Editor's Note: We are pleased again this year to feature valuable how-to advice and counsel from one of America's leading business performance improvement experts, Laurence B. Valant, President & CEO of Valant & Company. Here and in future newsletters, we will be providing our readers with excerpts from Larry's new book, "Lead and Manage! The Definitive Guide For Getting the Results You Want", which he co-authored with Valant & Company Partner Gayle W. Hustad. "Lead and Manage!" is available through Barnes & Noble, or can be ordered at www.valantco.com.
MANAGEMENT: Executing the Plan
MANAGEMENT - Executing the plan
Management is the process through which the strategies are executed to achieve the agreed upon quantitative objectives. While to manage means to bring about successfully, our definition is extended to define successfully as executing the plans delegated to the manager, achieving the specified quantitative objectives on time and on budget.
Effective management defined
Accordingly, effective management includes three essential fundamentals which when carried out will virtually assure success on the part of the manager. These three fundamentals are:
- The ability to clarify expectations.
- The ability to gain accountability from direct reports.
- The ability to select competent managers to fill key supervisory positions.
Management Fundamental #1 - The ability to clarify expectations
Effective management begins with the ability to clarify expectations. This fundamental requirement for effective management is seldom carried out, primarily for two reasons: 1) the manager isn't clear in his own mind what the expectations should be or 2) he fails to take the time to make his expectations clear to his direct reports. Many managers believe that once directions have been given, the responsibility for delivering results belongs to their staff. By delegating, they believe they have done all that is required. In reality they have just begun.
Clearly stated expectations:
- Are quantitative and measurable.
- Tie directly to the overall objectives of the firm as defined by the CEO in the vision statement.
- Have time frames attached to their achievement and delivery.
- Are perceived by both the manager and direct reports as fair and achievable.
Clearly stated expectations provide the basis for planning and completing tasks, and they also provide the foundation for fair and reliable performance evaluation. Ninety-nine percent of an effective performance evaluation can be answered by responding affirmatively to the following question, "Did I meet expectations on time and on budget?"
Management Fundamental #2 - The ability to gain accountability from direct reports is accomplished when the direct report states their commitment to achieving the objectives specified in the manager's expectations.
Accountability is elusive because very few people in management positions understand how to gain commitment. Gaining commitment, an internal commitment made to one's self, one's team, and one's direct manager, leads to accountability.
Elliott Jaques, a noted economist and organizational psychologist who developed the notion of a requisition organization, played an important role in defining and structuring accountability. Jaques wrote:
Let me identify with crystal clarity the specific institution with whose organization and management you are concerned. For the systems I wish to discuss with you - the systems you manage and lead - have never been clearly identified. They do not even have a name. They are variously called "the bureaucracy"; the "organization"; "the hierarchy"; "the organization chart";"the pyramid";"the family tree".
What they are in fact, are the organizations we use for employing people in order to get work done - employment systems - organized in hierarchies for managers and subordinates. I propose to call them Accountability Hierarchies (AcHs), for that is what they are. AcHs are systems of vertical organization for getting work done.
Managers hold immediate subordinates accountable for their own personal effectiveness in getting work done and for the output of their subordinates. Work and accountability cascade down successive levels, and a system of organizational layers or strata is formed...... at this point we come to the heart of the matter - to the tap-root of sluggish organizational functioning. It has to do with the withered sense of accountability which pervades our AcH systems....The malaise begins with the failure to identify and specify what it means to be a manager.
We shall define a manager specifically as a person who is held accountable for the outputs of others and for sustaining a team capable of producing those outputs....The manager is held accountable not only for his/her own personal effectiveness but also for the outputs of others.
As Jaques clearly states, a manager is held accountable for the outputs of the direct reports; therefore, to insure their success, managers must gain commitment from these direct reports, securing individual agreements to be held accountable as well. This process must be repeated down through the levels of an organization. Gaining commitment is not optional if accountability is to be achieved. Gaining commitment requires action on the part of the manager. The following steps must occur:
- The manager's expectations must be clearly understood
- The direct report must possess the technical and management (if required) capability to meet the manager's expectations
- The direct report must have the requisite authority to meet his commitments
- The resources and time required to meet the expectations must be available and under the control of the direct report
- The plan and budget to meet the expectations must be agreed upon by both the direct report and the direct manager
The process of gaining commitment requires planning, communication, and negotiation between the direct manager and each direct report. Gaining commitment takes time, but it is time that is well spent. The steps to gaining commitment are usually set aside because they are too time consuming.
A manager whose philosophy is expressed by, "We haven't got time to plan, we must get to work right now", is the same manager who fails to meet expectations. Meeting expectations can only happen when there is adequate planning and development of commitment.
Management Fundamental #3 - The ability to select competent managers to fill key supervisory positions
Selection of managers is one of the most important contributors to business success, and yet it is rarely done well. Management development is usually an ad hoc process through which people rise to successively higher positions over time. Sometimes the rise to a management or leadership role is based on valid and reliable performance criteria, although that is usually not the case. Instead, informal processes take over, and promotion devolves to the favored sons or daughters, whose rise confounds those who know them well! The failures at the top levels of management provide ample testimony to this.
Many companies expect to achieve lofty and demanding objectives while staffing with less than adequate managers and personnel. Effective leadership and management require effective staffing. Shortchanging the organization by skimping on the quality of staffing at both management and levels below is a foolish economy, for such skimping never saves a single dime, but rather wastes tens of thousands of dollars through ineffective execution of plans and failed achievement of deliverables. Moreover, the organization that decides to hire and develop managers and staff from the upper quartile of their industry always has a substantial leg up and will outperform their competition even with mediocre plans and programs because those plans and programs that exist will be implemented effectively.
