It really is about business. First a little background. I started a company in 1991 when I lived in Texas. Two years later I moved to Connecticut but the company stayed Texas. I’ve run it long-distance as a “remote control CEO”. I had to systemize the business to work like this and that’s what laid the ground work for my coaching other entrepreneurs to systemize their companies. About four years ago my wife took over and has done a wonderful job. She is much more of a people person than I. Here’s an illustration of that.
We have a system for tracking our sales efforts (number of calls, follow ups, contracts sent out etc) and our results. One of the guys in our fulfillment department quit and they decided not to replace him, figuring the people in the front office could fill in. This month, sales are down 33% from last month. That sounds worse than it is: we keep client for years and only get about 10 new ones a month (and we generally loose about 10 as well) so sales went from 9 to 6 and it so happens we only lost 6 so we’re even. But still 33% down is not the way you want to go.
My wife could tell from the sales tracking system that the number of contracts sent out was about the same as last month but the number of follow up calls was way down. And she could tell from the timing of when the calls were made (or not) that it’s because the people in the front who are now filling in in the back are letting the follow up calls fall through the cracks.
So what does she do? She goes over these numbers with our general manager and says basically “You see the problem? I’ll give you the month of April to fix it and if sales don’t come up we’ll have to do something different”
What would I have done? As a typical entrepreneur, I would have said that it’s OBVIOUS that the guy who left needs to be replaced and I would have been frustrated as hell that somebody didn’t see this coming half way through the month and waited till I saw it at the end of the month and I would have wanted changes made right now.
Which way is right?
What? You think I’m going to say my wife is wrong – all over the internet? I may be dumb but I’m not crazy. And I like to think that I’m not a typical entrepreneur anymore. There are three things to think about.
1. A typical entrepreneur’s approach only works if you’ve instructed people how to analyze the numbers and told them that it’s their job to do so and how frequently you want them to do this and how to come up with solutions to the problems they uncover when they analyze the numbers. If you’ve done that and put people who have that skill in the right positions then you have the “right” to be frustrated when they don’t do their job. In my experience most entrepreneurs don’t do any of this, but they still want the results of having done it.
2. My wife has never done this, and given the way responsibility is assigned in our company she has no intention of doing it. She’s keeping the job of analysis and problem solving on her desk. So her way is perfectly suited for our company – even though it’s slower than what a more typical entrepreneur might want.
3. I’ve given you a bit of a red herring by talking about the typical entrepreneur the way I have. If my experience of coaching entrepreneurs since 1994 has given me insight to what’s typical, the typical ones don’t even start to measure things to the degree that we do. So they would have no idea why sales were down. They’d just be upset when they saw the decline. So what appears to be slow as I tell this story (taking a month to see the problem and another month to fix it) is actually fast compared to what usually happens. (A month to see the problem and several months fuming about it while casting about for a fix – and maybe never uncovering the real cause). Because we’ve always measured a lot of stuff in our company, and always looked to find the root cause of any problems, not just the immediate solution, I don’t think I’m the typical entrepreneur.
Takeaways:
[tags] management, entrepreneur, small business [/tags]
I mentioned this before but I don’t think I gave it the focus it deserves. The focus it deserves is actually in this New Yorker article and a shorter one in Fast Company.
But consider this key quote
If someone found a new drug that could wipe out infections with anything remotely like the effectiveness of Pronovost’s [check lists], there would be television ads with Robert Jarvik extolling its virtues, detail men offering free lunches to get doctors to make it part of their practice, government programs to research it, and competitors jumping in to make a newer, better version.
The article focuses on checklists to improve outcomes in hospital intensive care units. But has examples of their use in other fields, with results just as impressive.
Why They are Unappealing
But just like the timer, a checklist is so mundane we feel funny using it. We think it will dehumanize our workers or our work. In my opinion it does the opposite. For two reasons.
Would your business benefit from consistency? Best Practices? Courage? Wits? Improvisation – what I’ll call creativity? If so then I’d propose that management’s primary job is to create check lists and make sure they are used properly.
Takeaways:
[tags] best practices, entreprneur, check list, productivity, small business, management. CEO [/tags]
I got this idea from a client – Thanks, Kendra.
In meetings when they have an topic on the agenda they allot a certain amount of time to it. Then they set a timer at the start. It keeps the meeting on schedule.
We also talked about the benefits of spending 15 minutes at the start of the day planning the calendar and developing a plan for the day. Many people have a hard time sticking to a routine like that because when they walk in, there are people wanting to talk to them, voice mails wanting to be listened to (it could be that big deal that you were waiting for and if you don’t get to it in 15 minutes it’s sure to disappear – really it could.) and emails screaming READ ME! READ ME! But usually those same people will keep appointments with another human, they just can’t keep the appointments with themselves to schedule their day. DAMHIKT – (that stands for Don’t Ask Me How I Know This meaing I learned it by personal experience).
Enter the assistant and the timer.
Make an appointment with your assistant every morning first thing when you arrive (or you could do it last thing before you leave to plan for the following day). By “your assistant“, I mean any other person in the office. If you don’t have an assistant, just pick someone and make this part of their job. When you first arrive, they are to drop what they’re doing, and come have a 10 second meeting with you. At the meeting they say: “I’m going to set the timer for 15 minutes. You’re going to do nothing but plan your day. I’ll call you when the timer goes off.” Then they go back to their regularly scheduled job and set a timer. In 15 minutes they call you. You spend that time planning your day. The end.
What’s weird about the timer.
What’s so funny is that all this use of the timer sounds so contrived and artificial. It’s true. It is. Don’t be afraid to say so and to laugh about it. But use one anyway. Do you work out? Don’t you measure your time on the tread mill? Your reps on the weights? Your miles on the bike? Would you eat in a restaurant where the cooks didn’t measure the ingredients? And of course you track the money in your company. Why are we so squeamish about measuring our most precious resource – time? I don’t know but we are. Acknowledge it and get over it.
Takeaways:
[Update - I didn't fall off the face of the earth since the last post, we had a death in the family. But I'm back now]
[tags] entrepreneur, small business, business owner, time management, productivity [/tags]
Let’s say you run a grocery store and your computers go down in the middle of the day so you can’t process any payments. What do you do?
Let’s say your employees decide that since the problem was the company’s fault, they shouldn’t make the customers wait, so they let them take their food for free. What do you do about employees like that?
To see what happened when that situation occurred in West Hartford CT click here.
Takeaways:
[tags] management, small business, entrepreneur, team work [/tags]
Joel Spolsky recounts his move from a Microsoft to (eventually) Juno Online Services in New York.
Eventually, though, I started to discover that the management philosophy at Juno was old fashioned. The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management. Managers exist to get furniture out of the way so the real talent can do brilliant work.
Guess what. Microsoft is still around and you probably never heard of Juno.
Takeaways:
[tags]small business, manager, management, CEO, entrepreneur [/tags]
There are examples to show incentives are good: they improve some behaviors and are a way to give people what they want in exchange for effort you want. There are also examples of why incentives are bad: they promote individuality at the expense of teamwork, they morph motivation to extrinsic rewards when motivation could (should?) be intrinsic, people always find ways to game the system.
Context is the Key
It’s like saying is fat bad? Too much is, so is too little. And it depends what kind, what else you eat etc.
Incentives are good for some things, bad for others. On top of that some people respond to them differently from others. Management is part science and part art. The smaller your group of people (less than a dozen) the more exceptions there are to the “science” and the more important is the art of knowing each person and what works for them and how to give people what they want/need without making others feel things are unfair.
Takeaway:
If you’re in the USA – have a happy Thanksgiving Day this Thursday. If you’re not in the USA be thankful. (Double entendre intended.)
[tags] management, CEO skills, small business, entrepreneur [/tags]
Leadership has been getting all the spotlight in recent years, but management is really where the action is if you want results. Management is the hard work of developing (as well as sustaining) an environment that supports people to be successful in a common goal. The common goal, of course is the success of your company.
Joel Spolsky said it well:
You can go into any coffee shop in the country and order a short soy caramel latte extra-hot, and you’ll find that you have to keep repeating your order again and again: once to the coffee maker, again to the coffee maker when they forgot what you said, and finally to the cashier so they can figure out what to charge you. That’s the result of nobody telling the workers a better way. Nobody figures it out, except Starbucks, where the standard training involves a complete system of naming, writing things on cups, and calling out orders which insures that customers only have to specify their drink orders once. The system, invented by Starbucks HQ, works great, but workers at the other chains never, ever come up with it on their own… As a manager it’s your job to figure out a system. That’s Why You Get The Big Bucks. [emphasis mine]
One reason the two are often confused is due to style. Management has become associated with an authoritarian style aka “Command and Control” Leadership has become associated with an more “empowering” style.
Sigurd Rinde makes this mistake in his post about leading children as training for MBAs.
When dealing with knowledge workers in our more flexible economy it’s usually more useful to use a more inclusive, empowering style whether you are leading or managing (not always but usually). It’s absurd to think you can create an environment that supports people without their input. But just leading people will not develop a scalable organization.
Takeaways:
[tags] Managing, Leading, Management, CEO Skills, Entrepreneur [/tags]
photo courtesy of GeekPhilosopher
This from Paul Orfalea
[founder of Kinkos which got acquired by FedEx
and now has 1,200 stores in 10 countries]
You must be flexible and astute and focus on the big picture. Busyness is not your friend. Startup entrepreneurs too often try to run away from their anxiety by being busy. But you have to leave time open on your schedule for hard thinking rather than hard working. Make sure you get plenty of sleep take vacations and don’t get mired in the details either at the store or at your headquarters. You don’t have to be at your desk in order to analyze cash-flow projections or revenue-by-category data, both of which I love to pore over by the way. Can’t get enough of it. You, as an owner have to be smart about managing your relationship with time. My definition of owning a business is to make money while you’re sleeping. If you can’t make money while you are sleeping, then your business owns you – you don’t own it.
Takeaways:
[tags] start-up, entrepreneur, CEO skils, running a business [/tags]
Everyone knows that to grow a business you have to delegate. But it’s hard. Here’s why. Most of what you do (and want to delegate) is knowledge work. Peter Drucker coined the term Knowledge Worker to mean someone who works in information or who develops knowledge in the work place. This makes it distinct from physical work.
Physical work is easy to quantify qualify and thus easy to delegate. If I delegate the task of painting a room to you, your only question would be “what color”? It will be obvious when you started, how far along you are by the end of the day and if you did a good job or not. Without me having to spell out the details.
If you ask me to negotiate a contract with one of our suppliers, or develop a marketing plan, or research the competition, none of those things are obvious. What level of detail is required? When am I finished? How do we determine when I’m missing something critical and when I’m missing something that doesn’t matter? What constitutes a good job?
So here’s what usually happens.
Scenario 1. You give me the task of negotiating the contract. I spend so much time getting your input on this, that, and the other thing, that between the two of us we spend twice as much time as we should. Next time you just do it yourself.
Scenario 2. You give me the task of negotiating the contract. You’re too busy to give me any input, or I want to show you how good a job I can do so I figure it out all by myself. If I luck out, and do it to your liking, you think I’m wonderful and lament that you can’t find other employees like me. You give me all the contracts to negotiate and I can’t ever move up in the firm because you can’t replace me.
Scenario 2a. Perhaps I don’t do it to your liking. Perhaps I negotiate a really bad contract and you spend more time fixing it or solving the problems the bad deal has caused. Next time you just do it yourself.
Scenario 3. You give me the task of negotiating the contract. But you check in with me so often and ask about every little detail that I can’t get any work done. You are frustrated by lack of progress. Between the two of us we spend three times as much time as we should. Next time you just do it yourself.
Is it any wonder that Entrepreneurs find employees the most frustrating part of running their companies? (Customers are in second place.)
What’s the underlying cause of this problem?
The real cause is communication. With the task “Paint the room” that simple sentence communicates very clearly what is to be done. The phrase “Negotiate the contract” is not nearly as clear. So the delegator (that’s you) has to figure out what exactly you want done. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined hard core pornography by saying in a judicial opinion “I know it when I see it” While that may have been good enough for the Supreme Court, it’ doesn’t cut it when you try to delegate knowledge work.
Here’s a solution. Assume you are delegating some task to me. You have to commit it to paper (OK electrons – but you have to write it down). Writing makes your thought much clearer or at least makes it obvious when they’re imprecise or contradictory. You can write it down – or you can explain yourself and ask me to write down what I thought you said. Yes it will take more time to assign a task that way. But you’ll save so much more time in the execution it will be worth it. If it’s not worth that little bit of extra time, then the task it probably not worth doing at all.
Write it down in the following format.
[Note: the process doesn't have to be autocratic. We can discuss any of these points, you can defer to my opinion or insist on your or we can meet half way. The point is the delegation is not complete until these points are well defined.]
The first two questions will almost always cause you to refine what you’re really delegating. The third question will make you clarify what you mean by success. It will make it easier for me to know if I’m doing the right thing without your constant involvement. The forth question will free me up to work at my own pace and still meet your deadlines. But you must play fair and not follow up before you said you would. That’s micro-management.
If I’m unfamiliar with a task, or you’re unfamiliar with my ability to do that task, I recommend a 10-50-90 follow up schedule. That means schedule the first follow up when you expect 10% of the job to be finished. For a task you expect to be finished in a day, the first follow up would be in an hour. If the task is expected to take a week, follow up in half a day. The purpose of this first follow up is to see if I understood the assignment (or if you communicated it clearly). If 10% of the job is not done by then, you’ve caught the trouble in plenty of time.
Schedule the 2nd follow up when you expect 50% of the job to be done. The purpose of this follow up is to see if the pace of the job is appropriate. Sometimes people take too long because they are working to too deep a level of detail, or perhaps they didn’t give it a high enough priority. A check at this point will alert you to any problems of speed.
The third follow up – at 90% completion is to catch any last minute snafus while there is still a bit of time left to help.
Takeaways:
[tags] small business, management, CEO skills, delegation, how to delegate [/tags]
200,000 deliveries a day. 5,000 employees (many barely literate) and an enviable error rate without depending on electronic technology. And such dedication that when Royalty visits, Prince Charles (yes, THAT Prince Charles) adjusts his schedule to fit theirs, because they won’t deviate.
What’s your error rate?
Your dedication level?
Read about the Dabbawala and see if you can think of reasons for their success.
My Reasons:
Post your reasons in the comments.
Takeaway:
[tags] small business, entrepreneur, error rate, management, productivity, Dabbawala [/tags]
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither it’s pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John W. Garner, Forbes “Thought” page Aug 1, 1977 from The Official Rules by Paul Dickson
It occurs to me that this applies in business if you substitute leadership, vision and other high level ideas for philosophy and you replace plumbing with management, training and oversight.
It’s amazing to me that amount of high falutin’ clap trap folks will espouse (not to mention pay consultants for) in the first category, without considering if the ideas actually work. Then they’ll go to all kinds of effort to convince themselves they don’t need to be consistent and specific in the later category.
The truth is, it’s more fun and feels great to philosophize about your vision and the like; while it can be tedious and time consuming to actually discover what’s important to measure and hold people accountable (especially yourself).
If you want to play football, a game plan is nice. But accomplishments happen on the field, in the huddle and executing plays. You’ll do better with good execution and good huddles and no game plan than the other way round. Better if you have people who can do both well.
[tags] management, leadership, vision, business, CEO, entrepreneur [/tags]
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