Making Management Simpler
 

Terrain

To be effective, a manager must know what he or she is expected to achieve in clear and unambiguous detail. They must have a valid strategy to realise those objectives. They must also have the facts and feedback to continuously monitor their strategy and ensure that it is effective. On top of that, they need time to anticipate or respond to problems and to plot a course around them.

Reshaping the management terrain is the starting point. It means changing the way we plan so that it becomes more connected, and changing our approach to feedback to make it more appropriate and relevant. Above all it is systematically and deliberately setting out to create management time. Managers will move away from the reactive activity when there is no need to be constantly reactive.


Handover planning & task defined strategies

Handover planning is a quick, simple way of communicating and validating the operational plan. As the core objectives are being deployed out across the management structure, each receiving manager should headline their delivery strategy in order to complete the handover. This progressively breaks the core objectives down into a series of defined and owned tasks.

The handover approach achieves a number of things. It clarifies the operational roles and responsibilities in terms of clear deliverables and confirms the precise nature of the feedback and measurement required. It confirms that the requirements are clearly understood and that a valid strategy has been developed. It bench tests the plan and bench tests the manager right from the start.

Stateless feedback & smarter use of data

Once each person's objectives are clear, the facts and feedback required can be clearly identified. Feedback needs to be structured so that it is stateless, that means it is automatically produced straight from the data, and always available. This ensures it is current, and minimises the risk of distortion or bias. It should give each manager the facts they need all the time.

Once the data is structured properly, it can be used in a smarter way. It can be used to retain the knowledge and experience so that it is owned by the company and the exposure to individuals is lessened. In the case of downtime for example, companies will generally know when the lines were down and what caused the problem. If they also hold what remedial action was taken and how well it worked, they can build a library of experience.

The data should also be used to prompt or drive behaviour rather than just "post mortem" the problems. This could be used to force customer complaints to be dealt with in a given time, for example, rather than just analyse their frequency and cause.

Creating management time

When managers know precisely what they need to achieve, and they can see clearly at all times whether they are achieving it, they can manage in a more effective way. When they are made aware of potential problems at the earliest possible point, and can identify the cause, their actions can be far more focused and precise. When they can be confident that the need for action will be automatically "prompted", they don't have to continuously check.

All of this frees up management time and allows the manager be proactive rather than reactive.