You may be able to say, “My boss wants me to focus in these areas,” but that's not enough. You can't quantify what is expected of you.
About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals, in numbers and percentages: “Higher than 92 percent call quality each week”; “Achieve 1.6 MM in sales”; “Maintain gross margins above 38 percent”; “Reduce shipping losses by 2.7 percent cumulatively year over year.” (If not having these kinds of goals frustrates or worries you, perhaps you think that everyone else has clear goals. But don't worry. They probably don't either.)
The problem with not having clearly delineated responsibilities is that you can't make intelligent choices about where to focus. You begin to feel that “everything is important.” You begin to “try to get everything done.” Of course, you can't, and you probably know that already, because you're working long hours and never get everything done. You're not alone.
If you can't list your goals almost off the top of your head, make a note somewhere to go to your boss in the near future. Ask her: “What results do you expect of me?” “What are the measures you're going to compare me against?” “What are the objective standards?” “What subjective things do you look at to round out your evaluation of me?” (If you want to know more details about how to have this conversation, go to There's a Cast for That™.)
Take notes, and go back to your desk and figure out what actions you're going to take in order to deliver those results.
A lot of managers fear this conversation. The thinking goes, “If there are no measures, they can't use them against me.” But that type of thinking is shortsighted. There are always measures. If you don't know what they are, they may be being used against you. Your boss is privately and subjectively evaluating you.
Okay, so results come first. Managers who produce great results have more successful careers than those who produce average results. But even reading this statement probably bothers you a little, because you've likely met at least one manager who gets great results and does well whom you despise. There are managers who put results so far ahead of everything else that they justify all sorts of behaviors to achieve those results. There are even industries – Wall Street comes to mind – that are more likely to tolerate this kind of behavior from managers. When the ends justify the means for managers, bad things happen to the workers who report to them.
A focus only on results far too often leads to abuse of workers. The worldwide labor movement – unions – traces its beginnings to soon after the beginning of…management. Managers were told, “Just get results,” and they did so, at the expense of the health and safety of their employees. So, fairly soon, the workers joined forces.
Your Second Responsibility as a Manager Is to Retain Your People
Effectively managed modern organizations now measure retention in addition to results when they are evaluating a manager. It's intended to be a brake against an unrelenting results focus. They want to ensure that a manager's team members don't leave the organization.
Replacing employees is expensive. When someone leaves, there's the lost work that had been planned for, the cost of interviewing in both money and time, the likely higher salary that will be paid in the event of replacement, the time and expense of training the new employee, and the cost of less productivity by the new employee until that person can match the quality and quantity of work of the person who has left.
For today's manager, it's not enough to get results.
The Definition of an Effective Manager Is One Who Gets Results and Keeps Her People
In the best companies in the world, when executives get together to review the talent of their managers, the results and retention of managers are always at the heart of the discussion. When there's a discussion about who is best, who deserves a promotion, and who is “ready now” or going to be “ready next,” these two metrics come up over and over again: How well did this manager do her job, as shown in her results? Did she retain her people?
If you want to be an effective manager and if you want to maximize your job security (and, I would argue, your professional satisfaction), you've got to achieve these two metrics. You've got to know how your organization (for results, it's usually your boss) measures them, and you've got to choose to spend your time on things that achieve them.
What are the things that you can DO that are most likely to achieve them?
2
THE FOUR CRITICAL BEHAVIORS
[Author's Note: If you don't want to learn the fundamental principles that underlie my recommendations, and you think you're ready to dive right in to what to do and how to do it, you can skip this chapter and the next one, and go directly to Chapter 4, “Know Your People – One On Ones.” I don't recommend it, but if you're impatient to get going, go.]
When my Manager Tools cofounder Mike Auzenne and I started our management careers, we had been taught very little about managing others. We struggled to learn what to do and how to do it, probably just the way you have struggled, and are doing so now. We didn't know that there are basically four things that great managers do a lot better than average and poor managers do. Once we understood these four things, we decided to start Manager Tools so that managers wouldn't have to learn the hard way, as we did.
The four critical behaviors that an effective manager engages in to produce results and retain team members are the following:
1. Get to Know Your People.
2. Communicate about Performance.
3. Ask for More.
4. Push Work Down.
Managers who get results and keep their people almost always do these four things much better than other managers do. (I say, “almost always” because there are exceptions. If you're incredibly smart – on the level of a Bill Gates, Andy Bechtolsheim, Warren Buffett, or Mike Morrisroe – you can probably get by just being smarter than everyone else. But, hey, you're probably not that smart. Mike and I sure aren't.)
The First Critical Behavior: Get to Know Your People
All of our data over the years show that the single most important (and efficient) thing that you can do as a manager to improve your performance and increase retention is to spend time getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of your direct reports. Managers who know how to get the most out of each individual member of the team achieve noticeably better results than managers who don't. The most efficient way to get to know your team is to spend time regularly communicating with them.
Despite the fact that your primary responsibility is getting results, the most important thing you can do isn't strategizing, task assignment, resource planning, or priority analysis. It's getting to know the people who have the skills and who are going to get the work done.
For the record, a manager can increase performance in the short term very effectively by using the power of his or her role as manager and threatening – and expecting – compliance. But if retention is thrown in as a required goal, that technique quickly sours.
Our data over the years suggest that, generally, a manager who knows his or her team members one standard deviation better than the average manager produces results that are two standard deviations better
