How to be a better manager

Posted by Mitch McCrimmon May 31, 2007

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.