"Bring me men to match my mountains: Bring me men to match my plains: Men with empires in their purpose and new eras in their brains." -- Thomas Paine
I always encouraged my managers to take initiative on those things that would improve our company, so when a particular manager suggested that we buy a very expensive piece of equipment, I listened. “It will make our crews far more efficient,” he said, “and we could schedule more jobs, which would easily pay for it. Plus,” he added, “since the work will become easier, the crew’s morale will improve.” “That sounds good,” I said, “but it’s very expensive, so if that doesn’t happen, the company will be in trouble. We can't afford to make a bad decision with that much money.”
He continued to sell me on his idea and was bothered by my lack of immediate response. But after hearing many promises that this was a sound investment, I bought it. I wanted my managers to take more initiative and responsibility, and here was my chance to prove it. I knew that in order to grow I must start to rely more on my managers’ ability to manage.
After a few months, I noticed that this manager had not increased the number of jobs like he had promised, which was the financial justification for the purchase. Then, walking through the shop one day, I discovered that the crew had left the equipment behind instead of taking it with them. When I got my manager on the phone, he told me that it broke down and had not been fixed yet. “Wasn’t the crew complaining about the equipment being down?” I asked. “I haven't heard them complain yet,” he said. So I asked, “Why do you suppose that is? Don’t they like it?” “Well, it hasn’t performed like I thought it would and then it broke down.” He then added nonchalantly, “Perhaps we should’ve have researched it a bit more.”
Naturally, I wanted to berate, demote, and publicly embarrass the manager for this disaster – and then fire him. But in retrospect, I realized that leaving such an investment decision to a manager who was not trained or qualified to make this type of decision was as much a reflection on my management skills as it was on this manager.
So how do you train your managers to make quality decisions, maximizing their contribution to the company, and take personal responsibility for the success or failure of those decisions?
Many owners see their managers’ primary role as overseeing their subordinates. While this may be the most time consuming task, it should not stand alone as the most important. Perhaps you will agree that the following managers’ responsibilities are equal in importance as your company grows.
1. Recruiting, hiring, training, and monitoring subordinates
2. Improving productivity
3. Attending meetings to account for their results
Since I have addressed the first of these responsibilities in a previous article titled, “7 Steps To Attract & Hire the Best People”, (which is available for free by contacting me) this issue addresses numbers two and three. A basic tenant of management is to constantly improve performance. This optimizes the return on investment, which is the financial justification to endure the risk involved in ownership. Much of this responsibility to improve performance should rest with your managers.
You pay managers more than their subordinates due to their added value, but it’s often difficult to measure that value. What you want, whether it’s actually written into their job descriptions or not, is to keep your company continually improving so you can more efficiently accomplish your goals. Therefore, you need managers, who in addition to handling their day-to-day responsibilities, are able to constantly:
1. Identify bottlenecks and challenges
2. Seek out possible corrections
3. Research the pros and cons of various solutions
4. Propose the best plan of attack
5. Communicate the timeline and resources required
6. Take responsibility for executing the plan
7. Report in staff meetings actual progress versus planned progress
If you were to create this level of competency in your managers, would your business grow faster, be more profitable, and require less of your time dealing with one crisis after another? If so, as in the pursuit of all good things, it starts with you. You may be frustrated by the same old challenges, obvious inefficiencies, rising costs, falling productivity, and managers who seem clueless – but believe me, they have a clue, it’s just how they’ve been trained. It might even be conspicuous to them that you are the bottleneck, where all problems come to rest, and where all solutions must originate. But how many managers will tell the boss that? They’ve discovered that they don’t need to take the additional work (or liability) of finding solutions because that’s your job. People by nature want to add value, but there is a process to adding value and if you don’t train it, promote it – and reward it, and then get out of their way – the path of least resistance is a natural default.
I believe that if you have the right people (and you probably do), they already have the desire to perform at this level; it’s up to you to teach them how.
Surrounding yourself with managers who are trained in these seven steps will not only help create the powerful infrastructure needed to support your growing organization, but they will be the impetus that causes the growth in the first place. And equally exciting is instead of you being a bottleneck, you will actually have time to lead the company, and they will be thrilled to have a leader to follow instead of seeing you saddled with the burdensome details that keep the company from being all that it can be.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Steve Meisenheimer
|
