The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

Your First Responsibility as a Manager Is to Achieve Results

Your first responsibility is NOT to your team of directs. It's NOT to your people. You should NOT worry about them first. Your first responsibility is to deliver whatever results your organization expects from you.

About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals, in numbers and percentages:

The problem with not having clearly delineated responsibilities is that you can't make intelligent choices about where to focus.

“What results do you expect of me?” “What are the measures you're going to compare me against?” “What are the objective standards?” “What subjective things do you look at to round out your evaluation of me?”

Your Second Responsibility as a Manager Is to Retain Your People

Effectively managed modern organizations now measure retention in addition to results when they are evaluating a manager. It's intended to be a brake against an unrelenting results focus.

The Definition of an Effective Manager Is One Who Gets Results and Keeps Her People

The four critical behaviors that an effective manager engages in to produce results and retain team members are the following: Get to Know Your People. Communicate about Performance. Ask for More. Push Work Down.

Never tolerate from your directs what you would not do to your boss.

Micromanagement is the systemic and routine application of an intrusive relationship such that the manager assigns a task, explains what to do, how to do it, insists on total process compliance, and then observes the work in real time, correcting the work as it is being done, and, in the event of divergence from standards, taking OVER the work and completing it himself.

But anyway, look, if you're that busy, we'd better be sure that you're working on the right things.

The agenda is simple: first, 10 minutes for your direct to speak, then 10 minutes for you to speak, and then 10 minutes to talk about the future.

Ask the same question every time. Memorize it, and tell your directs, “This is the question (or statement) I'm going to start every O3 with. I don't really need an answer to it; it's just a way to turn the podium over to you.”

Some examples of questions you can ask are: “How's it going?” “How are you?” “How are things?” “Your agenda—what have you been up to? What's going on?”

Whatever you do, don't ask a question you expect a real or detailed answer to.

As a general rule, if there's any information that you need to get out to your entire team, we recommend that it go out in what we would call a “waterfall meeting,” not in your One On Ones. This is likely to be your weekly staff meeting [There's a Cast for That™], where you will only have to say it once, to all of your directs at the same time, rather than seven times—once to each of your directs.

There are only TWO times to do phone O3s: (1) when your direct is not collocated with you, and (2) when a normally collocated direct is traveling or a manager is traveling, and a face-to-face O3 is not possible.

Ideally, rather than asking for documents in advance, you've created some sort of e-storage solution for your directs' work product. As a general rule, effective managers don't allow directs to keep large amounts of work product documents in storage locations that the manager can't get at without the direct's involvement.

You Cannot Be Friends with Your Directs

In fact, I'd bet part of the reason you're reading this book is that you were given virtually no training as a manager when you first ascended to the role.

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.

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

The moment you switch to a future focus, however, you free yourself up to focus on something that you (and they) can do something about.

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.

But effective feedback isn't about waiting until there's a pattern, and it doesn't get better with age.

If you're angry, don't give feedback. Period.

when your direct gets defensive, you needn't do anything at all about it, because you have already fired a shot across their bow.

we recommend that you give in when a direct argues or gets defensive.

Remember again what this all boils down to: does the direct change her behavior in the future?

We can tolerate directs who make mistakes. We cannot tolerate directs who repeatedly make commitments they don't keep.

You should use systemic feedback when you have already given six instances of standard feedback in a period of time that indicates a pattern, and the direct has not been engaging in the behavior they've committed to. This is the final step of feedback.

Talk to your directs about the purpose of giving feedback, which is to “encourage effective future behavior.”

The third critical behavior for effective managers is to ask for higher levels of performance: Ask for More.

Step 1: Collaborate to Set a Goal Step 2: Collaborate to Brainstorm Resources Step 3: Collaborate to Create a Plan Step 4: The Direct Acts and Reports on the Plan

Manager Tools uses a goal structure called DBQ: Deadline, Behavior, Quality.

Also, because we remember that coaching is a more powerful tool than feedback, we usually don't set deadlines of less than four months away. If someone can change their behavior in less than four months, the person probably just needs a lot of feedback and we don't need a coaching plan.

The Behavior portion is what we want the direct to master—the behavio...

The Quality portion is how we're going to measu...

By tightening tasks down to in some cases almost an hourly scope, we can, in the first week, start reading a book. We will also have helped Derek feel like he's getting somewhere: he has completed several deliverables, all on time. He doesn't start out dreading a month long task he's constantly putting off. He starts out in our next O3 saying he accomplished all five tasks he agreed to.

Also notice the use of tasks that are not done until they are reported on as “being done.” Yes, work is “done” in the mind of the doer when she finishes the task, but the work has no value to the organization until the organization knows it's done. That's the difference between assigning a task and assigning a deliverable.

The way this process is set up, we're getting daily or at least regular updates in the form of task completion e-mails, and we are briefly discussing the direct's progress each week during our One On One.

He recognized early as a software development manager that his job had changed from solving technical problems to making others more effective so they could solve problems. His job had changed from one about technology to one about people.

Your role as the leader means that you're the clearinghouse for who gets assigned what on your team (generally). You're not delegating a task when it's not a task you would normally do, and you're simply assigning that task among members of your team. This is an example of task assignment.

Delegation, on the other hand, is you turning over responsibility for one of your regular responsibilities—something you routinely do—on a permanent or long standing basis, to one of your directs.

Delegating your new responsibility, the big black ball, is an extremely bad idea. Why? In part because you don't know how to do it yet.

Don't ever delegate a new responsibility your boss has just given you to one of your directs. Learn it first, master it, before you consider delegating it.