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Baseball doesn’t have enough action…but
I love baseball. But I realize that many people don’t because they don’t believe there is enough action. The same thought occurs with managers. They believe action is good but the right action is best! Micro Managers want to walk around to be sure everyone is busy. Leaders know that busy only matters if you are working on the right tasks, yet many managers early in their career don’t understand this. If your team struggles with achieving goals, this episode of the Manager Mojo podcast will provide valuable insight into setting priorities and utilizing the strengths of your team to increase productivity and have fun while doing it!
TODAY’S TRANSCRIPT
Leaders always pay attention.
Hello and welcome, everyone. I’m glad you’re with me. Today’s topic is More Action Please. Now, what manager in his right mind wouldn’t want to see more action out of his or her people? I mean, we all want our people to do more stuff. We want them to stay busy, we want them to stay productive, we want them to stay engaged, but my question to you is: are they actually taking the right actions? You can require more action, but the question is: are they doing the right things or not?
You see, this was a lesson that I really struggled with early in my career. I was obsessed with making sure that everybody was just as busy as I was and I felt like that if they weren’t being really busy that they were being lazy and, so I wanted everybody to work as hard as they could. I wanted them to do as much as they could and I really was more like a micromanaging dictator. I just didn’t get it and I would do silly things – well they’re silly today, they didn’t seem silly then. I thought they were pretty smart.
I would do walk-arounds all the time. I know you know what a walk-around is. You get up out of your chair and walk around to see if everybody’s busy. You know how it is when the boss walks around – everybody’s like, “Okay, what’s going on? What’s he doing? What’s she doing? Why are they walking around the office?” – and, so people, even if they’re wasting time – visiting with one another – oftentimes, what they’ll do is find a way to get busy. I’ll bet you’ve seen the exact same thing that I have. So I would do these walk-arounds and I actually thought they were helping me.
Now, I just didn’t realize that it wasn’t accomplishing what I thought it was accomplishing – I just didn’t get that – so I began to suspect that they were watching to see if I was really doing these walk-arounds or not just to stay busy, so my next technique was that I was going to start making surprise visits. I would try to surprise people and catch them not doing things, and I was a real jerk when I did catch them. I’d ask them, “What are you working on? Why are you not doing this?” I was more in their face and I’ll bet you can guess that didn’t work very well for me.
The fact was, I just made so many mistakes and I really want to help you so that you don’t make the same mistakes I did. I didn’t understand that action by itself meant nothing. What I began to understand over a period of time is that everybody knows how to look busy when the boss shows up. They will find a way to get busy.
One of my favorite stories was a friend of mine who absolutely hated to have any interaction with the boss. Now, this was before I became promoted and I was an individual contributor just like he was. He was a master at keeping his head up and watching to see if the boss was walking around and if he saw one of the big bosses coming around all of sudden, man, his urge to go to the restroom was overwhelming. He would immediately hop up and head to the restroom and he’d camp out in there until he was fairly certain that the boss – or the boss’ boss – had already made the rounds and left and it took me a while to realize what was going on. I thought he just needed to go to the restroom. I didn’t have any clue that he was actually hiding out and, then it got to be a real joke. I mean, I just thought it was hilarious that here he is, he’s so desperate to avoid any kind of interaction with them, that, man, he’s going to run to the restroom so that he can avoid them.
I forgot that lesson though, so when I became a manager it didn’t occur to me that my own people were doing that because I was being a complete jerk. Then, it hit me and, frankly, I just had to laugh.
People figure this stuff out and that’s not really the key to helping people achieve their goals and to achieve the success that they want to achieve in their life. I had to learn that the hard way.
So, here’s what I didn’t get: I didn’t understand that, as a manger, as a leader, my job was really and truly to help establish the right priorities for my people to focus on. I didn’t understand that. I thought everybody could figure that stuff out on their own. I thought they could figure out what was important to do and what was not important to do, and that is just not true.
People need help and, the fact is, we’re all busy today. It’s so easy for people to get off track. They want to stay on track, but they’re not really sure what the track should be. They have difficulty establishing priorities that they need to work on and how to stay tuned in to those priorities. As the leader, I began to understand that what I needed to do was a lot better job of communicating what the most important priorities of every single day were. Initially I didn’t do that at all, and so people were guessing what the priorities were. They were working on what they thought was the most important thing to do and didn’t realize that they could be holding up somebody else that was more important today. What I began to do was to figure it out for them. The missing link for me – and maybe it is for you – was that I didn’t have a plan and I didn’t know I was supposed to have a plan.
I treated management more as a reactive job instead of a proactive job. Management is all about pro-activity, not reactivity and the vast majority of managers are working too many hours every week just because they are in a total put-out-the-fire reaction mode. That doesn’t work today. I understand this in such a personal way. It actually drives me crazy whenever I see managers who have no plan at all, like I used to be, because what it tells me is that they were just like I was.
They don’t have a clue what’s really happening on their teams and I’ve just got to encourage you – please, don’t let that happen to you – because it’s not necessary. It does not take a lot of time for us to have a plan of action for the day and that plan of action for the day can make the difference between you having a very productive, fulfilling day or having one of those days where you’re running around with a fire hose trying to put out the latest fire, solve the latest tragedy that’s happened and, then you go to the next. I mean, what a terrible way to live and, if that’s happening to you every day, this is your signal that you need help and you need to understand more about what management and leadership is. So I hope you’ll begin to think, “Okay, what can I do? I want to get a plan together.”
Here are a couple of tips for you, so that you can really start to make a change. I warn you, this is not going to happen over night because if you’re in a straight-reaction mode all the time it takes a tremendous amount of effort to change that momentum and to really get focused on the priorities that need to be focused on.
So, here’s the first thing that I want you to put down and write down if you’re taking notes. Number one is that – you, as the manager, must get laser focused. You have to get laser focused. That means really tune in, block out all the extra stuff and determine what the specific priorities are for you and for your team.
The second thing that you have to do after you begin to get laser focused is that you must determine where you want to go. In other words, what are your top three priorities for today? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you need to accomplish that with?
And, then the third step is that you have to understand how to leverage the strengths of your team. Most managers don’t even know what the strengths of their people are. They know what they’re weaknesses are because they do what I did, which is walk around and determine what they suck at. Unfortunately, I was not hesitant about telling them what they sucked at and how you needed to improve. That just doesn’t work. And the fact is, because it doesn’t work, there’s no reason to continue to repeat it. Why continue to do things that are not working for you?
Instead, start learning what the strengths of each team member are. Identify those strengths and make sure they get to exercise those strengths every single day. If you’ve got a project that requires someone who is really good at detail make sure that you give that project to somebody that loves doing all that detail work. You wouldn’t want to give it to a guy like me who has struggled all his career with getting fine detail done correctly. Today I’m far better than I was at one point, but I still struggle compared to somebody that is naturally great at detail. There’s no way that I could compete with them, because they have the natural ability to absorb details and see the nuance that, for me, I just flip right over. I miss it. So learn how to leverage the strengths of your team for better results.
The fourth thing you need to do is keep your team focused on the right priorities. Now, if you haven’t determined what the right priorities are, I promise you, they don’t know what the right priorities are either. You have to establish those priorities and, then you actually have to be able and willing to share it with them. You’ve got to be able to communicate those priorities in such a way that they don’t think you’re being a jerk, they don’t think you’re being a micromanager, but that you’re being a person that’s helping them to enjoy their day and take advantage of their skills to get things done that will benefit the entire team and when you begin to do that you begin to flex your own mojo.
You begin to flex your own magic power and what a great feeling it is when people begin to say, “Hey, that was fun today. We got stuff done and I’m really glad because I didn’t know exactly what do, but you helped me focus on the right things to get done today.” It’s such a rewarding change from being a guy that always has the fire hose in his hand trying to put out the latest fire. I don’t like living that way and I would bet that you don’t like it either.
So when you start thinking, “Hey, I need more action out of my team,” I hope that the first thought that’s going to come to your mind is, “but are they the right actions that I wish for them to do?” If they’re not the right actions, your team and you are going to waste a lot of time, and you’re not going to accomplish the goals that you want.
Start working on this today and over time you will become the leader that others want to follow. Thank you for joining me and I hope this has helped.
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