Management Secrets by Mary Elston

Two Minute Management Video Tip — Plot Your Management MAP

My sister came into town for a visit last weekend and while driving to the airport to pick her up I ran into a nasty traffic jam. As far as I could crane my neck, cars, trucks and SUVs were stuck in hopeless grid lock. Never fear, cell phones are here. I popped up the navigation app, quickly mapped out a new route, bolted at the next exit and made my way around the entire mess. Slick! Cut my delay in half.

As a manager, no matter how well you map things out your plans may become snarled. Just as traffic may slow to a crawl on the highway, business continues to hit the brakes due to the long term recession. With this in mind, you may be posing the question: “Now what?” What should you be doing and how should you be managing your group to extend your staying power and fortify your business success until the market turns around? You should be plotting and upgrading another kind of map — your management “MAP.” This means toning and clarifying how you manage, monitor and maximize these essential management resources: Money, Assets, and People. For the next few weeks I’ll be sharing ways you can take a fresh look at your management MAP.

Maps efficiently show you how to get from one place to another. The same is true for your management MAP. Great managers are constantly taking the pulse of what’s keeping their business strong and closely watching their management MAP. Consistently well-managed Money, Assets and People will generate a well balanced balance sheet. Several months ago I was chatting with a college professor who teaches entrepreneurial business skills. A comment she made echoed this thought and stuck with me; she said: “I love recessions because businesses who survive are those who know what they’re doing verses those who’ve been relying on luck.” She likes to see businesses apply management skills and good planning to weather tough times and emerge even more successful. Building or upgrading your management MAP will help you do this; put good business practices into play and regularly check and update those practices as the market changes.

M is for Money
How’s your business bank account or team budget looking these days? Here’s where the smart manager stands tall and says: “We’re looking pretty good.” No doubt they were looking pretty good before the recession too. If you’re not able to say this about the Money portion of your management MAP you may be nervously reaching for a drink. Always staying in good fiscal shape — keeping expenses and costs low while judiciously watching inventory, payroll and general spending – is good business and essential for survival in punk markets. We all know this doesn’t happen by chance. It takes deliberate, ongoing financial discipline and planning during both robust and rocky times.

How often do you take a long term, hard look at the Money portion of your MAP beyond the cursory – “Uh, yeah, we can make payroll this month”? Grab extra time and check improvements you can make in how you manage short term and long term money, accounting practices and processes, and everything else feeding dollars into and sucking bucks out of the budget in receivables, payables, checking and savings accounts and investments. If you can’t respond to the bank account question by saying, “we’re in pretty good shape,” start plotting the course for how you’ll get there. For all managers who haven’t done it lately, rebalance and chart an updated plan for the Money in your MAP now. Play with the numbers and look for improvements staring you in the face or hidden behind a value you haven’t picked apart in a while.

In light of the soft market, what changes can you make to improve the Money portion of your management MAP? Anything other than spending less and saving more? What monthly, automated purchase can you reduce or stop making and easily live without? What can you add to the budget to make you and your team more productive? Let me know what’s unique about your money management and how you’re doing! In my next installment we’ll take on the “A” in your MAP – Assets. What’s included? We’ll talk it about it in a couple of weeks! *

*excerpted in part and reprinted from Mary Elston management column with permission from Soundings Publications, LLC.

We all know networking with other professionals is how you get the real dirt on everything; particularly topics central to our latest management discussion: What helps make a great manager thrive and where can these standout managers be found? With this blog series, I’ve been focusing on three thresholds which must be crossed for managers to reach a high caliber level of supervisory skill. While networking I learn with lightening fast precision who are the best companies to do business with, the best contacts to engage and the best managers to work for. Positive reputations precede great managers and this plays directly into the importance of our three thresholds.

In my most recent blog entries in this series we covered the first two thresholds thriving managers must step through: communicate and enable. Thriving managers communicate consistently, openly, honestly, accurately and regularly. Thriving managers also enable their teams with budget, resources and decision making authority. See the details for “communicate” and “enable” in the blog installments immediately listed below this one. We’re ready to cross the third threshold for thriving managers: support.

If you are managing people right now, are you actively supporting them? If you answered “yes” to this question, would your employees agree? Funny how this can be a sticking point! As a manager, what you may perceive to be supportive may not be the support your team needs or wants. Let’s take a look at what the thriving, supportive manager should be doing to support their team and – in effect – be their cheerleader.

Remember the core of management is managing people. Not telling people what to do. The distinction is significant. A great manager has authority over their team but they are not ordering them around in a dictatorial fashion. To the other extreme, they do not leave them dangling in the wind without guidance or support either. There’s the word again for our third threshold – support. Providing support as a manager includes three P’s: protect, promote, progress.

A supportive manager “protects” his or her team’s interests across the business with others who are both internal and external to the organization. Protecting team interests means buffering them from political pitfalls, making sure they have key information to maneuver around organizational minefields and smoothing the path to productivity by making connections to the right people on their behalf. A politically aware manager should provide this kind of support to employees as a given, but many managers fail to protect their team’s interest – they simply miss this task. When you support your team by protecting their interests you help make both yourself and the entire team successful; a good idea for everyone.

Next, when we discuss the supportive manager who “promotes” their employees we are talking about recognition and rewards and promoting positive team visibility. Supportive managers promote their team by assuring others below and above them hear about the team’s great work. They don’t bad mouth their team to others no matter what the issue; there is a constant supportive demeanor the manager exudes when discussing his group. He is also eager to give recognition, rewards and promotions as earned and appropriate, without being overly gushy or patronizing. In short, the supportive manager promotes the team by being their primary and ongoing advocate.

Finally, the supportive manager who “progresses” their team helps them hit high performance levels with access to training and tools. He provides coaching and other feedback needed to meet and exceed success metrics. He is willing to mentor and help his team advance their careers. This part of being a supportive manager can be challenging for some supervisors. Selected managers aren’t interested in helping others advance; they figure it takes too much time and they’ll have to find a replacement for the person who moves on. As you may have guessed, this is short sighted. If an employee is ready to progress to another role it is anti-productive to hold them back in a job where they are bored and distracted due to lack of interest.

When it comes to being supportive you can readily see how managerial actions which protect, promote and progress the team are part of becoming a thriving manager for whom employees enjoy working.

Congratulations! You have now made your way across all three thresholds which make managers thrive: communicate, enable and support. As a manager, which of these thresholds are you crossing as you guide your team? Which doorways have you yet to step through and need to begin navigating? Ask a trusted friend how they perceive your success at consistently crossing the three management thresholds. And yes – get input from your employees. Find out what they need and what’s missing. Take their feedback and slot it into what’s needed for you to pass through the three thresholds — communicate, enable, support — then make adjustments. You’ll soon be a manager who has improved your ability to thrive!

Let me know what you are doing lately to thrive as a great manager; it’s a pleasure to receive your comments. Join me again in a couple weeks for a new management secrets series. See you then ….

When we connected a couple of weeks ago I began talking about Three Thresholds that Make Managers Thrive. What are they? How do they work? Why do managers who have crossed these thresholds tend to thrive? With a large percentage of today’s workers reported to be unhappy in their jobs, doesn’t it make sense to apply great management skills to help retain and motivate your high caliber employees? You bet it does! There are many factors contributing to employee satisfaction and productivity and being a high quality manager is always high on the list. Managers crossing these thresholds also thrive because these leadership characteristics generate an atmosphere of team spirit, reciprocity and an ongoing group bond for achieving common goals. Here are the three thresholds once more: communicate, enable, support.

With my last blog entry we ventured into the first threshold that must be crossed to become and consistently behave as a thriving manager – communication. Thriving managers communicate openly, regularly, accurately. For more detail, take a look at the complete text of this archived blog posting below. With this blog entry we’re ready to cross the second threshold for thriving managers: enable. Why should you worry about being a manager who enables his or her team and what does “enable” mean? Since you are a manager who hires experienced and capable professionals, what additional enabling is needed? Simply stated, you need to provide the kind of enabling that helps people do their work. Peter Drucker, the business strategist once said: “A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.” A manager who “enables” is actively applying this concept.

Thriving managers enable their team by giving them core “enablers”; namely budget, resources and decision making authority. In other words, managers who have crossed the “enable” threshold recognize they need to empower their employees in order to help them and let them succeed. We all know what this means, don’t we? But wait a minute … are you the kind of manager who is looking the other way when enabling constraints appear? Sounds so basic you may not feel the need to keep reading – but stay with me! This is an area mediocre managers often put on auto pilot. For great managers, enabling your team must be deliberate, ongoing and well nourished with good intentions. Let’s go through each enabling piece now.

Enabling your team with budget means giving them money they need to spend to get things done …such as buying the customer dinner, spending money on advertising, producing marketing materials or updating web features. I have heard many companies complain employees aren’t producing enough new business yet high level executives have stripped manager’s sales and marketing budgets down to a nub. Providing budget must be part of enabling or expectations must be adjusted accordingly when budget is not available.

Resources and efficient processes are likewise core to enabling. Providing laptops, cell phones, ready access to office supplies and the like are part of employee enablement for the thriving manager and his thriving team. Especially in today’s virtual office environments, when processes for acquiring office materials, submitting expense accounts or other repeatable processes are difficult to execute, the clunky processes hold back employee productivity and, at the extreme, create work avoidance. The manager who has crossed the enabling threshold provides resources and helps minimize frustrating process issues; thus maximizing productive output.

A thriving manager will also enable his or her team to the fullest by providing decision making authority. Organizations with decision making bottle necks waste time and money and hinder revenue gains. I was in a local home improvement store several days ago and found a large error on my receipt. The clerk indicated he needed to call the manager to get approval to provide a refund for the error. The manager came over, provided approval and then told the clerk he could have approved the refund himself (the clerk didn’t need to ask for management approval). The manager then learned the clerk didn’t know he had the ability to make the refund decision on his own and also learned the clerk did not know how to execute the refund process. Yet another person had to be called to perform the refund transaction.

Clunky decision making and poor process were apparent on several levels causing poor customer service. This was a manager who inadvertently had not properly enabled his team by not providing proper training or, if training was provided, it had not been validated correct decision making authority was being applied. Several other gaps could have contributed to this problem as well. In this case, the manager did provide decision making authority but it wasn’t being practiced. As a manager, I’m sure you recognize this is one of many daily frustrations that may pop up and must be corrected. Managers who work to enable their employees don’t always experience a slam dunk and often face complications like this along the way!

Now you have a good handle on the second threshold for thriving as a manager, enable. Enabling includes being a manager who provides budget, resources and decision making authority. In so doing, your managerial enabling helps employees perform. I’m certain you can think of many additional specifics to slot under each of these broad categories. With my next blog installment we’ll cover the third threshold – support. What do you think is involved? You probably guessed it’s not about being a “yes” manager. You’re right — it’s much more! Check in next time to learn the details. See you then …..