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The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.
If you only understand one thing about building products, you must understand that energy put in early in the process pays off tenfold and energy put in at the end of the program pays off negative tenfold.
The point is that whenever possible, you should choose in-process tests over those that destroy product.
A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.
But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.
It is important to understand that a manager will find himself engaging in an array of activities in order to affect output. As the middle managers I queried said, a manager must form opinions and make judgments, he must provide direction, he must allocate resources, he must detect mistakes, and so on. All these are necessary to achieve output. But output and activity are by no means the same thing.
Thus, transmitting objectives and preferred approaches constitutes a key to successful delegation.
The fact is, no single managerial activity can be said to constitute leadership, and nothing leads as well as example.
Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly.
How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.
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.
Without such an inventory of projects, a manager will most probably use his free time meddling in his subordinates’ work.
But an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business.
A middle manager I once knew came straight from one of the better business schools and possessed what we might call a “John Wayne” mentality. Having become frustrated with the way Intel made decisions, he quit. He joined a company where his employers assured him during the interview that people were encouraged to make individual decisions which they were then free to implement. Four months later, he came back to Intel. He explained that if he could make decisions without consulting anybody, so could everybody else.
