Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. –Peter Drucker

Who tells your boss what to do?

It has always amazed me that in every position I have worked in my past, employees always have the same response to that question – Who tells your boss what to do? Their boss!

When I ask the same question up the Table of Organization, they give the Ouroborosish like response all the way up -

Nobody tells Leaders what to do

I love to see the shock on their faces when I tell them that Leaders are not told what to do! Leaders see (and work with others to find) efficiencies, problems, and solutions before they become fires. They spread their leadership. They know what their bosses are looking for and provide it before they are asked for it because they understand the vision.

So if your working your way into Management/Leadership, when do you stop being told what to do and change from being an Employee to becoming a LEADER?

You don’t become a Director, and then start becoming a Leader. Just like any job, you get a job only because your skills and experience will ensure that you will be successful in that Job. Once you’re in your new job, you should begin to work on learning the next level There is no better time to begin than now, when being a leader sticks out even more.

Leadership is the fast track to being promotable

As you can see, Leaders rise higher than Managers in an organization. So the sooner you develop Leadership Skills the more promotable you become. Managers usually can only Manage people in their technical area. Leaders have skill sets that make them successful in any area, because those skills are transferable.

Remember, Managers are EVERYWHERE! But leaders are hard to come by. Great Leaders are even more scarce, so keep on developing yourself and you will stand out in a crowd!

One of the reasons that Skunk Works is so successful is the great leadership structure that is setup. Smart people are allowed to get work done, and are involved in the project all the way through. Unfortunately, the government isn’t setup the same way.

From Skunk Works -

One that particularly sticks in my craw occurred when President Johnson first announced in 1964 the existence of the RS-71, the Air Force two-seater Blackbird. That’s right, RS-71 was its official designation, but Johnson accidentally turned it around and called it the “SR-71.” Instead of putting out a brief correction, the Air Force decided not to call attention to a very minor mistake by the commander in chief and ordered us to change about twenty-nine thousand blueprints and drawings at a cost of thousands of dollars so that they would read “SR-71″ and not “RS-71.”

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating again and again – Do your employees come to you with mistakes as they happen with possible solutions already laid out, or do they work to keep you insulated from the mistakes because of a culture of fear?

QUESTION: Why do all these TOOLS seem ineffective?

ANSWER: You have to be able to apply it, consistently. Can you?

My tip to you for the NEW YEAR is simple and it really works; at least for me it has.

• Step 1: PRIORITIZE EVERYTHING both your Personal and Professional goals. Make sure your professional goals align to what your BOSS and ORGANIZATION needs. Not what you want to do. Refer back to some previous articles if needed:
  1. How you should look at your Job
  2. How to ALWAYS get a YES from your Boss

  First decide if it is Urgent or Important. There are only 4 choices for each item: A, B, C, or D. Quickly place each item, task or project into one of these ‘Buckets’ (Don’t spend time now Prioritizing within the buckets we will do that later).

  	URGENT	not Urgent
  IMPORTANT	A	B
  not Important	C	D

  Items in bucket A are URGENT and IMPORTANT.

  PROBLEM: You should NEVER have tasks in this bucket. If you do have tasks here it is because you already procrastinated doing the task and it finally ended up here in order to meet the deadline, or it is here because others are poor planners…You may be tricked into spending the majority of your time working on these, but these are the REAL PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS. Everyone knows that rushing through things does not produce the BEST RESULTS.

  SOLUTION: Try to work into ‘Your Plan’ and Move these items to Bucket B.

  Items in bucket B are not Urgent and IMPORTANT

  PROBLEM: No problems here, this is where you want to spend as much time as possible.

  SOLUTION: Items that fall in this Bucket, have been well thought out and you are working on the most important items in the best and most productive way. Work hard to keep as many tasks as possible in this Bucket. Good Job!

  Items in bucket C are URGENT and not Important

  PROBLEM: Items in this Bucket are typically ‘political’ and have no real value.

  SOLUTION: Attempt to educate and eliminate these activities since they are NOT IMPORTANT.

  Items in bucket D are not Urgent and not Important.

  These items should not be done at all… If you have to ‘Drop some balls’ these are the ones to drop.

  TIP: Re-prioritize OFTEN since many things or events will change your priorities.

• Step 2: CREATE MANAGEABLE TASKS Break big projects into many manageable tasks…
• Step 3: This is the Simple part. Actually plug those tasks directly into your daily calendar, like appointments with yourself.
  

  Here are some codes I use in my Calendar:

  • Mtg: (if it is a Meeting or Conference Call)
  • Todo: (if I’m dedicating time to work on a task, preferably only items in Bucket B)
  • Travel: (block travel time to give yourself enough time to safely make it to and from an appointment)
  • Event: (I sometimes use these for Church or other personal activities)
  • Info: (you may want to keep track of an on-line purchase, tracking the confirmation etc…)

  Here is a sample day:
  

  You’ll notice your days will fill up quickly, but hopefully with the right activities and prioritized in the right order.

  Make sure you leave some OPEN gaps in your schedule for others to make meetings with you (especially your Team).

  Plan for interuptions, THEY WILL COME. If you have to move something to make room for a new and higher priority, look at your deadlines and move a Todo item not a meeting (since that will effect others).

  If you think a task will take 3 one hour sessions plan for 4-5 one hour sessions to ensure you don’t miss the deadline. The more you understand your environment and patterns of others the better your planning will be.

  You’ll know your planning well by the decreasing amounts of changes you need to do to your calendar.

I hope these ideas work for you as well as they have for me. If you have questions or comments please let me know so I can respond.

GOOD LUCK!

But S.M. Lockridge doesn’t seem to have that problem describing the Leader of Leaders. Do you KNOW HIM?

Remember the Reason for the Season.

Have a Very Merry Christmas!

Usually, the results are enough to keep your team motivated, and encouraged. All of the members don’t need to see personal results, sometimes team results or positive results of another team member can be enough to keep growing themselves or challenging each other.

But what do you do when the results aren’t there? or you, as the Leader, start to feel demotivated? Check out some previous tips to ensure that you, THE LEADER, are ALWAYS on your Game:

• How to Get Started?
• How you should look at your Job.
• Are You a Servant Leader?
• How to ALWAYS get a YES from your Boss.
• Should I STAY or Should I GO?
• Are You a Scary Manager?
• Do You Make Work Harder by not Managing Your Boss?
• Leadership 101 – Seek First to UNDERSTAND…
• What’s a Leader to do when THEY have the BLAHs?
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs
• Ever Feel like things will NEVER change?

So this year was a good year, but the REAL question is, “How do we, as a team, continue to improve year over year”? Before I answer this, let me tell you a funny story about helping your Boss put things into perspective.

It all started with a simple lock, just like this one.

As I remember the story, I heard my General Manager (I was a Director of Housekeeping at a hotel at the time), call me on the two way radio… “You need to come meet me at the Store Room in the East Tower” (it was not really a store room but what I called the ‘Museum’). You see it was 5 Star hotel and when we stored things in the storeroom, we weren’t talking about old mop buckets and busted up computers etc… but hundreds of items from $30,000 pieces of artwork to antique chairs, or original statues etc… you get the picture. “Come up here right away, I need to see you” was the call… It sounded SO urgent so I dropped everything to respond. When I got there, I was frustrated to find that he only wanted to SHOW OFF his new IMPERVIOUS PADLOCK. As I was burning inside, frustrated that my idiot Boss just called me away from SERIOUS work; I began to ponder all the FACTS he was throwing at me:

• This lock cost me…(can’t remember exactly but it was definately WAY TOO MUCH)
• It’s Bullet Proof, at any distance (blah blah blah)
• Same lock they used at Fort Knox…(oh sure)
• I think it weighed like 8 lbs or something (it WAS Big, I’ll give him that)

All I remember is that he went ON and ON… like this was his FIRSTBORN. Telling me how this will be the perfect solution to protecting all our valuables in “The Museum”. I was thinking frantically how I could get out of this scenario and what I could do to bring my Boss ‘Back to Reality’, when just then my Chief Engineer walked up to see what all the ‘hub bub’ was on the radio. Then it came to me, Find The Weakest Link…

I asked my Chief for his tin snips from his tool belt and with two quick snips I cut the ‘$2.00 hasp’ holding the expensive lock and all 8 lbs came crashing to the floor (I was lucky it did not break the marble floor, that was not the impact I was trying to make) saying, “that is what I think of your Lock”, as I walked away…

You may think I purposefully tried to embarrass my boss (and maybe I did) but I did ask my Chief to see if he could remedy that for me and he said yes as he tried to keep from laughing out loud at the scene.

In order to continually grow a strong team, you need to continually find the ‘weakest link’ and improve it or replace it. Help your team find and correct the weakest links themselves, then your ready to move on to other opportunities. With these newly developed skills and perspective, they will be UNSTOPABLE.

When you’re NO LONGER NEEDED, consider it a JOB WELL DONE and leave with Pride.

Now Go Out There and find another opportunity to add value to.

Good Luck, and may this year be another good one for you as well. Thank you to Darren Rowse for the topic + group writing project.

How can they successfully Lead the Team if they are down or discouraged?

The answers are simple. Yes. and they can’t.

So what do you do when your the Leader and you have the BLAHs?

…my wife says… try an anti-deppressant…. but the real answer is Check your Balance!!!

Depending on how ‘out of balance’ you are, will determine the extent of your remedy.

Rate yourself, or better yet listen to others around you.

My wife often tells me I work too much, I guess I always have. But when you start hearing that from your employees or your team members want to know why your so down… You better do something quick to CHANGE…

It doesn’t matter what you do, just DO SOMETHING to change.

• Get Some Sleep, go to bed early
• Get some MORE Sleep, take a long NAP, your Body and Mind needs the rest
• Spend more time with Family and Friends (Holidays don’t count)
• Find some ME time. Read, excersise, go fishing, work on a hobby (whatever works for you)
• Serve others by Volunteering
• Hang with POSITIVE people, it is definately contagious
• Go to Church, Seeking God always helps to put things into Perspective
• sometimes JUST DO NOTHING (Give yourself permission to be UNPRODUCTIVE)

Hope this helps. Let me know what works for you?

Go out there and make a difference. Tomorrow your attitude can Make or Break someone else’s day!

There’s an interesting thread going on over at the Blogging Boss about managing your boss.

In the first post, More about Managing Up Eric quoted some of my thoughts about managing up -

This is a great point. It is also important to point out to stay positive about it. When your boss makes a decision that goes against what you expected or believed what was right for the company, do you take it to mean that your boss is an idiot or do you use it as a way to recalibrate?

To recalibrate, after your boss makes a decision that you didn’t expect you should be asking yourself questions:

• Is it because he has access to more information or can see more of the picture?
• Did I not give my boss enough information to make the correct decision?
• Is it not the right time, is it not for the right reasons, or the right cost to make this decision?

If you are of the my boss is an idiot mindset and you use that as an excuse to undermine them, you are hurting yourself more than your boss. If they are an idiot, most likely everyone else knows it as well – and all you do by pointing it out or trying to make your boss look bad is to make yourself undesirable by other managers in your company. Why would a manager want an employee like that working for them? Wouldn’t they rather someone who is able to get good work done without making others look bad?

That said, if this truly is the right decision to make, there are many ways to force your boss to make the right decision without undermining him…

In the next post, Managing up Dave’s Boss Eric talks about another strategy for managing your micromanaging boss – Withholding information.

I have discovered the best way to deal with that is to give him as little info as possible while still addressing his questions. I have also been standing up to him more when he brings out the steamroller. It has been awhile since he has really railed on me.

He still gets in his jabs and token jerk quota.

I tend to disagree with this strategy. Put yourself in Dave’s position and start by asking yourself “Why?”

• Why does my boss continually pester me for more information about what I am working on?

If your answer is “because he is a micromanaging idiot…” you are already going down the wrong path. It is your responsibility to teach your boss how to manage you. If you don’t they will manage you how they want to manage you. Seems easy enough?

Some reasons your boss micromanages you

• It’s all they know how to do, they have never managed any other way
• Their boss micromanages them, they don’t know how to manage up, and so it just keeps coming down the line
• They feel disconnected by a lack of information
• The Peter Principle has kicked in, and to compensate they over manage
• They don’t have faith in your ability to do your job

Here comes the hard part, how do you deal with it? The answer to dealing with a micromanaging boss is to overwhelm them with information. Know what they want to know, manage them so that when they want information you have already sent it to them the day before. Make them look good to their peers and their boss. Give your boss ideas that will make him look good, and then praise and give him credit for coming up with them.

It may seem unfair, or that this isn’t your job but the more you do it, the more people who know you as someone that can get work done.

Tell us how do YOU manage a micro manager in the comments below.

• When you present, or ASK for something do you ALWAYS get a YES or what you WANT?
• IF YOU ARE NOT GETTING A ‘YES’ you have more work to do.
• I believe you CAN always get a YES if the following are in place:

• Reason you were Hired
• Your daily work
• Follow orders without question
• Do things the same way it was shown to you, even if it makes no sense
• Always do things the same way, even if other things are changing around you
• Only care about things as they relate to Me (things that effect your peers, do not interest you)

BOX 2(figure 1): Your Leadership – Learning the WHY behind things

• You need to LEARN how to MANAGE your BOSS. In order to do this you have to UNDERSTAND the BIGGER PICTURE first…
• Start by Asking WHY?
• Get in the Habit of asking WHY… at least 3 times or until you get back to the root.
• WHY do we have to do this?
• WHO needs this and WHY?
• WHY Don’t others need this?
• WHY do we do things THIS WAY?
• WHY is this activity assigned (or not assigned) to ME, is it properly aligned in the organization?
• As you ask these investigative questions, LOOK for PROBLEMS (what I refer to as OPPORTUNITIES) that you can help be part of the SOLUTION to fix for your Organization
• This activity is the one the sets LEADERS apart from most people.
• WHY?
• This activity almost always adds MORE work to your plate or “ME BOX”.
• Most people don’t cause extra work for themselves.
• Eventually, some of this additional work, moves out of your Daily Responsibility or as we say leaves the “ME BOX”.
• If it doesn’t benefit ME or I don’t have to do it, then I won’t. That is someone else’s responsibility. This leads into BOX 3.
• The more you investigate the WHY behind things the more you start to understand the BIGGER PICTURE.
• The more you understand the BIG PICTURE, the more you understand your BOSS and what they want or are trying to achieve.
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