Bringing Management Value

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From the Ask Tom mailbag.

Question:

I’m going to be promoted in July as a manager and I will have to manage 5 people who are older and more experienced than me. I have been working with 2 of them for a year and 2 of them are new to the company, the last person has no experience. My boss knows that is going to be a real challenge for me, he is promoting me because I have the technical ability to do the job. I need to work on my soft skills. I have developed strong analytical skills which are not always an asset to manage a team effectively. Do you have any advice?

Response:

Age and maturity is always a problem for a younger manager working with older team members. You will have to earn their respect and you will not be given much room for error.

Here is the principle I follow.

Every member of an organization, in their pursuit of doing a good job, will always seek out the person who brings value to their thinking and their work.

Wouldn’t it be great if that person was the manager? Often, it’s not, and that is where the trouble begins. My advice to any manager who wants to be successful is very simple.

Bring value to the thinking and the work of your team members.

That’s it. I will let you think about that for a day, while I open this up for comments from the rest of you. What is that you can do, as a manager, to bring value to the thinking and work of your team members? -TF

One Powerful Lever

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“You said you would tell me how to bring this all together?” Marie asked. “You said there was one last thing I needed to know to bring my time management system together.”

“You are right, there is one more discipline that is critical to the success of this system,” I responded. “I was taught this several years ago by a firm who truly understood its power.

“Each Monday, every Monday, without fail, even if some members of the team were absent, there was a special meeting to review the action plans for the week. Daily was too often, monthly was too long, weekly was just right.

“To that meeting, attendees would bring all the tidbits, scraps of paper, file notes, phone slips, due date reports along with the schedules of every person in the firm. The purpose was to review every possible action step in the time frame of that week, to make sure every person and every thing was fully scheduled.

“Around the table sat approximately $3000 per hour of billable personnel. The meeting lasted two hours so double that number. That is the value that company placed on that meeting.

“The value of a full-on action-step-review on a weekly basis has been proven time and again. If you work alone, you need to meet with yourself to schedule your personal weekly calendar. If you work with other people, a mutual meeting can accomplish both personal calendars and cooperative calendars. The meeting can happen face to face or through some technical hookup when necessary.

“I always look for leverage. This is one powerful lever.” -TF

Ran Out of Time

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“You are actually suggesting that I don’t prioritize?” Marie was having trouble with this. I nodded slowly.

“I know it sounds like heresy, but think about this. What is the biggest difference between an A priority and a C priority?”

Marie hesitated. “Well, it’s either more important or it has to get done first.”

“Good guess, but tell me, have you ever approached a deadline on a C priority and had to complete it before an A priority?”

“Sure, it happens all the time.”

“Then what does that say about your priority system? And bottom line, it all has to get done sometime, just schedule it. If it doesn’t have to get done, it shouldn’t be on your list in the first place.”

Marie was still trying to protest. “But, if I work hard all day and if something doesn’t get done, at least it was the C priority.”

“You are a manager. If there is something you can’t get done, it should be assigned to someone else. At the end of the day, don’t tell me something didn’t get done because you ran out of time. It did not get done because you did not manage it correctly.” -TF

Prioritization Trap

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“So, Marie, what do you do with the rest of your to-do list?” I asked. We had been talking about her to-do list and her project lists.

“I guess, just work on them. I know I should probably prioritize them,” she responded.

“Well, you have known all along about prioritization. How come you haven’t been doing that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I never get around to it. I just look at the list, and really, I just start working on whatever I think is easiest to get done right then.”

“The reason you don’t prioritize, is that prioritization doesn’t really work for anybody. It’s a time management trap that makes you feel good, but doesn’t get anything done,” I said. I could see Marie give me that mental pushback.

She stared at me. “Everybody says you have to prioritize, but you know, you’re right. I never do it.”

“Let’s do something much more effective. As you review the list, including all your project next-steps, you do one of three things.

Do it right now.

Schedule it on your calendar.

Give it to someone else and schedule a follow-up time.

“Bottom line, if it is on your list, it doesn’t matter what the priority is, it all has to get done sometime.” I knew that was enough for today. “Think about it. I will see you tomorrow. There is still more to this system.” -TF

Secrets of a Project List

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Marie greeted me in the hallway. “Good news,” she said. “I’ve finished listing the steps for the Phoenix Redesign Project. I was amazed. Seven steps, and I bet I didn’t work for more than one minute. I made more progress in that one minute than I have in the past two months.”

“So, what is the difference between your to-do list and your project list?” I asked.

She looked to the side, as if the answer was written somewhere on the wall. “It’s sort of like going through time, one thing after another, very horizontal. Then, I hit this project. The project list is more vertical. It drills down into the project.”

“You seem more relaxed today than you did yesterday.” I observed.

“I do. I have a better sense of control. I know exactly what needs to be done.”

“And what is the next-step?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” Marie explained. “I just have to pull the budget from a similar project we did 18 months ago. I remember, it contains a narrative description we can modify and all the budget elements are listed with our assumptions. I put this next-step on my schedule this afternoon. With the project list, I can actually work things into my calendar instead of having this dark cloud lurking out there.”

“So, just to summarize what you have learned?” I prodded.

“If you have a project, quickly list out the steps and identify the next-step.”

Robust Next Step

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“Let me see your list?” I asked.

“Okay, but I haven’t really looked at it for a couple of days,” Marie mildly protested. We had been talking about time management. “I mean, I added a couple of things to it this week, but” Her voice trailed off as if she had another reason, but it just wasn’t worth the effort.

“Looking at your list, I see a couple of things. You have some easy single tasks that look like you could just knock off in a few minutes, but you also have some things that look like projects, like this budget you need to do for the Phoenix Redesign.”

Marie looked over my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, in fact, items 3, 6 and 7 are already done, I just didn’t scratch them off. And the Phoenix Redesign, I just can’t seem to get around to it.”

“When is the Phoenix budget due?”

“Well, three days ago, but nobody has asked me for it, so I probably have a couple of more days.” Marie winced as she was telling me.

“Why such a hard time getting started on it?”

“It’s a pretty complicated project. There are probably six or seven steps to it and I need some other people to help me on parts of it.”

“How long has it been on your to-do list?” I asked.

Marie winced again. “At least a couple of months.”

“Okay, I want to change the way we handle your to-do list. We are going to create a project list, called the Phoenix Redesign Project List.

“Your difficulty is not seeing the details of the project, specifically, you don’t know what the next step is. There are six or seven, but you haven’t listed them out and you don’t know what the next one is. That’s why the whole project has moved on your list, undisturbed from week to week for the past two months.

“Here is your assignment. Take the Phoenix Project, list out the six or seven steps and mark the Robust Next Step. Tomorrow, we will see how this works back into your overall to-do list.” -TF

Typical Time Horizons

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I am going to pick on the accounting department. For the past couple of days, we have talked about time span related to roles in the organization. Following are typical time spans for roles inside the accounting department.

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable roles typically have time spans around one month. As they work through their daily routine, A/P and A/R must look forward to check or billing runs with a monthly reconciliation. All during the month, these roles must look forward to things which will impact that monthly reconciliation.

Payroll may require a slightly longer time span. I usually look for a time span of three months, which coincides with quarterly payroll reporting and reconciliations. There are also annual responsibilities related to W-2 filings and reconciliations, but I often expect the payroll clerk has additional support from a full-charge bookkeeper, an outsourced payroll service or even just a great piece of computer software.

Full-charge bookkeepers are responsible for the production of in-house monthly financial statements but also must look forward to the end of year. The annual task of organizing the records for the firm’s CPA (tax returns and audits) stretches the time span of a full-charge bookkeeper to 13 months.

A controller’s responsibilities go beyond the compilation of financial statements to controlling all financial and management control systems. This would extend to the selection of computer accounting software to the design of all administrative systems that surround that software. Companies requiring departmental financial reporting or job costing also come under the purview of the controller stretching the time span from 12 months to 24 months.

CFO responsibilities extend out beyond 24 months. From my CFO, I expect trend analysis, capacity utilization, return on capital assets, indexing to economic indicators. I expect my CFO to look at the coming recession of 2009 and tell me when we need to renegotiate our lines of credit, when we need to be stockpiling cash (in case we want to buy a troubled competitor) looking at our leases and our owned properties. Time span associated with these responsibilities goes from 24 months to 48 months.

When you begin to measure the task in relation to time span, you become extremely precise about the level of person you need to fill that role. Next week, we will take a look at how to make that judgment about members of your team and prospective candidates in your hiring process. -TF

BTW. I have a white paper I would be happy to send you listing typical time horizons for a number of disciplines. Just drop me an email, be happy to send it to you.

Maximum Time Horizon

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question: Related to our discussion of Time Horizon. Submitted by David.

But, doesn’t the individual’s ability or skill level play a role in measuring the complexity of a task? If I give the same task to two different people, inevitably they will complete it at different rates based on their skill level and/or familiarity of the task. Doesn’t that skew the measurement?

Response:
There are indeed the additional elements of skill level and experience, but the complexity of the task itself does not change. A person’s experience and skill level does have a bearing on their ability to be successful, but the complexity of the task does not change whether the person is successful or not.

A person’s skill level and experience will have a bearing on a person’s current time horizon, but the important observation is of a person’s maximum time horizon. As a person’s skill level and experience increases, their current time horizon will increase, but never beyond the person’s maximum time horizon.

Tomorrow, we will look at typical time horizons to get a clear understanding of how this works and why it is an important concept for managers. -TF

Special thanks to David for the question.

Complexity and Uncertainty

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“My gut tells me that you are right, but I am not sure if I could explain it to someone else,” Marge said. “The longer the time span of a task, the more complex it is?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Remember we were talking about your freight supervisor working out two weeks into the future using the shipping calendar?” Marge nodded. “You said that the first week was pretty solid, but the second week was not as certain.”

“Yes, this week, we know exactly what orders are due, but there are always some unanticipated problems for next week. We just don’t know. It’s okay, we just don’t know.”

“Exactly, the further into the future, the more things are uncertain. That uncertainty into the future is what creates the complexity. The further into the future that you expect someone to work, the longer the time span that person needs to have.” You could see the wheels churning in Marge’s head.

“So, that’s why Martin has difficulty for anything beyond today. He doesn’t have the time span for it?” Marge finally surmised.

I nodded my head. “Time Span becomes an accurate measurement of complexity.” -TF

Time Span and Complexity

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“I never thought of it that way,” said Marge. “But I am not sure exactly what you mean.” We had been talking about how measuring time span was a valuable indicator of the complexity of a job.

“Time span is the length of time that a person can work into the future, without direction, using their own independent discretionary judgment,” I explained. Marge turned her head with a quizzical look.

“Let’s take a task. Let’s say I want to delegate a task to you. So we have a delegation meeting and I explain all about it. You get some questions answered and we adjourn the meeting. From that moment, you begin to work without further direction from me, using your own discretionary judgment.

“When you complete the task, you come back to me and say, -that’s it, I am finished, what’s next?

“The time that you were working independently, measures the time span for that task. On the shipping dock, you have people doing things with different time spans. Packing a box may only have a time span of 15 minutes. Working a rolling freight schedule, checking inventories, supplies and personnel on the loading dock may have a time span of two weeks. Two totally different roles, each with its own time span.

“Time span becomes an accurate measurement for the complexity of any given task.” -TF