Organizing your way to being a better manager

By Andrea Hill

Once you move beyond being a one-person shop you need a big new set of skills: management skills. Your ability to grow your business profitability becomes partly (even largely) dependent on your ability to motivate, engage, and inspire your employees. Last month we discussed the personal skills you must cultivate to be a strong manager. This month we’ll examine the organizational skills.

Most MBA programs teach four pillars of management responsibility:

1. Planning: Identifying the goals of your business (or department) and which actions must be taken to achieve them.

2. Organizing: Aligning all your resources to achieve your goals.

3. Controlling: Measuring, monitoring, and reporting on progress to keep everyone focused on your goals.

4. Leading: Motivating people through a combination of strong personal skills and the three pillars mentioned above.

Let’s take a look at how each of these pillars translates into management success.

Planning

It is your job as a business owner to have clear goals for your company, and then make sure each department or function has clear goals related to the company goal. For instance, if your goal is to produce $X million in sales, then your production department needs goals regarding how many pieces they must be able to produce per month. Those goals should be translated into weekly or daily goals.

Discuss and review your goals together as often as necessary for your employees to understand and commit to them. These discussions will reinforce how important the goals are, and they will facilitate input from your employees that can help make your planning process even better.

Organizing

Start with the environment: What type of corporate culture is most likely to help you achieve your goals? A competitive internal environment? A collaborative team-based environment? Sheep? Every business has a culture, so make sure your culture is intentional and not accidental.

When store employees are hired at Wal-Mart, they aren’t promised a voice in how the place is run. They understand clearly that there are specific ways to do each task, that tasks must be done precisely as directed, and that everything must be run through a manager. So if an ambitious and vocal young woman applies at both Wal-Mart and Home Depot (which has a more team-based environment than Wal-Mart), she is likely to be drawn to the environment that appreciates her input. Both she (and Wal-Mart) will be happier for it.

Create an intentional culture, and then discuss and model how that culture should work and how it contributes to success. This includes having a clear understanding about how people should be treated.

Next, work on making roles and responsibilities clear. As part of this role clarity, make sure each employee understands the following:

• Who does what (the broader the understanding, the better)
• What level of responsibility he or she has
• Which types of decisions he or she is entrusted to make
• Who to go to for decisions outside that scope
• What his or her job involves (activities and tasks, and the goals
  of those activities and tasks)

When employees understand their roles and how to be successful, they are better able to self-motivate and self-regulate their work.

Once you have a clear vision of your culture, roles, and responsibilities, you will do a better job of hiring. You’ll have insight regarding which types of personalities are most likely to be a good fit with your environment, and you’ll be able to identify the work gaps that need to be filled with hiring and training.

Controlling

This pillar of management is about measuring performance relative to goals, discussing shortfalls, and identifying ways to improve performance or maintain and improve upon successes. Budgets, financial reports, productivity statistics, sales reports, turn reports, and customer satisfaction reports are examples of the Controls toolbox. This information isn’t just for managers to use though. When employees participate in analyzing performance and planning improvements, they are more committed and effective.

Leading

Leadership is a huge topic, but here is the CliffsNotes version: When you have a plan and a vision, and you share them so your employees can understand what they must do and what you can accomplish as a team, you are demonstrating good leadership.

Good leaders tie rewards to successes. In addition to compensation, recognition, opportunities for growth and learning, and respect are all rewards that good leaders use liberally. Not everyone requires a ping-pong table and free lunch to be happy, but nearly everyone responds positively to seeing how they are an important part of the big picture.

Leadership is about setting ethical standards and being a strong ethical role model. Companies that do good work in a good way cultivate pride and respect among their employees. Finally, when you model the behaviors we discussed in last month’s article along with the activities presented this month, you will be fulfilling your leadership role.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to do all these things tomorrow! Keep this article handy, take one of these management elements at a time, and work on it. Highlight each one as you accomplish it, even if it takes a few years to get through them all. The time is going to go by anyway, so you might as well become a better manager along the way.