Review of Lectures 17 - 22

The first 16 lectures focused on how to manage so that you increase the motivation of your staff. Motivating your organization was addressed first because highly motivated workers are necessary for an effective organization and necessary to work with an effective leader in making the organization changes discussed in the lectures following lecture 16. Lectures 17-22 address the important management functions of staffing and communicating. Executing these two functions skillfully is critical to building a world class organization. The reason you should be building a world class organization is that today technology has made the workplace a global environment for almost all types of organization. If your organization isn’t world class you are likely to lose customers to competitors somewhere in the world that offer higher quality goods or services at equal or lower prices. Even governments and medical organizations are outsourcing work that can be done better or cheaper in other organizations.

Lectures 17 addressed staffing; specifically how to find and recruit the top people needed to build a world class organization and achieve a low staff turnover. It is necessary to achieve a low staff turnover rate because replacing people is both expensive and time consuming. As your organization becomes more and more effective you can expect to grow, assuming you are in an activity that permits growth. If you need to grow your staff at 10 to 15% each year you will be extremely busy with recruiting plus running your day to day work. If you have to replace workers because of a high turnover rate you may not be able to keep up with your staffing needs or afford the recruiting costs for the best talent. Lectures 1-16 taught how to develop a work environment that is conducive to low turnover. Also important to low turnover is not making mistakes in recruiting. An example of a recruiting process was discussed in lecture 17 that is proven to help recruit workers that meet an organization’s needs and fit well with the organization’s culture so that they are likely to be long term employees. The best approach to finding world class talent is to develop and maintain a network of people that are always on the lookout for exceptional young people that are candidate employees for your organization.

Lecture 18 covered the four basic principles for matching people to jobs. These are:

1.     Decisions about people are the most important decisions a manager makes

2.     Workers have a right  to competent leaders

3.     If a worker does not perform then the manager has made a mistake; don’t blame the worker

4.     Don’t give new people major assignments until they are familiar with how the organization works

Factors to be considered in matching workers to jobs include:

• Matching the skills and experience of candidates to the requirements of the jobs
• The compatibility of the personalities and work styles of candidates and potential coworkers
• The impact of removing candidates from their current positions
• The potential for career development of each candidate in the new position
• Matching the style of innovativeness of the candidates to that demanded by the job
• The candidates’ knowledge of the way things are done independent of what the organization chart says
• The opinions of other managers 

Lecture 19 provides guidelines for managing your time so that you accomplish more in the time you have available for your job and other facets of your life. There are five main guidelines to remember and keep in practice:

1. Write out six to eight short and long term goals and plans with specific actions for your work and the physical, mental and spiritual parts of your life.
2. Schedule the actions over a week at a time, carry your schedule with you at all times and do your best to follow it.
3. Remember to be effective with people and efficient with other work activities. This means spend as much time as necessary with people to ensure you understand them and they understand your plans and directions. Have unscheduled time in your schedule so that you have the flexibility to accept time wasters that are necessary to be effective with people.
4. Don’t allow yourself to become a workaholic, i.e. working so many hours that you do not have enough time for the important non work things in your life. If your life is unbalanced then you are not as effective in your job as you could be.
5. Learn how to use administrative help effectively if it is available to you. Learn to dictate to secretaries and to electronic media. Encourage your workers to use efficient practices.

Lectures 20-22 discuss ways to help workers manage their time. This topic was outlined in the introduction titled “Lectures 20-22” that is between lecture 19 and lecture 20. Go back and review that introduction before proceeding to lecture 23. If any topics in the outline are hazy reread the appropriate sections in the lectures.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

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