Is your Staff Weak? Sharpen your Management Practice.

The Complaint

Sure enough, I see the pattern repeatedly.  A very bright executive is having trouble with his management team to produce to his or her expectation.  A common complaint is “I told them three different times I wanted this… “ and the management team doesn’t deliver.  The executive speaks about how their team is weak and how he or she doesn’t understand why people seem to be “making things up” about what they said.

Orientation and Promise

One of the things I generally notice is that many business executives and managers appear to be disconnected from the energy required to produce action that delivers results in a reliable, sustainable, and effective fashion.  It was Peter Drucker, early management science pioneer, who said, “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.”  This discussion is about helping you get more productivity from your people.

When I work with others in a leadership role, it has been my personal experience, my followers will commit to the extent they see me commit.  This means if I act accountable, then they generally will as well. If I make better assessments about what it will take to get something done, my staff will generally accept my requests with a mood of willingness and enthusiasm.  If I remember what “already existing” commitments they need to take care of, and I stay sensitive to them, they will appreciate the practical reality they face working to deliver on their promises to me.  This will produce loyalty.

Through a set of management practices, I offer that you can develop a skill that will produce better leadership and thus better results in your business endeavors.  The promise, if you commit to the practice, is to lower your management costs, increase your profits, develop more time for both you and your team, and produce long-term staff loyalty.

Applicability

The practice I am offering works best under the following conditions:

1. Your staff will be with you over a long-time horizon.  Hence for short-lived projects, this practice will not work as people will not have enough time to learn it.
2. You have more than one person on your staff.  The practice demonstrates its value best when there are three or more direct reports.
3. Your staff each holds a different role from their peers and they need to coordinate with each other to produce results.
4. You have developed sufficient autonomy to control your calendar so that you can make recurrent commitments for conversation.

This article will be delivered in two parts:

1. The Direct Report Practice (this article)
2. The Cross Department Practice (future article now available here)

The Practice Elements

The practice begins with a common Manager / Direct Report hierarchy.  See the image below for the model’s structure and lines of communications:

The elements are as follows:

1. Manager: this is you holding your role as a leader.  Your orientation is that you need others to help you get things complete.
2. Direct Report: this is your staff where you have authority to produce consequences if they do not keep their promises.  The practice we will discuss will produce accountability.
3. Report: this is a document structure that a direct report produces to record their promises, concerns, and requests and is delivered to you recurrently.
4. Cross Department: this is another document structure that is used where direct reports record requests between each other.

With these basic elements and model, we can discuss the practice.

The Direct Report Practice

The practice begins with you being clear what you want to produce and the role each member plays as your staff.  This is easier said than done.  This article does not address the concern that you are not sure what you need to get done; it is perfectly reasonable that you may not be sure what is the most relevant and meaningful action to take to produce your objective; this practice does not help.  However, this practice will help you steer in any direction you decide to take.

It is important to ensure that your staff is clear what their role is in producing what you want.  At the simplest level, you are a customer and they are a producer and hence they exist to serve you.  It is quite important that your staff, acting as a producer, possess the skill to understand your requests and they have the capacity and knowledge to fulfill on promises to deliver.  A feature of strong leadership is to make sure structures are in place to work with people who can hold organizational roles that you invented.

Weekly Meeting

At a regular frequency, you will meet (face-to-face or, if remote, through a desktop share program such as GoToMeeting) with your staff to have a conversation.  At the meeting, your staff will bring their documented report (discussed more fully in the following section) to you.

The meeting should have the following characteristics to be effective:

• Face-to-Face / One-on-One Direct Communication
• Safe Environment with only You and the Direct Report meeting
• Recurrently Minimum Weekly Frequency
• One Hour Duration (typically)
• Report Maintained by the Direct Report
• Organized By Key Responsibility Categories
• Organized By Key Customers / or Channel
• Organized by Operation and / or Project or Initiative

It is important that you perform this recurrently.  The better you do this, the more effective your staff will become.  In general, it means this:

• Meet at the same day and time and be on time.  Demonstrate you care.
• Turn off your phone and get away from your computer
• Be in a quiet place so you can listen
• Emphasize precision and rigor
• Do not use this time to solve complex problems; that happens at a different time.  If you need more time, offer to schedule a separate meeting to solve specific problems.
• Only make new requests of your staff after you have heard their report so you can tailor them to fit their current progress and concerns

To help clarify, each report element will be described in greater detail below:

Weekly Report General Structure

The weekly report, authored and maintained by your direct report, should have at least the following informational elements:

1. Progress on Requests: list of your requests typically categorized by theme that makes sense for the way your staff organizes their department.
2. Issues and Concerns: list of issues or concerns that your staff feels they need help with else they won’t be able to keep their promise to you.
3. Cross Department Requests: list of requests that your staff has made between each other.  A follow up article will discuss this practice and the Cross Department Meeting.

I supply a couple of sample reports (#1 and #2) for your inspirational review that I used in 2003 when I held the Chief Technology Officer role and I reported to the Chief Operating Officer.  You will need to work with your staff to invent what makes sense for you.  Below is a visual snapshot of the report elements:

Here are more details about these report categories:

Progress on Requests

You need a mechanism to make requests, for your staff to make subsequent promises, to understand if your staff heard you, and to see how they are progressing toward fulfillment.  You need to help them understand the key concerns or initiatives you are after.

Everything you request will be recorded by your staff.  Your staff will be responsible for writing down what you want so that you can observe if they understand your request.  If they don’t understand you, you will not get what you seek.  If you don’t demand they write it down, then be prepared to have cases where they won’t deliver.  Give your staff time to take notes and to ask questions – remember, it’s not what you say but what they listen.  Having them write it down holds them accountable and teaches them to understand you so your cost to work with them goes down over time.

Your staff will report on your requests typically in a prioritized fashion for which you set.  You are there to help them prioritize what you care about.  They will offer a status on their delivery progress so that you can assess if they will meet your requirements (completion time, deliverable).

It is important to remember that despite best intentions, all human beings have a hard time remembering or holding everything they promise (this includes you).  The intensity of situations may produce significant stress and throw people into forgetting what they said they would do (and what you requested).  It’s important, as a leader, to develop good judgment on how your requests actually are responsible for their breakdowns in performance.  Of course, if you assess your staff member can’t hold the role and someone else can, it may make sense to make organizational changes.  Good leadership is to know when to make these calls.

Issues and Concerns

Your staff will always have issues and concerns when they are trying to produce action.  You need to see what they are concerned about because if these issues are not addressed, it will likely get in the way of them keeping their promises to you.

This can be a place where you develop empathy for the world your staff experiences because of the role you invented. By listening to their concerns, you can offer them thinking and tools to help them break through their issues. It is also a place for you to reflect on how much capacity you need to get what you want.  If you see recurrent patterns of breakdowns and obstacles in these discussions, you have an opportunity to design for a different organizational structure or configuration.

Cross Department Requests

The Cross Department Requests is elaborated more fully in the subsequent article.  This is a place where your staff has made requests of other staff members (their peers) that directly report to you.  You will learn how your team works together and if there are bottlenecks due to the way you have configured your organization. Like the Progress on Requests above, you will want to see the status on each item in a prioritized fashion.

The Cross-Department Practice

I delivered the subsequent article that discusses a different practice that ties all this together.  Please share your thinking so I can clarify the Direct Report practice.

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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