Making you more effective at work to reach the next rung.
It is not unusual for a manager to not care why one of their direct reports does the work, only that the work gets done. There is an element of truth in this. However, you, as a manager, also care how well the work gets down. Team members that are committed to the objective produce better work than those that are merely complying with directives from above.
Attention and focus have become targeted by companies as if they carry intrinsic value. Focus does not have a value unto itself, but its value varies on its use. You only have so much attention/mental energy you can pay out over the course of the day. When we try to multitask we become less effective. This means you should avoid all the little distractions that clamor for your attention and try to suck you away from your current task.
“Team” has become a pervasive concept when talking about a manager and his directs. It is a useful metaphor, but it is incomplete by itself. Teams function differently in different sports. The late, great management thinker Peter F. Drucker calls out three types of teams in his opus Management. They are the baseball team, the football team, and the tennis doubles team.
Your manager has just come by your desk and handed you a task. You know you can’t do it the way he laid out with the resources you have. Should you go back and tell your manager, “No, I can’t do this”? Although you may be tempted, this is neither prudent nor productive. This doesn’t mean you need to suffer in silence and then fail to deliver. You should, instead, have an honest conversation with your manager. And this is a conversation you need to prepare for. Giving your manager pushback on tasking is okay within limits.
The feedback you give should always be about the behavior of your direct. If you cannot link your feedback to a behavior, don’t give it. We tell you how.
Work comes from a few well defined places and when we get work from outside of those places bad things often happen. We will cover the main places your work comes from and what it means for you.
As managers, we know it is our job to correct behaviors that our subordinates engage in that is ineffective. The sad truth is, we generally don’t do it until it has gotten pretty bad. We wait and wait to give feedback before we feel compelled to step in. Then when we finally give feedback, we wonder why it is so painful and our direct is less receptive. Imagine if your bank informed you about your account balance this way. After several months of no statements they told you that you were $10,000 overdrawn. You would not be happy with your bank. You might be annoyed when your bank tells you your account is overdrawn by $2, but you are at least you can prevent future problems. The same principle holds true with your directs and their performance.
Operational measurements fall into two categories: measures of performance and measure of effectiveness. The first is measuring the things you do. The second is measure the results you get. People often measure the former because measuring activity is easy. How many hours did you work this week? Measuring the latter is harder. Did you achieve what you set out to achieve? Results is what we, as professionals, are accountable for. It matters more how effective we are than how busy we are.
Whenever I find a plan or a team that is going nowhere or going in circles one of two things tend to be the cause. 1) Everyone agrees on what needs to be done but disagree on the amount of resources to dedicate (or all refuse to dedicate any resources, they are just admiring the problem); or 2) there is no common understanding of what the group is trying to accomplish. If the second is the problem, no matter how much energy the organization puts into the effort, little to nothing useful will get accomplished. The group often benefits when one brave person decides to speak up and ask, “So, what are we trying to accomplish here?”