If you’re a manager, there are some things that you need to do in order to lead your people. Not someone else. I’ll state the corollary – there are certain things that you cannot assign or delegate if you want an effective team. And these things apply regardless of the level in the organisation; from CEO through to the people managing the shop floor or the sales team, if you’re accountable for the work of others, these things are yours. Read more…
Here’s one you’ve either heard or said yourself – “I’ve got to pull myself out of the weeds, I’m involved in the detail and I can’t get moving“.
Familiar? Here’s why people struggle in this area – the concept that they need to pull themselves up. It won’t happen because of the natural principles of how work organises. The way to get out of the weeds (an expression which, by the way, is fundamentally insulting to the work of your people) is to allow yourself to be lifted by creating solid layers of work. Read more…
Where to sir?
There’s something I’ve seen in organisations more than once, that if we put into a saying would read like this: “the higher you go in management, the more vague you can be about what you actually want“. This sentence will not exactly generate wise nods around the executive table, but it seems to be true a lot of the time.
Why does this occur? Three reasons 1) behavioural , 2) cognitive capability and 3) knowledge & skill
For behavioural, it means Read more…
Roles and verbs
The leader / manager distinction.
I’ve seen chapters in textbooks on it. I’ve seen MBA courses spend an entire session debating this. And I’ve never got any use out of any of it.
Here’s a way to sort this out that is actually useful:
Manager is a type of role. If you are accountable for the work of someone else, then guess what? You are a manager. Just like if you are accountable for the work of moving a football forward to score goals, you are a football player.
(How much time do you think people running football clubs spend discussing ‘what is a football player?’) Read more…
I think out of the box, I'm a type J.A.C.K
Managers in Australia love to try to ‘get into the mind’ of their people. Robert Spillane’s book The Rise of Psycho Management in Australia‘ contains an excellent analysis of how this came about, and the effects that it has had. One fact that might be startling to some is that the empirical evidence shows that the amount of performance difference that is due to personality is 4%.
Yep, 4%. In other words, 96% of the variation in performance is due to something other than personality type.
So what are the factors that determine performance? I like to use the model put forward by Elliott Jaques, if you want to go to the source, track down either Executive Leadership which he wrote with Stephen Clement, or Requisite Organization.
Here are his factors:
Cognitive Capability: does the person have the ability to handle the amount of variables, options and choices the role requires. This Read more…
I was given a great book by a colleague at work – it’s called “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, and it looks at the factors around success. It builds a great argument that although a certain seed is there in all the ‘successful’ people that we know, an amazing run of right time, right place, upbringing and cultural heritage is also required to coincide for the tree to ultimately grow.
It’s an excellent read, if this stuff interests you, don’t hesitate to get it.
There was one bit which particularly caught my attention – a description of the New York City garment industry in the late 1800s, which sowed the seeds for a group who’s grandchildren would become some of the most powerful businesspeople in New York. The garment industry required 18 hour days, back-breaking labour over sewing machines and often atrocious unsafe conditions.
It’s not a surprising image, and these work days were repeated in farms across America.
But Gladwell makes a key distinction for those in the garment trade: Read more…
There are some pretty common mistakes managers make at any level. How do I know this? I’ve made them. Here they are:
1. Not knowing your own job.
Every manager has generic things they need to do because they are accountable for the work of their team, but they also have a unique contribution to make beyond managing their people. For example, a manager who is in charge of multiple teams is also accountable for improving the way work occurs across all of their teams, while a general manager is responsible for moving the business into new areas and shutting down the old. Read more…
I was catching up with one of our most talented younger people the other day, discussing some good advice she’d received recently about motivating people. She spoke about the importance of providing context for people when you ask them to do things, like taking the time to point out how the task or the job fits into the rest of the work going on, and why it matters.
All good stuff.
The reason its true is that it goes right to the core of human respect.
Asking people to do something without explaining why sends a message that they are not as important as you. It says that you don’t deserve an explanation because you’re not worth it. If we take this to the extreme, we can arrive at serfdom or even slavery, where people have the same status as firewood – a resource to be used up.
But as humans in the world, we want to matter. To our friends, our family, our colleagues, or failing all of this, even to the police or the jailer. Whether it ends up good or bad, we want to matter. It makes us real. Read more…
I’ve been lucky enough to have a situation where my people have been arguing. Classic stuff too – the Sales Manager arguing that the Operations Manager isn’t delivering while the Operations Manager argues that the Sales Manager is selling what can’t be done.
Both are strong people who have an excellent feel for the overall business, and run their departments well.
Why am I lucky?
Because we’ve uncovered a genuine strategic question, which is: should we be in that market at all?
Reminds me of a great scene described in Robert Pirsig’s classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance where a fellow college teacher asked him what the noise coming out of his classroom was about. He calmly answered “we’ve come across a genuine question, and the shock of it is hard to recover from”. Read more…
I was at a Bucks Show on the weekend, at the awesomely old-school pool hall Chalkers at Glenelg. I played a game with Joe, who is an excellent bloke I get to see around the social circle from time-to-time, and as I successfully avoiding potting the 3-ball into the pocket I was aiming, he asked me what did I do before I became a consultant.
As I started to bore him with the details of what the business I used to oversee actually did, he stopped me with “yeah…but what was your job?”.
I had a quick think, and answered with my job title back then – General Manager.
He laughed and said “If someone could explain to me what managers actually do, that would be great”, then headed off for a pit stop. Read more…