Business Management

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

The key to being effective as a manager is to achieve your targets as efficiently as possible. The first step is to set clear goals. Then you have to allocate all the resources necessary to achieve your goals. Of course, you need to set the right targets in the first place. Efficiency alone won’t make you effective if you achieve targets that are of no interest or value to anyone. But, let’s assume that you have set desirable targets. In this case, the objective is to maximize efficiency and this means making sure that you have the best price you can get for all the material you need to use, you get your budget right and you make the best use of the people required to do the job.

You can’t really be an effective manager unless you are reasonably well organized. If you are not, you might get the results you want but not make best use of all your resources. You might waste too much material, break your budget or not get the best performance out of the people working on your project.

Organizing complex projects so as to manage them well requires sophisticated information technology. You need to know what factors have the greatest impact on performance and how to measure them.

To manage people effectively, you need to get the balance right between performance measurement and empowerment. This means trusting people to do the right things independently and allowing them some freedom to measure their own performance.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

You may think that you could never be a leader. Maybe you need a conception of leadership that makes sense of how you could show leadership and, more importantly, encourage you to do so.

Suppose you lack either the confidence, the skills or the interest to be formally in charge of a group of people. Perhaps you feel it would be too much pressure to have other people looking to you for direction and to settle disputes. You might feel you could do this with some people, but maybe you are in a team where there are such strong personalities that you would be nervous if you were asked to be their leader, formally or informally.

To be an informal leader in any group, according to conventional wisdom, you would have to be at least subconsciously regarded as the main person to go to for direction, support and advice in your group on an ongoing basis. However, another conception of leadership says that it has nothing to do with being such a person in an ongoing role, whether formal or informal. This view of leadership says that any time you successfully convince your colleagues to behave differently, you have shown leadership. Here, leadership is seen as an occasional act, one that is successful in promoting a new direction. On this view, you don’t need the skills or interest to manage a group on an ongoing basis. You can simply display an act of leadership when the inspiration strikes you, when you see a better way of doing something and you succeed in convincing others to follow suit.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

The first step in becoming a better communicator is to start being a better listener. Think of targeted marketing. A scatter gun advertising strategy is not as good as one that is targeted to a particular audience.

Listening is the key to identifying your target when you want to get just the right message across to a particular person or group. This is not a matter of passive listening, but of actively probing to get to the core of that the other person feels, wants and would like to see happen.

Just dumping your ideas on people is like throwing darts in the dark. Sure, you might hit the odd target, but in the meantime you come across as insensitive. If you finally hit the target, your audience has been so put off by your monologue that they have stopped listening, not just out of boredom but resentment that you aren’t bothering to listen to them, that you don’t think their views or feelings are worth listening to. So, you try harder, think of other angles or raise your voice. This only makes it worse. The key to effective communication is knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them. First you have to avoid sounding like a police interrogator. Then you have to ask what people think and feel, not just ask for information. Finally, it is essential to find something in what they say to agree with before you express any disagreement.

Now, when you deliver your message, you are in a position to highlight features that are genuinely of interest to your audience. And, they will listen because you have shown respect for their views and needs.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

If management is akin to investment, how can you get a better return on your efforts as a manager? The first step is to determine your most important customers. This should include your immediate boss and a few other key internal stakeholders. If you were an external supplier to these customers, you would look for regular opportunities to find out their current needs and priorities. If you think like a conventional employee, you might feel you’ve had a good week if you didn’t see your boss at all. This is not a customer focused attitude and it could reduce your chance of success.

Your objective as a manager is to get the best return possible out of all your own efforts and those of everyone reporting to you. This means deciding how to invest your resources where they can add most value. But to determine what is most important, you need to know what your customers most value. Managers who aren’t proactive to ascertain their boss’s needs regularly, decide for themselves how to allocate their time and people, but this is a manufacturing mindset because you are deciding for your customers what they should want.

Organizational complexity demands extra effort to generate alignment if full efficiency is to be achieved. Effective management follows the 80-20 rule, meaning that you should allocate 80 percent of your efforts and those of people reporting to you to the top 20 percent of your customer’s priorities. It’s not a matter of asking your internal customers how to do your job but of convincing them that you can better serve their needs if you get updates and feedback from them regularly. Nor is it about slavishly just doing what they ask but rather working with them as a partner to determine what allocation of your resources will yield the best return for the organization and its customers.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

As I said in my Suite 101 article on playing to your strengths, we all have a tendency to overlook our strengths. This is because the things we are good at we find easy to do. But, for this reason, we discount them by saying it’s just our job or surely anyone can do that! Perversely, we are much more aware of our weaknesses. We have a bad habit of comparing ourselves to people who can do thing we can’t do rather than to those who aren’t as good at things as us. This is a recipe for low self esteem and poor confidence.

We really need ongoing, regular feedback on both our strengths and weaknesses. Like a business, we should periodically survey our key internal customers to see how we are doing. The problem is that, because our distorted self perception undermines our confidence we tend to be very defensive about our weaknesses. As a result, whenever we get negative feedback, instead of learning from it we make excuses. We blame circumstances or other people for our own failings.

There are lots of situations where it is very easy to say that we didn’t get our work done on time because someone else didn’t give us the input we needed from them in time. Regardless of how true this explanation may be, we can always ask ourselves the challenging question: “What could I have done differently to move this along faster?”

If we never ask ourselves what we could do differently, then we are disempowering ourselves and stifling our own development. If we really want to learn how to surmount the endless obstacles thrown in our path, then we have to ask ourselves this difficult question repeatedly.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

How do you lead others? The classic leadership styles are limited because they focus mainly on how decisions are made and how direction is given. When leaders are asked how they lead, many refer to example. This means working hard and showing that you will work alongside people rather than just sit in your office. Today, setting an example also means being ethical, having integrity and being environmentally considerate. Then there is the importance of being fair, equitable and ethical in how you treat people. It is essential to communicate openly and frequently, ensure that people know what is expected of them, give them regular feedback and provide the tools and resources they need to do their jobs.

You could say that all these specific behaviors are elements of the classic participative leadership style. Such actions certainly show respect for team members. In today's knowledge driven world, team leaders are closer to their teams than were old fashioned overseers. For this reason, leadership commentators have moved away from the older three classic leadership styles of being autocratic, participative and laissez-faire to a much more fine-grained analysis where it is assumed that the leader should be broadly participative most of the time when it comes to making most work decisions. Naturally, you have to reserve staffing and pay decisions to yourself.

Because of the high level of technical or professional content in today's work, those in charge like to stay closely involved in doing the work, unlike the old fashioned assembly line supervisor. Compare being the leader of an accounting, IT, legal or HR team. This makes leading by example and being participative core leadership styles.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

We are hearing a lot about emotional intelligence these days but what is all the fuss about? First of all, what does it mean? It is first a matter of having insight into your own emotions and being able to manage them. Second, it's being sensitive to the feelings of others, being able to manage people whose emotions are getting in the way of their success and yours. Relationships are vital in virtually all aspects of life and emotions are at the heart of both good and bad relationships. People with poor emotional intelligence see only their own needs; they are oblivious to the feelings of others and they let themselves get carried away by their own feelings. Many careers depend on emotional intelligence: jobs that involve persuading, advising, managing or helping people are obvious examples. Creative roles are not so dependent on emotional intelligence. Being a writer, artist or inventor is less dependent on relationships if your creations are so good that they can virtually sell themselves. Some roles in large companies are called 'individual contributor' roles where you can get away with less than perfect interpersonal skills as long as you are really good at your job and are not too obnoxious. Where does leadership fit into this picture? If you equate leadership with being an executive, then yes, you need to be emotionally intelligent. However, if you see leadership as being creative and promoting new ideas to people, you might get away with a blunt, abrasive influencing style if you can provide really convincing, hard evidence for your proposal. Because creativity is at the heart of much of today's knowledge work, we are prepared to put up with insensitive types if they can really deliver.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

In modern organizations, leadership can be bottom up as well as top down. It can even come from outside the business altogether. If this is true, we need to understand what executives are doing when they are not leading. This means we need an understanding of what executives do that shows how it is possible for them to make a productive contribution without necessarily leading. The point here is we need to break the executive's monopoly on leadership to account for how leadership can come from elsewhere. This is critical in an age where all employees want to have a say in where their organizations are going. Increasingly, knowledge work is causing a shift in power so that leadership is becoming equated more with the power to promote better ideas rather than just having a larger than life personality.

This jars with common sense because we are stuck with a hard-wired preconception of what it means to be a leader. We have the biological bias to form ourselves into hierarchies, just as do most higher animals. So, we are programmed to see the top dog as our leader. Secondly, being inherently paternalistic, our image of the good leader is a father figure, someone who knows what to do and can calm our fears in the face of adversity. Again, this means that an effective chief executive must be seen as our primary leader. But the world is fast changing. Our knowledge driven, rapidly innovating organizational life is demanding a more democratic, less hierarchical distribution of power. People in low level positions can champion a new product and, thereby, show leadership without wanting to dominate the group or be seen as a parental figure. The bottom line is that some executives do provide leadership, but some are great managers instead. For more on this topic, see my article entitled What is an Executive: http://businessmanagement.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_an_executive

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

Historically, leadership has been defined as motivating followers to do things they would not otherwise do. In a business or public sector organization, this means getting them to be more productive in their efforts to achieve the organization's goals. On this conception, leadership style refers to the means you use to move your employees to work harder or smarter.

But there was a sea-change in the mid 1970's when the Japanese commercial success in the U.S. caused pundits to call for an end to management, to replace managers with leaders. Unfortunately, we still haven't seen the need to shift our conception of leadership away from its traditional internal focus. As I argued in my recent article, The Number One Job of Leadership, http://businessmanagement.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_number_one_job_of_leadership, it is essential for business success to keep developing new products, new sources of competitive advantage. This means that leaders need to keep a constant eye on their markets and the activities of their competitors. Effective leadership now means continually promoting new ways of beating the competition. This requires an external focus. But if leadership now means successfully promoting better products, then all employees can do it. Those at the top can do, but their primary responsibility is more managerial. In the interests of division of labor, we need to split executive roles into management and leadership. The role of the former is to get things done through people effectively. We won't fully understand leadership until we recognize its new external focus.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

How can you motivate employees if you can't motivate yourself? The key question is: When are you really in flow, when you are so enjoying your work that you forget your surroundings and stop watching the clock? Is it doing a technical job, negotiating a deal with a customer, making a big sale, coaching someone, crunching the numbers, brainstorming with colleagues to develop a new product or what? Conversely, what types of work bore you the most? What tasks do you put off? When do you feel really down at work? You can push yourself to do unpleasant tasks but you can't expect to be at your best when you are doing them. You will never be excited at such times. Psyching yourself up, just telling yourself to get excited about something that turns you off just won't work. So, the key to motivating yourself is to find ways to spend most of your time doing what most turns you on. This is not selfish so long as this is what really adds value to the business. Generally, we will do our best when we are doing what we enjoy. You may also need to think about whether you go for intrinsic or extrinsic motivation or whether you need a bit of both. Intrinsic motivation comes from doing the things that you enjoy for their own sake. Extrinsic motivation is what you get by way of reward or recognition. If some form of recognition is more important to you than the sheer enjoyment of any task, then changing what you do won't help unless it generates bigger rewards for you. See my article on Employee Motivation for more on this topic: http://businessmanagement.suite101.com/article.cfm/motivating_employees