Posted on May 5, 2021May 4, 2021 by Mike Clayton

Delegation: Double your Capacity

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

Management is not about doing things: it is about getting things done. So a large part of your responsibility is allocating work among your team and developing people to take on more demanding challenges. Delegation – getting other people to do aspects of your work – is a part both of effective working and of developing people.

Whilst there are lots of poor reasons for delegating – like off-loading unpleasant tasks, or abdicating responsibility – there are many positive benefits to you, to your team, and to your organisation.

Exercise 1: The Reasons to Delegate?

Make a list of all of the good reasons to delegate. To help you, consider the question from three perspectives:

How can you benefit?
How can your team members benefit?
How can your organisation benefit?

Failure to delegate

The problem is that many managers constantly find excuses for not delegating; even when they know they ought to for many of the reasons you have probably identified. What are yours?

Exercise 2: Excuses for Not Delegating

Here are some excuses I commonly encounter. For each of these, how would you counter the excuse?

“I’d be better off doing it myself”
“I don’t want to overload my staff”
“I don’t have the time to delegate”
“I know exactly how I want it done”
“If I ask him/her to do it, he/she will be nagging me every five minutes”

How to Delegate

Some people use these excuses simply because they don’t feel comfortable with the process of delegation. Indeed, many guides either make it seem like a big deal, or they miss out an important aspect of the process, leaving people wondering why it fails. So let’s look at the basic delegation process.

Step 1. Matching

Understand the task, its level of importance and urgency, and the risks associated with it. Then consider the people available to you, and their abilities, strengths, preferences, and their existing commitments. Also think about their development routes. Now match the task to the most suitable person.

Step 2. Briefing

Brief effectively. Taking time to do this properly is an investment that will result in fewer interruptions, a greater chance of innovation and excellence, and a reduced chance of mistakes and failures.

Step 3. Commitment

After you have briefed and answered any questions, ask if they:

Understand the task required
Can carry out the task required – do they have the ability and availability?
Believe the resources and time allocated are sufficient for the task required

Then ask for their commitment to do the task required. In return, offer your commitment to support and monitor the process.

Step 4. Monitoring

An important part of risk management and of developing the person you have delegated to is to monitor their performance. Monitor more or less frequently, depending on your level of confidence and certainty, and the level of risk. Remember: when you delegate a task, you retain responsibility for it.

Step 5. Feedback

When the job is done, offer objective feedback on performance and listen to what they have to say about their experience and any concerns. Recognise the work done and contribution made, reward it with thanks and praise, and highlight what the person can learn from their experience.

Further Reading

- The Delegation Pocketbook
- The Feedback Pocketbook

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Posted on April 8, 2021April 7, 2021 by Mike Clayton

Transactional Analysis for Managers

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

Have you ever had a conversation where the other person left you feeling a bit like a small child?

Or maybe you have felt like kicking yourself at the end of a meeting because you spent the whole time criticising someone.

Have you found yourself being over protective of a colleague, or perhaps you have seen someone stamp their feet and rebel against a perfectly reasonable request?

What all of these situations have in common is that you can easily understand them, spot them coming, and take control of them, when you understand a simple model of communication, called Transactional Analysis, or TA.

Eric Berne developed TA and suggested we can think of all of our communication as coming from one of three ‘ego states’. When we speak, we speak as a parent does, as an adult does, or as a child does. We all encompass all three, but address others from one state at a time, depending on the relationship, how we feel, and how the other person is acting.

Parent Ego State

Parents are both worldly and experienced, and therefore speak critically of anything that does not match their learned view of the world, or they are caring and try to nurture and protect us.

Child Ego State

Children can both do what they want and rebel against any kind of authority and they can conform; adapting themselves to the wishes of those around them. Their responses are primarily driven by the emotions they are feeling.

Adult Ego State

Adults behave rationally, looking for the best outcome and trying to find the most effective way to achieve it. They think things out, rather than repeating past lessons or acting purely on emotion.

Transactions

In the workplace, Adult-Adult transactions are nearly always the ideal: both of you are speaking respectfully, looking for the best result. However, if you find yourself annoyed by something I have done, it is easy to find yourself slipping into Critical Parent ego state and addressing my Child state. If I respond accordingly – either by arguing petulantly (Free Child) or by being too obsequious and over-apologetic (Adapted Child) then we will get stuck for a time in that Parent-Child structure.

Likewise, if you feel guilty about asking me to do something so instead of asking assertively, you plead with me (Adapted Child), I will respond from Parent state, by either telling you off or reluctantly agreeing (Critical Parent) or by condescending to act in a patronising manner (Nurturing Parent) thereby taking control of the situation.

Parent-Child transactions work well in communicating, even if what they communicate is rarely healthy for a mature workplace relationship. Consequently, they can persist and become ingrained patterns that repeat over and over again, reinforcing inappropriate power balances.

Other transactions are possible too, such as:

Parent-Parent – let’s moan about her
Child-Child – let’s play a trick on him

But not all transactions are universally unhealthy:

Parent-Parent – let’s gossip about yesterday’s football – a healthy way of passing time in the appropriate context
Child-Child – let’s come up with some new ideas – the Child state is the state from which we become creative.

There is a whole lot more to TA than Parent, Adult and Child states and a whole lot more to Ego States than we have covered here. It is a rich and rewarding source of understanding for any manager.

Further Reading

Management Models Pocketbook

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Posted on January 12, 2021January 11, 2021 by Mike Clayton

Starting in Management

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

Beginning a career in management can throw the best of us. You are probably excellent at the job you have just finished and, whilst you will still need some of your technical skills, they will play a far lesser role in determining your success. You will naturally feel a draw towards the security and comfort of burying yourself in the technical aspects of your role, but almost certainly, this will be a mistake. Your role is management and managing should now occupy the bulk of your time.

So, what are some of the things you will need to focus on now?

supporting and motivating your staff
setting expectations and assessing performance
giving recognition for achievement and corrections for errors
planning and preparing at increasingly strategic levels
maintaining an environment where your team can succeed
securing the resources your team needs – including new members
training and developing team members
reporting on progress and on setbacks
negotiating for opportunities, resources and funding
financial and personnel management

Exercise: Understand your Management Responsibilities

Using this checklist, speak with your boss and with your new peers to get a clear idea of what your roles are and also how you are likely to need to split your time among them. Understand:

which are most important to your and your team’s success?
which are most time-consuming?
where are the pitfalls?
what are the annual cycles and how will the balance of priorities shift through the year?

What First?

As a manager, your role will be to manage resources: usually people, but sometimes materials or assets.

Step 1: Your first priority is to understand those resources: meet the people, inventory the stock and survey the assets. As you do, make notes to help you remember what is important.

Step 2: When you have finished, write yourself a readiness memo, titled: ‘An analysis of the resources at my disposal and their fitness for the task at hand’. You may want to conduct a SWOT analysis to help you with this.

Step 3: Next, use this as the basis for drawing up a two to three month plan of action. At best, it will focus on stabilisation and incremental improvement. At worst, it may need to be a turnaround plan.

Step 4: When you have done this, file your memo securely, where nobody else can access it or, better still, destroy it. It will likely contain frank opinions about the people on your team that you will not want to become public.

Further Reading

- The Starting in Management Pocketbook
- The Manager’s Pocketbook

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Posted on December 15, 2020December 14, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Being Organised

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

No matter how good you are at your job, you will never be as good as you can be until you organise your work effectively. This means making time for things like filing and time management. Here are ten top tips:

Keep a To Do list, but never let it be your primary time management tool. At the end of each day, look at the things on your to do list and decide which ones will be on tomorrow’s To Day list. Put any things that are substantial in terms of complexity, duration or importance into your diary.
Follow President Eisenhower’s advice and always distinguish what is important from what is merely urgent.
Keep a day-book – a notebook that lives on your desk and in which you record any conversations in person or over the phone. As soon as the phone rings, or as soon as you decide to make a call, open your day book, write the date and note the person that you are speaking with and their affiliation. You are now ready to record any comments or agreements.
Use a multi-part folder to plan your work a week ahead.
Periodically make time to clear the clutter and do your filing. Better still, embrace the principles of the 5S Methodology:
– Sorting – only what you need
– Set in order – a place for everything
– Shine-up – tidy and clean
– Standardise – uniformity
– Sustain – make tidying up a routine
File papers in themed folders. If your filing system isn’t working for you; start a new one. But don’t waste time transferring all your old papers into the new system. Instead, just transfer any papers you access in your day-to-day work. Very soon, your old system will become an archive of the materials you don’t need.
If you need to make a lot of calls, keep a call sheet, on which you record the person and purpose (and number if it isn’t in your organiser. Fill gaps in your day with a call – or take the sheet with you when you travel.
You probably keep a to do list. Do you keep a list of things you have done? Specifically, things you did that should result in something happening: a book you ordered should turn up, a message you left should be returned, a request you made should be fulfilled. Keep a ‘waiting for…’ list so that you never drop the ball by forgetting something.
Do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is not as effective nor as efficient as focus.
Redundancy: if it’s important, have a back-up plan. Have spares, have alternatives. Stash a bit of spare cash in every bag you have – and spare pens. Leave early and plan to have a coffee before a meeting. Take reading or work wherever you go.

Further Reading

- The Time Management Pocketbook
- The Personal Success Pocketbook

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Posted on November 24, 2020November 23, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Decision Making

Pocketblog has gone back to basics This is part of an extended course in management.

In understanding decision-making, there are three key things to focus on:

Using a structured process
The role of intuition, gut instinct and hunches
The effects of bias and automatic thinking

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Structured Decision Making Process

… like the example below.

One of the most important choices in your decision process will be whether to go for an adversarial process of setting the options against one another – perhaps even having advocates for each, competing with one another to win the decision – or to go for a process of inquiry, learning as much as you can before assessing the options.

Intuition

Although Malcolm Gladwell received a lot of attention for his book Blink, his work leans heavily on the research by Gary Klein and his books, The Power of Intuition and the more technical Sources of Power are first rate. Klein shows how, in domains that are very complex and in which you have extensive experience, your intuition can quickly get you to the right understanding, well ahead of your ability to explain why or how you reached the conclusion you did. But, if you don’t have sufficient experience, then your hunches are likely to be wrong, due to the existence of…

Bias and Automatic Thinking

Two psychologists, Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, were responsible for overthrowing the crude assumption that economics is based on rational decisions. In fact, they showed that many decisions are a result of automatic thinking and biases. The automatic thinking is a short cut that works well in the domains in which humans evolved, but leads frequently to wrong answers in a modern world context. An example is the ‘horns and halo effect’ and another is our bias towards noticing examples that confirm what we believe to be true, whilst being blind to counter examples. Daniel Kahnemann wrote the wonderful ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ to summarise a life’s research and it is, without a doubt, one of the most important and stimulating reads of the last few years.

Further Reading

- The Decision-making Pocketbook
- The Thinker’s Pocketbook

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Posted on November 3, 2020November 3, 2020 by Mike Clayton

John Adair’s Four-D System

Pocketblog is going back to basics. This is part of an extended course in management skills.

Time management is a vital part of your personal effectiveness. As a manager, you will face greater time challenges than you did as a team member; but you will also have additional resources and greater flexibility in how you use your time.

One of the simplest and most powerful time management approaches is John Adair’s Four-D System. This is documented in his (now out of print) Handbook of Management and Leadership.

Adair starts with a standard Eisenhower Matrix putting urgency against importance.

Adair then identifies starting time management strategy for each class of activities:

Do it now
Delay it until you have some good quality time
Do it quickly
Drop it or Delegate it

Critique

As always, John has identified a powerful model with real practical application. Yet I can’t help feeling we must modify it a little. Here are three ways you can make it even more effective still:

Priorities

Although the urgency suggests that box 1 is top priority, this creates a high stress, low sustainability work style. Prioritise box 2 and you will find yourself planning and preparing ahead of urgency and so find less work falls into box 1.

Drop or delegate… Really?

If it is not worth your time to do it, why is it worth someone else’s time? Yes it may be important enough for someone else to do it, but don’t just Dump it on someone to avoid an assertive NO. Indeed, get in the habit of delegating Box 1, 2, and 3 tasks too, to develop the people who work for you.

More Ds…

We’ve already added Dump, but I don’t propose to honour it with emphasis. But Diminish is a powerful strategy. Look at the task and ask: ‘do I need to do all of it?’ If you can reduce the work required and still deliver all or most of the value, you will save valuable time. And there is another D: Decide. You need to decide which strategy to adopt. Unless, that is, you Defer your decision. If you do that as an example of purposive procrastination* it is a sound approach.

Exercise

Make an Eisenhower grid on a whiteboard or on the four panels of a door, or in your notebook. Use post-it type notes to jot down all the tasks facing you (big for the whiteboard/door or small for your notebook). Allocate the notes to one of the four quadrants. If everything is at the top left, re-calibrate your mental scales for importance and urgency.

Further Reading

*Purposive Procrastination: putting something off because there will be a better time to tackle it.

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Posted on October 28, 2020October 28, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Type A and Type B

Pocketblog is going back to basics. This is part of an extended course in management skills.

Are you a ‘rush-rush-got-to-get-things-done’ sort of a manager, or are you a ‘take my time; want to get things right’ type? Or are you nicely balanced. Doctors Mike Friedman and Ray Rosenman identified these two styles as, respectively, Type A and Type B personalities. When I tell you they were cardiac specialists, you might start to worry. There is no need. Take the test and then I’ll explain.

Exercise

For each of these nine statements, score yourself 0 to 10 according to how close you lie to the first statement (a low score) or to the second statement (a high score).

Casual and relaxed 0 … 10 Often feel on edge

Slow and deliberate 0 … 10 Always rushing

Dislike deadlines 0 … 10 Love working to deadlines

Patient 0 … 10 Impatient

Express your feelings 0 … 10 Suppress your feelings

One thing at a time 0 … 10 Lots of things at once

Ready in advance 0 … 10 Just in time

Plan and prepare 0 … 10 Just do it

Enjoy relaxing 0 … 10 Feel guilty when relaxing

Interpretation

Friedman and Rosenman predicted that strong Type A personalities would be prone to heart disease and die young. They were wrong. Many of their patients did have a cluster of personality traits that they characterised as Type A, but only a few of them were truly predictive of illness – and not the ones relating to rushing about.

However, both Type A and Type B personalities each have their own challenges in operating in an organisation. Let’s look at some.

Dealing with other People

Inevitably, we deal best with people who are like us. We find them easy to understand and their habits agreeable. Type As readily get impatient with Type Bs. They want the B to hurry up and despair that the B has no sense of urgency about things. Type Bs find Type As’ hurry annoying; they would rather the A would slow down and do things properly and are concerned about quality standards.

Dealing with Admin

Type Bs will take on the organising and admin tasks as another thing to do carefully and well. Type As – unless they really value it – will rush through it, wanting to move quickly onto ‘proper work’. They will then get angry when they can’t find what they need or get what they want.

Dealing with Interruptions

Type Bs may not welcome an interruption – especially when they are engrossed in something – but when they accept it has happened, they will turn their whole attention to you. This is great for the interrupter and can lead to positive outcomes. But when the interrupter has a non-critical issue, Type Bs can lose valuable time on the work they were doing. Not so Type A’s. The interruption may be unwelcome or a welcome distraction when they are starting to feel bored, but the Type A will soon be tapping their foot, keen to get on.

Managing Time

Type A personalities get masses done; often just in time and at breakneck pace. Quality can suffer, especially when they try to multi-task, but it is Type As who are at the heart of the (perfectly true) cliché: ‘if you want it done; ask a busy person.’ Type Bs focus on one thing at a time and do it well. They plan well and execute effectively, as long as they don’t get held up by an interruption or by finding a problem and working deliberately to solve it.

Exercise: Balance is Everything

The most successful people inevitably balance both personality types. Look at your weak points and note them down. What strategies can you use to neutralise them?

Further Reading

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Posted on September 15, 2020August 26, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Sunk Cost and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

‘You’ve bought it now. The money’s gone.’ That snarky comment made by thousands of parents (mine included) to their reckless child encapsulates the meaning of sunk cost. Once you met the cost, it’s gone: sunk. You’ve sunk it into the investment for good or for ill.

This, then, could be the shortest Big Ideas article yet. Sunk Cost is a familiar and easy concept.

Continue reading Sunk Cost and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

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Posted on September 8, 2020August 26, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

You’re an Entrepreneur. Or you’re a Product Manager charged with launching a new product. But how can you know if your new product or service idea is a good one? How can you minimise the risk of an expensive flop? The answer is to build a Minimum Viable Product – an MVP.

Like some of the best of our Big Ideas, a Minimum Viable Product is exactly what its name suggests. It is the minimum product you could create that is viable in terms of serving its primary purpose. So, let’s put some detail on that minimum viable explanation.

Continue reading Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

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Posted on September 1, 2020August 26, 2020 by Mike Clayton

Technology Quotient (TQ): Measuring Digital Savvy

It is a cliché to assert that technology is ubiquitous in the workplace. Yesterday’s innovations will eventually become today’s commonplace tools. So, we all live with and easily manage technology our great grandparents would have found strange and maybe alarming. But some of us are comfortable with the very latest creations – those that will only be deeply familiar to the coming generations. And we might describe these people as having a high TQ: a high Technology Quotient.

The Big Idea, ‘Technology Quotient’ takes its inspiration from IQ, Intelligence Quotient. But what does it measure and is it a useful concept?

Continue reading Technology Quotient (TQ): Measuring Digital Savvy

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