Copy Righted Articles

Many people believe that to be a good manager you have to give orders to the people below you. They are wrong. You do not have to give orders. In fact, you should not give orders.

Don’t give orders
When you give orders, you tell someone to do something. “Put that file on my desk”, is an order. So is, “put Roger on the late shift”. When you give an order, you do not allow the other person any latitude to think about what to do or how to do it. All they can do to satisfy your order is exactly what you ordered. There are two reasons why this is bad. First, you do not allow the person to figure out the best way to do the task. Second, you do not let them learn.Sometimes it is appropriate to give orders. In the military, there are times when a leader has to give orders. When you tell a squad to “charge that hill” you don’t want them to think about it. You just want it done. However, even in the military, leaders don’t give orders unless they have to. Instead of giving orders and telling someone what to do, good managers give instructions. Instead of telling them what to do, you tell them what you want done.

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Every morning, it seems, you read an article in the paper about layoffs at another company. Those layoffs are hard on the people who get laid off, but they are also just as hard on the people left behind. There is more work to be done and fewer people to do it. There is the lingering fear that more layoffs might happen or that the company might close altogether. Here’s what you need to know to survive in this business climate, both as a manager and as an employee.

As an employee
Your employer believes that you are good at what you do. You are valuable to the company and its plans for the future. That’s why they kept you and not someone else. They believe you are capable of producing more, or better, work than others. To survive in this climate every employee must look out for the Company’s interest as well as there own.

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How can I tell if my best employees are getting ready to leave?
Why would they want to leave?
How can I keep them?

Top 10 Clues Your Best Employees are Leaving

• They start dressing better
• They take lunches at different times
• Their production drops off
• They seem “quiet” or “down”
• They request vacation one day at a time
• They are “sick” more often
• They stop championing their positions
• They stop volunteering
• They get more incoming phone calls than usual
• They ask you for a reference

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Many companies have done away with “sick leave” and “vacation” as employee benefits and have replaced them with “paid time off” (PTO).While this looks good on the surface, it can be a costly mistake.

What is Paid Time Off PTO
Paid time off is a bank of hours from which employees can draw. Employers credit additional hours to their employeess “banks”, usually every pay period. Most US employers offer their workers 10 paid holidays, 2 weeks vacation, two personal days, and 8 sick leave days per year. Under a PTO plan, the employees would be credited with 30 days paid time off instead (10+10+2+8).On a bi-weekly pay schedule (26 pay periods per year) employees would accrue an additional 1.3 days of PTO every two weeks. Where a semi-monthly pay schedule is used (pay days on the 1st and 15th of each month) employees accrue 1.25 days PTO on each of the 24 pay periods.

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Managing change means managing people’s fear. Change is natural and good, but people’s reaction to change is unpredictable and irrational. It can be managed if done right.

Change
Nothing is as upsetting to your people as change. Nothing has greater potential to cause failures, loss of production, or falling quality. Yet nothing is as important to the survival of your organization as change. History is full of examples of organizations that failed to change and that are now extinct. The secret to successfully managing change, from the perspective of the employees, is definition and understanding.Resistance to change comes from a fear of the unknown or an expectation of loss. The front-end of an individual’s resistance to change is how they perceive the change. The back-end is how well they are equipped to deal with the change they expect.

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Cross training is training an employee to do a different part of the organization’s work. Training worker A to do the task that worker B does and training B to do A’s task is cross training. Cross training is good for managers, because it provides more flexibility in managing the workforce to get the job done. However, done right, cross training is good for the employees too. It lets them learn new skills, makes them more valuable, and can combat worker boredom.

Cross Training
Cross training can be used in almost any position in almost any industry. My first cross training experience as a consultant was convincing a Customer Service Manager that some of the 13 Customer Service Reps (CSR) who handled telephone enquiries could be cross trained to handle walk-in customers as well. By using staggered lunch hours, she was able to have the telephone CSRs provide lunch relief for the walk-in CSRs and didn’t need to hire the additional person she thought she needed.I cross trained some of my design engineers to go on field installation trips and get first hand knowledge of how their designs worked, or didn’t work, in the field.

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There never seems to be enough time during the day to get everything done. You can’t spare people to go to training because there is so much work to be done, but you also can’t neglect their training and development. Lunch and Learn is a way to get more training done by making the lunch hour multi-tasking.

What Is Lunch and Learn?
At its simplest, a lunch and learn program is a training event scheduled during the lunch hour. Employees who attend bring their lunches and eat them during the training session. The training is usually less formal and less structured than normal.Typical Lunch and Learn programs include:

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Leslie Kossoff is a management consultant and author with an outstanding reputation as an invited speaker at professional and educational conferences. Her second management book, “Executive Thinking: The Dream, The Vision, The Mission Achieved”, was selected as one of the Top Ten Books of 1999 by Tom Brown’s Management General, the “New Ideas” Webzine.

Tom (MG) and I (MGT) spoke with Leslie (LK) about her book and how it can change your company, your outlook, and your life.

MGT Leslie, why this topic? What message did you want to get out?

LK As you may know, I started in the world of Total Quality - before it had that name. For all the successes - and failures - I saw, there always seemed to be something missing. Even when I worked and spoke with Deming, we were always looking for that secret key that somehow kept eluding everyone. Eventually, I realized that it was the executive thinking part of it.

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What is management? What do managers do? How do I manage?

These are standard questions that most of us in the management profession have been asked more than once. And questions we asked once in our careers too. Here, then, is a basic look at management, a primer, Management 101 from my perspective.

Art and Science
Management is both art and science. It is the art of making people more effective than they would have been without you. The science is in how you do that. There are four basic pillars: plan, organize, direct, and monitor.

Make Them More Effective
Four workers can make 6 units in an eight-hour shift without a manager. If I hire you to manage them and they still make 6 units a day, what is the benefit to my business of having hired you? On the other hand, if they now make 8 units per day, you, the manager, have value.

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Pay for Performance
According to Business Week, the average CEO of a major corporation made 42 times the average hourly worker’s pay in 1980. By 1990 that had almost doubled to 85 times. In 2000, the average CEO salary reached an unbelievable 531 times that of the average hourly worker.

“Pay for performance”, tying executive compensation to the financial success of their company, has become very popular in the past decade. In the face of the largest bull market ever, that isn’t surprising. It also isn’t realistic. What CEO honestly believes that all or most of the appreciation in value of their company is due to their own talent?

ZD Net’s Total Compensation Vs. Total Return To Shareholders chart (no longer online), shows that total return to shareholders was higher for many companies whose CEO compensation was under $500,000 than for companies who paid their CEOs multi-million dollar compensation.

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