The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

Something else we've learned about drinking alcohol with directs: have only one drink with them. They'll appreciate your willingness to not set yourself apart from them completely. When you turn the second one down, they'll appreciate you more for setting an example and admitting you know you're not one of them, completely.

I know it's hard to hear that some friendships will have to become less important to you than your work responsibilities. We've felt that sting, and yet we've found over and over again that the best of friends totally respect it and understand it, and the relationship becomes better even as it becomes different. Effective managers want to know their directs, and they are required to make hard decisions that put the company first. Be a professional, and be friendly, not friends.

Can I Do One On Ones as a Project Manager? You can have One On Ones in a matrix or matrix-hybrid organization as a project manager. You don't have to have line authority or control of directs who officially report to you to make it work. This type of One On One can work very well.

While we recommend One On Ones virtually exclusively for manager and team member relationships, the project manager and team member relationship has become important enough, and common enough, to justify this additional meeting.

Horstman's Law of Project Management: WHO does WHAT by WHEN.

The way you can make one of your team members most effective on your project is by keeping that team member on track to meet their deliverables by the deadline.

For most of the project managers who have learned about this concept, these PMO3s turn into miniature status updates. Team members tell us where they are, what issues they're facing, where they need help, and then we ask questions about what the status is and what their plans are to meet deliverable standards on time.

You might think that the weekly or biweekly project review does that, and you would be right. But we've been in hundreds of project review meetings ourselves, and the amount of professional, helpful candor that can appear in them, as opposed to blame shifting and defensiveness, is quite small. You can't give feedback. There are too many empty moments during which everyone knows what's going on but nobody wants to say it out loud. That's not a problem in PMO3s.

Our general rule for the shortest project that benefits from PMO3s is three weeks.

Phone PMO3s also are fine.

If (a big if) you feel that you can add this to a project launch meeting, introduce your plan for having PMO3s there. Walk your team members through the idea of PMO3s.

One key difference between rolling out standard O3s and PMO3s is that you don't wait three weeks for everyone's schedule to clear. Early project successes—deadlines met, standards kept—are important bellwethers of overall success.

When the project is over, the PMO3s stop. Resist any attempt by a team member to have them continue.

This is how I manage projects. It will help with communication. It will last only 30 minutes once a week. It will give you guaranteed time with me regularly, no matter what. PMO3s will significantly reduce the bane of every project since the beginning of time: lack of communication.

Take the number of directs you have, multiply that number by 1.5, and that's the number of choices you need to make available to your team in your e-mail.

Don't let your directs choose whatever time works for them.

Don't choose times that work for you without any input.

The reason you need 15 half-hour slots if you have 10 directs is so the last direct who chooses still gets a choice. Don't worry—those five unused slots will come back to you.

Send Out a One-On-One E-mail Invitation You can find a recommended text to use for the e-mail on our website link. Basically, it says that you're going to start doing weekly One On Ones in three to four weeks, it explains why you're doing them, and that your e-mail is to start the scheduling process. Give your directs 48 hours to respond with their chosen time. Tell them to “Reply to All” when they respond so that everyone will know which time slots have been taken.

planning is everything; plans are nothing. Things are going to change.

So, you set the schedule, and then after a few weeks, you allow for some changes, based on whether the schedule is working for both you and your directs.

Once you've sent the e-mail and set the schedule, set some time apart in your next staff meeting—say, 30 minutes—and walk everyone through what you've learned here. Walk them through the purpose, the agenda, how you're going to take notes, and how they're going to continue indefinitely.

For 12 weeks, don't introduce any other new management behavioral change. Just work on One On Ones, for 12 weeks. At the end of the 12 weeks, you'll know your directs better, and you'll be much more aware of how to deliver the next steps.

If you start delivering feedback using our model after only a few weeks of O3s, you'll be learning two things at once. We've tested it, and it doesn't work. If you don't take time to build trust, your directs will struggle more and longer with getting more feedback from you.

(It's a great deal easier to give and receive feedback when trust has been built.) When you do it wrong, however, it feels really wrong to the direct. But doing it right just isn't all that difficult.

When the average manager gives feedback, the focus is on what happened. The manager thinks about what happened in the past and asks herself how to talk to the direct—about what happened, in the past, about which the manager can do nothing. It ought to be obvious why talking about something that happened in the past is a problem. It also ought to give you a clue as to why directs get defensive when managers talk to them about their mistakes. They get defensive because managers talk to them about their mistakes—which happened in the past—about which the directs can do nothing. So, they feel trapped.

Have I made any mistakes in the last month? If you're like the rest of us, you'll privately admit, “yes, a number of them, if I'm being honest.” Did I intend to make those mistakes? Did I set out to mess things up on purpose? If you're like the rest of us, you'll immediately say, and perhaps vehemently, “No, of course I didn't.”

Challenge someone who fears you at some level, and you'll get some pushback.

The purpose of performance communications (and therefore feedback) is to encourage effective future behavior.

Rather than thinking, “What can I say to this person about her mistake?” or, “How can I praise her for that great decision?” the right approach is to focus on what you want (the future), not on the past, because there's nothing she or you can do about the past.

If your direct made a mistake, you want different behavior. If your direct did something well, you want more of the same.

When you realize this, you realize you're not very interested in the mistake itself when it comes to talking about performance. Sure, you want to know what the mistake was, but you can't do anything about it, because it's already happened. The only question is, can you encourage the direct not to do it again?

The Manager Tools Feedback Model has four simple steps: Step 1: Ask. Step 2: State the Behavior. Step 3: State the Impact of the Behavior. Step 4: Encourage Effective Future Behavior.

It's an important managerial rule to never ask a question of your directs if you don't intend to honor their answer.

Asking directs for permission to give them feedback significantly increases their appreciation for your giving them the feedback and also the likelihood of their effective future behavior.

do you want to be the boss, or do you want your team to be more effective?

We say, “When you (insert behavior)…”

The words you choose to say out loud to others are a choice, and different words produce different results. Your choice of words makes a difference in business results. Furthermore, certain words are known to produce distinctly better results in certain situations.

Even if the intent is the same, the words matter if they're likely to influence the outcome.

Meaning is determined 7 percent based on the words we use, 38 percent by tonal differences, and 55 percent by nonverbal cues (facial expressions and body language).

What you do and how well you do your job are behaviors as well.

As a general rule, work product behavior is defined more specifically as: Quality: How does your work compare to accepted standards of effectiveness and excellence? Quantity: How much work have you done? This is certainly true in many jobs where there are numerical goals. There are also many jobs that are not formally measured where quantity and efficiency can be assessed. Accuracy: Does your work require rework, or does it meet generally accepted practices in your profession? Timeliness: Do you meet deadlines? Speed can sometimes create inefficiencies, but usually it is an enormous competitive advantage. Frequency of work product is also a part of timeliness. One's own timeliness is included, too—being where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there. Documents: You're responsible for the communication (and analysis and ideas) you present to others in written and electronic form. E-mails are behavior: you made choices about what you said and how you said it. This is very much akin to the words you say and how you say them, as mentioned earlier.

we're bad at guessing what others' intent is, and our directs know they can argue about what's in their head, because we can't prove that was “actually” their intent.

Step 2 of the model always begins with the words, When you. By starting your sentence with these words, you encourage yourself to focus on the direct's behavior.

Our guidance is to look for small impacts that happen every day. It's easier to give feedback on them, and all those small changes will add up.

Beginning step 3 with “Here's what happens”

When we are giving negative feedback, we are asking the direct to behave differently. We're not punishing the past mistake, because we've already forgiven it. Remember that our focus is on the future, not the past.

Giving immediate feedback is ideal. When athletes perform, they take an action, and they get an immediate response to their action. They can adjust based on what happens. When we drive, we turn the wheel, and the car responds. When we say something in a conversation, the person we're talking to responds quickly.

The point of immediacy is not to wait. The sooner your directs get feedback about what they do, good or bad, the more quickly they can implement that feedback. If managers can give feedback immediately, it works better.

The value of feedback doesn't decline appreciably within the first three to five days the vast majority of the time.