I think Mick Malthouse is having fun. Mick is the coach of Carlton, a team in the Australian Football League which is the top competition in the land. He took on the job this season and I think overall he is having a good time due to two structural reasons that are useful for us to pay attention to.
The first is clarity of accountability. I doubt Mick has Read more…
A younger friend of mine has recently made the elite professional level of his sport; there is no higher level besides international representation in his game. Very impressive as he had the courage to leave his hometown and try to reach something in which there was a genuine chance of failure (when was the last time you did something with that condition?).
I asked how is he finding things at the top level, and his answer was about feedback. He said that any mistake gets punished on the field by the other team, so there is heaps of pressure, and along with it heaps of feedback Read more…
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…
Some people just get it. When faced with decisions they seem to see what others can’t. One second before they gave their view, you were floundering, not sure which way to go. Now it seems so obvious it’s almost embarrassing.
We know this ability when we see it. Here’s a 3-minute clip so you can see an example for yourself (link here if you can’t see anything):
At 2:20 Sam Seaborn says “I don’t know the word”, as he’s trying to work out how President Bartlet pieces it all together.
Well….there is a word. Two words. It’s called cognitive capability, 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…