FREE online courses on Great Managers - A GENERAL APPROACH
In management there is always a distant tune playing in the
background. Once you hear this tune, you will start humming it to yourself: in
the shower, in the boardroom, on the way to work, when watching the sunrise. It
is a simple tune which repeats again and again in every aspect of your
managerial life; if goes:
PLAN - MONITOR -
REVIEW
Before you start any activity you must STOP and THINK about
it: what is the objective, how can it be achieved, what are the alternatives,
who needs to be involved, what will it cost, is it worth doing? When you have a
plan you should STOP and THINK about how to ensure that your plan is working.
You must find ways of monitoring your progress, even if it is just setting
deadlines for intermediate stages, or counting customer replies, or tracking the
number of soggy biscuits which have to be thrown away, whatever: choose
something which displays progress and establish a procedure to ensure that
happens. But before you start, set a date on which you will STOP again and
reTHINK your plan in the light of the evidence gathered from the monitoring.
Whenever you have something to do, consider not only the task
but first the method. Thus if there is a meeting to decide the marketing slogan
for the new product you should initially ignore anything to do with marketing
slogans and decide: 1) how should the meeting be held, 2) who can usefully
contribute, 3) how will ideas be best generated, 4) what criteria are involved
in the decision, 5) is there a better way of achieving the same end, 6) etc. If
you resolve these points first, all will be achieved far more smoothly. Many of
these decisions do not have a single "right" answer, the point is that they need
to have "an" answer so that the task is accomplished efficiently. It is the
posing of the questions in the first place which will mark you out as a really
great manager - the solutions are available to you through common sense.
Once the questions are posed, you can be creative. For
instance, "is there a better way of producing a new slogan?" could be answered
by a quick internal competition within the company (answers on a postcard by
tomorrow at noon) asking everybody in the company to contribute an idea first.
This takes three minutes and a secretary to organise, it provides a quick buzz
of excitement throughout the whole company, it refocuses everyone's mind on the
new product and so celebrates its success, all staff feel some ownership of the
project, and you start the meeting with several ideas either from which to
select a winner or to use as triggers for further brainstorming. Thus with a
simple -- pause -- from the helter-skelter of getting the next job done, and a
moment's reflection, you can expedite the task and build team spirit
throughout the entire company.
It is worth stressing the relative importance of the REVIEW.
In an ideal world where managers are wise, information is unambiguous and always
available, and the changes in life are never abrupt or large; it would be
possible for you to sit down and to plan the strategy for your group.
Unfortunately, managers are mortals, information is seldom complete and always
inaccurate (or too much to assimilate), and the unexpected always arrives
inconveniently. The situation is never seen in black and white but merely in a
fog of various shades of grey. Your planning thus represents no more than the
best guess you can make in the current situation; the review is when you
interpret the results to deduce the emerging, successful strategy (which might
not be the one you had expected). The review is not merely to fine-tune your
plan, it is to evaluate the experiment and to incorporate the new, practical
information which you have gathered into the creation of the next step forward;
you should be prepared for radical changes.
