Business Mentor Weekly #44 • Establish Management Tasks

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and
don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Implement This Principle: Tasks should be established by the manager
which lead to the accomplishment of his or her objective, the closer
the manager is to either the worker or the work, the more granular the
task description and the number of tasks should be.

To Get These Results: Accomplishing tasks which are aimed at
achieving objectives provides a roadmap to accomplishing objectives in
a systematic manner and removes waste from the process.

Thoughts to Ponder: Before creating a task to achieve an objective,
first outline the required outcomes, then write a task that will
achieve the outcomes as you stated. Remember, you are not looking for
activity, you are looking for results. Washing a dish is an activity,
making sure that a dish is clear of any foreign matter is an outcome
or result. It is not the responsibility of the manager to create tasks
for subordinates, only to refine them. It is the manager’s
responsibility to assure the subordinate has everything he or she
needs to create effective and efficient tasks which will assist them
in meeting the objectives which they also created for themselves. The
manager’s responsibility is to assist workers in understanding what
the required outcomes are in the form of objectives which he or she
collaborated on with the worker.

Take Action: When creating a task for yourself, measure quality of
the task against its ability to achieve your stated objective while
staying within the context of the strategy you established for the
objective. Assure all tasks remove variation and waste from the
process, are time bound, measureable and have standards which the
outcomes must perform to. More on standards next week.

Next Week’s Topic: Establish Task Standards

Business Mentor Weekly #45 • Establish Task Standards

“The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for
themselves.” ~ Ray Kroc

Implement This Principle: Every task preformed in the organization
must have standards which guide the quality of the work being
accomplished. The closer the task is the worker or the work, the more
granular the standards must be.

To Get These Results: Standards allow flexibility in that they
provide principles and concepts so tasks can be accomplished in a
framework where knowledge workers talents and strengths are
encouraged.

Thoughts to Ponder: Objectives, tasks and standards assure you are
doing the right things the right way. Once they are in place, you can
work on the problem, not in the problem. If something is not working,
you will spot the problem in the way the objective was conceived, the
way the task is written, or the way the standard was developed. You
might find people are not working the tasks to standard, in which case
you know what to do, coach, retrain or get the right person on the
bus. When things are running smoothly, your people have what they need
to do their job; you have more time on your hands to build your
company.

Take Action: Standards are prepared by the manager or worker who has
to perform the task. Create standards for every task you routinely
accomplish, include these standards in your departmental Standard
Operating Procedures.

Collaboratively review standards with your direct reports assuring
what they believe is the standard and what you believe is the standard
intersects; not the way to accomplish the task, not the activities,
but the outcome standard. What you are looking for is the correct
outcome, not how people get there. The amount of time it takes to
accomplish the task (one of the standards) is something you should
also assure is correct.

Next Week’s Topic: Establish Management Metrics

Business Mentor Weekly #46 • Establish Management Metrics

“Unmet expectations are the root cause of all disappointments in
life.” ~ Unknown

Implement This Principle: Fine tune planning, preparation,
objectives, tasks and standards through the development of metrics (or
Key Performance Indicators) which monitor objectives, measure task
effectiveness and how well workers meet standards.

To Get These Results: All knowledge workers know what is expected,
what the right results are, how to achieve and measure them. Knowing
how they are measured puts employees in a position to produce the
outcomes expected of them.

Thoughts to Ponder: If unmet expectations are the root cause of all
disappointments in life, not setting standards for work performed is a
setup for disappointment. If you, your associates and your direct
reports do not have a firm grasp on what is expected, they will
disappoint. The root cause of the disappointment is your failure to
assure the standard was understood, not the person failing to meet
expectation.

Take Action: Standards are created to establish the results you
expect, not activities but results. Metrics are created to report on
whether or not standards are being met, without metrics, or key
performance indicators as they are often referred to, standards are
useless.

Next Week’s Topic: Develop Metric Feedback System

Business Mentor Weekly #47 • Develop Metric Feedback System

Once you start measuring something, you can easily end up in a
situation where the measurement itself starts influencing the things
you want to measure. ~ unknown

Implement This Principle: Metrics are of no use without a feedback
system which is embedded into you businesses day to day processes. All
tasks should spawn input into the metric system and a feedback loop
should report actual to anticipated results.

To Get These Results: Ever increasing growth in revenue and reduction
in expenses as management removes waste, refines objectives, tasks,
standards and retrains employees.

Thoughts to Ponder: In order to effectively make informed business
decisions, individuals must have access to relevant information. KPIs
and metrics aid individuals with assessing performance, identifying
activities or events that are of concern and focusing resources on
those activities that require attention. ~ Jonathan Wu

Metrics or Key Performance Indicators as they are often referred to,
have an additional benefit often overlooked in the conversation, which
is the process of developing the metrics themselves. What you don’t
know is often more important than what you know, in the area of
metrics this is especially true. The process of developing metrics is
particularly revealing in that it helps identify issues in the
processes themselves as well as identify things you are doing that are
not measureable. If you are doing things that are not measurable, they
are questionable. Do not establish objectives or tasks you cannot
measure, something that subjective is open to all sorts of waste.

Take Action: Identify methods of measuring whether or not objectives
are being met and whether or not standards are being met. Collect this
information in a spreadsheet and create graphic charts that measure
planned to actual, and historical to current trends. Use the results
as a dashboard you can review at regular intervals to assure you are
on track and to establish initiatives you might require to bring the
numbers into compliance with your stated targets.

Next Week’s Topic: Implement Coaching Program