The Rules Of Management (Pioneer Panel's Library) (4 page)

Now it makes sense to give the gardener as much to do with the decision-making process as possible to free you up for long-term strategy, seeing the big picture, seasonal planning and perusing seed catalogues while sitting in the shade sipping a cold beverage.

There is no point standing over the gardener while he mows lawns, weeds beds, prunes trees, and the like. It is better to give him the job to do and then let him get on with it. After he finishes you can check his work and make sure it is up to par. And then you probably won’t need to do that again—don’t keep checking.

And that basically is the secret of good management. Give ’em a job to do and let them get on with it. Check once or twice to
make sure they’ve done it the way you want it done, and then next time just let them get on with it. Increasingly give them more and more to do, and stand back more and more from the people processes and concentrate instead on the planning processes. Build your team and then trust them to get on with it. Sometimes this will backfire and people will act up, goof off, do things badly—and hey, that’ll be entirely your fault because you are the manager and it’s your team. No, that’s serious; it is entirely up to you. Read on and we’ll find ways to make sure it doesn’t happen—well, not too often anyway.

There is an old Chinese saying that goes something like this: “Tell me and I’ll remember for an hour; show me and I’ll remember for a day; but let me do it and I’ll remember forever.” Fair enough. And if you are going to let people do it, then they are going to do it badly at first. They are going to make mistakes. And you are going to let them.

If you are a parent, you know the agonizing thing you go through with a 2-year-old who insists they can pour her own drink—and then proceeds to spill most of it on the table. You stand by with a cloth behind your back because you know that:

• She is going to spill it.

• It is you who is going to have to mop it up.

• The spilling process is important; you have to let her do it; and she will progress to not spilling but only after she gets the spilling out of the way first.

As a parent you do that wonderful hovering thing, ready to grab the juice if it is going to spill too much, or grab the cup if it is tipping over, or even grab the child if she is going to fall off the chair due to such intense concentration.

I’m not saying members of your team are like small children—well, I am actually but don’t tell them—but it is imperative you learn to let them do the spilling if they are to progress. Make sure you have your cloth behind your back ready to mop up after them.

And after each spilling you don’t tell them off. Instead you offer praise—“Well done, brilliant job, incredible progress.” Try not to let them see the cloth or the mopping up.

As we saw earlier, effectively fusing a team together means you need several different parts—or team members. Now some of us are good at certain things and others not so. If we were all the same, we wouldn’t be able to work as a team—we would all be leaders or all followers, and you need a combination, not either/or.

So if some members of your team aren’t leaders—or followers—you have to accept that. If some are good at figure work and others not, you have to accept that. If some are good at working unsupervised and others not, you have to accept that.

And to accept these things, you have to know your staff pretty well. You have to know their strengths and weaknesses, good points and bad. If you don’t—and I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you—you will be forever trying to shove round pegs into square holes and vice versa.

You have to accept that not everyone is going to be as bright, as determined, as ambitious, as clever, or as motivated as you are—praise indeed from me, but see the next rule. Some of your team are quite possibly going to be brain dead from the feet up, and you might need to practice
Rule 10
before
Rule 13
if there simply is no hope. But don’t act in haste. You might not need a team of geniuses. (In fact if you hire people far too smart for a job, they will just leave, fast.)

Suppose your team contains machine operators or admin assistants. Now you don’t need these good people to have Einstein brains nor to be really on the ball when it comes to brainstorming. But you do need them to sit in a butt-numbing position for hours at a time concentrating on a bit of work
that would drive you or me batty. Just don’t expect them to take creative wing and soar away with new ideas, new innovations, or new technologies. You have to accept their limitations—and love them for them because these limitations are their parameters by which you can get the very best out of them—their best of course. And while you’re at it, have a quick check of your own limitations. What’s that? You haven’t got any? Come on.

If you don’t let people know you’re pleased with them, they’ll wilt. People come to work for a whole bunch of reasons—most, nothing to do with the money despite what they’ll tell you—and right there at the top of their unwritten, unspoken, undeclared list will be “Praise from the boss.” That’s you by the way, the boss.

They might call it “recognition” or “acknowledgment” or “feeling I’ve done well”—but how do they know? They know because you tell them.

Now you can praise them retroactively, so to speak—wait until they’ve done good and then tell them they’ve done good—or you can encourage them in advance—active praise. Tell them they’re going to do good before they’ve done it. Why? Because the chances of them doing good are that much greater if you have praised them in advance. They won’t want to let you down, or themselves.

Being a manager is a minimalist’s dream. You want to build a great team, and you want to do it with the smallest output of resources. Praise is free. It is instantly replaceable, doesn’t wear out, is invariably 100 percent effective, is incredibly simple to do, and takes no time at all.

So why don’t more managers do it? Because it takes self-assurance. You have to be feeling pretty good about yourself to dish out praise well in advance. If you doubt yourself, you’ll doubt them. If you doubt them, you’ll not praise them because you’ll be sure they are going to screw up.

It takes nothing except courage to say, “Come on; you can do it. You’ll be fine.” The more responsibility you give people, the more you trust them, the more you praise them, the more you encourage them, the more they’ll give you in return. Praise costs nothing and brings in loads. Encouragement should be a given.

Encourage an atmosphere where everyone encourages everyone else—“You can do it” should be heard every day all around you. If you’re not saying it, chances are your team isn’t either. Encourage the good ones to give the less good ones a hand up. In any good team an air of fostering help should be actively encouraged and praised when it happens. We’re all in this together, and we sink or swim together.

You have to be good at finding the right people to fill the right jobs—and then leave them to get on with it. OK, I know this is one rule that requires a certain intuitive touch, but I’m sure you know the sort of manager I’m talking about. They seem to surround themselves with capable, competent people, and then they just seem to sit back and watch them go for gold. You can do that, too. It is a special talent but one you can cultivate. I guess the skill is in both picking the right people and letting go—leaving them alone to get on with it. You have to have lots of trust to do that; trust in their ability and trust in your own as well.

You have to have a very clear idea of who you are looking for to fill a job as much as what you are looking for. For instance, you might need a senior account manager—that is what you are looking for. But who? Team player? Good all rounder? Someone able to make decisions on the run? Someone who can plan ahead? Someone who understands your industry’s quirks? Someone who speaks fluent spreadsheets? Someone who can work with an overexcitable union?

I’m sure you get the idea. If you have a clear picture of who you need as well as what you need, you make the transition to being a manager who seems to have an uncanny knack of finding the right people. It’s not a knack, of course, but planning, vision, logic, and hard work.

I once made the mistake of being totally seduced by a manager’s credentials—I was a general manager seeking to employ a manager—and failing to look hard enough at who he was rather than what he was. Yes, he had the credentials and was very good at his job. But he wasn’t a team player and saw everything as a competition, mainly between him and the other managers. Fine in itself, but it didn’t work for me or the other managers, who all wanted to pull together. This was one case where I was not good at finding the right person. I had found the wrong person, and it took a lot to extricate myself. I had only myself to blame because I hadn’t thought sufficiently about who I wanted.

If you’re not good at this, or think you could improve, invite somebody you respect to sit in on interviews with you to give you another perspective. Find a mentor or coach to help you work out who you really need.

Do you know how many publishers turned down the first
Harry Potter
book? I’ve heard several numbers quoted, but the answer is at least eight, whoever you ask. And what does that say about Barry Cunningham, the publisher who finally signed up the author? To just about everyone it says he was a whole lot smarter than all the folks who turned the book down.

All hugely successful managers were once fresh out of school or college, waiting for someone to recognize their talent and offer them a job. They were junior managers looking for promotion, or middle managers hoping it would be them who’d be asked to head up the new project or department or enterprise.

These are the people you want on your team. The raw talent, ready to step up. Never mind about experience—anyone can get that, given time. But you can’t fake real talent, brains, and energy. When you find someone who has that, offer them the job first and worry about the details later. I’m not talking about mere enthusiasm—sadly lots of untalented people have that—but real ability and an intelligent grasp of the issues they’ll be dealing with.

Of course, these talented recruits could eventually outshine you. They could fly up the career ladder and even overtake you. That worries some people. A lot. But it doesn’t worry a Rules player. You see, Rules players understand that if it says anything about them at all, it will be reflected glory that shines on them. Just like the publisher who offered JK Rowling her first contract.

Think about it. These people are going to get to the top with or without you. How much better to be the one who had the perception to recognize them, and the sense to hire them, and the privilege to set them on their upward way.

After you start putting your own team together, the people in it and their performance says more about you as a manager than anything else does. The better the team, the more impressed people will be with you. Hell, some top managers will confess to you that their only real talent has been in hiring people who were smarter than them. They may say it self-deferentially, but actually it’s really the only skill you need to get to the top. Know who to hire, and then stay out of their way except to give them what they need to do the job. That doesn’t make you a bad manager, it makes you a top class one, because your team will outperform the rest thanks to your talent-spotting skills.

Sorry, but if the team screws up, it is entirely your fault. If the team does well, the credit is all theirs. A good manager will always take the rap. I know it’s easy to use your team as an excuse, but it won’t wash. You are the leader, the manager, the boss. If it all goes bottoms up, you have to stand up and take the flack.

It is very easy to say, “We didn’t meet our targets because....” But you have to say, “I didn’t meet my targets because....” And that “because” has to be followed by “I,” never “they.”

It is easy to say, “We didn’t meet our targets because young Brian accidentally upset Client X, and they pulled out leaving us short of our sales.” But who put young Brian in charge of such an important client? You. Who organized the sale? You. It has to be you. And your team will die for you if you ask it to, if you take the rap when the going gets tough, believe me. Nothing generates more loyalty than a boss who’s prepared to stand up and say, “I take responsibility.”

But I also know this is a tough one, really tough to do. It takes self-confidence, courage, trust (that you won’t get sacked or disciplined) and a certain maturity.

You might think it will go against you, look as if you are incompetent, but on the contrary. If your boss sees you stand up and say, “We lost the contract and I take responsibility—these are the steps we’re taking to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” they won’t see a failure—they will see a future board member.

Just as you must always stand up and take the blame, so too must you always heap praise and credit on your team when things go well. If that fabulous sale to Client X comes off because you happened to stay up all night working on it and then used an old contact from a previous job and then swung it because you happened to know something the competition didn’t—why, then you say, “The team did it.”