Tag Archives: responsibility

Three Counter-Intuitive Steps to Becoming a More Effective Manager

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Become a More Effective Manager – Three Counter-Intuitive Steps

In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too much study, too much thinking, too much integration of the many many skills and aptitudes required to become more effective. In both strategy and management skills action is almost always preferable to another round of study. Action bumps you up against the real world and provides the real basis for improving skills and results.

But, that still leaves us with the nagging question as a manager, especially for rookie managers and supervisors, how do I get started?

Based on many years of personal work as a manager and many years coaching managers, here are three steps you can take that will get you into action and guarantee striking results. These results will come in your personal effectiveness and in of the results of the organization you manage.  Remember,  by results, I am referring to the three meanings Drucker defined: (1) direct business results (usually measured in $s); (2) improved organizational culture (values); and (3) development of people. ((see Chapter 2 – What Can I Contribute? in his book The Effective Executive))

1. Stop Answering Questions

If most managers could listen to themselves, the proverbial fly on the wall, for just a few hours, they would discover that they are chronically enabling dependency all around them and undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place. How is this happening? Just listen and you will hear a stream of questions coming at them followed by answers in response. You are enabling the following the reflexive pattern: ask the expert and be rewarded with answers. Ask the boss, get an answer, and be safe from responsibility for the answers.

If you want to get people to take responsibility and be involved in the business, you can’t go on answering all these questions. They will just go on asking whether they need to or not. And, you are spending an enormous amount of your time, your most valuable resource, to answering all of these questions.

What should a manager do to break this pattern? Continue reading →

Podcast: Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth

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Shifting your focus from weaknesses to strengths is a powerful step towards being personally more effective and building a more effective organization.

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This podcast is based on an earlier blog posting: “Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth”.

This podcast is 7 minutes 21 seconds long.

You can download a PDF file with the transcript of this podcast

Managing for Weakness – a mis-management myth

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The Myth

Managers spend a lot of time worrying about the weaknesses of their employees. “If only I could get her to perform better we would have a really great team.” And countless more along that line. Companies have performance evaluation systems that focus attention on how employees should overcome their weaknesses by additional training, supervision and mentoring, and, above all, more work on self-improvement by the employee. Perhaps this focus on weakness flows from an educational system that has always been more attuned to the “Cs” and “Ds” and what must be done to raise those scores, rather than building on the strengths. Our focus on overcoming weakness is reflected in a saying like, “You can become anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough.”

Debunked

In the management world, Peter Drucker, the great god-father of modern management, spoke clearly about this matter way back in 1966 in his still prescient and useful little book, The Effective Executive (still in print). He wrote, “The effective executive fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength…. Performance can only be built on strengths. What matters most is the ability to do the assignment.”

More recently, others have also come to see that when it comes to both people and organizations the only way to build for results is to build on strengths. One example of this is the work of the Gallup Organization and Marcus Buckingham and Donald D. Clifton in Now, Discover Your Strengths ( (Free Press, New York 2001) and Tom Rath, Strengths Finder 2.0 (Gallup Press, New York 2007). Go to the website (https://www.strengthsfinder.com/) and check this out.

A Better Approach – Build on Strength

Focusing on strengths engages peoples’ best attributes, skills, and experiences. Focusing on strengths engages people where they have the most passion, energy and success. Focusing on strengths focuses on the activities where people have already demonstrated results. Focusing on strengths creates a positive relationship because you a talking about activities that the employee is good at and has the best chance of producing good results.

Managers should focus their attention on how to be sure that every person is working on their strengths as much as possible.

There is another reason for this focus on strengths, it removes a crutch that managers use to avoid taking complete responsibility for their performance and the performance of the organization – the myth of lousy personnel – “If I only had better people, I could get my organization to really perform.” I wrote about this recently in another posting, It’s Always Your Fault – taking responsibility for your personnel”.

Start With Your Strengths

To move us beyond this discussion, ask yourself:

“What are my strengths?”

The simplest way to answer this question is to look at the activities where you have had the most and best results. These are your strengths. You might enrich this line of thinking by asking which activities make you happy, put you into a state of flow where you really concentrate and loose track of time? An external, third party assessment can be helpful. I have used StrengthsFinder 2.0. It is good, adequate detail without overreaching. There are others.

Then ask this question:

“Am I spending most of my time working on my areas of strength?”

Make a list of your activities over the last two weeks. Do a large number of your strengths play a significant role in many of your day-to-day activities? If there are, great!! If not, you need to take action.

The most important step is to move your work day towards your strengths. Start by asking yourself how you can make changes. Many times my clients find that they are doing tasks out of their strength zones simply because they always have. Habits are made to be changed. Look around the organization to find someone whose strengths include these tasks. Off load them. Keep your eye on the results required, but, off load. Other clients have realized that they need a new employee or business partner to take on the tasks that are in their weak zones.

One of the great side effects of moving to your strengths is that the tasks you shed will be performed better, in a more productive fashion, by somebody who feels good about exercising their strengths in carrying them out.

Look for Strengths in Others

Once you have identified your own strengths and acted to move towards them, you can turn to asking others in your organization, “What are your strengths?”. It is important that you empower them to answer the question for themselves. Then, together, you can act to move them towards their strengths. This is a task requiring more space and time than possible here. A hint is that you will need to build a matrix that displays all of the organization’s primary activities’ strengths requirements on one axis and the strengths of all personnel on the other.

What About The Weaknesses?

OK, so it is true. Everyone has weaknesses. It is true that inevitably these weaknesses show up in the results. The only useful answer to this quandary is the old saying, “Just take your lumps.” Whenever you find a bad result due to someone working in a weakness zone, ask yourself, as the general manager, “Could I have assigned someone else to do that job and have it in their strength zone?”

If you work seriously for yourself and those in your organization to focus on strengths, you will find that the results overall are much better and you and everyone else feels better because they are working in the strength zone.

It’s Always Your Fault – taking responsibility for personnel

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Attracting, selecting, training and mentoring, and pruning human resources are among the most important tasks a manager confronts. Almost everyone agrees that, at the top level of organizations, managers need to be devoting a significant portion of their time addressing the people needs of the firm. Without the right people in the right positions, no strategy, no matter how clever, can succeed.

To be truly successful in meeting these responsibilities, a manager must embrace an all important management rule: “If an employee is working below expected or required performance it is always the manager’s fault.”

The first place to look is at the manager. After all, the manager hired or selected the person. The manager defines the work, provides tools, training, and all other resources required for the job.  The manager is responsible for the success of every person they supervise.

An important effect of this rule is that it prevents you from entering the whinny land of thinking, or worse, saying:  “Why doesn’t Joseph pay more attention to detail?” “Mirabelle keeps making the same errors over and over in these quotes.” “Walt just doesn’t get the big picture of where this project is going and he is heading down the wrong track, for the umpteenth time.”

Embrace your responsibilities and powers to make your personnel successful.

  • Make sure that you really have well thought out and planned jobs.
  • Are job definitions focused on results?
  • Are the task definitions actionable?
  • Do the skills listed actually match up with the results you want to achieve?
  • Have you provided the training required?
  • Do your personnel understand where the company is going strategically and is it clear how the results of their jobs connect with these strategies?
  • Have you acted promptly to provide feedback and take corrective action to support performance?
  • Do you have a company culture that embraces, supports, and demands full participation by everyone?

Selection and promoting personnel are management tasks with a high error factor. Every manager needs to acknowledge that their judgments are not always perfect, nor even close to perfect, in selection and promotion. So, faced with a weak performance from a new hire or newly promoted person, managers must ask the question early, “Did I make a mistake here?” If you come to that conclusion you need to act promptly to correct the error.

The central point is that you selected your personnel, you set the conditions and environment of their work, your provide the tools and training, you set the expectations, the results required. If you are not getting top performance from your personnel, look to the basics, look to your own responsibilities as a manager first. After all, if you are really holding yourself accountable for these responsibilities, you will achieve equal or better performance from everyone in your organization.

Managers: Don’t Answer That Question! – part two

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In the previous posting, I wrote about how managers are chronically undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place and enabling dependency all around them.

One of the reasons managers answer so many questions from their staff and others in the company is that they fear that if they don’t, then really important issues and opportunities may be addressed incorrectly or sub optimally.

A key to getting out of the round of endless questions while still being involved in important ones, is to set some boundaries, some limits.

This might sound like this: “I want you to develop three solutions before you come to ask me a question. Ask your colleagues for help if you get stuck. But, in the case of the following critical customer, Immense Big Machines, Inc., I want to be informed of any issues involving delay or cost overruns in Project XZY.”

With the right boundaries set around your new rule, you can still be assured of being involved where you need to be.

Finally, to make your staff and others in the company comfortable about taking responsibility for solving problems and answering their own questions, you need to have environment in which mistakes are expected and dealt with positively. Remember, if you are not making mistakes, you are doubtless doing very little and learning not at all. Mistakes need to be analyzed and the lessons learned. Perhaps the only rule about mistakes is that they should not be repeated.

Note that this skill, “Don’t Answer That Question!” is a great precursor to grasping the opportunities for controlling your time. More discussion about this in my entry: Seizing Your Time – the first step in time management.