Mitch McCrimmon's Blog

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

The key to being effective as a manager is to achieve your targets as efficiently as possible. The first step is to set clear goals. Then you have to allocate all the resources necessary to achieve your goals. Of course, you need to set the right targets in the first place. Efficiency alone won’t make you effective if you achieve targets that are of no interest or value to anyone. But, let’s assume that you have set desirable targets. In this case, the objective is to maximize efficiency and this means making sure that you have the best price you can get for all the material you need to use, you get your budget right and you make the best use of the people required to do the job.

You can’t really be an effective manager unless you are reasonably well organized. If you are not, you might get the results you want but not make best use of all your resources. You might waste too much material, break your budget or not get the best performance out of the people working on your project.

Organizing complex projects so as to manage them well requires sophisticated information technology. You need to know what factors have the greatest impact on performance and how to measure them.

To manage people effectively, you need to get the balance right between performance measurement and empowerment. This means trusting people to do the right things independently and allowing them some freedom to measure their own performance.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

You may think that you could never be a leader. Maybe you need a conception of leadership that makes sense of how you could show leadership and, more importantly, encourage you to do so.

Suppose you lack either the confidence, the skills or the interest to be formally in charge of a group of people. Perhaps you feel it would be too much pressure to have other people looking to you for direction and to settle disputes. You might feel you could do this with some people, but maybe you are in a team where there are such strong personalities that you would be nervous if you were asked to be their leader, formally or informally.

To be an informal leader in any group, according to conventional wisdom, you would have to be at least subconsciously regarded as the main person to go to for direction, support and advice in your group on an ongoing basis. However, another conception of leadership says that it has nothing to do with being such a person in an ongoing role, whether formal or informal. This view of leadership says that any time you successfully convince your colleagues to behave differently, you have shown leadership. Here, leadership is seen as an occasional act, one that is successful in promoting a new direction. On this view, you don’t need the skills or interest to manage a group on an ongoing basis. You can simply display an act of leadership when the inspiration strikes you, when you see a better way of doing something and you succeed in convincing others to follow suit.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

The first step in becoming a better communicator is to start being a better listener. Think of targeted marketing. A scatter gun advertising strategy is not as good as one that is targeted to a particular audience.

Listening is the key to identifying your target when you want to get just the right message across to a particular person or group. This is not a matter of passive listening, but of actively probing to get to the core of that the other person feels, wants and would like to see happen.

Just dumping your ideas on people is like throwing darts in the dark. Sure, you might hit the odd target, but in the meantime you come across as insensitive. If you finally hit the target, your audience has been so put off by your monologue that they have stopped listening, not just out of boredom but resentment that you aren’t bothering to listen to them, that you don’t think their views or feelings are worth listening to. So, you try harder, think of other angles or raise your voice. This only makes it worse. The key to effective communication is knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them. First you have to avoid sounding like a police interrogator. Then you have to ask what people think and feel, not just ask for information. Finally, it is essential to find something in what they say to agree with before you express any disagreement.

Now, when you deliver your message, you are in a position to highlight features that are genuinely of interest to your audience. And, they will listen because you have shown respect for their views and needs.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

If management is akin to investment, how can you get a better return on your efforts as a manager? The first step is to determine your most important customers. This should include your immediate boss and a few other key internal stakeholders. If you were an external supplier to these customers, you would look for regular opportunities to find out their current needs and priorities. If you think like a conventional employee, you might feel you’ve had a good week if you didn’t see your boss at all. This is not a customer focused attitude and it could reduce your chance of success.

Your objective as a manager is to get the best return possible out of all your own efforts and those of everyone reporting to you. This means deciding how to invest your resources where they can add most value. But to determine what is most important, you need to know what your customers most value. Managers who aren’t proactive to ascertain their boss’s needs regularly, decide for themselves how to allocate their time and people, but this is a manufacturing mindset because you are deciding for your customers what they should want.

Organizational complexity demands extra effort to generate alignment if full efficiency is to be achieved. Effective management follows the 80-20 rule, meaning that you should allocate 80 percent of your efforts and those of people reporting to you to the top 20 percent of your customer’s priorities. It’s not a matter of asking your internal customers how to do your job but of convincing them that you can better serve their needs if you get updates and feedback from them regularly. Nor is it about slavishly just doing what they ask but rather working with them as a partner to determine what allocation of your resources will yield the best return for the organization and its customers.

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon

As I said in my Suite 101 article on playing to your strengths, we all have a tendency to overlook our strengths. This is because the things we are good at we find easy to do. But, for this reason, we discount them by saying it’s just our job or surely anyone can do that! Perversely, we are much more aware of our weaknesses. We have a bad habit of comparing ourselves to people who can do thing we can’t do rather than to those who aren’t as good at things as us. This is a recipe for low self esteem and poor confidence.

We really need ongoing, regular feedback on both our strengths and weaknesses. Like a business, we should periodically survey our key internal customers to see how we are doing. The problem is that, because our distorted self perception undermines our confidence we tend to be very defensive about our weaknesses. As a result, whenever we get negative feedback, instead of learning from it we make excuses. We blame circumstances or other people for our own failings.

There are lots of situations where it is very easy to say that we didn’t get our work done on time because someone else didn’t give us the input we needed from them in time. Regardless of how true this explanation may be, we can always ask ourselves the challenging question: “What could I have done differently to move this along faster?”

If we never ask ourselves what we could do differently, then we are disempowering ourselves and stifling our own development. If we really want to learn how to surmount the endless obstacles thrown in our path, then we have to ask ourselves this difficult question repeatedly.