Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

How to Miss Something Important in a Candidate Interview

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Kirklin was shaking his head.  “I don’t know how we missed it,” he muttered.

“Missed what?” I asked.

“We hired this guy about a month ago, to be a supervisor in one of our technical areas.  Six guys on his team.  How hard could it be?”

“I don’t know, how hard could it be?” I probed.

“Apparently, pretty hard.  His team’s production is behind and his team members are coming up to me privately and complaining.”

“What are they complaining about?”

Kirklin thought for a moment.  “Just general stuff, doesn’t really matter.  Bottom line, this new supervisor has never supervised a team before.”

“Then, why did you pick him for the job?” I wanted to know.

“Well, he was a supervisor at his old job.  I mean, he had a supervisor title.  Today, I asked him how many people he had on his team.  Turns out, he didn’t have a team.  He supervised a machine.”

“How did you miss that in the interview?”

“I guess I never really asked THAT question,” Kirklin replied.

How to Anticipate the Unpredictable

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Brent wasn’t sure he heard me right. I know he was expecting some sympathy for all of his long hours.

“Your long hours are not because you are working hard,” I said. “Your long hours are because you didn’t budget your time.”

He tried the puppy dog look. “But I don’t know exactly how much work there is to do until it piles up on me,” he protested.

“That’s BS,” I responded. “If you would sit down and think about your week coming up, you would find that 95 percent of it is totally predictable.”

“But customers call with questions about their bids, or they want to add something to the project that we quoted for them.  I can’t just tell them that I will get to it next week, they will give the job to one of our competitors,” he defended.

“So, how often does this happen?” I pressed.

“Well, it happens all the time.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t predictable?”

The Just Reward for Hard Work

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I had a hot tip to stop by and visit with Brent. As I entered his office, I noticed his eyes were sunk in. It was Friday, but he didn’t look like he was ready for the weekend.

“You look like crap,” I observed. “When did you get here this morning?”

Brent sat up, a bit startled. “Oh, man,” he said. “I rolled in around 5:00a. I just had to get some stuff done.”

“And when did you leave last night?”

“Well, I got out of here about 9:45p. I don’t know what it is. This has been going on for the past three weeks. On Monday, things don’t look so bad, but come Thursday and Friday, the work just seems to pile up. I have worked the last three Saturdays and last week, had to come in on Sunday. Missed the football game.”

“So, this is not some special project. Just your regular work,” I inquired.

“Yeah, in fact, if I had known about it ahead of time, I could delegate some of it out and it would already be done. But I don’t know about some of this stuff until it’s too late, or don’t realize how long it is really going to take. All of sudden, the pile is stacked up and everyone has gone home. The work’s gotta get done.”

“Brent, what if?” I started. “Brent, what if I don’t believe you.”

How Not to Appear as a Control Freak

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“I am taking over a new department,” explained Ellen. “It’s not a promotion, just a new department. I heard through the grapevine that some people are off-balance wondering what life is going to be like under my direction. Two people said they might quit. How do I let them know that I am not going to be some micro-managing monster?”

“You could wear a sign,” I suggested.

Ellen laughed. “Be serious. I want to let them know that I am not some control freak boss.”

“It sounds backward,” I started, “but instead of telling them about you, why don’t you find out about them?”

Ellen looked puzzled.

“Look, you may be under the microscope. If you become genuinely interested in each of your team members, you will accomplish two things. First, the focus will immediately shift away from you. Second, asking questions about them will speak volumes about you.”

How to Smile and Train Slow

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“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Charlie. “You are going to lose eight hours of production today.”

My plan was to rotate eight operators off-line for one hour each. In that one hour, Charlie was going to coach the operator to perform data entry in real-time with a customer on the line. The current method was to take notes on paper and, later, enter the order in the computer. It was a delayed process that created mistakes and missing information.

Charlie was coaching the operators, I was coaching Charlie. Actually, I was training Charlie. Our first subject was Sonja.

“Good morning, Sonja,” I took the lead. “You have completed the training for the real-time data entry and then we throw you back on-line with real customers. I don’t know if that is fair, so today, we have you off-line for an hour. We will do the same work, but the customer won’t be real. In fact, I am going to be your customer, so if you need to stop and slow down, all you have to do is smile and we will slow down.

“Since, I am the customer, Charlie will be your coach. Every time Charlie sees something he really likes, he is going to stop you and tell you about the element you did well. Ready?” Sonja smiled.

“You smiled,” I said. “So, let’s take it slow. You have your phone script, let’s start at the top.”

Sonja started through the script. Twenty seconds in, I stopped her.

“Charlie, we just finished the first few seconds of the call. What were the elements that Sonja did well?” Charlie stared at me, intently. Though I had briefed him before we got started, he was still focusing on mistakes. In the first twenty seconds, Sonja had made no mistakes, so Charlie didn’t know what to say.

“Charlie, in the first few seconds, did Sonja stick exactly to the script?” Charlie nodded. “Then, tell Sonja what positive element she accomplished by sticking to the script.”

So, Charlie talked about consistency. And we went on, stopping every few seconds, so Charlie could make a positive comment about Sonja’s performance. The first call took 15 minutes. The second call took 12 minutes. The third took 8 minutes. The fourth took 7. Then 6 minutes. The last two calls hit our target at 4 minutes, and then we had coffee.

Why Train When There is No Time

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“Look, we have a certain amount of work that has to be done around here and I can’t just sit by and watch these guys go so slow. They just don’t get it. I have been working with them for eight months.” Charlie stopped. He shook his head. He had been trying to get his telephone operators to go paperless. It wasn’t working.

“Did you know that you are a really good phone operator?” I asked.

“I know. I did it for six years before I came over to work here. I am the best. I just wish there was ten of me. This is a busy place.” Charlie seemed off the defensive, now.

“Why do you think the coaching is failing?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s not the coaching,” said Charlie. “It’s the training. We just have so much work to do that we don’t have time to train. It’s fast paced. These guys just can’t keep up. And the turnover on my team is killing me.”

“Charlie, what happens when a race car driver takes a curve too fast?”

“What?” said Charlie, off guard. He wanted to talk about operator through-put, and I was talking about race cars.

“Let’s say there is a straight-away coming up, where we can really blow it out, but we have to negotiate a turn first. What happens if the driver takes the turn too fast?”

“Well, he’s going to hit the wall.” Charlie responded.

“Charlie, sometimes, you have to slow down to go fast.” I waited to let that sink in. “Charlie, tomorrow I want you to schedule one operator per hour to be off the phones and back into coaching. See you at 8:00 sharp.”

The Meaning of Micro-Management

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“Move over, let me take the console. Why don’t you just watch me?” Charlie insisted.

This was the ultimate in micro-managing.

Charlie, the supervisor, observing a mistake, simply took the project back under wing and proceeded to do the work himself.

Of course, for the past twelve minutes, Charlie had berated the team member for not being fast enough, taking things out of sequence and ultimately falling back to the old way of doing things.

As a supervisor, Charlie had been working to get his team of telephone operators to record data in real time on the computer, rather than using paper in a two-step delayed process. In fact, Charlie got the job as supervisor of this team because he had used this real-time process at another company. He was the best telephone operator on their crew. When he came here, he picked out the software, but had been unsuccessful in getting the operators to use it. Eight months later, they were still writing paper tickets and entering the data later, if they remembered.

Charlie’s behavior, as a supervisor, demonstrated the subtle difference in dealing with mistakes by a micro-manager and a coach. As a micro-manager, Charlie focused on the task and the method (mistakes). The more he focused on the task and the mistakes, the more he drove the operators back to the paper system they were comfortable with.

I let Charlie be a telephone operator for another eight minutes (he was really very good) before I pulled him aside. Do I praise him for being a great telephone operator or admonish him for micro-management?

How to Look at the Size of the Role

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“So, as you see me struggle with my new role as a manager, what do you see as my biggest challenge?” asked Joel.

“The biggest mistake most companies make is underestimating the level of work required for success in a role. The biggest mistake most managers make is underestimating the level of work required in a task,” I replied.

“And level of work can be measured by looking at the Time Span of the task?”

“And don’t be fooled.  For a manager, the task starts earlier and the completion time is much later than for a supervisor.  A supervisor makes sure the production gets done.  A manager creates the system in which production is done.  It’s a much bigger job, a higher level of work.”

How to Detail a Task to Discover its Time Span

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I could see that Joel was stressed. This was a big job. Joel had been a successful supervisor, but this assignment as a new manager was different for him.

“It was all about improvisation,” he proclaimed. “Life was exciting. Things were always moving.

“But you asked me to make a list of the most important tasks in my new role, as a manager. I started with my role description. The insight came when I tried to peg the time span associated with each task.

“Here is one,” he continued. “The role description says that I am responsible for making sure we have enough direct labor to meet the production needs for all the cycles during the year.

“At first, I thought it just meant that I should post job vacancies and do some interviews. But when you asked me to attach time span to the task, my head started to spin.

“It was only then, that I realized I needed to research our historical workloads during the three cycles of our year. I had to take a look at our maximum production capacity along with the marketing and sales forecast. I spent the time to lay out all this data for the whole year. I used a line graph to help me visualize it. Then I had to figure out what resources we needed to produce the numbers related to the forecast. The forecast is helpful, but it is often wrong by as much as ten percent.

“All in all, when I looked at my new job, I really have to be planning out 12 months or more, in advance. This is a lot bigger than I thought.”

I smiled at Joel. He was new to the job, but he was beginning to understand the time span related to this new level of work, the time span necessary to be successful as a manager.

How to Calibrate the Time Span of a Task

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Joel laid the list on the table. “It’s weird,” he started, “there were some obvious things, but there were some other things that were more interesting.”

I had asked Joel to make a list of tasks that he had performed as a supervisor and to identify the time span of each task.

“For example,” he continued, “I ran a rolling production schedule out for six weeks. So at any one time, I was working six weeks into the future. But there were some other tasks that were longer than I thought.

“I was in charge of raw materials. We would get in shipments of plastic parts that had to be inspected. There was a time when a whole boatload of parts was defective. In the short term, I had to really move around the production schedule to keep things moving. But in the long term, I had to work with the vendor on getting replacement parts. I had to figure out what we needed to keep in production, then to build back our raw goods inventory.

“Finally, I had to spend time figuring out what the problem was with the parts, working with the vendor to solve the problem. Turns out, there was a bad batch of resin from another supplier. Because of the problem, the resin supplier actually went out of business and our vendor had to find a new source. I know it was his problem, but I had to work with him, trying out and finally certifying a new resin supplier so our parts would hold up. That whole process took five months and my manager expected me to handle it without a lot of direction from her.”

“So the time span for that project was about five months?” I asked.

“Yes, you could call it five months.  Most of the time it is easy, averages out to be fairly short in time frame.  But, when it’s hard, I have to look out further.  Even when it’s hard, it’s still part of my job.”

“So, now in your new job, as a manager, what are some of the tasks that you will be responsible for and what is the time span? Take a look at your job description and meet me back here tomorrow.”