Purpose Makes the Intangible Tangible

The work of a manager is very intangible.

Managers don't make products, provide services, sell either of those, conduct research, or design things. Managers attend a lot of meetings, have a lot of conversations, review work done by others, and make decisions about who to hire and fire and where to spend their time. In other words, they do a LOT of intangible stuff.

Without a clear purpose of why the organization or the work group exists, the manager can literally fill up his or her day doing intangible stuff and achieving nothing.

A clear purpose gives meaning to all the intangible activities.
A clear purpose clarifies which metrics matter and which ones don't.
A clear purpose helps managers identify the employees they need and the ones they don't.

Southwest Airlines is all about democratizing the skies. They are all about making air travel possible for more people and making it a fun, on-time experience. That simple purpose simplifies all of the intangible work of their managers. Suddenly their managers know what to do and whom to hire and what kind of culture to build.

Don't rush into your work day to attend meetings and review work done by others. Instead begin your day by reminding yourself of why your organization exists and why your team exists. With that purpose in mind, go about the work of doing intangible activities that generate lasting, meaningful, important, and tangible results.

I encourage you to read It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For by Roy Spence and Haley Rushing. You can learn more about it here.

Schedule Balance

The biggest complaint I hear from executives and managers is they don't have enough balance in their lives.

Then when they pull out their schedules I soon find out why. They are complaining about something for which they have not planned. As we look at their next 60 days all we see are business meetings and events. They've planned no time to be with their family or at their kids's schools or at fun events related to their hobbies. It's all work stuff.

If you want to increase sales, you schedule sales visits.
If you want to improve operations, you schedule operational reviews.
If you want to improve life balance, you schedule a variety of work, family, and personal events.

Steps to Improve Life Balance

1. Write down the different areas of your life.
2. Take out your calendar for the next 60 days and schedule time for each area of your life.
3. If you ever have to change the schedule, immediately reschedule the event that was affected.
4. At the end of the 60 days review your calendar and see if you really did have a balance of life acitivities.
5. Repeat the process for the next 60 days.

Balance does not just happen. It requires a focused effort to make it a reality.

Honor the Platform You've Earned

In his book, Take the Risk, Dr. Ben Carson talks about the privilege of speaking to audiences all over the world. He earned this platform through his work as a professor and director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes. Because of several famous operations he conducted on children who were born connected at their heads, Ben Carson has spoken to millions of adults and students. He sees this platform for sharing his messages as an honor that is to be treated with respect.

Every manager has a platform upon which to share his or her thoughts with others. For some managers, the audience consists of three people. For other managers, the audience might consist of 300,000 or 3 million people. The size of your audience doesn't matter. What does matter is that you honor the platform you've earned.

Here are four insights to honoring your platform:

• Carefully decide on the 3-4 main points that you want to consistently get across.
• Develop a variety of ways to reinforce those points using analogies, personal stories, stories about famous people, quotes, visual aids and so on.
• Deliver your main ideas in a variety of ways including speeches, e-mails, podcasts, voicemails, handwritten letters, and regular conversations.
• Avoid off-the-cuff remarks where you're trying to be "one of the gang." Oftentimes those remarks ruin a manager's credibility and undermine the message he or she is trying to get across.

Beware of the Dangers of Abusing Power

Managers by definition have a certain degree of power over others. Beware of the dangers of abusing that power.

Managers have the power to hire and fire, to promote and demote, and to assign responsibilities and take away responsibilities. Managers do affect their employees' short-term, and oftentimes long-term, career opportunities in both positive and negative ways.

Be very careful in never using your power as a manager to get away with things that you wouldn't be able to get away with if you didn't have the title of manager. I've seen managers swear at their employees, publicly humiliate them, and talk to their employees in a degrading manner. I've seen managers get away with telling dirty jokes that most employees would never even consider saying. Why did they do it? Because they could and they allowed themselves to abuse that "privilege."

I encourage you to read an extraordinarily powerful book called, Broken Trust: Stories of Pain, Hope, and Healing from Clerical Abuse Survivors and Abusers by Patrick Fleming and Sue Lauber-Fleming. It includes five stories from priests who abused children and young adults and three stories from adults who were abused. (You can learn more about this book by clicking here. In reading these stories and the commentary from experienced psychotherapists you might see more clearly the following:

• How inexplicable horrors and terrible abuses of power can actually happen.
• The long-term affect of abuse on the victim and the victim-abuser.
• The necessity of avoiding even the smallest exploitation of your power as a manager.
• The need to see employees as human beings and not as objects to be manipulated for your individual success or pleasure.

Abuse of management power happens far too often, and most of it happens at a subtle level that doesn't impact the manager's career. The responsibility falls mainly on the shoulder of the manager to monitor his or her own behavior and to avoid taking advantage of the power that comes with the title of manager.

Essential Management Questions

As I said in the first blog entry, the job of a manager is to convert resources into results.

That simple definition leads to a few essential management questions:

1. What are the three to four most important results your organization is focused on achieving or improving?
2. What are all the available resources you have to choose from in order to improve or achieve the desired organizational results?
3. How can you combine and deploy those resources toward the improvement or achievement of the desired results?

Most managers I've met have little problem answering the first question. However, many of them are not aware of the full array of resources available to them.

The primary resources they miss out on are the lessons that their employees have learned during their careers. Too often I've seen top managers huddle with a very small group of peers and direct reports and develop a plan of action that completely avoids any input from the people responsible for implementing the items on the plan. The knowledge of the front-line work force is a key resource available for no additional fee. Just tap into it.

In answering question three, remain patient as you keep digging for ways to leverage what you have to achieve what you want. Consider unusual combinations and keep in mind that success does not solely depend on throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Sometimes spending very little money can force you and others to really think of powerful new combinations for the resources you already have available.

Essential Leadership Questions

For many years, I've used this definition of leadership:

Leadership is influencing the way other people think in ways that generate better sustainable results both for the organization and the people in it.

This definition generates these Essential Leadership Questions, which include:

1. What is the organization you are focusing on right now and who are the people in it?
2. What are the sustainable results you are ultimately trying to produce for the organization?
3. What are the sustainable results you are ultimately trying to produce for the people in it?
4. Who are the people you are trying to influence?
5. What are you trying to influence them to do?
6. How will you influence these people on an individual and/or group basis?

These six questions can be applied regardless of whether the organization is a family, a school, a not-for-profit organization, a business, a nation, a society, or the world.

Take out a blank sheet of paper and answer each of these six questions carefully. Keep your answers close by you as you go about your day-to-day activities. See if your answers can influence your own behavior first.

Communicate Expected Standards and Hold People Accountable

Don't post your corporate values where customers can see them.

Instead communicate to your employees the values you expect everyone in your organization to live up to and then provide positive and negative consequences that reinforce the importance of those values. As they say, talk is cheap. Either you are going to make the expected values real and meaningful or they will quickly lose all credibility.

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, has made it VERY CLEAR that players and coaches are expected to behave with a certain standard of values. He has suspended superstars who rarely have ever faced such serious negative consequences in their careers. As he said to PARADE Magazine on October 18, 2009, "We are role models. People look up to us. I think when a high standard is communicated to everybody, people will meet it. I thought it was important to make that clearer."

If you want to read the whole article, click here.

The Process versus The Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal

When a new manager take over a group, he or she usually follows one of two paths.

Either the manager announces that this group will achieve an extraordinary goal by a certain date, or the person says the focus will be on continually improving the process and eventually great results will occur.

Both approaches have an upside and a downside. If process managers don't eventually achieve something remarkable, employees and investors stop caring about the process and start looking for another manager. If the big-goal managers don't achieve those big goals, they lose their credibility as well.

On the other hand, both approaches can be effective. What makes a management approach effective is if it impacts the employees' behaviors and decision-making in ways that generate better sustainable results for the organization both in the short-term and in the long-term. We can argue all day whether a new manager should announce big goals on day one or should focus everyone's attention on improving the process of achieving great results.

The truth is it doesn't matter. A manager is only successful if he or she impacts behaviors and decision-making in ways that generate significantly better sustainable results. I encourage you as the manager to consider the situation and ask yourself these two questions:

1. For this particular group at this particular time, will announcing a big goal cause them to focus on improving their behaviors and decisions in ways that will help them achieve the goals or will it seem so unrealistic that it causes them to not take me seriously and ignore my advice?


2. For this particular group at this particular time, will focusing everyone's attention on the process of achieving great success move them to improve their behaviors and decisions or will it cause them to write me off in the haze of "we've been there and done that"?

Obviously this is going to be difficult. There is no management crystal ball that tells you for certain which approach will be more effective for your group at this time. Consider the two approaches and challenge yourself to select the one that you believe will have a greater impact on improving behaviors, decisions, and results. In the end, that will be the measuring stick of your effectiveness as a manager.

A Strategy is a Guide for Making Decisions

If you were on an African safari or climbing through the Himalayas, you would take a guide with you. Your guide would provide options and explain the risks at each step on the adventure. However, you would make the final decision on what to do.

A strategy provides parameters to operate within, but you have to choose the final decisions within those parameters.

A business strategy has the following parameters. Choose them carefully for your organization, and then let them be your guide to make decisions within.

Questions for Establishing Your Business Strategy

1. Why does the organization exist? What is it's purpose?
2. What are the underlying values our members are expected to use in determining their behaviors?
3. What are the short-term and long-term financial objectives in terms of revenue, costs, and profits for our entire organization?
4. What is the primary decision driver for our organization? Fill in this blank: We want to be primarily a ____ organization. (Choose carefully what type of organization you want to primarily be. The choices are a customer-centric business, a product-centric business, a service-centric business, a technology centric business, a method of sale-centric business, or a method of distribution-centric business.)
5. What is the secondary decision driver for our organization? Fill in this blank: We want to be secondarily a ____ organization.
6. What is the value we will deliver and to whom are we delivering it to?

Once you (including you and the other members of the strategy development team) have clarified your answers to those six questions, you will have a strong sense of the parameters that will guide decisions on what your organization will do in the future. As you consider a certain tactic or planned activity, determine if it fits within the guidelines you've established in answering those questions.

As in taking on an adventure, a strategy serves as your guide. It doesn't tell you what to do, but provides you with paramenters within which to make decisions.

A Result is Not a Result Until It's a Result

The best intentions in the world do not constitute great results. Having lots of potential customers in the pipeline does not equal a great quarter. Having well-crafted designs of new products does not equal a breakthrough for your company.

A sales manager recently shared a story with me. One of his sales reps sent him a report every month filled with positives about his sales pipeline. However, he had no sales. At the end of the first month, the sales manager said, "Great job." At the end of the second month, he said, "Keep going." At the end of the third month, he said, "The proof is in the pudding." At the end of the fourth month, he said, "Activities are not sales. A sale is when the customer says yes and puts money down." Suddenly the sales rep started to actually make sales.

Don't let yourself or others think that activities and possibilities equal results. It's better to move one project, one sale, or one new product all the way to the finish line than to have a dozen great ideas in the pipeline.

Remember: a result is not a result until it's a result.

Sustain Thought-Filled Practice

There are books and then there are books.

The finest book I've ever read on generating great performances is Development of Professional Expertise, which is edited and partly written by Dr. Anders Ericsson. He has spent more than thirty years studying great performers in chess, ballet, the military, education, medicine, and so on. You can learn more about it here.

This is the most comprehensive and in-depth book on how to develop great performances I've ever come across. It is over 450 pages with intense chapters written by a couple of dozen experts on how to perform at a very high level. One main idea that runs throughout the book is called deliberate practice. I think of it more as "sustaining thought-filled practice" because it involves both doing something and thinking about what is happening before, during, and after it occurs.

The Components of Sustaining Thought-Filled Practice

1. Identify the role you have passion and strengths for doing.
2. Clarify the 5-6 critical aspects of that role.
3. Create simulations of the actual performance that allow you to focus on improving one or more of the role's critical aspects.
4. Gain relevant feedback on the simulated performance in a timely manner.
5. Consider the feedback and make adjustments.
6. Sustain your effort for long periods of time.

In a way all of this seems so obvious. It's basically the formula for success in youth sports and in learning to play the piano and in doing math homework. The world's greatest performers take this formula to the highest level. They refine the steps and reapply them over and over and over for more than 10,000 hours.

Teamwork is Not Built in a Workshop

As the economy begins to breathe again companies will focus on improving the teamwork in their organizations.

It's important to remember that teamwork is never, ever established in a one-day seminar. Seminars and workshops are useful for improving understanding of a topic and for seeing what needs to happen and why it needs to happen. This can include interactive activities that might feel like teamwork, but they are actually just a mechanism for explaining what needs to happen in order to have true teamwork.

Teamwork occurs when a group of people support one another toward fulfilling a meaningful purpose. All parts of that statement are important in the final actualization of a team. In the end, five key questions need to be answered:

• Which individuals will constitute the group?
• What is the purpose that the group is working to fulfill?
• What can the individuals do to support one another on the road to fulfilling that purpose?
• Do the individuals actually step forward and provide that support for one another?
• Is there real progress being made toward fulfilling the desired, agreed-upon purpose?

These questions are answered over time, not in an excercise during a workshop. The workshop can help the attendees understand what questions need to be answered and possibly spur the individuals into action after it is over with. But the real work of teamwork happens back at the work site, not in the hotel ballroom.

Err on the Side of Safety

Two days ago I was on the treadmill watching CNN when sudddely the president's speech in New Orleans was interrupted by a silver flying saucer over Colorado. I couldn't hear the volume and couldn't understand why they kept mentioning a boy in the caption below the images.

It turns out they thought the six-year-old boy was in the helium saucer-like balllon that had risen to 7,000 feet. For the next 90 minutes I was mesmerized by this wild event and thought often of my own eight-year-old son, Ben. When the balloon finally landed and the workers opened it up, I feared that the boy had fallen out in route. Only much later did millions of people learn that the boy was hiding in the attic.

Whether this event was a hoax or not, and as of this writing we're really not certain, is not the point. From the perspective of delivering a great management performance, the media and rescue crews all did their jobs exactly the right way.

Always err on the side of safety. Even if the circumstances seem bizarre and outlandish, stay with the pursuit of safety until you've learned that what you thought was true is not true. Great managers always consider that the unlikely is possible and put the safety of other people ahead of their financial concerns.

It cost an incredible amount of money for all those people to try to "save" that little six-year-old boy. Obviously people worked frantically to do everything they could to increase the chances that the boy would live. That is the appropriate response if you want to be a great manager. Go all out in the pursuit of safety, not in the pursuit of short-terms savings or profits.

Color Code Your Results

Can you see your business performance at a glance?

• Do you know how the different parts of your business are doing right now?
• Can you find the answers in less than five minutes?
• Can you immediately identify areas of concern and areas of strength?
• Do have to go on a three-day retreat to really understand what is happening in your business?

In his terrific new book, Obstacles Welcome, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, provides a variety of practical management gems. He clearly is a person who's "been there and done that."

One of my favorite ideas from the book is his practice of color coding results. He uses a simple green-yellow-red coding system for all of his organization's results. If a result is meeting or exceeding the expected results, then it's marked in green. If a result is slightly below the expected result, it is marked in yellow. If it is well below the expected result, it is marked in red.

He, and everyone else in the organization because the results are posted out in the open, can see what is happening at any given moment. This helps him and everyone else to determine what to do immediately.

Start this idea on a few key areas: financial results (expected revenues, expected cost of doing business, and expected profits), operational results from the customers' perspective (expected value received and expected quality of the delivery of that value), and marketing results (expected responses from targeted audiences).

Regularly color code the actual results versus the expected results. Visually scan the colors on your Results Sheet and see if you can immediately identify any areas for short-term concern or any areas that can be leveraged for long-term great results.

Use Outcome-Based Scheduling

The most precious resource you have as a manager is time.

Use it wisely or wastefully, but either way it's gone when you go to sleep. Your job is to improve a few key results. Take our your schedule of activities for the upcoming week. As you look at it, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you know what the most important result is that you are trying to improve for your organization?
• Are these the activities that will have the greatest positive impact on improving your most important result?
• Have you saved time on your calender for emergencies?
• Are you realistically going to get to the few activities that can make the biggest difference in improving your most important desired result?

I suggest you use an Outcome-Based Scheduling Approach. Here are the steps:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper. (Get used to this. Most of my advice starts with "take out a blank sheet of paper.")
2. Write down the single most important outcome you want to improve in your organization in the next three months.
3. Carefully select and write down the three activities that you can do that you believe will have the greatest positive impact on improving that outcome.
4. Take out your calendar and write in specifically when you will do each of these three activities. Lock those in place.
5. Add any other activities that need to be added, but never remove or overlap the three critical activities for improving the desired result.
6. Remove as many non-essential activities from your calendar as possible. Force yourself to give up some of your activities. Create lots of free space in your calendar. This will allow you to both deal with emergencies and still accomplish the three critically important activities you selected above.

The Job of a Manager

Managers don't make products and they don't deliver services.

Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone and the manager of a quick-service restaurant doesn't serve the food.

The job of a manager is to convert resources into results. Within his or her realm of influence are certain human, capital, and occasionally natural resouces. Ideally, the task is to combine those resources and guide them toward the achievement of remarkable results.

In the months to come my objective is to provide you with an on-going set of user-friendly insights, strategies, practical tips, and examples that you can use to generate a great management performance. I define a great management performance as achieving signficant and sustainable results in your organization's highest priority desired outcomes.

The job of a manager is absolutely necessary for any organization to succeed in today's complicated and constantly shifting scenarios. It is also necessary for the success of a country or society. Never underestimate the importance of being a manager. It is THE critical role in the success of any on-going enterprise.