3 posts tagged “manager”

An organisations strategic vision defines what the organisation wants to be and where it wants to go. An effective strategy guides the decisions made that affect the direction of the organisation.

In order to deliver the strategy it is necessary for managers to incorporate the vision into their plans and day to day operations.

Often the best strategic plans fail either because managers do not develop concrete action plans for delivering the plan, or because they are too bogged down in day to day details and lose site of the big picture or lack management training.

To develop more effective strategic plans managers should:
• Check to ensure their own teams targets are congruent with the organisations.
• Rank targets to identify the top 2 or 3 that will have the greatest impact in delivering the strategic plan.
• Define their goals clearly and the roles of their staff in achieving them. Who is going to deliver what?
• Determine key results areas and identify the steps required to achieve these results.
• Develop measures to track progress to enable managers to know when they have reached their targets.
• Document their plans in a clear format that can be seen by the whole team.

However, what should a manager do if the organisations strategy is unclear or doesn’t exist? The answer is simple - prepare their own mini strategic plan for their team/function.

For example managers should:
• Be clear with their team what the purpose of the team/function is.
• Develop a number of targets/goals that will improve the performance of the team over the following 12 months.
• Create a plan to deliver the targets/goals set out above.

At the end of the day a significant part of a managers role is to plan for the future and more than ever it is time for managers to lead from the front.

So what is empowerment about and what are the benefits? Empowerment is quite simply a highly practical and productive way of getting the best form yourself and your staff. It involves not simply the delegation of tasks but decision making and full responsibility to.
Empowerment is one of the high leverage activities that a manager should engage in. Using Pareto’s 80:20 rule, empowerment is one of the 20% tasks that gives you 80% of the results you seek.
Why is this? Quite simply it is because it encourages staff to use their initiative. For example, there are a number of levels of initiative that a manager can encourage their staff to demonstrate. From the lowest to the highest they are:

1) Wait until told.
2) Ask what to do.
3) Recommend and then take action
4) Act, and advise immediately.
5) Act and advise routinely.

If a manager behaves in a ‘do what you are told’ way towards their staff, they simply encourage their staff to come to them with all their issues. A manager who engages in this type of behaviour will have little time to work on their important tasks as they will spend most of their time resolving staff related issues.
However a manager who encourages their staff to demonstrate high levels of initiative (ie levels 4 and 5 above), is effectively saying to their staff, ‘I trust you, you are responsible go and sort it!’. This therefore leaves the management more time to concentrate on their important, high impact tasks
However, empowerment often worries managers because they are afraid of losing control. Losing control of their staff, of budgets, customer service, ideas or standards. The idea of empowerment worries them because it seems to entail the loss of all that carefully planned control. However, empowerment is not about losing control – it is about giving it away.
There’s a big difference between losing control and giving it up. Giving up control, in other words empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it is not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. We will consider preparing for empowerment in the next article.
So, empowerment is not about loss of control In fact it’s about gain, gain of time, impact, commitment, and ideas. Most of all it is about gaining access to the skills, knowledge and initiative of your staff. Why wouldn’t you want to empower them?

Too frequently managers find themselves dealing with their team’s problems rather than encouraging them to solve their problems themselves.

Consider the following exchange, between a manager and their supervisor:

“Hi John, I wonder if you can have a word with Fred. I have spoken to him a number of times about wearing his safety goggles in the lab and he still doesn’t wear them. I thought if you had a word with him he might take it more seriously from you?”

What happens if John accepts this problem from his supervisor? He will become burdened with a task that’s not his and undermine the authority of his supervisor because next time, Fred will not do anything until his bosses boss tells him to.

So what should a manager do?

The following is paraphrased from Orcken and Wass’ article in the Harvard Business Review (January 1990) and sums the issue up nicely.

‘At no time while you help someone with their problem must you let it become your problem. The instant their problem becomes yours, they will no longer have a problem and you will have one more than you had before. If you have 10 staff and you let them each give you a new problem to resolve every week, then in three months you will have over 100!’

To minimise “problem collection” managers should follow some simple guidelines:

1. Don’t accept responsibility for your people’s problems. This doesn’t mean that you won’t help them, it just means that the responsibility for the problem stays with them.

2. Meet with them to discuss the issue, preferably at the appointed time and to agree any resulting action.

3. Help them to deal with the problem, so that they can resolve it themselves.

4. Agree what action they will take and when you will review it with them. Follow up is vital to ensure that the problem is resolved satisfactorily.

It is also important to ensure that the individual understands the level of initiative they are expected to use. For example, the issue may be serious enough to warrant a “please look into it and come back with your recommendation before taking action”. Alternatively, the issue may warrant the following response “act on your own and tell me when it has been resolved”.

To prevent managers from being overworked and their staff becoming paralysed due to indecision, managers must ensure that they don’t become burdened with problems that aren’t theirs.