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The negative leverage produced comes from the fact that after being exposed to many such instances, the subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his supervisor.
The person who comprehends the critical facts or has the critical insights—the “knowledge specialist” or the “know-how manager”—has tremendous authority and influence on the work of others, and therefore very high leverage.
The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.
The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.
delegation is an essential aspect of management.
“delegator” and “delegatee” must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems,
We all have some things that we don’t really want to delegate simply because we like doing them and would rather not let go. For your managerial effectiveness, this is not too bad so long as it is based on a conscious decision that you will hold on to certain tasks
be sure to know exactly what you’re doing, and avoid the charade of insincere delegation,
should you delegate activities that are familiar to you or those that aren’t?
delegation without follow-through is abdication.
Because it is easier to monitor something with which you are familiar, if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best.
We should apply quality assurance principles and monitor at the lowest-added-value stage of the process.
the frequency with which you check your subordinates’ work. A variable approach should be employed, using different sampling schemes with various subordinates;
How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it—
Making certain types of decisions is something managers frequently delegate to subordinates. How is this best done?
By monitoring their decision-making process.
to monitor how good his thinking is, we ask him quite specific questions about his request during a review meeting.
The most common approach to increasing a manager’s productivity—his output over time—has been time-management techniques,
These time-management suggestions can be improved upon,
First, we must identify our limiting step:
In short, if we determine what is immovable and manipulate the more yielding activities around it, we can work more efficiently.
second production principle we can apply to managerial work is batching similar tasks.
set aside a block of time and do a batch of them together, one after the other, to maximize the use of the mental set-up time needed for the task.
factory, on the other hand, is usually run by forecast and not by individual order. From my experience a large portion of managerial work can be forecasted.
Forecasting and planning your time around key events are literally like running an efficient factory.
What is the medium of a manager’s forecast? It is something very simple: his calendar.
the manager should use his calendar as a “production” planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those “limiting steps”
To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things:
move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes
say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity
Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.
allow slack—a bit of looseness in your scheduling.
A manager should carry a raw material inventory in terms of projects.
this inventory should consist of things you need to do but don’t need to finish right away—
Most production practices follow well-established procedures and, rather than reinventing the wheel repeatedly, use a specific method that has been shown to work before.
managers tend to be inconsistent and bring a welter of approaches to the same task. We should work to change that.
become more con...
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continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.
As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates;
This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.
The next important production concept we can apply to managerial work is to strive toward regularity.
we should do everything we can to prevent little stops and starts in our day as well as interruptions brought on by big emergencies.
you can only move toward regularity if others do too. In other words, the same blocks of time must be used for like activities.
Manufacturers turn out standard products. By analogy, if you can pin down what kind of interruptions you’re getting, you can prepare standard responses for those that pop up most often.
If such meetings are held regularly, people can’t protest too much if they’re asked to batch questions and problems for scheduled times, instead of interrupting you whenever they want.
By maintaining an archive of information, a manager doesn’t have to do ad hoc research every time the phone rings.
a manager should try to force his frequent interrupters to make an active decision about whether an issue can wait.
you can channel the time needed to deal with them into organized, scheduled form by providing an alternative to interruption—a scheduled meeting or an office hour.
point is to impose a pattern on the way a manager copes with problems.
the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged.
