On the last blog, we discussed success and how it may be defined in the workplace. Your homework from that post was to list up the ways your work could be considered a failure even though these criteria are not listed on your goals and objectives. Obviously, death, injury, tornadoes and bankruptcy are true worst-case scenarios. For our purposes on the topic, however, worst-case simply means a situation with a potentially large negative impact to your career.
Faced with what many would consider a worst-case scenario, what can you do? In many cases, as you look through your list, the answer might be 'nothing'. Nobody can do everything perfectly. The modern business climate does not afford anyone the time or money to fix every gap or meet every need. We are all forced to prioritize. First we have to decide what must be done vs what should be done. Then we have to go through the list of what must be done to decide what needs attention on a given day.
Many of my worst-case scenarios were completely out of my control. I may have noticed something that I want to fix, like a training gap. If someone from headquarters does a thorough audit, they would find that my team is far behind in training. If I've noticed the problem but haven't been able to free people up to attend training, all I can offer is the lame, "I noticed this already, but haven't been able to send people." Which is just as weak an excuse as it sounds. What the other party hears is, "I know about this, but I don't care enough to take action."
As an individual, you are limited in your power. Particularly as a front-line supervisor, your options to respond directly to such critiques from headquarters are limited. If you are able to address an issue yourself, you should of course do it. If you are powerless to do it (say that you need to sway the opinion of an executive), you must find someone who is not powerless to do it.
Wait, what? In these cases, networking is key to success. If you do not know the executive well, you need to be friends with someone who is or who can effectively advocate for your cause. To a certain extent, this is playing office politics. In another way, it is a simple recognition of the human condition. How is that the case?
Executives (and everyone else with an axe to grind) are people. People have a limited amount of time and patience. If an executive sees a report and doesn't like something, he may ask a question. Maybe he's just curious. Maybe he thinks it's really a problem. In any case, the executive probably does not have time to hear your valid reasoning. We'll discuss why this is the case in a later post. So what you need is someone the executive knows and trusts who does have the time to discuss the issue with you and can take it to the executive and influence his opinion.
There are a few ways this can happen. Let's assume your contact is part of the executive's common circle of coworkers: they see each other on a regular basis, and have friendly relations. Your contact could ask the exec about the issue, and find out if it's curiosity or concern that prompted the question. She could vouch for you to the executive, something simple like, "I know Mike, and he has a good plan to address this." Or (and this is more difficult) she could follow a completely different line of questioning: "Why are you concerned about this?" Maybe the executive is not concerned about the training gap per se, but he sees it as an example of letting things fall through the cracks. Perhaps your contact would suggest a different report that shows all of the objectives that are being accomplished. Or perhaps the executive is right. Lastly, and most effectively, you can take the added attention as an opportunity to ask for help.
Yes, added executive attention is often a positive thing. In the training gap scenario, you may not have enough people to complete necessary business if you send some away to training. So you can ask for backfill while your people are out. Certainly you should have asked for it before, but remember, this is a worst-case scenario. When you receive unexpected negative/scrutinizing attention, make it into a positive whenever you can. Think yourself into a solutions-based mindset and come up with reasonable solutions that the executive could provide to help solve the problem.
We'll explore this topic some more in the coming weeks.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
December 16, 2014: How Can You Recognize Success?
Do you know success when you see it in others? Do you know it when you see it in yourself? Do you know when others see it in you?
These are all questions we have to answer. If we have to answer "no" to any of them, we owe it to ourselves and our coworkers to find out how.
In many organizations, the obvious measure of success is a person's review score. 4/5 might be a great review, 153 out of 200 might be a great review. Whatever your organization's system is, you should have a good idea of what constitutes a successful review score.
But take a moment: what things are going in in your office that are essential to perceived success but are not on your review? In one organization, the new management team led an effort to improve the company's performance to a level that previous management teams had said was impossible. They use that word: impossible. But the new team did it in about a year.
The company was more profitable than ever before, customers were happier than ever before, and the company suddenly had the opportunity to take market share from its rivals. Everything looks good, right? This is what success looks like. By every single measure on every person's company goals, the company was rocking. The executive team flew out from headquarters to congratulate the team for such an achievement, they distributed awards, they met with the customer to shake hands and tell each other how great each other was.
6 weeks later, this same team, the one that had achieved the impossible, was under threat for their jobs for something that was not on their performance reviews. No one would have guess it just a few months prior. The team was shocked. After all this work and success and recognition, how is it that perception could change so dramatically? The team's performance had not changed since all the good things had happened.
For reading today's blog, you have earned a homework assignment: take 5 minutes and write down all the the negative things that could happen in your workplace. Everything that might reflect your work in some way, no matter how remote. Is there a report that someone could interpret to mean something that isn't correct? Is there an individual that upper management has their eye on that maybe you should have taken corrective action with? Is there a gap in your team's training that you haven't addressed? What would a highly critical visitor from the home office think of your operation, and would such a visitor be able to tell the home office executive who sent her that all is well?
We'll spend the next few posts exploring these hypotheticals and what your options are surrounding them.
These are all questions we have to answer. If we have to answer "no" to any of them, we owe it to ourselves and our coworkers to find out how.
In many organizations, the obvious measure of success is a person's review score. 4/5 might be a great review, 153 out of 200 might be a great review. Whatever your organization's system is, you should have a good idea of what constitutes a successful review score.
But take a moment: what things are going in in your office that are essential to perceived success but are not on your review? In one organization, the new management team led an effort to improve the company's performance to a level that previous management teams had said was impossible. They use that word: impossible. But the new team did it in about a year.
The company was more profitable than ever before, customers were happier than ever before, and the company suddenly had the opportunity to take market share from its rivals. Everything looks good, right? This is what success looks like. By every single measure on every person's company goals, the company was rocking. The executive team flew out from headquarters to congratulate the team for such an achievement, they distributed awards, they met with the customer to shake hands and tell each other how great each other was.
6 weeks later, this same team, the one that had achieved the impossible, was under threat for their jobs for something that was not on their performance reviews. No one would have guess it just a few months prior. The team was shocked. After all this work and success and recognition, how is it that perception could change so dramatically? The team's performance had not changed since all the good things had happened.
For reading today's blog, you have earned a homework assignment: take 5 minutes and write down all the the negative things that could happen in your workplace. Everything that might reflect your work in some way, no matter how remote. Is there a report that someone could interpret to mean something that isn't correct? Is there an individual that upper management has their eye on that maybe you should have taken corrective action with? Is there a gap in your team's training that you haven't addressed? What would a highly critical visitor from the home office think of your operation, and would such a visitor be able to tell the home office executive who sent her that all is well?
We'll spend the next few posts exploring these hypotheticals and what your options are surrounding them.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Blog is on hiatus for a few days
A few days of extraordinary events prevents me from publishing for a few days. I'll be back by December 10.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
December 2, 2014: A performance review for a high performer with a significant flaw
Let's suppose an employee on your design team is a great designer. She is easy to get along with, works hard, and is very competent. She hates to do any paper work. Her expense reports are months late, her weekly project reports are late or don't come in, etc. You know the drill. Her goals and objectives are weighted heavily to her design work, and the entire admin side is about 15%. She has earned high ratings for everything except admin. Her poor admin, however, has drawn attention from your 2nd line manager, the VP for operations.
By the numbers, her review should be about 4.5 out of 5. You feel like she should get a 2.8 as a wake up call because of this one area of poor performance. But the numbers don't justify it. Referencing our analogy from yesterday, her fuel pump gave out. How do you write and deliver this review?
The first thing you do is do the review by the numbers. It's not right to change the goals to gerrymander the result to the number you want it to be. When you do it by the numbers, she ends up at 4.5 Given her total performance compared to her peers (who aren't as good at design work but do take care of their admin), the 4.5 does seem high. The review then needs a second pass. Is there a teamwork goal? You are part of the team, and her poor performance in this one area made your work more difficult. That one can come down a notch. Is there something on delivering projects in a timely fashion? If the admin can be considered part of the project, then this can also come down a notch. In the end, although you only have 1 specific goal for admin, admin work influences many other aspects of a person's performance.
In the end, she gets a 3.8 instead of the 4.5. This is still well above average. The review is very repetitive, referencing these same failings in instance after instance. You have plenty of positive feedback for her, but you need to make sure she understands how you perceive her total performance.
You meet for your one on one, and you can tell from her face that she's not pleased with the score. You ask why, and she asks, "What else could I have better? I thought I was really on top of it this period."
You start to go through the form (it's a long one), and you point out the places where admin brought her total score down. You tell her that you took the time to do the review without admin impact, and the result was a 4.5. "When you don't prioritize key business processes, it hurts you over all your goals. If you have done your admin well, I would have been happy to give you a 4.5." You complement her on the other aspects of her job. Thankfully, because she is a good performer, she can take the bad news.
It is clear from the feedback from your VP, however, that a 3.8 is not much of a punishment. She is still rated higher than all but 1 of her peers despite the headaches from the finance department with her expense reports. The work for this employee isn't changing for the next review period. The content of her goals shouldn't change. In this case, it is worth it to increase the weight for her admin for the next review period. You explain your plan to the VP, and it makes sense to him. He is concerned, but trusts you.
At the goal setting session, you explain the need for admin to increase as a percentage of total score, and your employee understands. She's not happy because admin is only 10% of her time, but now it's 30% of her review. She understands that the purpose is to focus on it so she'll do it.
You have other options, of course: disciplinary action, move to another department, change job duties, decrease the admin burden. But she is good in her current role as long as she fixes this little thing. There is no reason she can't or won't. You now have to follow up and help her be successful.
Just about every employee has an Achilles heel: poor emotional control, low work quality, tardiness, late work, making promises that he can't keep, etc. The review process allows both you and the employee to put these weaknesses under the bright lights, examine them, and take some action. If done properly, it will deepen the trust in your relationship and enable a partnership for improvement for both of you.
By the numbers, her review should be about 4.5 out of 5. You feel like she should get a 2.8 as a wake up call because of this one area of poor performance. But the numbers don't justify it. Referencing our analogy from yesterday, her fuel pump gave out. How do you write and deliver this review?
The first thing you do is do the review by the numbers. It's not right to change the goals to gerrymander the result to the number you want it to be. When you do it by the numbers, she ends up at 4.5 Given her total performance compared to her peers (who aren't as good at design work but do take care of their admin), the 4.5 does seem high. The review then needs a second pass. Is there a teamwork goal? You are part of the team, and her poor performance in this one area made your work more difficult. That one can come down a notch. Is there something on delivering projects in a timely fashion? If the admin can be considered part of the project, then this can also come down a notch. In the end, although you only have 1 specific goal for admin, admin work influences many other aspects of a person's performance.
In the end, she gets a 3.8 instead of the 4.5. This is still well above average. The review is very repetitive, referencing these same failings in instance after instance. You have plenty of positive feedback for her, but you need to make sure she understands how you perceive her total performance.
You meet for your one on one, and you can tell from her face that she's not pleased with the score. You ask why, and she asks, "What else could I have better? I thought I was really on top of it this period."
You start to go through the form (it's a long one), and you point out the places where admin brought her total score down. You tell her that you took the time to do the review without admin impact, and the result was a 4.5. "When you don't prioritize key business processes, it hurts you over all your goals. If you have done your admin well, I would have been happy to give you a 4.5." You complement her on the other aspects of her job. Thankfully, because she is a good performer, she can take the bad news.
It is clear from the feedback from your VP, however, that a 3.8 is not much of a punishment. She is still rated higher than all but 1 of her peers despite the headaches from the finance department with her expense reports. The work for this employee isn't changing for the next review period. The content of her goals shouldn't change. In this case, it is worth it to increase the weight for her admin for the next review period. You explain your plan to the VP, and it makes sense to him. He is concerned, but trusts you.
At the goal setting session, you explain the need for admin to increase as a percentage of total score, and your employee understands. She's not happy because admin is only 10% of her time, but now it's 30% of her review. She understands that the purpose is to focus on it so she'll do it.
You have other options, of course: disciplinary action, move to another department, change job duties, decrease the admin burden. But she is good in her current role as long as she fixes this little thing. There is no reason she can't or won't. You now have to follow up and help her be successful.
Just about every employee has an Achilles heel: poor emotional control, low work quality, tardiness, late work, making promises that he can't keep, etc. The review process allows both you and the employee to put these weaknesses under the bright lights, examine them, and take some action. If done properly, it will deepen the trust in your relationship and enable a partnership for improvement for both of you.
Monday, December 1, 2014
December 1, 2014: Ubiquitous Goals
I hope your Thanksgiving and the long weekend went well. It was nice to take a little break from the blog; at the same time (or 4 days later), it's nice to get back to it.
It is nearing the end of the year. For some companies, it's time for annual reviews. In honor of one of management's least loved essential functions, the next few days we'll discuss performance reviews.
In most large companies, the Board decides the direction of the company with input from the company's top executives. Those executives' goals might read: "increase stock price by 3% per quarter" or something similarly overarching. At the level of the VP, that 3% share price increase goal might mean a 6.5% market share increase for Widget Zebra. Below the VP, that market share increase goal might mean the manufacturing line has to find a 15% cost reduction so the sales team can decrease price without sacrificing margin. The 15% cost reduction goal, when taken to the operations level, might mean reduction in overtime. It might mean lowering product defect levels.
In the perfect world, every goal on your review can be rolled up the line to the people leading your organization. It's commonly called "goal cascading", because as the goal descends each layer of management, it is spread out a bit to show a level of detail that is actionable at that level.
We don't live in a perfect world.
The vast majority of management professionals are 1st line managers: the people who supervise the people who are making widgets, writing programs, giving medical care, serving coffee, selling cars, etc. Many of these peoples' goals will be things that simply don't change, no matter what the executives' goals are: employee safety, paperwork accuracy and timeliness, producing a certain amount of work, training, and a few smaller categories. One could argue that without these ubiquitous goals, the company would not be able to achieve its share price increase. Over the long term, that may be correct. In the larger scope, however, these are things that just have to happen for the business to run.
If we consider the business to be a car, these ubiquitous goals are like the fuel pump. If you want your car to go faster, you change the exhaust. You add a turbo charger. You increase engine displacement to increase horsepower. The fuel pump? You just leave that there. It doesn't need to be improved; it just has to work. without it, nothing else matters. An organization that cannot achieve success with these quotidian goals is unlikely to achieve a more specific (increase share price 3%) goal.
How much of your review (and those of your team) should be based on these fundamental goals? Views vary widely on this, and there is not a single correct answer. Let's look at a couple of them.
Safety is #1 at your company, right? So safety should be the most heavily weighted goal. No? Not where you work? I have been lucky to be exposed to an extremely safe work environment for a very long time. Safety goals ranged from 5-15% in weight, with the expectation that everyone would work safely and that an avoidable incident would weigh negatively but a perfectly clean safety record for the period would result in a "met target" rating. Similar for admin. Timesheets, regular reports, work logs, request for quotes, invoicing, all of these could fall in a single category. In my industry, these kinds of ubiquitous goals usually roll up to about 20%.
The other 80% will be composed of larger, customer-visible goals, internal team goals, and employee development goals. We'll discuss each of these as we consider goal setting.
How much is the appropriate weight for these ubiquitous goals in your team? It may be different if you are managing a call center vs a graphic design department vs a restaurant vs a warehouse vs an elementary school. Take a few minutes to write them out - all the things that a customer won't see or notice, and that won't get anybody a company award, but has to be done anyway, just as a matter of course. Also take a moment to think on what you are managing with these ubiquitous goals: you are managing the company owners' resources. How much of that focus should enter into this calculation?
It is nearing the end of the year. For some companies, it's time for annual reviews. In honor of one of management's least loved essential functions, the next few days we'll discuss performance reviews.
In most large companies, the Board decides the direction of the company with input from the company's top executives. Those executives' goals might read: "increase stock price by 3% per quarter" or something similarly overarching. At the level of the VP, that 3% share price increase goal might mean a 6.5% market share increase for Widget Zebra. Below the VP, that market share increase goal might mean the manufacturing line has to find a 15% cost reduction so the sales team can decrease price without sacrificing margin. The 15% cost reduction goal, when taken to the operations level, might mean reduction in overtime. It might mean lowering product defect levels.
In the perfect world, every goal on your review can be rolled up the line to the people leading your organization. It's commonly called "goal cascading", because as the goal descends each layer of management, it is spread out a bit to show a level of detail that is actionable at that level.
We don't live in a perfect world.
The vast majority of management professionals are 1st line managers: the people who supervise the people who are making widgets, writing programs, giving medical care, serving coffee, selling cars, etc. Many of these peoples' goals will be things that simply don't change, no matter what the executives' goals are: employee safety, paperwork accuracy and timeliness, producing a certain amount of work, training, and a few smaller categories. One could argue that without these ubiquitous goals, the company would not be able to achieve its share price increase. Over the long term, that may be correct. In the larger scope, however, these are things that just have to happen for the business to run.
If we consider the business to be a car, these ubiquitous goals are like the fuel pump. If you want your car to go faster, you change the exhaust. You add a turbo charger. You increase engine displacement to increase horsepower. The fuel pump? You just leave that there. It doesn't need to be improved; it just has to work. without it, nothing else matters. An organization that cannot achieve success with these quotidian goals is unlikely to achieve a more specific (increase share price 3%) goal.
How much of your review (and those of your team) should be based on these fundamental goals? Views vary widely on this, and there is not a single correct answer. Let's look at a couple of them.
Safety is #1 at your company, right? So safety should be the most heavily weighted goal. No? Not where you work? I have been lucky to be exposed to an extremely safe work environment for a very long time. Safety goals ranged from 5-15% in weight, with the expectation that everyone would work safely and that an avoidable incident would weigh negatively but a perfectly clean safety record for the period would result in a "met target" rating. Similar for admin. Timesheets, regular reports, work logs, request for quotes, invoicing, all of these could fall in a single category. In my industry, these kinds of ubiquitous goals usually roll up to about 20%.
The other 80% will be composed of larger, customer-visible goals, internal team goals, and employee development goals. We'll discuss each of these as we consider goal setting.
How much is the appropriate weight for these ubiquitous goals in your team? It may be different if you are managing a call center vs a graphic design department vs a restaurant vs a warehouse vs an elementary school. Take a few minutes to write them out - all the things that a customer won't see or notice, and that won't get anybody a company award, but has to be done anyway, just as a matter of course. Also take a moment to think on what you are managing with these ubiquitous goals: you are managing the company owners' resources. How much of that focus should enter into this calculation?
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
November 25, 2014: So you are a manager. What do you manage?
When a person becomes an engineer, she knows what she is engineering. She is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer. Many (possibly most) managers do not have a degree in management. So you're an architect who is a manager, or a graphic artist or teacher who is a manager. What do you manage? What does the word even mean?
To answer the question, we have to step back from the situation at hand and consider your workplace. Look around you. Is the computer on the desk yours? Do the people on your team work for you? Do their paychecks come from your bank account? What, in your immediate work environment, belongs to you? A quick inventory of mine shows a desk drawer full of fun size Snickers and some pictures of my family on the cubicle wall. That's all. And yet I'm a manager.
So who owns the things I'm managing? My company does. But can a company own itself? No. Every company is owned, in the end, by people. These people are called shareholders if the company is public, owners or investors if it is private. These people own the company, and by extension, "my" work computer, the employment of "my" team, "my" cubicle, "my" company car.
Now, what am I managing? I am managing the resources of the company's owners. My job, then, is to manage these resources (they could be paintbrushes or software experts or race cars or teddy bears) on behalf of the owners. Why do they entrust me with their money and resources? Because they believe I can provide a return on their investment because of my expertise. That's my value-add.
Managers (every single one of us) are not managing teams or projects or anything else that we touch every day. We are managing the company owners' resources. It is our responsibility to do our best to return value to them - that is what they pay us for, after all. A hedge fund manager is very close to this idea. Is the manager of your local TGI Friday's aware of it?
It is important to note that company owners don't always know what they want. Do they want to show growth quarter-over-quarter? Year-over-year? Are they in it for the long term? The answers to these questions will come through the executive management team and trickle down. I worked at a wholly-owned US subsidiary of a Japanese company that was part of a huge conglomerate. To trace ownership back to a person, I'd need to trace my management chain up 4 levels to the CEO, then to the board of directors of the Japanese company, then to the board of directors of the conglomerate, and then back to millions and millions of shareholders.
Somewhere along the line, the message came to the US subsidiary that we needed to make our revenue projections every fiscal half. My team was an integral part of recognizing revenue for my company: we did the last $100K worth of work that allowed the company to recognize $20M in revenue. So my job as a manager was to get my technical team the resources they needed to move their work forward so the company could recognize revenue on time and meet shareholder expectations.
This longer and wider view of the manager's role is vital to planning and successfully executing our jobs as managers. Should I send my lead person out for training if the training may not pay off for a year? Or should I manage for the short term, and keep him available for today's work? Even if I have approval to hire another person for my team, is that in the best interests of the company's shareholders? Or will it be a waste of their money? I have found that keeping these questions in mind helps me to avoid making decisions that will cause pain later. If I see a reduction in force coming, and someone transfers out of my team, I won't replace him even if I have authorization. I'll inform my boss of what I am doing and why, and then when the RIF comes, I will need to make 1 less very hard decision. In the mean time, I've saved the shareholders money. If it looks like we're going to be engaged with a certain customer for a long time, I'll invest a year of being very tight with manpower so I can send them to training and reap the benefits of that training long term.
So take a few minutes to write down the goals your company's owners want you to achieve. If you don't know, as your supervisor. If she doesn't know, ask someone else. Someone has to know, and the more people who do know, the better your company will operate.
To answer the question, we have to step back from the situation at hand and consider your workplace. Look around you. Is the computer on the desk yours? Do the people on your team work for you? Do their paychecks come from your bank account? What, in your immediate work environment, belongs to you? A quick inventory of mine shows a desk drawer full of fun size Snickers and some pictures of my family on the cubicle wall. That's all. And yet I'm a manager.
So who owns the things I'm managing? My company does. But can a company own itself? No. Every company is owned, in the end, by people. These people are called shareholders if the company is public, owners or investors if it is private. These people own the company, and by extension, "my" work computer, the employment of "my" team, "my" cubicle, "my" company car.
Now, what am I managing? I am managing the resources of the company's owners. My job, then, is to manage these resources (they could be paintbrushes or software experts or race cars or teddy bears) on behalf of the owners. Why do they entrust me with their money and resources? Because they believe I can provide a return on their investment because of my expertise. That's my value-add.
Managers (every single one of us) are not managing teams or projects or anything else that we touch every day. We are managing the company owners' resources. It is our responsibility to do our best to return value to them - that is what they pay us for, after all. A hedge fund manager is very close to this idea. Is the manager of your local TGI Friday's aware of it?
It is important to note that company owners don't always know what they want. Do they want to show growth quarter-over-quarter? Year-over-year? Are they in it for the long term? The answers to these questions will come through the executive management team and trickle down. I worked at a wholly-owned US subsidiary of a Japanese company that was part of a huge conglomerate. To trace ownership back to a person, I'd need to trace my management chain up 4 levels to the CEO, then to the board of directors of the Japanese company, then to the board of directors of the conglomerate, and then back to millions and millions of shareholders.
Somewhere along the line, the message came to the US subsidiary that we needed to make our revenue projections every fiscal half. My team was an integral part of recognizing revenue for my company: we did the last $100K worth of work that allowed the company to recognize $20M in revenue. So my job as a manager was to get my technical team the resources they needed to move their work forward so the company could recognize revenue on time and meet shareholder expectations.
This longer and wider view of the manager's role is vital to planning and successfully executing our jobs as managers. Should I send my lead person out for training if the training may not pay off for a year? Or should I manage for the short term, and keep him available for today's work? Even if I have approval to hire another person for my team, is that in the best interests of the company's shareholders? Or will it be a waste of their money? I have found that keeping these questions in mind helps me to avoid making decisions that will cause pain later. If I see a reduction in force coming, and someone transfers out of my team, I won't replace him even if I have authorization. I'll inform my boss of what I am doing and why, and then when the RIF comes, I will need to make 1 less very hard decision. In the mean time, I've saved the shareholders money. If it looks like we're going to be engaged with a certain customer for a long time, I'll invest a year of being very tight with manpower so I can send them to training and reap the benefits of that training long term.
So take a few minutes to write down the goals your company's owners want you to achieve. If you don't know, as your supervisor. If she doesn't know, ask someone else. Someone has to know, and the more people who do know, the better your company will operate.
Monday, November 24, 2014
November 24, 2014: Slow Week at the Office?
You have arrived at the office, the Monday of Thanksgiving week. You have a lot to do, I know. You always do. But it seems like every stakeholder, every decision maker is gone this whole week, and normally smooth business processes, you know, will stall until next week.
So you have time at the half-empty office to fill. What to fill it with?
First, you know that anything you do can't rely on anyone else to complete the task. No approvals, no help with an IT system (although that department is most likely to have good coverage), nothing that will directly impact anyone outside your team. What can you do that will positively impact your team, both up and down the management chain? Here are some suggestions.
1) Build a tool to increase your knowledge and understanding of the business. You get reports on your unit's performance through SAP or Crystal Reports or some other form of business intelligence. But they don't tell you exactly what you want to know. So build a tool that gets you the information you need. I have seen managers build tools that model how busy each type of equipment is in a factory so they could forecast future periodic maintenance activity, or a financial tool that let him modify the number of people in his contract to maximize profitability without killing functionality, or a tool that tracks performance reviews for the team along with their raises to assess if he was really doing a good job at "paying for performance" like he was supposed to. These are something you might show your boss at some point, but they key thing here is that they will help you to understand your operation better, and that will improve your performance.
2) Do some analysis to share with your team about their performance. Perhaps you will do an COGS analysis and break it out by category, do a little drilling to see what potential savings are there. You could share your analysis with your team to see what ideas they have about improving that metric. Or perhaps your company is in a tough competitive market, and you can do some research on the competition. Again, you can share this with your team at a later date and solicit their input on how they can impact your company's performance.
3) Learn something! Always wanted to know how those Excel nerds write VBA? You can, too! It's not that hard, and Microsoft has free lessons online. You local library or your college library almost certainly has access to business articles and research journals. Do some reading on a topic that you are curious about.
4) Get ahead on an upcoming project. Performance reviews due by the end of the year? A budget due Dec 12? Annual strategic plan due by Jan 15? Get started now. Even an outline is something. If you take some solid first steps now and need to step away for a week, you will likely be surprised at how quickly it falls together when you come back to it. The subconscious will work on this kind of stuff in the background; the results can be amazing.
5) Spend 1:1 time with the members of your team that are available this week. They are probably having a slow week as well. Do some coaching, get to know them better, see how you can help them and then follow up.
You already have a list 100 miles long of things that need to be done yesterday. We all do. A week like this one can let you get a little bit ahead. Don't miss the opportunity.
So you have time at the half-empty office to fill. What to fill it with?
First, you know that anything you do can't rely on anyone else to complete the task. No approvals, no help with an IT system (although that department is most likely to have good coverage), nothing that will directly impact anyone outside your team. What can you do that will positively impact your team, both up and down the management chain? Here are some suggestions.
1) Build a tool to increase your knowledge and understanding of the business. You get reports on your unit's performance through SAP or Crystal Reports or some other form of business intelligence. But they don't tell you exactly what you want to know. So build a tool that gets you the information you need. I have seen managers build tools that model how busy each type of equipment is in a factory so they could forecast future periodic maintenance activity, or a financial tool that let him modify the number of people in his contract to maximize profitability without killing functionality, or a tool that tracks performance reviews for the team along with their raises to assess if he was really doing a good job at "paying for performance" like he was supposed to. These are something you might show your boss at some point, but they key thing here is that they will help you to understand your operation better, and that will improve your performance.
2) Do some analysis to share with your team about their performance. Perhaps you will do an COGS analysis and break it out by category, do a little drilling to see what potential savings are there. You could share your analysis with your team to see what ideas they have about improving that metric. Or perhaps your company is in a tough competitive market, and you can do some research on the competition. Again, you can share this with your team at a later date and solicit their input on how they can impact your company's performance.
3) Learn something! Always wanted to know how those Excel nerds write VBA? You can, too! It's not that hard, and Microsoft has free lessons online. You local library or your college library almost certainly has access to business articles and research journals. Do some reading on a topic that you are curious about.
4) Get ahead on an upcoming project. Performance reviews due by the end of the year? A budget due Dec 12? Annual strategic plan due by Jan 15? Get started now. Even an outline is something. If you take some solid first steps now and need to step away for a week, you will likely be surprised at how quickly it falls together when you come back to it. The subconscious will work on this kind of stuff in the background; the results can be amazing.
5) Spend 1:1 time with the members of your team that are available this week. They are probably having a slow week as well. Do some coaching, get to know them better, see how you can help them and then follow up.
You already have a list 100 miles long of things that need to be done yesterday. We all do. A week like this one can let you get a little bit ahead. Don't miss the opportunity.
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