Business Coaching for Owners & Managers of Small Businesses

I receive a regular email titled, “Management Intelligence…… from Edward de Bono and Robert Heller”^[[1]] . Their most recent email was “Management Intelligence: A proven checklist for business success”. Here is the checklist they provided:

“DO YOU…

1. IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies continuously?
2. THINK simply and directly about what you are doing and why?
3. BEHAVE towards others as you wish them to behave towards you?
4. EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?
5. CONCENTRATE on what you do well?
6. ASK questions ceaselessly about performance, markets and objectives?
7. MAKE MONEY- knowing that, if you don’t, you can’t make anything else?
8. ECONOMISE always seeking Limo (Least Input for Most Output)?
9. FLATTEN the organisation to spread authority and responsibility?
10. ADMIT to your own failings and shortcomings and correct them?
11. SHARE the benefits of success with all those who helped to achieve it?
12. TIGHTEN up the organisation wherever and whenever you can because familiarity breeds slackness?
13. ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?
14. SERVE your customers with all their requirements to standards of perceived excellence in quality?
15. TRANSFORM performance by innovating creatively in products and processes including the processes of management?

Again from this email concerning this list: “These questions penetrate to the heart of successful management. They have passed, and will pass, the test of time.

This list looks a lot like others I have seen, and certainly many entries would be on such a list that I might create. But, whenever I see lists like this, I say to myself, “Great, but how do I do this?” Lets just take number 15, for example,  “Transform performance by innovating….”. What business processes do I put in place that assure that these results are regularly and sustainably produced? Or, what approaches and tools do I deploy to achieve number 8, “Economize…” ? Again, are there tools and approaches available that assure the we meet number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimize their individual and group contribution?”

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1. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/ [↩]

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Be a More Effective Manager – stop answering those questions, seize your time, and it’s your fault

 

 Three Steps to Be a More Effective Manager [14:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (116)

I have not read Tim Brown’s book Change By Design, but this TED talk strikes me as very valuable in itself. I look forward to reading the book which has just been published. The focus on involving end users, rapid prototyping, systems thinking resonates for me. Lean practitioners will find much in common here. It is great to hear a designer talk forthrightly about the ephemeral nature of most design efforts and even alluding to how much design is gratuitous design.

Become a More Effective Manager – Three Counter-Intuitive Steps

In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too much study, too much thinking, too much integration of the many many skills and aptitudes required to become more effective. In both strategy and management skills action is almost always preferable to another round of study. Action bumps you up against the real world and provides the real basis for improving skills and results.

But, that still leaves us with the nagging question as a manager, especially for rookie managers and supervisors, how do I get started?

Based on many years of personal work as a manager and many years coaching managers, here are three steps you can take that will get you into action and guarantee striking results. These results will come in your personal effectiveness and in of the results of the organization you manage.  Remember,  by results, I am referring to the three meanings Drucker defined: (1) direct business results (usually measured in $s); (2) improved organizational culture (values); and (3) development of people.^[[1]]

1. Stop Answering Questions

If most managers could listen to themselves, the proverbial fly on the wall, for just a few hours, they would discover that they are chronically enabling dependency all around them and undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place. How is this happening? Just listen and you will hear a stream of questions coming at them followed by answers in response. You are enabling the following the reflexive pattern: ask the expert and be rewarded with answers. Ask the boss, get an answer, and be safe from responsibility for the answers.

If you want to get people to take responsibility and be involved in the business, you can’t go on answering all these questions. They will just go on asking whether they need to or not. And, you are spending an enormous amount of your time, your most valuable resource, to answering all of these questions.

What should a manager do to break this pattern?

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1. see Chapter 2 – What Can I Contribute? in his book The Effective Executive [↩]

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Learning to be an effective manager is almost entirely a self-guided learning enterprise. Almost no business schools even approach the topic despite the hundreds of courses they offer on almost every functional aspect of management^[[1]]

Recently I was speaking with the owner of a financial services firm. She has 15 people in her organization which is now almost 18 years old. By any measure a successful firm.

She told me about one person who has been with the firm for eight years. The owner described this person as the most professional and reliable person in the organization. She performs all sorts of important customer-facing activities flawlessly. This employee is a key person in the organization. The owner went on to tell me about a recent conversation she had with this key person who confided that she did not want to be just an “insurance geek”. She was emphatic about this. The owner told me that this statement jived with other comments this person had made recently. She believed her and felt that her days are numbered.

The owner then went on to describe how she had begun to put together a job manual for all of the key tasks now under the wing of the key employee. This seemed to me to be just the right step. First, the key employee was cooperating in constructing the job manual. This is a great sign of continuing good faith. Second, the owner is testing out the manual to be sure that it really will be a solid platform for training a replacement.

Put your Founders’ Agreement in place before the inevitable business conflicts arise.

This podcast is 2 minutes 51 seconds long. The text is available here.

Just this morning I heard another tale of woe from a business owner who is now entering into legal disputes because a partner is getting divorced. The business is ten years old, healthy, in fact, holds a strong position in a niche market. But, now the business will be sold or broken into pieces. Several lawyers are also enjoying a feast of fees. 

All of this points back to a fundamental of business formation and business planning – the need for “what if” agreements among the owners.

What if someone dies, becomes disabled, divorced, married, wants to leave the business? How are new partners added? Can a founder be fired? Who owns what and in what form? How will disputes be settled? And, the list of “what ifs” goes on.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I learned something quite startling.

The age-old problem of rolls of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and other rolled goods jumping out of the box when you are dispensing them was actually solved years ago by a clever packaging engineer.

My sister-in-law, Meredith Morgan, an award winning chemistry teacher at Governor Livingston HS in Berkeley Heights NJ, learned this from her students one day when she was fumbling around in front of a class with a roll of aluminum foil.

“Dr. Morgan, don’t you know about the little tabs your press in on the ends of the box?”

She didn’t. But she learns quickly. Meredith was so impressed by this innovation that she demonstrated it to me on every box of foil, plastic wrap, and wax paper in the kitchen.

Now, you might ask, “What does this have to do with my business?”

Last week I ran into a little book (it really is little, 135 pages in a 5″ x 7″ format – very easy on the hand and eye), The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done by David Crenshaw (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco 2008).

The initial chapters take up the question of humans as multitaskers. For those who need to be reassured that the common sense answer to this question is, in this case, more than common, that it really is the sensical answer, take the time to follow the narrative. Yes, this is one of those business books written as a story. In most regards I have come to think of the first such approach that I know of to writing a business book in a narrative story format, The Goal: a process of ongoing improvement, by Goldratt, wishing it had been the last. But, I digress.