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Ok, we have to admit it. We are busy—too busy.
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There are meetings to prepare for and participate in. There are reports to write, read, review, comment upon, and process. The day’s schedule is often controlled by someone else or at the very least, torpedoed by unplanned activity. In my time-management seminars, I challenged my students to keep a daily log for two weeks before they even thought about becoming a more efficient manager of time.
Why? Because some portion of our time every day is controlled by others. Just how much depends on where you are and whom you work for. Keeping a log, writing down everything you do in no longer than 15-minute blocks, and monitoring it for two weeks will begin to reveal just how much (or how little) of your day you can actually plan.
Try to plan too much, and you will soon become frustrated with yourself for not getting more done.
As critical as time management is, it is not the topic of this article. So why have I brought it up? Because ours is a big club. We have much to do, maybe too much to do, so we tend to let the events that occupy our time mold our approach to and response to our schedules. We abdicate control over events and responsibilities, and in so doing readily fall into the all-in, all-out style of management.
There are two extremes to which we tend to gravitate
The first is over-engagement, also known as meddling. At one time I worked as a subcontractor for a charity on the West Coast. One of the jobs in my contract was to coordinate an annual conference that generally attracted about 1,500 paid registrants. One night, as the registration deadline approached, my team and I worked on the piles of paper forms that had accumulated, making sure that each were properly and accurately entered into the computer database. (This was during the early days of computers. That particular organization had a Wang mainframe computer. The CPU was about the size of a washing machine and featured a whopping 128 K memory on circuit boards about the size of a three-ring binder.)
Now, I am a cut-to-the-chase type of guy and get really bothered by people who clutter up the process with needless frills, well-intended though they may be. The executive director of the charity was an all-in manager, meaning he meddled into everything, trusted no one, and viewed himself as the only thing holding back the organization from complete chaos and certain collapse.
Here I was with my team trying to complete application processing, when Mr. Big decided it was time to modify the font on the confirmation letters and forms. It made absolutely no difference whatsoever in the process whether the font was Times New Roman or Arial. None. But he wanted another font. In those days changing fonts was not so simple as today’s selecting from a drop-down menu. No, one had to enter codes in the correct sequence in precisely the proper place, or everything came out looking like gibberish. It took an hour for him to make the change because he wasn’t as adept at font manipulation as he thought he was. So, we tried to keep busy doing anything important, even though he was muddying up the flow of things with his meddling.
It gets worse.
The next day we were an hour behind schedule and assembling preconference information packets, which had to be mailed the following day. The hour got late, well into the evening, and we still had lots to do. But Mr. Big kept hanging around making frequent forays into our space, each time slowing down or stopping the process to make his presence, expertise, and perceived redemptive value known.
Finally, it occurred to me that Mr. Big really did consider himself to be the one who worked harder, longer, and more intelligently than anyone else, and that he was not about to leave as long as anyone else was there. He simply could not ever let it be known that someone else left after he did.
So, I quietly assembled my team members and informed them that we were going to announce we were done for the day, leave the building, and hide behind the shrubs just outside the entrance so Mr. Big would find it acceptable to leave and we could complete our responsibilities in peace.
I made the announcement that we were leaving. We made the pretense of wrapping up things for the day and left the building, finding hiding places in the bushes. Within seconds, Mr. Big was out the door and into his car. Because I was a trusted contractor, I had a key. (The key system at mission control is another amazing story, but I’ll save that for another time.) I unlocked. We reentered. And we got things done free from meddlesome Mr. Big.
All-in managers are typically like Mr. Big. They innately distrust everyone. They consider themselves to be more intelligent, more experienced, more capable than anyone else. They will not leave you alone. They create as many issues as they resolve, probably more. In aeronautics this is called “self-induced turbulence,” which comes from over-control of the plane’s flight control systems, holding on so tightly and rigidly the fluid nature of movement becomes harsh and jerky.
And everyone who works for them or with them can see exactly what’s going on. Meddlesome managers gum up the works, slow down progress, and annoy just about everyone they interact with. Blinded by massive egos, they fail to attract and retain the talent that would enable them to extend their reach, multiply their effectiveness, and divide their work. They seem to be quite content with that. Effective managers are not.
The opposite position is the disengaged manager. He stays out of the process even when intervention would be the right thing to do. I think of Mr. Carlson, the hapless manager of WKRP in Cincinnati, one of my favorite sitcoms. Content to busy himself with new gadgets and hobbies, he hides in his office away from the processes that would make his company even more successful. (To his credit he does finally hire a capable manager and lets him turn things around.)
To be fair, many disengaged managers are not disengaged at all but simply distracted. Busy people always juggle conflicting demands, and it is easy for most of us to simply leave running machinery alone when some interaction would be helpful.
However, the extreme position of over-engaging is not balanced by neglect. You need to know when to intervene. Here are four keys to determining when and how to get involved:
1. When you notice numbers start to slide. Most quality professionals would agree with Peter Drucker’s maxim that “if you can’t count it, you can’t manage it.” And most of us work with monitoring systems that give us sales numbers, response numbers, reports, accounts, and inventories. Over time, a norm will emerge. If that norm remains, well, normal, then you can probably leave well enough alone. It’s your call, but sometimes your participation (not meddling) will cause those numbers to get even better. Managers can do a lot simply by acknowledging that someone is doing well. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman brought attention to the “Let alone, Zap!” style of management in their book, In Search of Excellence (HarperBusiness, 2004). If you’re going to intervene, try to get there before it’s in free fall.
2. Even when you do get involved, try to abandon dramatics. A former IBM executive (and personal friend) once said that a thousand “attaboys” are instantly wiped out by one “Oh s...t!” It serves no purpose other than to label you as an absentee manager who shows up unannounced but demanding the lead role and a center stage spotlight. Prima donnas get attention but not respect.
3. Learn when to reward the producers among your associates, how to motivate and structure those who show the potential to become stars, and why to ignore the consumers. These last are not customers but those in your team who do not have what it takes to produce without a large investment of time and attention from you.
4. Determine if the process needs attention, or the people who pull the levers and work the gears need attention. Sometimes it’s the people. Sometimes it’s not. Before you say or do anything you might have to walk back, determine just where the problem is. This flows parallel with Douglas MacGregor’s X and Y styles of management.
I’d like to know your experience with the Mr. Big’s in your life and also the nowhere-to-be-seen ones. Leave a comment so the rest of us can enjoy and learn from what you have discovered.
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