Management

by Brian Tracy

The strength of any organization is determined by the quality of its managers at all levels. They are the “officer corps” of the business army. What they do and how well they do it are the key determinants of corporate success.

Good managers are extremely results-oriented, instead of being processor activity-oriented. They are always focused on the results they have been hired to produce.

The most successful companies use their resources efficiently and well. They achieve a higher level of output per unit of input than their competitors. They are continually seeking ways to do things better, faster, or cheaper. A focus on increasing productivity requires clear goals, plans, checklists of essential activities, and a never-ending focus on getting more and more important things done in less time.

“Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to learn and apply new ideas faster than our competitors.”

There is a principle in psychology called the Hawthorne effect, which comes from the pioneering work on labor productivity conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in 1928. What they found was that when people are clear about a particular number or target, they continually compare themselves against that number and both consciously and unconsciously improve their performance in that area. This process of continuous improvement starts with you and your employees being clear about the number in the first place.

In business and in life, clarity is one of the most important words associated with success. Thousands of employees have been surveyed and asked about the characteristics of the best bosses they have ever had. They universally agree on this point: “I always knew what my boss expected me to do.”

This Law of Three says that no matter how many tasks you perform in the course of a month, there are only three tasks and activities that account for 90 percent of the value of the contribution you make to your business.

The rule for success in management is to “think on paper.” Write down your objectives and become absolutely clear about the goals you wish to achieve. Make detailed lists of every step that you will have to take to achieve those goals. Make checklists of those activities in chronological order to create a recipe or a blueprint that you can follow, step by step.

The more time you spend planning and organizing before you take action, the more likely it is that you will be successful.

High-performance organizations are those in which people feel terrific about themselves and are happy in their relationships with their superiors. People who are happy in their work, and who feel good about themselves, produce far more and better work than those who are not.

The foundation of peak performance is high self-esteem. Self-esteem is defined as “how much you like yourself.” The more a person likes and respects himself, the better he performs, the better he works with other people, and the more confidence and competence he has.

Psychologists have identified seven key managerial behaviors or conditions that you can create to motivate the people under your control, in turn raising their self-esteem and increasing their performance.

you must give people jobs that are beyond their capabilities so that they have to stretch, in terms of their time investment and effort, to get the job done well. It is only when people are stretching to improve themselves and how they do their work that they feel fully alive, and that they feel like winners.

People enjoy having a maximum of freedom to do their jobs. Practice giving each individual as much freedom as possible to achieve an agreed-on goal. The key to giving people this freedom revolves around your skills in using management by objectives and management by exception, and your ability to delegate well.

People have a great need to be respected by other people whose opinions they value, especially their bosses. Employees need to be able to express their thoughts, feelings, and concerns to their boss—and they need to feel that the boss genuinely respects their ideas, whether or not the boss accepts or agrees with them. The more your employees feel that you respect them, the more they respect you and want to do a good job for you.

You convey warmth to your staff members when you talk to them and ask them questions about nonwork-related issues, such as sports and hobbies. You can ask them about their families, their personal lives and activities, their children, and so on. Whenever you express a genuine interest in these subjects, you convey that you care about the other person as a human being, rather than simply as an employee in your company.

Ask if there is any way that you can help or if there are any resources that you can provide to help the person do the job. This gesture lets the employee know that you consider the task to be important and that you are concerned about both the task and the person performing it.

Whenever you assign a job that your employees can do well, and when they complete the task, they have a success experience and feel like winners. Everything that you can do or say that causes your employees to feel like winners raises their self-esteem, improves their overall performance, and increases the value of their contribution to the organization.

When you express confidence in your staff members, they will usually do everything possible to show you that you are right. Continually convey to your staff members that you believe in their ability to do an excellent job.

YOUR ABILITY to hire the right people to help you get the job done will determine your success as much as any other factor. If you cannot hire good people with the right skills, knowledge, and temperament to assist you, you will end up having to do much of the work yourself.

There is a Turkish proverb that says, “No matter how long you have gone down the wrong road, turn back.”

Your organization or department will eventually take on the attitudes, values, opinions, behaviors, and habits that you demonstrate. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every organization is merely the lengthened shadow of one man.” You can never expect people in your organization to be much different or much better than you are.

If you want people to have good work habits, establish good work habits for yourself. If you want people to be fully prepared for meetings, come to each meeting fully prepared.

Becoming a role model that everyone admires and looks up to is one of the most important contributions that you can make to your business. It is for you to set high standards to which everyone wants to aspire.