Clearview® Performance Systems brings you ... ® ... a Culture of Results & Engagement®
Here's the next in our series of weekly managerial TIPS (Techniques, Insights, and Practical Solutions)
to help you better engage your team in the activities that lead to higher performance.
CORE Bites Issue #87
(August 11, 2020)
While our job descriptions might contain a very broad range of duties and activities that we—as managers—are responsible for, I'd like to cull that down to three simple words: We Manage Work. While it's easy to think that we manage people, what we're really managing are the activities people DO to accomplish the WORK that's been determined as important/necessary/critical to moving the organization forward.
But the more work there is to manage, the easier it is for stuff to slip through the cracks—especially now when many people are remote and/or not immediately accessible to stopping-by and checking-in. This 'slippage' frequently results in quality declines and delays in deliverables (which can have a cascading effect downstream).
In a humorous aphorism created to explain this slippage, Tom Cargill (Bell Labs), stated what has come to be known as the Ninety-Ninety Rule: "The first 90% of the [project] accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the [project] accounts for the other 90% of the development time." While we can chuckle at this mathematical aberration (180%), his wry allusion accurately epitomizes the extent to which many tasks, assignments, and projects end up being over-time and/or over-budget and/or under-quality.
Because most organizations are built on an interdependent philosophy where the work completed in one area is the pre-work needed in another, we can understand why there is such a strong emphasis on timely delivery of expected work. This is why, after many years observing managers in action, I believe effective management is the demonstrable ability to develop a fluid and dynamic work structure within a complex world, where the independent variables of time, cost, resources, and human behavior intersect.
To help you in this pursuit, this week's CORE Bites will cover in detail how to use our '1-10-Mid-90' (pronounced exactly the way it looks) system to achieve your managerial Ne Plus Ultra (the highest degree of accomplishment). If you don't want to be seen as a micro-manager BUT you do want your team to be habitually excellent in their deliverables, I think you'll find this system works extremely well and is adaptable enough to work for teams of all sizes, all configurations (physical and virtual), and all industries.
The 1-10-Mid-90 system enables you to get a lot more out of the time you spend with your team because the expectation-setting conversations ultimately deliver better outcomes. But now you need to work this method into the language of your organization. This week (starting today), look for projects and assignments where you can apply the following HVA cut-points:
I'd love to hear how these HVAs work for you!
Neil Dempster, PhD, MBA
RESULTant™ and Behavioral Engineer
"Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things."
— Peter Drucker —