The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

Your First Responsibility as a Manager Is to Achieve Results

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

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.

and weaknesses of your direct reports. Managers who know how to get the most out of each individual member of the team achieve noticeably better results than managers who don

Every person on the earth expects and deserves to be treated as an individual.

People and their behaviors are what deliver results to your organization. (Not systems, not processes, not computers, not machines.)

Your directs don't see you as a nice person.

They see you as their boss.

the binding and distinctive element of teams that outperform others is the amount of trust that they build and engender among their members.

If you're going to create trust and trusting relationships with your directs, then, you're going to have to talk to them frequently about things that are important to them.

Getting to know your directs accounts for 40 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

The Second Critical Behavior: Communicate about Performance

One of the underlying reasons for that beauty is the athletes who perform at the highest levels of the game are provided with feedback about their performance for their entire career.

Performance communication accounts for 30 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

The Third Critical Behavior: Ask for More

if you want great results and retention, you have to be willing to constantly raise the bar on performance.

Eustress is the stress you feel that helps you get ready, get excited, and “get up” for the big game.

The ideal place for your directs to be for maximum output/results is right on the line between distress and eustress, almost over the line into fear, but not quite there.

The only way to know where that line is, for each direct, is to push each direct into moments of distress and pay attention

to when they start to lose ef...

Asking for more accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

The Fourth Critical Behavior: Push Work Down

while the first three parts of the “Management Trinity” create value for the team, “pushing work down” creates capacity for the organization.

answer. The direct should do the job and not the manager, because the direct is cheaper labor. If we can achieve an acceptable quality level with less cost, for all but the most important things we do, we should do so.

Pushing work down accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total value created by engaging in the four critical behaviors.

However you manage, your techniques, behavior, and philosophy must be both teachable to others and sustainable.

We don't really think about it very often, but the way in which people do their work matters, at some level.

To sustain organizational growth, new managers must be created, and the way to create new managers is to teach them before they move into the role.

like it or not, your relationship with your directs is a force multiplier.

If you're not taking notes, it's not a Manager Tools One On One.

The fact is, O3s are business meetings about results, and sometimes personal matters are discussed.

First, let's be clear about pushback in general. Don't ever be surprised by it.

when you change how you manage, then fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the change are always part of the response.

The fact is, your directs don't respond precisely to you but, rather, to their perception of you.

From the company's perspective (which is the perspective the manager must take), a direct who wishes for virtually no managerial oversight is a liability risk.

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.

you're busy if you're not getting all your work done.

Before trying to get more of everything done, get the most important things done first. This is a simple argument that it's better to try to first achieve results through effectiveness—doing the right things, the valuable things, the important things—before trying to achieve results through efficiency—doing the same work in less time. Work on the right things first. Then become more efficient at doing those right things, and you'll have more time for either more right things or some less important things.

Manager Tools One On Ones are business meetings. They're about building relationships, but the primary purpose of the relationships you're building is results. Since they're business meetings, they have an agenda.

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.

Start each O3, every time, with every direct, no matter what, with the same first question.

“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.

If you're going to build a relationship with someone whom you're going to trust to do high-quality work without micromanaging that person, you're going to have to respect that the person is different from you.

If it's important to my team member, it's important to me.

Don't use your O3s to pass down standard information that everyone's getting.

The agenda of a meeting always serves the purpose of the meeting, not the other way around.