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The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.
nobody owes you a career. You own it as a sole proprietor. You must compete with millions of individuals every day, and every day you must enhance your value, hone your competitive advantage, learn, adapt, get out of the way, move from job to job, even from industry to industry if you must and retrench if you need to do so in order to start again.
Are you adding real value or merely passing information along?
Are you plugged into what’s happening around you?
Or do you wait for a supervisor or others to interpret whatever is happening?
Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?
to correct a potential problem before it becomes a real one during the course of the day.
you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).
The linearity indicator will help you anticipate such a problem
A manager can do his “own” job, his individual work, and do it well, but that does not constitute his output.
spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities—information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting?
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.
will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That
process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged.
Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision.
At Intel we use three kinds of process-oriented meetings: the one-on-one, the staff meeting, and the operation review.
mutual teaching and exchange of information.
A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him.
sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.
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.
The criterion to follow is this: don’t push for a decision prematurely. Make sure you have heard and considered the real issues rather than the superficial comments that often dominate the early part of a meeting.
if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding MBO system’s time frame should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly.
few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to—which is what we must have if an MBO system is to work.
In a contractual obligation, management has a role in setting and modifying the rules, monitoring adherence to them, and evaluating and improving performance. As
To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.
So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.
because motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish.
The physiological, safety/security, and social needs all can motivate us to show up for work, but other needs—esteem and self-actualization—make us perform once we are there.
he was named a vice president of the corporation. Such a position had been a life-long goal. When he had suddenly attained it, he found himself looking for some other way to motivate himself.
He can be competence-driven or achievement-driven. The former concerns itself with job or task mastery.
When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it. In an MBO system, for example, objectives should be set at a point high enough so that even if the individual (or organization) pushes himself hard, he will still only have a fifty-fifty chance of making them. Output
Thus, our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals (to move them along the horizontal axis shown in the illustration on this page), and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.
The role of the manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach. First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him. Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide. Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at one time. And having played the game well, he also understands it well.
The inevitable conclusion is that high output is associated with particular combinations of certain managers and certain groups of workers. This also suggests that a given managerial approach is not equally effective under all conditions.
As the TRM becomes even greater, the effective management style changes again. Here the manager’s involvement should be kept to a minimum, and should primarily consist of making sure that the objectives toward which the subordinate is working are mutually agreed upon.
The fundamental variable that determines the effective management style is the task-relevant maturity of the subordinate.
It is partly because managers think of themselves as perfect delegators. But also, sometimes a manager throws out suggestions to a subordinate who receives them as marching orders—furthering the difference in perceptions.
is to improve the subordinate’s performance. The review is usually dedicated to two things: first, the skill level of the subordinate, to determine what skills are missing and to find ways to remedy that lack; and second, to intensify the subordinate’s motivation in order to get him on a higher performance curve for the same skill level
To make an assessment less difficult, a supervisor should clarify in his own mind in advance what it is that he expects from a subordinate and then attempt to judge whether he performed to expectations.
performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization! It
There are three L’s to keep in mind when delivering a review: Level, listen, and leave yourself out.
Knowing where you are will help you both move through the stages together.
Put another way, concentrating on the stars is a high-leverage activity: if they get better, the impact on group output is very great indeed.
A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in. It is generally accepted that motivating employees is a key task of all managers, one that can’t be delegated to someone else. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the other principal means at a manager’s disposal for increasing output?
