The best manager is one who achieves a given target while making the best use of all relevant resources. Take self-management for starters. Suppose you are planning to visit a location that is completely new to you. Instead of planning your route carefully, you simply jump in your car and go looking for your destination. You get there in the end but not without several wrong turns, a lot of wasted time and using more gas then necessary. You did not manage your journey very well because, although you achieved your goal, you did not make the best use of the resources at your disposal – especially your time and your car’s fuel.
Management Effectiveness in Organizations
Effective managers in organizations follow this same basic principle. It is not just about getting results. The “how” is also critical. Management effectiveness entails efficiency, which means reaching a destination with minimal cost. The only difference between business managers and simple self-management is the number and types of resources involved and the complexity of tasks that need to be managed. The more complex the task, the more complex needs to be the planning, coordination and monitoring to achieve success efficiently. Managing widely diverse types of people, large amounts of money and working to tight timeframes creates a great challenge for even the best managers. Leadership is different. It is about promoting new directions, not executing existing directions efficiently.
Managing People
The need for efficiency creates the impression of a mechanical, inhuman, uncaring process. In the days of the assembly line, management was rightly criticized for being overly mechanistic. Today, however, effective managers are excellent people managers. Just like the best sports coaches, the best manager knows how to motivate people, develop them and get the best out of everyone. Because today’s knowledge workers want to feel valued and important, managers need to be less dictatorial and controlling than they were in the past. The skill of the best manager is to be able to strike the right balance between the demands of efficiency and the requirement to let people think for themselves. This is no easy balance to strike. Efficiency depends on close performance monitoring.
Performance management.
Without measurement, there is no way to determine or improve efficiency. The effective manager knows how to involve employees in monitoring their own performance by selling them on the benefits to them of being fully aware of how they are doing at all times. This is also true in sports. Top athletes cannot excel without measuring their performance against challenging targets. It’s just a matter of how the need for performance measurement is presented. It is easier to accept if it is presented as being in the individual’s own interest rather than being imposed in an authoritarian manner which conveys a lack of trust.
Doing the Right Thing
Managers must do the right thing, not just get things right. Management is like investment. Managers have resources to invest: people, material, a budget. To obtain the greatest return on their investment, managers need to deploy their resources where they will achieve the best return. Doing the right thing is just as much a form of efficiency as doing things right because it entails making the best possible use of a set of resources. That is, you can implement a goal efficiently but you can also make the most value-adding choice of goals in relation to the potential of the resources at your disposal.
