Dead Begonia Haiku

My begonias died

Too many frosts in a row

I guess Winter's here

Managers Part XIV - Management Time vs. Vocational Time

One of the false yardsticks that you hear all the time is that a good manager isn't "afraid to get his hands dirty", or "helps out". As we have already looked at, the job of a manager is to "get things done", not "do things". Before we get into the details of using leverage to get things done, we're going to look at another division of time: management time vs. vocational time.

Very few people start their careers as managers. In typical fashion the first rungs on the corporate ladder involve doing things: making things, selling stuff, serving people, repairing items. It is during this epoch where your worth as an employee is measured by your output, you learn that everything that you do can be measured. How many widgets did you produce? How fast did you ring up those orders? How many errors per thousand did you make? Quality comes into it as well; did you repair that vacuum cleaner correctly? But it's all about doing things and doing them according to standard. In most companies the path to a bigger paycheck lies along the management track. You start out making widgets, soon you're a widget team leader, responsible for some other widget makers, eventually you're the widget department manager, responsible, not only for all the widget makers and team leaders, but the budget, payroll, supply ordering and shipping. Even though you now have all these additional responsibilities, in your heart, you're still a widget maker. You wear a little leather tool belt that carries your needle nose pliers and little screw driver that you use to assemble widgets. Once or twice a day you head down to the widget room to make a few widgets and build some camaraderie with your team. When you have some free time you're back down there. Why? There are three broad categories of vocational lures:

1. Identity: this is who you are, a widget maker! Once you become a manager, you're not just a manager, you're a widget manager. Very few people identify as a manager, i.e. a practitioner of the craft of management, but rather as a member of the vocation from which you were promoted.   
2. Pride of Craft: before you were a manager you could point to what you produced and be proud of it. You could see the widgets, or the displays that you built. You can't see management
3. Instant Feedback: When you're doing things, you know when you're done, you know when it's complete. Even if it's just paperwork. You're always right there where it's happening. But as a manager, since you're planning, fixing, correcting, training, observing etc., you're either at the scene after everything is completed, or anticipating the scene before it happens. If something goes wrong you find out about it afterwards. You don't get that endorphin rush from getting things accomplished because what you're doing may not bear fruit for days or weeks or years. 

None of this means that a manager never does physical work. On the contrary, many management jobs include a physical component. In my previous career, a department manager was required, due to labor constraints, to do a certain amount of stocking and cleaning. In my current job, statutory requirements necessitate that many tasks be done by a manager because the law says so. The definition of vocation vs. management time will vary depending upon the job description and staffing levels. Stocking the yogurt on a Monday morning may be necessary for a manager in a small grocery store, but unnecessary vocational time in a large superstore. In short, anything that is not in the manager's job description, but is in the job description of a subordinate, is vocational time and should not be indulged in by a manager. There is nothing intrinsically vocational about a task, as long as it isn't supposed to be done by someone else. 

Some managers cannot seem to grasp this concept and make several classes of excuses to continue to be vocationally occupied:

• "If you want something done, do it yourself" - which presupposes that you be everywhere at once, and did a bad job of training your subordinates
• "I want my people to know that I am willing to do anything that I ask them to do" - admittedly this has short term benefits - the crew thinks you're a good guy - but what about the jobs that you are really bad at?
• "We were really busy"/"We were really shorthanded" - there may be times when it is necessary to lend a hand, but what you're doing is training your people forgo thinking and just expect you to jump in. 

Most first-level supervisory jobs still require a large amount of vocational time and a small amount of management time, say 30 hours vocational and 10 hours management, with the amount of vocational decreasing and the management component increasing as your amount of responsibility rises. What happens, however, if you insist on spending the same amount of time "in the trenches" as you did when you weren't a manager, your work week will expand. The reason that your work week will expand is that if you're keeping your vocational component at 40 hours, in your first management job in the example earlier in this paragraph, you will be working 50 hours (10 management and 40 vocational). And you're only getting paid for 40, since you're on salary - but hey, 50 hours isn't bad, right?. But as you move up in rank, the management portion will increase, so if you're still dead set on spending all that time "doing things", pretty soon you'll find yourself working 70 hours a week (30 management and still 40 vocational). Your subordinates are all used to this, so trying to cut back will leave you, in effect, short-handed. 

It's a trap...but there is a way out...

Did You Know That Not Everybody Is The Same Religion As You?

It's easy to assume that everybody thinks like you do when everybody around you 

does think like you. 

When it comes to religion, a vast majority of people in the United States are Christians of one flavor or another. Nebraska is even more homogeneous in its religious leanings, a small Nebraska town might have a Presbyterian Church on one side of town and a United Church of Christ on the other side of town...and people think that they're different! Christianity is so much the default position for spirituality that even people who don't attend church, don't pray, don't have any spiritual tendencies at all, would be appalled and insulted if you suggested that they weren't Christian. But the truth is that there are a variety of different faiths and people who lack faith as well. There are Hindu temples, mosques, Buddhists, Baha'i, Wiccans and (gasp) atheists...in Lincoln they're all over! Yet many of these "others" are viewed as aberrations, somehow spiritually wrong.

Now if Christianity, or for that matter Islam or any other religion had objective proof, or even a hint that their faith was the correct one, that would be one thing, but there isn't a religion out there that can present any kind of proof, however small, that what they believe is right. Now some folks will say that there is proof, that, for example they prayed for something and it happened! Well, people from other religions pray and claim the same results, so we're deadlocked there. Another thing that most people don't consider, even when they claim to have "talked with God" (i.e. God talking back!) or "experienced God's love", when pressed to recount in detail exactly what they experienced, usually describe a very subjective feeling, that may, if you take their word for it, indicate the existence of some deity of some kind, but doesn't all all indicate that the warm, fuzzy feeling comes from the god who ordered all the Amalekites killed, knocked down the walls of Jericho and wrote on then tablets. In other words, it is a subjective spiritual experience that the recipient chooses to label in a familiar manner.

But we have A BOOK that was given to us by GOD! Really? What you have is a collection of books that someone claims was given by God. So why should the subjective religious experiences written down thousands of years ago and copied and recopied and translated and mistranslated, in a culture very unlike our own, trump our own religious experience today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Christianity or even religion in general, and I'm by no means an atheist (although I sometimes act like one and often take their side in an argument) but the position that any one faith is THE one true way to look at things is arrogant and misguided.

So get off your high horse and stop condescending to those who are different, stop thinking that they're going to a hell that they don't believe in and that you need to convert them!

Happy Halloween!

Managers Part XIII - The System

It likely came as no surprise that your boss has a legitimate claim on your time, maybe a bit more of a surprise that your subordinates had a legitimate claim on your time, but what's this about the system having a claim on your time? We're going to define the system as anything and anyone who is not in your chain of command, but whom you have to deal with and/or keep happy as part of your job. For many businesses this includes the customers, suppliers, and vendors. It probably goes without saying that you have to treat your customers right, whatever that entails in your business, and to pay your vendors and suppliers on time. But it also includes those who are part of your company, but whom you don't directly answer to. This could include Human Resources, Accounting, Tech Support, or Janitorial. Some of the people in these other departments may be at the same level as you in the organizational chart, some may be on the same level as your boss, some may have positions that don't translate neatly into the hierarchy. But they all make up the system that you have to deal with. They all have procedures, and maybe even paperwork that you have to fill out before you can make a legitimate claim on their time. How well you get along with these other departments can determine how strictly they decide to enforce their requirements and how often they "cut you a break". If most of the time you follow their rules, don't go over their heads, and don't make unreasonable demands, then you've got some good interdepartmental credit that you can draw upon in an emergency. For example, at the government agency where I work there is a defined procedure for resolving computer problems. It's not very difficult, but it can take a while to get a result. Unfortunately I require computer access to do 90%+ of my job and my computer was not functioning the other morning. I know that the normal procedures would cause me to be non-productive for a good portion of the morning, so I walked over to the IT department and asked for some help. Since I never before had jumped the line and get along well with all of the tech people, I was up and running in about five minutes. They could have easily made me follow procedures, "paying full price" for what I needed, but since I had good credit with IT that I had not squandered, I was given a "discount" on the time it took. On the other side of the coin, several years ago I was managing a grocery store. The various stores usually helped one another out by transferring items from stores that had a surplus to stores that were short a product. The procedure was to call ahead, ask if you could spare item xyz, and find out when would be a good time to pick it up. This allowed the store that was transferring out the time to organize the transfer without disrupting their own operations. One particular store manager never called ahead; he just sent one of his subordinates with a list of things that they needed. The first time we chalked it up as inexperience, the second time to an emergency, but it kept happening, even after we asked that procedures be followed. After a while we stopped helping this manager - he had ruined his credit with us.

There are many examples, some that you could think of, where cooperation and help from another department, or even from your peers in the same location would make your work day proceed smoother. There are a lot of people on your team that are neither boss nor subordinate that can make or break your day. If you are spending all of your time battling the system, your self-imposed time might be shrunk to nothing.

The other part of the system involves reports, those you read and those you produce. This includes emails, trade publications, tracking, forecasting, payroll and whatever else you have to involve yourself in that doesn't involve direct interaction with another human being. There are a few ways to handle these items. One is to delegate. Does everything that you do necessarily have to be done by you? Is there someone else who would benefit by reading that report, or by answering those emails? Is it really someone else's job and not yours?

Does the report even have any impact on your job? Years ago the store director that I worked for asked all of the department managers to report the dollar amount of their waste every week. One of the managers refused to do it, claiming that the head guy wasn't doing anything with the information. I thought that he had a point, so for a couple of weeks I just made up numbers and put the report on the boss' desk, which he proceeded to file away unread. There was another incident where a central office supervisor required that we enter sales numbers in a database in order to project sales and labor. I thought that I had a better way to do it, but had to use this other guy's system. After a while I stopped changing the numbers and just changed the date every week. He never noticed. This is a strategy known as benign neglect. If you leave something undone, and no one notices, you probably don't need to do it. Furthermore, if you make it look like you're reporting something and no one sees that the information is fake, or isn't changing, then they don't really care about the information, only that you are obeying their order. You have freed up the time that you would have spent compiling information that no one will look at or care about and can spend that time wisely, managing, rather than stupidly following orders. 

Notice that I haven't trotted out the usual time management tips like "make a list" or "prioritize. I used to tell my subordinate managers that I was paying them to think. Think about what parts of the system can be eliminated and eliminate them. We've touched upon the skill of knowing what you should be doing and what you should delegate. Coming up in the next installment, management time vs. vocational time.

Managers Part XII - Minimizing Your Boss-Imposed Time

Most people, no matter how high they are on the company organizational chart have a boss. Even CEOs have a board of directors, and most businesses have customers that have to be kept happy. Managers are generally looked upon as people who get to tell others what to do, which is somewhat true, but they also have others telling them what to do. The five levels of freedom apply to the manager in his role as managEE as well as in his role as managER. In the role as manager, the goal is to get subordinates as high as possible on the freedom scale in order to minimize the theoretically nonexistent subordinate-imposed time. Minimize, or even eliminate that theoretical ghost and you're left with the three theoretically valid demands on a manager's time: boss-imposed time, system-imposed time and self-imposed time.

Unless your goal is to get fired, you cannot evade boss-imposed time. In most companies there is a hierarchy, and the person above you in the hierarchy gets to tell you what to do. The starting point is the kind of manager that your immediate supervisor is. Is your manager a professional manager, i.e. one who understands the principles of managing management time, including the five levels of freedom?  Or do you work for a micro-manager? Or perhaps even a hands-off manager? An example of a manager who manages at Level One would be one who gathers all of his subordinate managers together at the beginning of the day and hands out assignments.These assignments might include a to-do list and would definitely involve the managers' manager checking everyone's work at the end of the day, or maybe even at several points during the day. No one is ever given a chance to make a decision. A Level Two boss might operate in a similar fashion, but would dispense with the meeting, but would expect all the managers to come to him and ask what they should do that day. In reality, no boss acts like this all the time. Some might, in some areas of their oversight, hand out assignments, especially in the training phase of a new manager's career; or they might tolerate an inexperienced manager asking how to handle a situation. In my own management career, there have been times when my own supervisor acted as a Level One manager, telling me to undertake a task that had not been on my own self-to-do-list. Examples might include starting a new sales initiative, changing priorities in some area or just indulging the boss' whim. However, most managers do most of their managing at a Level Three or above, typically at a Level Four. At a Level Three, your boss is still micro-managing, i.e. still requiring his stamp of approval at every step. If your manager is not on-site, this is obviously a difficult situation. Level Four, where you make all your own decisions, but reporting after the fact, is typical for most management decisions. Level Five, where reporting is done only at regular intervals, is rare, except with very routine tasks. The reality is that most managers will have some areas where they will allow you free reign and others where they keep you on a tight leash, and most where you're somewhere in the middle.

So, how do you minimize that boss-imposed time? You have to manage your boss. How do you do that? That depends on the primary mode of management that your boss employs. If it's Level One or Two, honestly, you've got a lot to overcome. You've got one of those bosses who believe that it's the manager's job to "work hard" and to have his fingers in every pie. You've got one of those managers who believes "if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself". You've got one of those managers who views his subordinate managers merely as higher-paid grunts. Making your own decisions, or even suggesting actions, might be interpreted as insubordination. On the other hand, the manager who lets you operate at Level Five all the time probably doesn't exist in the wild! Managers who habitually manage from Level Four or Five can be categorized as "hands-off" managers. This shouldn't always be considered a good thing. Very rarely can everything be put in these top levels. A true hands-off manager is probably just lazy and doesn't want to actually manage, just sit back as a figurehead. Most managers are going to be in the Level Two - Level Four range, with occasional forays into Levels One & Five, depending on the task. To use a grocery store as an example, your daily & weekly ordering might be Level Four, or even Level Five, something he has no reason to get involved in. Your holiday displays and ordering might be in Level Three, where you make the decision on what displays to build and what to order, but he gets to weigh in and make the final decision. Staffing might be Level Two, you ask him what to do about hiring. Once in a while there might be a Level One moment, your boss gives you an assignment in area that you had not considered.

Managing your boss in most cases involves anticipating what decisions he would have made before he makes them, and building a track record of making good decisions. If your boss' comfort level is Level Three, the way to get to a regular Level Four is for him to agree with most of the decisions that you run by him, and this requires that you know what your boss' priorities are and what he thinks is important. Eventually he will realize that every decision that you run by him succeeds spectacularly and will move you into Level Four. When you're at Level Two the role of anticipation is even greater, since your boss is expecting you to ask what to do; having a solution ready is a sneaky way to get yourself up to Level Three. The only to be slapped back down to Level Two is to be told to stop having ideas - very unlikely. Moving from a Level Four to a Level Five is in some ways the easiest - you already have the freedom to make decisions without clearing them with the boss, all you have to do is to negotiate the gap between reports!

The point of all of this is that there is one person who is responsible for the Level at which your manager manages you...it's you. It's not your boss' responsibility to make your life easier, it's your job to take the initiative. The reality is that you're never going to eliminate boss-imposed time, but by careful managing of your manager, you can minimize it and increase your self-imposed time.