Archive for the ‘management’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Close Escape Hatches

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Close escape hatches. Whenever you challenge your team to test its performance, you are likely to encounter resistance from some members. Quite frequently this resistance will not be presented directly at the start of a job assignment or project but will begin to emerge subtly only after a work effort is well under way and the performance pressure begins to build.
Closing escape hatches means anticipating the types of excuses and rationalizations you are likely to encounter for the team’s failure to achieve its goals and eliminating these excuses well before they have an opportunity to delay or derail a project.
One of the best methods for closing escape hatches is to have your team play the role of devil’s advocate and for each stage of anticipated project identify the following:

  • • The types of problems or roadblocks it is likely to encounter.
  • • How these roadblocks or problems might affect the success of the project.
  • • The types of actions that could be taken to prevent these problems from occurring or to get around them after they’ve occurred.
  • • An agreement regarding when and how you will alert each other to changes that could affect progress on a project.

Tags: , ,
Posted in management | No Comments »

Management Strategy: Challenge the Limits

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Raise the bar. This tactic involves raising the bar, that is, setting more difficult performance standards.
In my consulting practice I frequently encounter managers who say that they’ve made efforts to raise the bar for their teams but have seen few payoffs. Upon closer observation, these failures can always be traced to one of these factors:
• The manager’s message that the team must raise its performance level wasn’t credible. This manager is like the angry parent who, upon receiving a poor report card from his child, issues vague threats that “this better not happen again,” only to forget entirely about the incident until next time it occurs. The child, knowing the game well, learns to lay low until the entire situation blows over and things return to normal.
• The new performance expectations were unilaterally presented by the manager with no input from the team.
• The new performance standards were too vague or addressed performance factors that were well outside the team’s control.
• The team felt that the manager’s new performance standards were completely unattainable.
• The manager created consequences that were at odds with desired performance.

To overcome these roadblocks, consider these two steps. First, dramatically raise your expectations on a few key performance measures. Focus your efforts on the vital few performance areas most important to your teams survival.
Second, select performance goals that can be measured. The performance goals you select should include a definite time frame, focus on discrete performance areas, be quantifiable, and be worded in such a way as to be relatively free from ambiguity. If you aren’t sure whether your performance goals meet these criteria, ask your team and a trusted associate to help you troubleshoot them.

Tags: ,
Posted in management | No Comments »

Warning Symptoms

Monday, June 29th, 2009

The following symptoms may indicate that lack of commitment and effort is rapidly becoming a critical management issue for your team:
• Your members leave as soon as possible after quitting time each day and refuse to work overtime when needed.
• Members doubt their ability to perform. They feel overwhelmed by small challenges and routinely gripe about the lack of fairness in assignments.
• Members seem to feel that “it’s every person for herself.” They are unwilling to help each other on projects or to assist each other in problem solving.
• Whenever you ask members to take on new assignments or skill areas, their first reaction is to offer excuses why they can’t be expected to handle these new job challenges.
• You feel that your team is performing well below its maximum performance potential.

Strategies
The first strategy is to overcome inertia. An engineering friend once explained that 90% of a locomotive’s energy is expended during the first few minutes of start-up as it attempts to move the train from rest. Once the engine overcomes its massive inertia and the train is running at high speed, relatively small amounts of energy are needed to keep it in motion. In much the same way, the first job you must tackle will be to overcome your team’s initial inertia and get it started along the track. In this section we offer strategies for overcoming inertia by creating a sense of urgency, removing yourself as a buffer, conducting a performance analysis, and creating competitors.

The second strategy is to challenge the limits of your members. This strategy involves encouraging your members to raise their self ¬expectations, redefining performance, modelling limit-busting, cloning superstars, and using incremental successes and celebrations.

The last strategy is to get out of the way of team members. This involves removing any roadblocks that you may be unintentionally placing in their path. Managers get in the way whenever they hamstring a team’s authority and its control over its own work, send inconsistent messages about desired performance, or create conse¬quences that actually work against desired performance. As part of getting out of the way, you will discover how to strategically empower your staff, send clear messages about your performance expectations, and create consequences that support desired performance.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in management | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »