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:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

22 Identify work that can be done better by others

An area related to time wasting is those situations where overzealous cost cutting eliminates too many support staff with the result that extra administrative work is forced back on highly paid knowledge workers. These cases are not always clear cut. I can describe the boundaries but I can’t give you foolproof answers because there are human factors involved that are unknowable. A few examples best illustrate what is involved.

Secretarial support

My favorite is secretarial support. Before personal computers, knowledge workers either had personal secretaries or access to a pool of secretaries who had the typewriters. The knowledge worker either wrote drafts in longhand or dictated to a secretary versed in shorthand or to a dictating machine and the secretary did the typing. With the availability of personal computers and good word processing software many knowledge workers prefer to do their own typing because they now have access to typing equipment and because they are spared from having to organize their thinking as required for dictation. This has led to fewer and fewer secretaries. Is this cost effective? A knowledge worker typically types at 20 to 40 words per minute at best. A secretary types at 60 to 80 words per minute and is paid 1/4 to 1/3 that of a knowledge worker. If only the direct typing time and cost were involved it is clear that having secretaries do the typing is about ten times cheaper than allowing workers to do their own typing.

Other factors affecting the cost comparison include the cost of dictation time, editing time and time to get the product finished. Experience and experimental data has shown that it is about three times faster to dictate something than it is to write or type it so; at most, the time for dictation cuts the advantage of secretarial typing to about a factor of three. My experience indicates that editing is faster if done using standard journalism techniques on paper copies, which again favors the dictation/typist approach. However, not all knowledge workers take the time to learn these editing techniques and some secretaries aren’t familiar with them so I will call the editing cost equal. I will also ignore the advantage dictation has in that less editing is usually required. This is because most people outline a document before they dictate whereas those who do their own typing typically just start typing without an outline.

That leaves only the cost of time to get to a finished product. This cost is the cost of information latency and depends on the product involved, the dictation process in use and the worker involved.  Information latency cost is very high for situations where knowledge workers are exchanging vital task information because the latency time translates directly to delays in other work products and thereby to increased costs. If the product is small then it is more cost effective for the worker to type and send an email. If the product is so large that it must be typed, reviewed, edited and then distributed it is more cost effective to dictate the work and have a skilled typist type and distribute the work. In these examples the most cost effective approach is the one that gets the data to users quickest.

Most emails are small and it isn’t convenient or cost effective to dictate and have a secretary type and send them. At the other extreme are reports and similar paperwork that have deadlines days or weeks away. In these cases the information latency cost is negligible and the dictation/typist approach is about a factor of three cheaper. Thus the most cost effective balance of what should be directly typed by the worker and what should be dictated and then typed by a typist depends on the mix of products and the dictation process. The product mix varies from organization to organization and likely from time to time.

However, if the product mix was the only factor remaining in determining the cost effective solution then it could be worked out by a diligent manager. The problem is there is also a human factors issue that is worker dependent. Some workers want to do all their own typing no matter how costly it is and they present all kinds of spurious arguments to defend their position. Others are more than happy to use the secretaries as much as possible and perhaps even for things they should do themselves. I believe this human factors issue makes it too hard to get the exact right answer because the most cost effective balance includes some disgruntled workers and it’s not possible to accurately estimate the resulting cost of the inefficiency due to their being disgruntled.

I believe that modern electronic tools, including personal computers, the intra/inter nets and recording devices so small they are embedded in cell phones and MP3 players, make dictation even more cost effective than in the past.  E-mail, fixed and portable, and cell phones have greatly reduced information latency but expensive knowledge workers spend a lot of time inefficiently typing. Sound files recorded on personal computers, or portable devices can be sent almost instantly to typists anywhere and text documents, with corrected grammar and punctuation, can be typed and returned about as fast as a slow typing knowledge worker can type a document. This modern technology has the capability to reduce information latency for most work requiring typing but it doesn’t seem to have caught on for two reasons. First, workers wanting to do the typing themselves, even though they are inefficient typists and second, overzealous cost cutting leading to reducing the availability of skilled typists.

Given all these factors what should the effective leader do? My advice is, if you have access to secretarial support use it as much as possible. Experiment with the various new technologies for dictation and collect data on how much of your time is saved and how long it takes to get data to users for the various work products in your organization. Keep it up long enough that you are comfortable dictating and have adequate data to make decisions. The experience and the data will help you determine what is best for you and your work. When you have the results share them with your workers and encourage them to use the best practices you have determined. But be prepared for all kinds of arguments why they can’t effectively use dictation.

Administrative support

The personal computer has complicated the issue of administrative support even further. Take for example, travel arrangements and expense reporting. In the past workers submitted a travel request and a secretary or administrative assistant made the travel arrangements. At the end of the travel the worker gave the travel expense data to the secretary or administrative assistant who then filled out an expense report for the worker to sign before it was submitted to the financial system. Now it is likely that the worker goes on line and makes travel arrangements and fills out an on line expense report upon return. Here again the worker is doing work that a less costly secretary or administrator can do much faster. This example and many others like it aren’t so easy to analyze. There is no question that having an expensive knowledge worker do such work in place of a support person isn’t cost effective in the simplest analysis. However, here again human factors are involved.

If the knowledge worker completes all the work scheduled or expected of them in a given time period and also does the administrative work then clearly it is cheaper to layoff the support people. I am convinced that in many cases this happens. The knowledge workers absorb this extra work and put in the extra time to get it done without an increase in compensation. On paper it looks like the organization has gained in cost effectiveness in such cases. My opinion and it is only an opinion as I have no data to back it up, is that the organization does gain up to a point but loses after that. I think the knowledge worker can absorb some administrative tasks but at some point the administrative tasks begin to interfere with the workers ability to focus on the tasks they were hired to do. When knowledge workers are continually interrupted from their main work they become inefficient because they have to spend time revisiting thought processes, and they make more mistakes because they are distracted. I believe some organizations today are fooling themselves. They are employing extra knowledge workers to cover for the inefficiencies of existing knowledge workers brought on by pushing more and more administrative tasks onto these workers in the guise of being more cost effective by laying off administrative personnel.

Having made the case that determining the optimum number of administrative workers is complex and involves factors that are unknowable what should the effective leader do? My advice is to make your mistakes on the side of having too many administrative workers rather than too few. First because having too few leads to having to hire additional knowledge workers and the optimum number of knowledge workers is the minimum number required to get work done with no administrative overhead assigned to the knowledge workers. This is because of the costs of data latency and the hidden costs of extra communications between workers incurred when there is more than the minimum number of knowledge workers. It is also less costly to err by having one or two extra administrative workers than to have even one extra knowledge worker due to the large difference in salaries between knowledge workers and administrative workers.

Treat support people with respect

Before leaving this topic I must remind you of a couple of things that can undermine the effectiveness of your organization. First, never ask a secretary or an administrative person to do something for you while you wait for it that you could do yourself. Besides the fact that it is simply rude behavior it takes two people’s time instead of one. It is important to treat secretaries and administrative people as professionals and to give them as much responsibility as each one’s skills and experience allows. Think of them as knowledge workers just like the rest of your workers. Then you realize that the more work they do at their relatively low salary is less work you have to pay for at the higher salary of other workers. Second, when you are assembling a team to solve a crisis don’t forget to include secretaries or administrative workers that have responsibilities for portions of the process that is in crisis. Very often such workers have more intimate knowledge of process problems than others that have less day to day involvement in the processes.  I have worked in organizations whose culture just won’t allow them to include secretaries or admin people in process improvement teams. If your organization’s culture includes such thinking you need to work to change the culture in order to gain the benefit of all the skills and all the experience in the organization.

Exercise

The objective of this exercise is to determine the size of the largest document that you can type more cost effectively than you can dictate and have typed for you. For documents larger than this size dictation is more efficient than typing and for smaller documents typing the document yourself is more efficient. Although this takes some time it is well worth knowing in the long term. If you have software that translates dictation to text you can modify this exercise to compare the time to type and edit something to the time to dictate and edit the software transcription.

1.     Pick two similar, but unrelated topics, e.g. a recent sports event you watched and a recent repair job you did around the house or yard. Start with either topic and write 250 to 300 words, i.e. about a page, about it. If it is your habit to outline work before you type it then do that. If you don’t normally outline then just begin typing. Time yourself and record the time it takes you to outline and type, or just to type a page, edit it, save the file and email it to yourself. The word count and the time will give you an effective typing speed. For example, if you actually type 30 words per minute it should take you ten minutes to type 300 words plus the time it takes to think about what to write, edit, save and email, say another four to five minutes so that the task overall takes about 15 minutes for an effective speed of 20 words per minute. If you outline first it should be about the same overall time since you are likely to spend three to four minutes outlining but you won’t have to spend as much time thinking during the typing and there is less editing of the draft.

2.     If you have a pc with a microphone set it up so you can record a sound file. If not use the recording capability on your MP3 players, PDA or cell phone and transfer the sound file into your pc. Next determine the time it takes to outline and then dictate about 250 or 300 words on the second topic, save the sound file and email it to yourself. If you can’t stand outlining then you can skip that step and just dictate the sound file directly. If you are somewhat used to outlining and dictating you will have accomplished the outlining, dictating, saving and emailing in about seven or perhaps eight minutes. Record your own time but for now assume it is eight minutes.

3.     Account for the time a typist would take in opening your file, transcribing it, checking it, saving it and emailing it back to you. Assume you dictated at about 80 words per minute and the typist transcribes at the same speed. Thus it takes about 3.75 minutes to transcribe your 300 words. Suppose it takes about the same time to check the work and an additional half minute for corrections, saving and emailing for a total of eight minutes.

4.     Now you have the data needed to estimate the size of document above which it saves you time to dictate the document and the size above which it is more cost effective to dictate. For the example discussed so far it took 15 minutes of your time to type a 300 word document and only eight minutes to dictate 300 words. Assuming the typist makes about 1/3 your salary the cost of dictating is only 71% of the cost of typing it yourself for this example.

By now you have figured out that I have gamed you. There is no size of document beyond a small paragraph that is faster for you to type or cheaper for you to type unless you assumed some unreasonably large overhead times relating to dictation. The important factor is information latency. If you can get critical data faster by typing yourself, e.g. via email, then it is more effective and cost effective. Otherwise it is always more efficient and cost effective to dictate rather than type unless you are the rare manager that can type at 100 words per minute. The point of this exercise was to get you to try dictation so that you would see it is relatively easy. It gets easier as you get used to it.

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

20 Eliminate Time Wasters

Crisis Management

Crises are a fact of life in any organization and test the skills of even the most effective leaders. Each one is unique and requires carefully thought out methods for resolution. There are several factors that must be balanced in resolving a crisis. First, of course is urgency. By definition a crisis is an undesirable situation that is disrupting normal operations and is likely costing money or the organization’s reputation. In a crisis the leader’s objectives are:

·       to restore normal operation as fast as possible,

·       at the least cost,

·       with a high probability that the system is changed so that the crisis can not recur,

·       with assurance that any changes to the system do not encumber the organization or work processes in ways that reduce overall effectiveness

·       and that the rationale for changes is documented.

Problem solving tools are discussed in later lectures. Here I just want to emphasize two constraints in effective crisis resolution. First, it is very important to not just resolve the crisis but to understand why it happened, what deficiency in the system enabled the crisis to occur, to change the system so that the same crisis cannot reoccur again and to document the rationale for decisions relating to any changes in the system, or rules or policies. The crisis manager’s job isn’t done until all of this has been accomplished. There is always pressure to return to normal operations as fast and cheaply as possible and this pressure can inhibit getting to the root cause of crises, changing the system so that they don’t reoccur and properly documenting the rationale for the changes. If the crisis manager succumbs to this pressure the crisis will likely reoccur and blame will be assigned to those that didn’t fix it right the first time.

The second constraint is to ensure that system changes are effective; that is they are not cosmetic and they do not unnecessarily encumber work processes. Old organizations are often filled with rules and policies that were put in place to solve long ago crises. Too often such rules and polices do not reflect changes to the system that prevent the crisis from reoccurring but rather try to constrain workers so that they don’t allow or cause the crisis to reoccur.  Often the crises continue and more rules and policies are instituted until the organization is so bogged down it becomes non competitive. If tempted to add rules or change policies to prevent a crisis from reoccurring take the time to question whether the system is being changed effectively by such rules and policy changes. Ask whether the proposed changes are changes to the system or the result of blaming people for the crisis. Recall the 85/15 rule discussed earlier. If people are being blamed for the crisis 85% of the time the managers are wrong and proposed changes are more likely to encumber the system than to prevent reoccurrence of the crisis.

The effective leader is always on the lookout for old rules and policies that inhibit productivity and may no longer be necessary due to changes in work processes or products. If the rationale for the old rules or policies was properly documented knowing when they can be changed is usually evident. Caution is required if there is no documentation to ensure that changes in work processes or products have really eliminated the need for the old rules or policies. New data may be needed. If so, the issue becomes a process improvement activity, which is covered in more detail later.

Your crisis resolution plan must be based on in depth analysis of the causes of the crisis and in depth discussions with the people closest to the problems. Jumping to popular solutions rather than carefully thought out plans usually results in a continuing crisis. Failure to have an effective plan and effective communications invites others to give you help, which typically just makes the problems worse, and always increases your workload. You must maintain the confidence of stakeholders, particularly your superiors; otherwise expect to be removed from leadership of the crisis. At the same time you must fend off uninformed advice, which is abundant in a crisis. More will be discussed on crisis management in the next lecture on meetings.

Poor Information Systems

Defining proper information systems is beyond the scope of this course but it is necessary for the effective leader to know how to identify the symptoms of poor information systems or improper use of good information systems. One tip off of poor information systems is people saying meetings are necessary to gather information. If you hear this reasoning for meetings not related to a crisis or a new project then you should examine the information systems. It takes much less time for workers to record key job data in some type of data base for a manager’s review than it does to have to meet with the manager and provide the data verbally or, even worse, on PowerPoint charts. If you find workers are not entering necessary data properly than training is required. If workers are entering data properly then either the processing of the data in the data base is ineffective or the manager using the data doesn’t have the training to properly use the data.

A second tip off of poor information systems is workers or administrators having to chase down needed information. Information should flow up and with today’s computer networks this can be make to happen nearly automatically if the right data is being entered at the right time by the right people.

Finally, be on the look out for information that isn’t actionable. This is information that is no longer needed or just doesn’t apply well to current work processes. This can result from commercial or homegrown information systems that are improperly tailored to your organization or enterprise. If you see information that isn’t useful to you or anyone else then question whether it is worth having workers collect and enter the data.

Poor information systems are costly if highly paid workers are required to process data that could be processed by lower cost administrators. This topic is explored further in Lecture 22.

Over staffing

When projects or special tasks fall behind schedule there is often pressure to add additional people in order to get back on schedule or at least not fall further behind schedule. Of course there are times when this is the right management action. However, there are times when process problems are causing the delays and adding more staff isn’t the right answer. If process problems are the cause then usually fixing the process is preferred to adding additional people. The difficulty is that it takes time and knowledge to identify when process problems are the root cause of delays and there is typically pressure for immediate management actions such as adding staff.

The theory of constraints, often used in manufacturing and service organizations, also applies to projects and special tasks but its effects are not as easy to identify. Failure to understand constraints can lead to the wrong management action and overstaffing is a typical wrong action. Project management techniques use critical path analysis to identify constraints to schedule but projects are dynamic and critical paths change or new critical paths emerge. The project manager and the supporting managers must not only identify and track the critical paths as they evolve, they must also understand the reasons the work is schedule constrained and the nature of the work that is on the critical path.

In some cases the critical path work is easily divided among additional workers and schedule can be reduced by adding staff to the tasks on the critical path. Other times the work is dependent on special skills or requires extensive review to understand before a new person can contribute effectively. In such times adding additional staff actually delays work on the critical path because the existing staff must bring new people up to speed and because of communication induced delays introduced by the additional people. 

In an ideal situation doubling the number of people on a task cuts the time to complete the task in half, that is, ideally, the schedule is inversely proportional to the number of people assigned to the job. However tasks are typically complex and can only be divided into a limited number of pieces that can be worked independently. On complex tasks there is a need for work results to be communicated to other workers, as well as to managers. The more workers assigned to the task the bigger this communication need and the time spent communicating grows geometrically with the number of people. At some point workers are spending more time communicating results and status to each other and to layers of management than they are actually generating direct work products. The result of these relationships is that there is an optimum number of workers for a task in order to achieve minimum schedule and adding workers beyond the optimum actually delays the time to completion.

How does the effective manager avoid over staffing?   The details of project management are beyond the scope of this course but we can touch on some highlights. First of all, when a project or special task falls behind it must be treated as a crisis and the effective manager takes charge or ensures that the right kind of manager is in place. A project or task in crisis is no time to have a manager that leans toward affiliative management. A czar is called for until things are under control. (Don’t forget to change your behavior if you are the czar, or remove the czar, when the project stabilizes because czars are best at “stop the bleeding” situations and are not the most effective managers in non crisis situations.) Second, remember that in a crisis it is doubly important to manage both up and down. Down requires that you get involved sufficiently to really understand what is going on in detail, otherwise mistakes will happen, e.g. as discussed above. Managing up means having a detailed plan to resolve the crisis and communicating the plan and progress on the plan to all stakeholders more frequently than normal. These communications must be honest and timely but you must understand problems before they are communicated upward. The trick is balancing your understanding and the timeliness of your communications.

Please remember that project management is one of the most complex management jobs. The steps listed here are necessary but by no means sufficient. You should study books on project management if that is on your career path. And a final reminder, under staffing, although not a time waster, is a serious detriment to effective organizational performance if left uncorrected for more than a couple of months.

I will digress here to share a story from my early management experience that may be helpful to those new to project management. If project management isn't on your career path feel free to skip ahead to the subheading “Useful Hint”.

As a young department manager in an engineering organization I was given management responsibility for an important product development project that had been in crisis for several years due to technical problems, resulting in large loses of company money, unhappy customers and the firing of the two previous project leaders. Many people in the company believed they had the solution for the technical problems and were more than free with their uninformed advice.

Fortunately, I was saved by the previous manager’s hiring of a new engineer just before the manager was fired. During the short grace period I had before results were expected I learned that this new engineer understood the technical problems in depth and had developed an effective plan to resolve them. Unfortunately, it was going to take at least four months and considerable investment to solve these problems. The new engineer had neither the respect of management (because he was new and untested) nor the communication skills needed to sell his plan. I recognized that continued failure would lead to my firing so I had little to lose. I went to the company president with a simple plan. Give us six months, the money we needed and keep all management off our backs during this time. I promised we would achieve the desired product performance within that time or he could fire us both (which would have happened anyway).

The plan, which was really no additional risk to me, gave us the freedom to work in peace for six months. The technical problems were solved as promised, the product performance exceeded requirements, the new engineer got the credit he deserved and the product went into a long and profitable production run.  The lesson is simple. Successful crisis resolution requires in depth understanding of the causes, sound plans and no shoot from the hip management actions.

Useful Hint: Don’t Be Afraid to Use Time Logs

Increasing the effectiveness of your organization must include changes in processes as well as changes in people. Data is required to change processes effectively. The reasons are discussed more fully in a later lecture so for now accept this requirement. A simple and convenient way to gather data relevant to time management is via time logs used as appropriate by everyone in your organization. I don’t recommend time logs be used all the time but if you suspect some process is wasting time or if you are concerned that your people are spending too much time on some relatively unimportant task ask them to keep time logs for four to six weeks. The objective is to find information that is not on formal time reporting systems. This includes time lost in amounts too small to record on formal time reporting systems. Two examples are time lost due to unreliable equipment or time spent correcting poor work done by another person.

When you suspect such time wasters in your organization pick one to three of the suspect items and ask your staff to jot down on paper or electronically each day how many minutes are spent on each suspect time waster. In a few weeks you should have enough data to make effective decisions. The lost of ten minutes per day by each person in a 40 person organization over 250 work days amounts to 100,000 minutes or almost a full person year; well worth correcting. Such data is useful for making decisions for your organization and for convincing your peers and your superiors action is needed on topics important to your organization but not under your control.

A couple of examples better explain the use of time logs. Suppose you think your staff is spending an inordinate amount of time doing remedial work on defective paperwork submitted to them from another organization and the manager of the other organization doesn't respond to your concerns about the quality of his or her organization’s work. Presenting the other manager with hard data on time lost in your organization fixing mistakes made by his or her organization makes your argument more effective because such data can’t easily be dismissed and reflects poorly on the manager’s performance if not addressed.

Suppose your workers are complaining that a copy machine is unreliable and is wasting their time. You report it but the unreliable machine is neither repaired nor replaced. Ask your workers to keep a temporary log of the time they waste coping with the unreliable machine. You can use this data to calculate the excess cost of the unreliable machine and then use the cost data to make a stronger case for having the copy machine repaired or replaced.

Exercises

1.     Think through a crisis you have recently handled or observed and answer the following questions:

·       Was the system blamed or were people blamed?

·       Were the root causes of the crisis identified?

·       Were changes made to the system or were new polices and/or rules introduced?

·       Was the rationale for any changes documented?

·       Do you think the same crisis can happen again or have the changes made that possibly remote?

·       Should you handle the next crisis the same or differently?

2.     Review how actionable information is gathered and processed in your organization and answer the following questions:

·       Is it necessary to gather some information by holding meetings?

·       If so, could this information be gathered automatically just as well?

·       Do you receive management information that isn't actionable or useful in some other way?

·       If so, is this information useful to others or could collecting it be stopped?

·       Is there information that you need but don’t get because no system is in place to gather and process it?

·       Would implementing a system to provide the needed information be cost effective?

·   If so, what information do you need to convince others that the information is worth collecting and processing?

3.     Think about things that might be wasting your staffs’ time unnecessarily. Would time logs confirm your intuition and give you the information needed to fix any of the time wasters you suspect exist?

4.     Have you observed situations of over staffing in your enterprise? If so, what was the evidence that indicated over staffing existed? Do you think you would recognize over staffing if it occurred again?

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

20 to 22 Helping the Workers Manage Their Time

At first reading your reaction may be that helping workers manage their time is not the manager’s responsibility but bear with me. One principle of leadership is that it is the leader’s job to make subordinates’ jobs easier. Ken Blanchard (Co-author of The One Minute Manger) and Phil Hodges wrote an excellent book, The Servant Leader, that provides an in-depth treatment of this principle. Their book shows that Jesus Christ is not only a model for spiritual leadership but also a model for organizational leadership. They define this model as the “Servant Leader”.

Helping workers manage their time is important to having an effective organization and the aspects of worker time management discussed here are those that the manager can influence. This topic is a bit long so I treat it as three lectures.

It’s quite likely that you as manager are the biggest source of wasted time for your workers. At least that’s probably what they think. Therefore the topics we cover in the first lecture are:

•        Eliminate time wasters that are the manager’s fault

–       Crises that occur more than once

–       Too many meetings (examine  job and organization structure to  see why meeting are needed)

–       Poor  information systems (holding meetings to gather information that should be automatically reported and processed)

–       Overstaffing to correct schedule delays (leads to time wasted in interacting)

Many would argue that meetings are the biggest time wasters so meetings are the topic of the second lecture:

•        Managing meetings

–       Meeting to communicate

–       Types of effective meetings

–       Guidelines for effective meetings

Finally, an insidious time waster is workers doing work that can be done faster and cheaper by others. This is the topic of the third lecture:

•        Identify work that can be done better by others

If by studying and practicing the ideas discussed in these three lectures you are able to save two hours per week for each of your staff members you will have improved your organization’s productivity by five percent. Actually it will be more than five percent because many time wasters interrupt workers from their core tasks. Some researchers claim it takes twenty minutes for workers to regain focus and effectiveness on a task after being interrupted. This productivity gain will be achieved with no investment other than your time learning and practicing better methods.

  

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

19 Managing the Manager’s Time

The final topics under Building a World Class Organization are Managing the Manager’s Time and Helping the Workers Manage Their Time. I’ll discuss managing your time in this lecture and how to help your workers manage their time in the next three lectures. Points discussed in this lecture include:

•        Schedule time by the week

–       Keeps precious  time from “melting”

•        Have an open door policy and accept time wasters gracefully to maintain good personal relations

•        Accept the reality of daily crises

•        Be effective with people; efficient  with things

•        Use lunch hours for formal and informal communications with staff

There are many systems for managing time and you must select one that works for you. I like one recommended by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In simple form it involves allocating time to your job and to your personal life. Your job should have six to eight objectives for both the long and short term at any given time. Having more limits the time available for each objective so that it takes a long time to accomplish the objectives. Therefore it is better to limit the number of objectives to six to eight so that they can be accomplished effectively before adding new objectives. There are three parts to your life; physical, mental and spiritual. This means allocating time to keep yourself physically, mentally and spiritually healthy so that you are able to be effective in your work; and with your family and friends. In the mental part you must allocate time for learning in order to keep up with technology and your career ambitions and time for hobbies or other mental recreation. It is important to take the time to write down your objectives for your job and your life and develop plans. These plans don’t have to be detailed written plans but you should think about what is necessary to achieve your objectives.

Personal Observations about Work and Work Hours

This is a good point to insert some observations about work from my decades of management experience. The number of hours spent each week on work depends on three factors. These are the culture of the enterprise, the business environment at any specific time and the choice of the worker. Some organizations have a culture of working 60 or more hour weeks and workers that don’t put in those hours are looked down upon. The culture in other organizations admires those who work just the scheduled 40 hours and of course there are cultures that expect between 40 and 60 hours. Similarly there are times in any organization when critical deadlines impose the need for long hours for a few days or even weeks and other times when work can be easily accomplished in normal work hours. Even without such cultural or business environment constraints there is a distribution of typical work hours among workers. Some want to work excessive hours and others want to work just the minimum required. For this discussion I want to ignore the first two factors and consider the factor that is the clear choice of the worker most of the time.

There is an optimum amount of work time per week for each worker. For some it may be just 40 hours and for others it may be 60 or more hours. Working more or less than your personal optimum isn’t effective in the long term because you can’t be as effective in either your work or your non-work life. Those who become “workaholics” voluntarily usually don’t accomplish any more in their long hours on the job than other workers accomplish in their optimum times, even if their optimum is only 40 hours. This is because workaholics often don’t work effectively. They get involved in unimportant tasks, they often spend too much time in social activities and they lose creativity due to lack of involvement in activities outside of work. Workaholics thinks they are helping the enterprise or their career or both when in fact they are not; except in those deviant cultures that prize excessive work hours.

Now to explain what I mean by an optimum number of work hours for a person. Each of us has different obligations in our life outside the job. Each of us has different needs for recreation and relaxation. Individuals with few outside obligations and low need for recreation and relaxation can work more hours effectively than an individual with many outside obligations and high need for recreation and relaxation. To be effective in our work we must have a balance between our work and other activities. Working more than our personal optimum for protracted times isn’t effective because our mind is on our failing to meet obligations and personal needs rather than on our work.

It is important to remember that work isn’t the most important thing in our lives. I have observed several people that made work more important than necessary. Then comes the time when they are faced with a family crisis or get a health scare, e.g. chest pains while on a business trip. When faced with their mortality they change their priorities. Suddenly their families are the most important thing in their life and work is relegated to second place or lower. Don’t let that happen to you. That is what I mean by having a balanced life. The relative unimportance of work, compared to our families, is easy to understand near the end of or after our working life. It’s much harder to understand when we are young. However, young people do see older people that have led an unbalanced life and suffered the consequences. Use these examples to remind yourself to maintain a balanced life.

Scheduling Time by the Week

After completing the definition of your objectives and thinking through plans to achieve them you are ready to schedule your time. It is very important to schedule a whole week at a time. The reason is that you cannot work on six to eight objectives in one or even two days, but you can over a whole week. There are too many uncertainties in life and jobs to schedule longer than a week without rescheduling every week so just do one week. Pick a time each week when you can be alone for 20-30 minutes and make this your scheduling time. Early Sunday evening after dinner is a good time for me. If I try to develop a schedule on Friday evening after work my mind is filled with minutia resulting from the weeks crises that seem important at that time. Scheduling such minutia pushes off work on more important but seeming less time critical objectives. By Sunday evening most of this minutia has receded in apparent importance and I can better focus on things that contribute to achieving my objectives.

Select a format for your schedule that suits your taste. I prefer a single sheet of paper for each week’s schedule. The format isn’t important but I find it easier when I can see all the hours of a week at one time along with my lists of objectives and tasks for the week. I make up a form using a spreadsheet and prepare copies of the blank form. You may prefer a printed calendar or a software schedule on a personal computer or personal digital assistant. The key is to allocate some time to each important task you have for the week. Allocate the tasks for the week by one or two hour chunks and leave several unscheduled hours each day during work time. This unscheduled time is necessary to fight daily fires and to go back and complete tasks that were interrupted by firefighting or other unanticipated events.

A planned and recorded schedule works if you discipline yourself to stick to your schedule and work the task assigned for each period. You will find that this discipline results in getting significant amounts of work done on major objectives in the one or two hour chunks of scheduled time. The biggest benefit is that it helps prevent you from filling in your time with displacement activities. Without the discipline of following your weekly schedule you tend to fill your time with what Stephen Covey calls urgent but not important tasks. With the weekly schedule you are more likely to work the important but not necessarily urgent tasks. As a result, at the end of the week you have accomplished a number of important tasks that contribute to your objectives whereas without the schedule the week is filled with the urgent but not important tasks and very little that is important is accomplished. Think of your weekly schedule as a refrigerator that keeps your precious time from “melting away”, i.e. being wasted in doing urgent but not important tasks.

Open Door Policy

Having an open door policy is important at all levels of management. For first and second level mangers it means being open to interruptions by any of the people working under you as well as your peer managers and superiors. If you are more senior then you need a gatekeeper that will filter those allowed to interrupt you but you should allow interruptions by all of your direct reports, your peer level managers and of course by your superiors. The reason it’s necessary is that if you don’t maintain an open door you are not likely to hear all of the information you need. You are at the mercy of the “chosen ones” who are allowed to interrupt, thereby filtering what you hear. (I’ll address how to use vertical staff meetings to obtain unfiltered information from levels below your direct reports in the lecture on meetings.) Having an open door means that you will be interrupted with trivial matters from time to time. Accept these time wasters gracefully as the price for maintaining good communications and good relations with others in the enterprise. If someone abuses your open door, i.e. takes your time to discuss non work related items; then say you have a deadline and suggest continuing the discussion over lunch or after work.

Make Sure You Are Effective With People

Don’t become a slave to a rigid schedule. You must accept the reality that there are daily crises that require your attention. That is why you leave unscheduled blocks of time in your schedule. Attend to the crises when they arise and then go back to your schedule and use the unscheduled periods to catch up. When you are dealing with a person make sure the time you spend is effective and spend the time necessary to be effective. Don’t rush through a conversation so that you can get back to what you have on your schedule; otherwise you won’t achieve effective communication and will waste the time spent.

Learn to Be Efficient With Other Tasks

Learning how to work with a good secretary or administrative assistant is essential to being an efficient and effective manager. When I started working there were no personal computers; secretaries were numerous, available to all and used by all knowledge workers because the secretaries had the typewriters. By the time workers became managers they had usually learned how to work effectively with secretaries. This is no longer true due to the introduction of personal computers, which has led to fewer and fewer secretaries and less opportunity for workers to learn how to work with them effectively. I now see vice presidents that haven’t a clue to how to work effectively with their secretaries and are either too arrogant or ashamed to ask the secretary or other managers for advice.

I have had the pleasure of working with some outstanding secretaries and I know that they at least doubled my effectiveness. Not all secretaries are good at everything and manager’s needs vary. For example, in my case I could cope with secretaries that were not expert at filing, although it was great when they had that skill. The skills I sought most, and needed most, were the ability to take care of administrative work independently and to keep in tune with the organization’s grapevine.  As a technical person I focused on business issues and would have missed important personnel issues without having a secretary that alerted me to people issues that needed my attention. Let me relate two examples of how a good secretary can improve a manager’s effectiveness.

For several years I was general manager of a company in a small town and it was necessary for me to spend at least 5% of my time involved in civic activities on top of the demands of running a difficult business. I was fortunate to have a secretary that was outstanding at administrative work as well as having good secretarial skills and being in tune with everything that went on in the company. This was before email was widespread so there was a lot of paperwork traffic. My secretary prescreened all paperwork; eliminated junk stuff, handled the easy stuff herself and came to me for 15 minutes each morning with the small amount that she couldn’t handle. She came in with everything sorted; some for my signature, some for questions and some she wasn’t sure what to do with. She summarized each item, often giving her recommendation or telling me what questions she had about the item. I only needed to give her quick verbal instructions on most remaining items. Typically there were only one or two items daily that I had to handle in detail myself. She saved me more than enough time every day to cover the civic activities I was involved with.

At another company managers were required to send a weekly report up the management chain that was distilled by senior managers and eventually went to the corporate offices. Every manager at the division level and below knew these reports were useless but our pleas to drop the requirement for them were rejected. My solution was to select a secretary that could write them without my help. In eight years I didn’t write a single one. I read, edited and signed the reports my secretary wrote and there was never a problem. This skilled secretary saved me roughly an hour a week; precious time for a manager.

I had learned in my first management job that, although widely used, written weekly reports are a useless communication tool and therefore I quit spending precious time on them. If I needed to communicate something to my superiors I did it face to face or during meetings so that I was sure my concerns were heard and understood. Don’t require weekly reports from your workers if you have a choice. Walk around and talk to them to find out what is going on. This takes no more of your time, a lot less of their time and is more effective for understanding what is really happening compared to reading sugar coated reports.

If you are fortunate enough to have a secretary or access to a secretary please learn how to dictate to them, if they know shorthand, and to electronic dictation equipment. I have timed my work and found that it is three times faster to outline and dictate something than it is for me to write it out or type it. Just as important I can dictate things while driving to and from work or at home if I think of something I forgot that is critical for the next day. Today I see many managers doing their own typing and spending hours at a keyboard. This isn’t fun and it isn’t effective. Learn how to offload such work to a secretary and it will make you much more effective. There is a more in depth discussion of the benefits and trade-offs of dictation in the next lecture. Here I want to make the point that managers must learn how to effectively use secretaries to become more effective and if they expect their staff to follow their lead.

Many of us need the time allocated for lunch not only to eat but to wind down from the morning and regenerate our energy for the afternoon. However, we don’t have to spend every lunch period unwinding or socializing. Spending a couple of lunch periods a week on some formal or informal communications tasks is well worth while. Examples include “all hands” meetings for your organization. Lunch hour is about the only time you can expect to have your entire organization available to listen to you or to each other on topics of interest to all. The cost of providing lunch for the group of workers is a good investment for having their attention for important communications.

You can also use lunches to catch up with what individuals are doing in their jobs. It’s much more effective to discuss job performance during an informal lunch than it is across your desk. In informal lunch sessions with subordinates it is easy to focus the discussion on their tasks, processes associated with their tasks and the system encompassing the work. Such discussions are more effective in evaluating the subordinates’ work than a formal review in your office and they certainly are more pleasant for you and the subordinates. In a formal review both individuals are tense and guarded so truly open and honest communication rarely takes place. An exception is formal discipline of an individual, which should always be discussed in your office or other private setting.

Exercise

1.     Write down your objectives for your job and your life outside of the job remembering to include both long and short term job objectives, the physical, mental and spiritual parts of your life and your relationship with family and friends. You may want to spend a day or two doing this and if possible do it while on a long weekend or even on vacation. You can think more objectively about your life when away from your normal surroundings and work environment.

2.     Think through plans to achieve the objectives listed under number 1.

3.     Identify tasks that you should work on over the next week that will begin to implement your plans and contribute to achieving your objectives

4.     Decide on a format for a weekly schedule and prepare a schedule for the next seven days

5.     Begin to follow your weekly schedule starting the next morning when you report to work.

Maintain the discipline of scheduling your time by the week for at least a month and then evaluate whether it is helping you achieve your objectives. You may find that your planning works well or you may need to adjust the planning depending on how well your schedules have worked for you.

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx