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At a recent family gathering, my nine-year old niece used her new colored pens to draw animals on scraps of paper she found. The first horse she drew was a very nice blending of blues and yellows and greens and was kneeling in a field of tall grass. What does this have to do with Management? A lot really. Keep reading.

Interest and Motivation
She made several more horse drawings, in assorted artistic shades, and gave them to her grandparents an an uncle. I was impressed by the sense of color balance she demonstrated, as well as her skill level in drawing a horse that actually looked like a horse.

Late in the day she handed one to my sister. I jokingly asked her where mine was. She turned, matter-of-factly, and asked me what color I wanted it. I picked red. Just a few minutes later she returned and presented me a mono-chromatic red drawing of a stationary horse.

It’s a wonderful drawing that my wife has already hung on the refrigerator door, but it is not the artistic, multi-hue drawing of a horse in motion that she had done in all her others.

Be Careful What You Ask For
Have you ever done that at work? Have you ever been impressed with the way an employee completed a project so you assigned them another one like it and it got done, but wasn’t exactly what you wanted? Why do you suppose that was? What can we learn from my request of my niece that can help us as managers.

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\\ tags: Business, Management

Listed below are ten things you can do to become a better manager. Pick one. Do it today. Pick another one for tomorrow. In two weeks you will be a better manager.

1. Select the best people
As a manager, you are only as good as the people on your team. Give yourself a better chance to succeed by picking the best people from the start.Read Job Interview Questions to Ask to learn to be better at selecting the best candidate for the job.

2. Be a motivator
Human beings do things because we want to. Sometimes we want to because the consequences of not wanting to do something are unpleasant. However, most of the time we want to do things because of what we get out of it.It’s no different at work, people do good work for the pay, or the prestige, or the recognition. They do bad work because they want to take it easy and still get paid. They work really hard because they want to impress someone. To motivate your people better, figure out what they want and how you can give that to them for doing what you want them to do.

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\\ tags: Business, Management, Manager

When the screening of the candidates is done, you will bring the top two or three in for an interview. What questions should you ask them? What answers should you be looking for? How will you know which one to hire? Whether you work for a large company with a Human Resources department and volumes of procedures or are a small business owner with a few employees, the questions you want to ask are the same.

The Questions to Ask
You want to ask questions that, in increasing order of importance, tell you 1) whether the person has the skills to do the job, 2) how they function under pressure, and 3) how well they will fit into the team.

Can They Do the Job
These are perhaps the easiest questions. You have seen the person’s resume so you know they claim to have the necessary skills. Ask a few questions to verify what they claim.

• “I see you managed the payroll for three subsidiaries. What was the most difficult part of integrating all of them?”

• “When you were the Marketing Manager for ABC company what were the steps you took when planning the annual marketing budget?”

• “I see you program in (whatever language). How would you link an indexed field variable to display on mouseover?”

Notice these questions ask how or what. They can not be answered yes or no. Listen to the answer to see how quickly they answer, how complete/correct their answer is, and whether they actually answer what you asked or go off to something with which they are more familiar.

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\\ tags: Business, Job, Management

Do your employees trust you?

Do your employees trust you? A recent suggests they probably do not. They trust their co-workers and they even like their job for the most part, but they don’t believe that their managers are making the best decisions. This is especially true when it comes to decisions made about them.

I have two questions for you to think about:

1) Does it matter that your employees don’t trust you?
2) How do you find out?

I believe the first question is the easier one to answer - YES, it matters very much. The two biggest reasons why it matters are related - PERFORMANCE and Profits.

Their Performance
I guarantee you that you will not get top performance out of any employee who does not trust you. If they don’t trust you to make the best decisions AND trust you to look out for their best interests - they feel they have to do it themselves. The time they spend doing that, or thinking about how to do it, takes away from their production, their quality, and their creativity.

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\\ tags: Business, Employee, Management

What is Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process of determining who is the very best, who sets the standard, and what that standard is. In baseball, you could argue that seven consecutive World Series Championships made the New York Yankees the benchmark.If we were to benchmark “world conquest”, what objective measure would we use to compare Julius Caesar to Adolph Hitler; Gengis Khan to Napoleon? Which of them was the epitome, and why?

We do the same thing in business. Who is the best sales organization? The most responsive customer service department? The leanest manufacturing operation? And how do we quantify that standard?

Related Issues
Once we decide what to benchmark, and how to measure it, the object is to figure out how the winner got to be the best and determine what we have to do to get there.Benchmarking is usually part of a larger effort, usually a Process Re-engineering or Quality Improvement initiative. The US Department of Energy’s Quality Management Implementation Guidelines shows one way of fitting it all together.

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\\ tags: Benchmarking, Business, Management

Companies have been outsourcing work for many years. This trend has been carried to an extreme in the case of offshoring - sending work and jobs to other countries where labor is cheaper.

Outsourcing
For decades companies expanded their conglomerates by buying other companies. Initially these companies were related businesses, often suppliers. Soon the conglomerates began buying companies with no relation. Profit motives and the desire to be the biggest became sufficient motivation for acquisition. Ultimately, the conglomerates began to collapse under the weight of the acquired companies. Profits started falling and companies began to retract to their “core” businesses.Next they discovered that they could shed even core functions by hiring them out to companies that could do them more efficiently and, thus, less expensively. Payroll processing was subcontracted. Shipping was farmed out. So was manufacturing. Companies were hired to do collections, customer call centers, and employee benefits. Collectively, this was called outsourcing.

Outsourcing made sense. Specialized companies provided their services to many client companies at lower prices than the client companies could do the work in-house. Both companies, the service provider and the client, profited from the arrangement. Unfortunately, like the building of conglomerates before it, outsourcing got carried to extremes. Companies began outsourcing work to the lowest bidder and lost sight of the effect it had on the company except for finances. Outsourcing this work to “foreign” or “offshore” companies, solely to take advantage of lower labor rates in those countries, became known as offshoring.

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\\ tags: Business, Management, Offshoring

Time was when sleeping on the job could get you fired. If you were in the military, it could get you shot. Now we have companies, and whole industries, encouraging workers to sleep during the business day.Yes, some employers spell out “Sleeping on the job” as a specific infraction. Some consultants tell you how to handle an employee caught sleeping on the job to see that they get the help they need to stop. Even humorous lists like Top Ten Excuses If You Get Caught Sleeping On The Job acknowledge that it is a prohibited behavior.

However, that may be changing. The Detroit News reported “daytime snoozing is an important part of ‘full-spectrum fitness.’” One Connecticut metals company actively encourages napping by its employees to “give them a break or a perk, a napping area where they can unwind.” Some companies allow employees to have a bed in their office.

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\\ tags: Business, Management, Work

Recently, I was speaking with a System Architect friend who expressed frustration with her current project. “The Project Manager is not using the (people) resources well,” summarized this former manager’s complaint.

Manager’s Perspective
What manager hasn’t struggled with the problem of not having enough of a key resource needed to do the job? You shuffle people, juggle tasks and priorities, and plead for more resources. You cross-train where you can, contract specialists if you can, and work far too much overtime. You know how much it is taking out of you over time, but what about the people you supervise. What is it doing to them?

What About Your People?
The key people on your team like being busy and feeling needed. Yet they can easily burn out and begin to resent the demands you place on their skills. Others on the team are bored with being underutilized or unhappy being cross-trained to help in areas they lack skill or interest.

“Think of all the hours lost,” the system architect told me “by people doing jobs they aren’t suited for or excited about.”

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\\ tags: Business, Management

Sure, when I play basketball against my brother I keep score. But what my score is at the end of the game doesn’t matter unless it’s bigger than his.

The same is true in business. Many business keep score, but that isn’t enough. You have to manage the actions that will make that score bigger.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Many business have certain metrics that they use to track their performance against company goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). It is important to note, however, that keeping score isn’t enough. These metrics are only a guide to tell you how you are doing. You still have to manage the underlying activities that contribute to the numbers.These are essential management tools and even if your company doesn’t have them, you should establish and monitor KPI for your group.

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\\ tags: Business, Management

What is management? What do managers do? How do I manage?

These are standard questions that most of us in the management profession have been asked more than once. And questions we asked once in our careers too. Here, then, is a basic look at management, a primer, Management 101 from my perspective.

Art and Science
Management is both art and science. It is the art of making people more effective than they would have been without you. The science is in how you do that. There are four basic pillars: plan, organize, direct, and monitor.

Make Them More Effective
Four workers can make 6 units in an eight-hour shift without a manager. If I hire you to manage them and they still make 6 units a day, what is the benefit to my business of having hired you? On the other hand, if they now make 8 units per day, you, the manager, have value.

The same analogy applies to service, or retail, or teaching, or any other kind of work. Can your group handle more customer calls with you than without? Sell higher value merchandise? Impart knowledge more effectively? etc. That is the value of management - making a group of individual more effective.

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\\ tags: Business, Management