The Rules Of Management (Pioneer Panel's Library) (2 page)

And all you wanted to do was your job.... Luckily there are a few hints and tips that will have you sailing through it looking cool, gaining points, and coming up smelling of roses. These are
The Rules of Management
—the unwritten, unspoken, unacknowledged Rules. Keep them to yourself if you want to stay one step ahead of the game.

Management is an art and a science. There are textbooks of thousands of pages devoted to how to do it. There are countless training courses. (You’ve probably been on a few.) However, what no textbook contains and no training course includes are the various “unwritten” rules that make you a good, effective and decent manager—the
Rules of Management
. Whether you are responsible for only one or two people or thousands—it doesn’t matter. The Rules are the same.

You won’t find anything here you probably didn’t already know. Or if you didn’t know it, then you will read it and say, “But that’s really obvious.” Yes, it is all really obvious, if you think hard enough about it. But in the fast-paced, frantic, just-about- coping kind of life we lead, you may not have thought about it lately. And what isn’t so obvious is whether you do it.

It’s all very well saying “But I know that already.” Yes, as a smart person you probably do, but ask yourself honestly for each rule: Do you put it into practice, carry it out, work with it as standard? Are you sure?

I’ve arranged these Rules for you into two sections:

•
Managing your team

•
Managing yourself

I think that should be fairly simple. The Rules aren’t arranged in any particular order of importance—the first ones aren’t more important than later ones or vice versa. Read them all and then start to put them into practice, adopting the ones that seem easiest to you first. A lot of them will flow together so that you can begin to carry them out simultaneously, unconsciously. Soon we’ll have you looking cool and relaxed, confident, and assertive, in charge, in control, on top of things, and managing well. Not bad considering it wasn’t too long ago you were shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground and back to the wall. Well done you.

Before we begin, it might be worth taking a moment or two to determine what exactly we all mean by “management.” And that isn’t as easy as it sounds. For my money we are all managers—parents, the self-employed, the entrepreneur, the employed, even the ones who inherited wealth. We all have to “manage.” It might only be ourselves, but we still have to cope, to make the best use of the resources available, motivate, plan, process, facilitate, monitor, measure success, set standards, budget, execute, and work. It’s just that some of us have to do all that with bigger teams. But the fundamental stuff doesn’t change.

The Harvard Business School defines a manager as someone who “gets results through other people.” The great management consultant Peter Drucker says a manager is someone who has the responsibility to plan, execute, and monitor; whereas the Australian Institute of Management definition of a manager is a person who “plans, leads, organizes, delegates, controls, evaluates, and budgets in order to achieve an outcome.” I can go along with that.

It can get very wordy and complex:

A Manager is an employee who forms part of the organization’s management team and is accountable for exercising delegated authority over human, financial, and material management to accomplish the objectives of the organization. Managers are responsible for managing human resources, communicating, practicing and promoting the corporate values, ethics and culture of the organization, and for leading and managing change within the organization. (The Leadership Network, California)

Fine, whatever. We are all managers in whatever form or shape we think, and we all have to get on with the job of managing. Anything that makes our life simpler is a bonus. Here are the simple Rules of Management. They aren’t devious or
underhand. Actually they are all pretty obvious. But if you think about each carefully and implement each without fail, you’ll be amazed what a difference it will make to your work and your life.

You may
know
everything in this book, but do you
do
it? This book will help motivate you into doing what you already know.

Let’s get on with it....

We all have to work with people. These may be loosely known as a team or a department or a squad or a crew—even a posse. It doesn’t matter. The mistake a lot of managers make is to think they are managing people. They think that people are their tools, their stock-in-trade. Make the people successful and you have the successful manager—or so the theory goes.

But unfortunately this is a myth, and we need to see that the real role of the manager is to manage processes rather than people. People can manage themselves if you let them. What you need to be concentrating on is the real job of management—the strategy. The team is merely a means to fulfilling that end. If all your people could be replaced by machines—and how many of us haven’t prayed that this might happen?—we would still need a strategy, still need to manage the process.

Of course we, as managers, have to work with real flesh-and-blood people, and we have to know what motivates them, how they think and feel, why they come to work, why they give their best (or their worst), what they are afraid of, what they hope and dream for. We shall have to encourage them, coach them, give them the resources to do their job and manage themselves, oversee their processes, and set their strategy for them. We will worry about them, look out for them, be on their side, and support them. But we won’t manage them. We will let them manage themselves, and we shall concentrate on our real role as a manager.

You manage people. People who are paid to do a job. But if it is “just a job” to them, you’ll never get their best. If they come to work looking to clock in and clock out and do as little as they can get away with in between, then you’re doomed to failure, my friend. On the other hand, if they come to work looking to enjoy themselves, looking to be stretched, challenged, inspired, and get involved, then you have a big chance to get the best out of them. Trouble is, the jump from drudge to super team is entirely up to you. It is you that has to inspire them, lead them, motivate them, challenge them, and get them emotionally involved.

That’s OK. You like a challenge, don’t you? The good news is that getting a team emotionally involved is easy. All you have to do is make them care about what they are doing. And that’s easy, too. You have to get them to see the relevance of what they are doing, how it makes an impact on people’s lives, how they provide for the needs of other human beings, and how they can reach out and touch people by what they do at work. Get them convinced—because it is true of course—that what they do makes a difference, that it contributes to society in some way rather than just lines the owner’s or shareholders” pockets, or ensures that the chief executive gets a big fat pay check.

And yes, I know it’s easier to show how they contribute if you manage nurses rather than an advertising sales team, but if you think about it, then you can find value in any role and instill pride in those who do whatever job it is. Prove it? OK. Well, those who sell advertising space are helping other companies, some of which may be very small, reach their markets.
They are alerting potential customers to things they may have wanted for a long time and may actually need. They are keeping the newspaper or magazine afloat as it relies on ad sales income, and that magazine or newspaper delivers information and gives pleasure to the people who buy it. (Otherwise they wouldn’t, would they?)

Get them to care because that’s an easy thing to do. Look, this is a given. Everyone deep down wants to be valued and to be useful. The cynics will say this is nonsense, but it is true, deep down true. All you have to do is reach down far enough, and you will find care, feeling, concern, responsibility, and involvement. Bring all that stuff up, and they’ll follow you forever and not even realize why.

Oh, just make sure that you’ve convinced yourself first before you try this out on your team. Do you believe that what you do makes a positive difference? If you’re not sure, reach down, deep down, and find a way to care....

So what is a team and how does it operate? If we are going to be successful managers we have to know the answers to these questions.

A team isn’t a collection of people. It is an organization with its own dynamics, qualities, and conventions. Without knowing these things, you will flounder. Knowing them, you can work your team to achieve greatness.

In every team there are a variety of people all pushing and shoving in different directions and with unequal force. Some shove louder, if you know what I mean. Others are happy to push from the back. Others don’t appear to be doing anything, but you’ll need them for ideas.

If you haven’t looked at team dynamics before, I urge you to read Meredith Belbin’s Management Teams: Why they succeed or fail.
^*
(If you have, go right to the next Rule.) This is designed for managers concerned with achieving results by getting the best from their key people. I’ll paraphrase what he says, but I do urge you to practice what he preaches.

^*
R. Meredith Belbin,
Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail
, Butterworth-Heinemann, 3rd edition, 2010.

Belbin says that there are nine team roles—and we all carry out one or more functions of these team roles. Yes, it is fun to identify our own, but it is much more useful to identify your team’s and then work with that information.

The nine team roles are the Plant (that’s the ideas person), the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Monitor Evaluator, the Team Worker, the Implementer,
the Completer, and the Specialist. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read the book.

Now you know who you might have on your team. So what exactly is a team, and how are you going to make yours more effective? Again, read Belbin and also come to understand a team is a group where all the members focus on a collective target. A team doesn’t pull together well when each individual member focuses on their own target—be that just getting to the end of the day, their own personal progress, how to appease the boss (that’s you, by the way), use work as a social club, and so on.

You’ll know you have a team when you hear “we” and “us” more often than “I” and “me.”

You’ll know you have a team when difficult decisions become easy—because someone says, “It’s OK, we’re all in this together.”

You’ll know you have a team when the team tells you it is a team.

When I was doing the research for this book, someone said that setting realistic targets was unrealistic and that all targets should be “stretching” ones because that would impress the board. Now, can you see the problem here? Yep, we’re not talking here about motivating a team, getting a job done, and creating an atmosphere of success and creativity. No, we’re talking about impressing the board. Now on paper that might be a smart thing to do if your board is made up of monkeys, but I bet it isn’t. I bet it’s made up of pretty shrewd folks who would see through a maneuver like that in a nanosecond.

When I say realistic, I don’t say lower or easy-to-achieve targets. I say realistic. That might mean taxing. It might mean a struggle. It might mean your team has to redouble its efforts, work harder, longer, and brighter. But
Rule 3
says realistic and that means achievable, within your grasp. And yes, you might have to stretch a bit.

Realistic means you know what your team is capable of and what is expected of it by your bosses. Somehow you will have to marry the two to keep both sides happy. You can’t pressure your team out of existence, nor can you let your bosses think you’re slacking.

If your bosses insist on setting targets that aren’t realistic, you must feed that back to them. Don’t argue or procrastinate; feed it back to them. Ask how they think the targets could be achievable. Say they are unrealistic. Be very well prepared; make your case that the targets are unrealistic, and ask again how they think they could be achieved. Suggest a realistic target of your own, well supported by facts and figures. Keep
feeding the problem back to your bosses and asking for clarification. Sooner or later they must set a more realistic target or order you to achieve the impossible. Either way, you are absolved of the problem. If they set realistic targets, then all you need to do is meet them. (You know you can do this.) If they order you to fulfil unrealistic ones, you are also in the clear; when you fail to achieve the unachievable, you can explain that at the time you did register your protest and bring your case back to them.

We’ve all been to them—the meetings that drag on, people who ramble, agendas written on the back of an envelope or in the spur of the moment, any-other-business surprises, lack of information, and insufficient notice.

As a manager you will have to hold meetings. Make them effective. Decide in advance what the objective of the meeting is and make sure you meet that objective.

Basically, meetings have only four purposes:

• To create and fuse a team

• To impart information

• To brainstorm ideas (and make decisions)

• To collect information (and make decisions)

Some meetings might well take in one or more of these, but you should still be aware of that and add it into your objective. If your meeting is to impart information, then do it and get the hell out. If it’s a discussion about that information you want, then that’s a different type of meeting and as such should have different objectives.