The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

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.

For the record, a manager can increase performance in the short term very effectively by using the power of his or her role as manager and threatening—and expecting—compliance. But if retention is thrown in as a required goal, that technique quickly sours.

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.

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. They should have lots of energy but not panic. 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 effectiveness. Everyone has his or her own point of diminishing returns.

Don't stunt your people's possibilities because they're not you!

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.

Manager: “When you tell me week after week after week that you're going to improve your quality numbers and then you don't, my concern is no longer just about the quality of your work. It's about you making repeated commitments—to me—that you are failing to keep. In my mind, this is much more serious than missing your quality standard. Your word of commitment will follow you your entire career. What can you do differently about this more serious problem?”

Manager Tools uses a goal structure called DBQ: Deadline, Behavior, Quality. We start with the Deadline portion because deadlines drive behavior. 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.

If you're a manager, your key to long-term success is to master the art of delegation.

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.