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Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or “flattened” the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.
You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double your efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I’m advocating is “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
As we will see, in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity.
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities. Getting together with others is not, of course, an activity—it is a medium. You as a manager can do your work in a meeting, in a memo, or through a loudspeaker for that matter. But you must choose the most effective medium for what you want to accomplish, and that is the one that gives you the greatest leverage.
As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.
The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged. Such meetings take place on a regularly scheduled basis. The purpose of the second kind of meeting is to solve a specific problem. Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision. They are ad hoc affairs, not scheduled long in advance, because they usually can’t be.
Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff. Decision-making is not a spectator sport, because onlookers get in the way of what needs to be done.
any decision be worked out and reached at the lowest competent level.
What are some of the advantages of organizing much of a company in a mission-oriented form? There is only one. It is that the individual units can stay in touch with the needs of their business or product areas and initiate changes rapidly when those needs change. That is it. All other considerations favor the functional-type of organization.
Do any exceptions exist to the universality of hybrid organizations? The only exceptions that come to my mind are conglomerates, which are typically organized in a totally mission-oriented form. Why are they an exception to our rule? Because they do not have a common business purpose.
To put a man on the moon, NASA asked several major contractors and many subcontractors to work together, each on a different aspect of the project. An unintended consequence of the moon shot was the development of a new organizational approach: matrix management.
Similarly, our behavior in a work environment can be controlled by three invisible and pervasive means. These are: • free-market forces • contractual obligations • cultural values
We must recognize that no action communicates a manager’s values to an organization more clearly and loudly than his choice of whom he promotes.
There are three L’s to keep in mind when delivering a review: Level, listen, and leave yourself out.
So in the end careful interviewing doesn’t guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky.
We at Intel believe that conducting training is a worthwhile activity for everyone from the first-line supervisor to the chief executive officer. Some 2 percent to 4 percent of our employees’ time is spent in classroom learning, and much of the instruction is given by our own managerial staff.
