One of the biggest frustrations for any business owner is when an employee doesn't perform to your expectations. The higher level the employee, the worse it gets. The root cause it often a mismatch between our expectations and their performance. I found the "LADDER OF LEADERSHIP" is a great tool to help codify our expectations and improve their performance.

 Delegate Don't Abdicate

I see too many business owners who just want to set it and forget it as Ron Popeil would say. But your employees are not a Rotisserie BBQ. Your job as CEO is to coordinate the output from everybody else like the conductor of the orchestra.

 The Ladder of Leadership

	Employee says	Manager says
7	I've been DOING …	What have you been DOING …
6	I Just DID ...	What did you DO …
5	I INTEND ...	What do you INTEND …
4	I would LIKE to …	What would you LIKE …
3	Here's what I THINK ...	What do you THINK …
2	Here's what I SEE …	What do you SEE …
1	Tell me what to DO …	I'll tell you what to DO …

I'm on a bit of a rant. But this is important. And I put it in the category of "Management" because as a manager, it's your job to devise and enforce communication standards in your company. Do this and it will be obnoxious at first but it will pay off.

Email is not normal communication so it needs different rules.

Rule #1 - Only one topic per email

If I have 3 different things to talk to you about I'll send you 3 different emails. One for each topic. If I ramble and think as I write, I need to edit before I send and make each one a different topic.

Not doing this is LAZY and disrespectful of your time and attention.

Rule #2 - Subject Line MUST be useful

Both rules work together. But rule number 2 means:

• Every email must have a subject
• The subject must say what the topic is
• The subject should say what I want you to do with this

Some examples:

Monday's meeting notes - for your files

Monday's meeting notes - please comment by Friday

Question about Monday's meeting

You see what I did there? Just by reading the subject you know what to do with the email. 

Even better if you can communicate your whole thought in just the subject line. Remember when twitter was only 140 characters? Think like that and see how powerful your subject line can be.

There are other rules

There are lots of other rules for good emails, but those two are the most important. If you're a real glutton for punishment, here are two more. 

Never ask for a meeting or to reschedule a meeting without including a date AND time that works for you. Maybe include more than one and let the recipient choose. But never say "Can we reschedule to next week?"

Use EOF - Those three letters stand for END OF FILE and if your message is short enough to put entirely in the subject line, by ending with EOF I know I don't have to open the email. Example: Monday's meeting has moved to 2PM - EOF This is an advance technique and required enough people to understand what it means to be useful. 

</End of Rant>

OK one more thing. I noticed I made most of the examples about meetings - email is the least efficient way to schedule meetings. Use Doodle.com for a group or YouCanBook.me to let one other person book with you (it's better than Calendly). 

Picture Source: stephen-phillips-hostreviews-co-uk-3Mhgvrk4tjM-unsplash.jpg

First let's define management. 

MANAGEMENT is getting work done through other people.

There are two parts to that - the work and the people. A great manager melds those two together to produce an amazing outcome. The work is done better and, perhaps more importantly, the people grow and improve.

We're going to look at three reasons that management is hard through the lens of those two things: work and people.

First Reason: It's not your full-time job.

Most people who run companies of under 100 employees - especially founders, have work they need to do themselves, on top of all the work they need to get done through the people on their teams. So you may be tempted to feel like managing people is a distraction from your "real job."

This is a mistake. If you want to grow your company, your real job is to organize your company so that everything is done by people who do it better than you could. Except for what you do best. That takes care of the work. The people aspect is simply to tell people what you're doing. Explain the times you are available to help them and the times you're not. Be sure to explain why.

Use the Time Blocking Tool

The best tool you can use to help with this is time blocking. Set aside time for the work you produce yourself and a different time for management. Structure each in an organized fashion. Be sure to leave some white space in your schedule. Stuff happens and you need the flexibility to deal with it.

Second Reason: You're Afraid of Micromanaging

We have this idea that if we hire good people and leave them alone, they'll figure it out. Maybe this came from Jim Collins who said the most important thing is to get the right people on the bus. Maybe it came from Peter Drucker. He's the guy who coined the term knowledge worker and said, “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail, he must direct himself.” (In Drucker’s world, workers were always men. He published this in 1967).

We know this idea doesn't work in the physical world. Imagine getting some carpenters and plumbers and electricians all together and saying “I want you to figure out how to build this house. We don't have any blueprints, but I have a picture of what it's supposed to look like from this magazine. Also, I'm not doing any scheduling because you're smart and I’m sure you'll figure it out.” It doesn't make any sense. In order for very smart people to work as a unit they need the support of management to define things like what their output should look like, how it should integrate with other people doing their work, and to provide them a schedule, and specifications of parts and inputs that they need to do good work.

However, in knowledge work we somehow think if we put those pieces in place we'll be accused of micromanaging. As a result, people show up to work and when they need some help, they end up interrupting each other with incessant emails and meetings that waste time because they lack a clear definition of what the output of a good job looks like.

It’s your job as a manager to provide these good, smart people you hired with the support they need to be effective. I’m not talking about training - though that's important too. I’m talking about these things:

1. A clear description of what the output of good work looks like.
2. Knowledge work often means making decisions. So be sure to include decisions in this description of their output.
3. A schedule or prioritization so they know what to work on when for them to be productive to the rest of the organization.
4. Workflow diagrams when appropriate.
5. A communication protocols so people have time to get deep work done without interruptions but can still get the help they need from others.

Now I say this is your job because it's your responsibility. I don't mean to say you are the one to figure it out sitting alone in an ivory tower and deliver the message from on high. In fact, many of the people who work for you have better ideas than you about some of these things. But they don't have the perspective you do of how their work fits into the bigger picture of the entire organization. So work with them to craft a description of the outputs you expect from each person so that you can in fact get good work done through other people. In some cases, there may be no one on your team who's good at (for example) developing a workflow diagram or a value map. That's when to bring in an outside consultant. Then make sure you publicize the results so everybody that needs to have access to it can find it easily and quickly.

Agile Gets it Right

There is an example of doing this right in software development. It's called the agile methodology. It's a very structured framework where output is broken down into small, well defined tasks. Those tasks are scheduled and people meet regularly to track progress. Within that structured framework people are free to be creative and direct themselves as Drucker said. But that framework is imposed by management. 

A final note about micromanagement. It usually happens when someone is told how to do a job in a way that doesn't affect the final output but is based on an arbitrary opinion or outdated policy. If there's a valid reason something needs to be done a certain way, then explain the reason, don't just make a rule.

People almost always object to what they consider arbitrary rules. If the rules are truly arbitrary get rid of them. The founder of Shopify one day eliminated all recurring meetings. Why? He felt many had outlived their usefulness and being Canadian, his people would be reluctant to mention this for fear of offending those who'd set up the meeting. I assume that relevant meetings got reinstituted.

But if the rules are not arbitrary, then explain them. What makes a rule arbitrary? The customer. if there's a reason that relates ultimately back to serving the customer better, then explain the connection. As the owner or CEO of your business you see those connections in ways that others don't.

The Best Tools for This

• A functional org chart - one that describes output from each function (not people and job titles).
• A communication protocol involving communication platforms and meeting rhythms

And that brings us to the third reason management is hard.

Third Reason: Management is not social intercourse.

It's human nature to want people to like you. We survive as a species because of this. But as any good parent or schoolteacher knows, sometimes you have to be willing to be unpopular in the short term to be effective, respected, and even loved in the long term. This is not the case with the folks you just hang out with. The norms of communication are different.

A good manager's job is to help people grow and improve - not to be their drinking buddy.

Ben Horowitz wrote about this in a great post called Making Yourself a CEO. Here's the gist of it.

In fact, even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the buildup then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, then the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

This is true for all managers, not just CEOs.

A company is like a team not a family.

When people say their company is like a family, they're wrong. You can't fire your family and for the most part you didn't hire them. Ever go to a restaurant for a birthday dinner? Somebody paid for that meal. Did your mother ever make you a birthday dinner? I bet nobody paid her for it.

See what I mean? The norms are different. When people say they're a family at work what they usually mean is Uncle Bob shows up drunk all the time and talks politics. No sorry. What they usually mean is people care for each other. Sometimes they care deeply. And that's a good thing.

A better metaphor than a family is a team. People on the best sports teams also care for each other. Deeply. But they also know they need to perform. Not least because they don't want to let down the people they care so much about. And they know that if they don't perform they won't be on the team much longer.

One way a company can be different from a team is you can make exceptions for people who aren't performing. Sometimes this is temporary due to an illness or a personal situation. Sometimes you make a permanent exception to reward someone's loyalty. I'm reminded of an accountant I had in the 1980's. The firm was moving from paper to computers. But one of his oldest employees just couldn't make the switch. Out of loyalty, he kept her on and let her do everything on paper, then had another staff member put it all into the computer. Just because.

Exceptions like this wouldn't happen on a professional team. They are even unusual in a company, yet they'd be normal in a family. Which is why a family is not a business. And why family businesses have problems when they don't separate the family dynamics from the business dynamics - but that's a different TED Talk.

Here are some tools to make this aspect of management go better.

• Mutual Understanding that it's your job to improve people. Make sure you know this, and your people do too. Regular 1:1 meetings are useful for this.
• User Manuals for a person not a machine. These help explain the best way to communicate with you.
• Good Feedback that comes in constant, immediate informal contexts as well as more formal, structured settings.
• Radical Candor see below.

Many of these principles are wrapped up in the concept of Radical Candor

Kim Scott coined this term. She says there are four ways to communicate, defined by two axes:

• The CARE PERSONALLY or "Give a Damn" axis
• The CHALLENGE DIRECTLY or "Willing to Piss People Off" axis

If you're willing to challenge directly, but don't show that you care personally, your communication comes off as Obnoxious Aggression. If you back off from challenging but still don't show you care, you'll come off as manipulatively insincere. And the most common is when we do care personally but fail to tell someone something they'd be better off knowing. That's what she calls Ruinous Empathy. Radical Candor requires both showing you care personally and being willing to challenge when necessary.

A manager gets work done through other people. This is impossible without delegating. But delegating is a skill that must be learned.

There are three things to communicate in order to delegate well. I said communicate, not broadcast. That means it’s your responsibility to insure not only that you said these things but that they are heard and understood clearly.

Thing 1 - What the Result Should Look Like

What is the outcome or deliverable that would indicate to you the task was done properly? Often the breakdown occurs when someone assumes the other knows what they want. I recently asked my wife to pick up some sunflower seeds when she went shopping. I was expecting raw ones. She picked up roasted and salted. The fault was mine. And, I should have known better because of all the times I’ve gone grocery shopping and made an assumption about her requests.

One helpful tip is to ask the person to repeat what they think the outcome should be. If you hear it come out of their mouth correctly there’s a good chance they understand what you said.

Thing 2 - Deadlines & Follow up

It’s important to communicate when the job must be finished. But also when you’ll be checking in – then don’t mention it till that time or you’ll be a micromanager.

The 10-50-90 Check in.

If the person is new to the type of task, or you aren’t confident in their ability or if you are new to clear delegation, then I suggest the 10-50-90 follow up. That means schedule the first follow up when you expect 10% of the job to be finished. For a task you expect to be finished in a day, the first follow up would be in an hour. If the task is expected to take a week, follow up in half a day. The purpose of this first follow up is to see if the person understood the assignment (or if you communicated it clearly). If 10% of the job is not done by then, you’ve caught the trouble in plenty of time.

Schedule the 2nd follow up when you expect 50% of the job to be done. The purpose of this follow up is to see if the pace of the job is appropriate. Sometimes people take too long because they are working at too deep a level of detail, or perhaps they didn’t give it a high enough priority. A check at this point will alert you to any problems of speed.

The third follow up – at 90% completion is to catch any last minute snafus while there is still a bit of time left to help.

Thing 3 – When to Ask For Help

Often people don’t want to ask for help thinking they’ll seem incompetent when in fact, you’d rather they ask early rather than too late. Be sure to communicate what they should do when they hit a snag. Should they figure it out? Ask you? Ask someone else?

Delegation is the Work of Management.

To delegate well, you must set aside time to think through the three things mentioned above. Then you need a system for following up. This can be your calendar, a spreadsheet, or a full blown task management software depending on the complexity of your needs. Pick one and use it.

The Capability Maturity Model was developed to rate the maturity of a process for software development. It was funded by the US Department of Defense and written by Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1990s.

I’ve adapted it to apply to any process in your company:

• Your sales process
• Your production processes
• Your hiring process

Image Credit: By Entertainment Software Association (ESRB Ratings Brochure) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I think it’s because entrepreneurs are intuitive. We know instinctively how things should be. Like a chef that can make a great meal by tossing in a handful of this and a pinch of that and cooking it at just the right temperature till it looks the way it should. It may be a wonderful meal, but that chef will never get out of the kitchen. If he or she didn’t care about quality, it would be easy to let someone else do the cooking. But we do care so we cook.

But there is a better way – well, let’s hold off on the judgment – there’s a different way. It’s only better if you really want to get out of the kitchen, if you want to build a business that works even when you’re not there. Some people don’t and that’s their choice.

But if you do, you need a special tool. It’s called a recipe. That’s how the famous chefs get out of the kitchen. How they open up more than one restaurant. Some even write books and star on TV shows. And, at the low end, that’s how they serve billions and billions of hamburgers that all taste the same year after year no matter who’s working what shift.

A recipe is a way to take the intuition, and wisdom, and experience you’ve gained through long hours and hard work, and put it into a form that others can use. Even if they aren’t as smart as you, or haven’t been at it for so long, or don’t care as much as you. But here’s the thing – not every recipe is the same. Some are so simple even a caveman could do it (presuming he could read). Others require more finesse, skill and even creativity to apply.

Consider the Blue Man Group. If you haven’t seen them; go. They are a wonderful show. It’s three guys all painted blue – faces, hands, bald heads – and they act on stage without any words and no plot. They make music, they throw (and spit) paint around, they flash lights and make amazing sounds. It’s lots of fun and very funny. The music has no written score.

At first it was the same 3 guys doing every performance six days a week for three years without a break. But they wanted to expand. As I write this (June 2013) they perform in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Australia, Berlin, Brazil, they tour the US and perform on Norwegian Cruise Lines. No way 3 guys could do it all. To keep the consistency, they needed to write something down. According to Rob Walker “[What they wrote] is not so much a how-to manual as a why-to manual; it’s not about stage directions, but rather tells the story of the show step by step, from the point of view of the Blue Men.”

But I digress. My point is this. Entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go, not because we want to hold on – but because we don’t know how to translate that stuff we know intuitively into tools we can use to train and monitor and ultimately trust others to do it right.

And that’s the good news. Because learning how to take wisdom and turn it into processes and procedures and training etc. that just requires learning a new skill – or hiring a ghost writer or consultant. Turning a control freak around – that’s a bigger problem.

How to Get Started

First pick a platform. I suggest something electronic that lives on a server or the cloud so everyone can access it. Google docs is a good example.

Second pick a simple place to start. Don’t try to make it complete or even systematic. Just start somewhere. The beauty of electronic documents is you can search them – they don’t have to be organized the way paper does. Just make sure each section, or task or “dish” (to keep with the cooking analogy) has a name, a description of  the goal or purpose and a name and date of the person and time it was last updated.

Third write a checklist. Take a simple task and start enumerating the steps, in order that need to be done. You may think this is too simplistic for people. But it’s not. Pilots use check lists. Doctors in ICU’s are starting to. It frees people’s mind to not have to remember all the details.

When a checklist is too simple, describe the parameters. This is often the purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish, or the qualitiative measures – like with Blue Man. It’s a way to set the boundaries of quality that you’ve learned over the years. This may be the hard part for you because you tend to “know it when you see it”. But work with someone on describing what you see; why one thing is “right” and another isn’t. Imagine you’re explaining it to a person who’s unfamiliar with your industry.

Rinse & Repeat. Keep on adding to the list. Change things as you need to make them better. You’ll end up with a document that’s often called Policies and Procedures or as I’ve sometimes called it The Big Book O’Wisdom.

Then use the document. Use it for training. Refer to it when people have questions. Make it a living document.

It will allow you to give up authority, and trust that things will be done the way you know they should be. What will you do when you can get out of the kitchen and know the food is just as good as when you’re cooking?

FreeCause is teaching all 60 of its employees to write code. I don’t think this make sense for every company (very few things make sense for EVERY company). But here are some things the article made me thing of that you might want to consider.

How Important is Software to Your Company?

If software is a significant differentiator for your company – either part of the product or something critical to your competitive advantage – then you might consider doing this as a way to develop the right corporate culture.

Learning Sparks Communication

I have a hunch that a big part of the benefit this company will see is not from employees learning how to code but from the activity of having their tech people mentor the non-techies through the process. That kind of interaction and communication of how different groups see the world is something that really cements the interaction between different parts of the company. Perhaps you could adapt it to other areas of learning in your company. Maybe everyone should learn to sell, or how to read a financial statement or write clearly or use a spreadsheet.

Coding is a way of Thinking – so is Design.

The ability to write code hinges on a way of thinking. You look at the data in terms of inputs, outputs and algorithms. That kind of thinking is valuable in many areas besides writing code.

In some ways the “opposite” of the ability to code is the ability to design: it’s creative, and based on narrative and emotion. This article is about when designers and MBAs were put in a contest to solve business problems, the designers beat the MBAs hands down. Maybe everyone in your company should learn about design as well as how to code.

I understand the appeal. After all, didn’t we start our companies because we wanted to make money doing something we love? In my experience the things most entrepreneurs love revolve around sales or making product.

Then as the organization grows, there’s all this stuff we HAVE to do whether we like it or not. Maybe for you it’s doing the books or personnel issues. Maybe it’s marketing or dealing with computers. Whatever, it has to be done.

So then someone comes in with a problem that we can solve, and it’s in our sweet spot. Man, we jump right on it. And it feels great. Great to solve a problem, and great to be asked. And that encourages people to bring more problems to us. And pretty soon we spend all day, every day putting out fires. Which can be fun and exciting. But then we wonder why the company isn’t growing like we hoped it would; and why we can’t find people who can prevent some of these fires, or at least fight them on their own. Isn’t that what we pay them for?

You see the problem.

There is a solution, but it’s not for everyone.

Why would you want to change what you do?
As Einstein is reported to have said, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So first decide if you’re sufficiently unhappy with the results you’re getting to change what you do. Maybe you’re not. And that’s fine. You can stop reading now.

But if you want your company to be different, if you want to work on other things than firefighting, here’s a suggestion:

1. When people come to you with a problem, instead of jumping in to fix it, ask this one simple question: “What solutions have you considered already?” If the answer is none, ask that they come back when they’ve considered some and you’ll help them decide which one is the best. Then bite your tongue. Don’t say any more.

It’s simple, but it’s not always easy. What you’re doing is coaching them to fix the problem. It’s a big change for most entrepreneurs. But it’s how you build a company – by building people.

Advanced techniques:

2. Decide which fires you really like to fight and which you want others to deal with. Make a list.
3. Tell people you’re going to change the way you work, and expect them to step up. You’ll have to do this in a way that is inspiring. That’s what leadership is for.
4. Prevention. After you (or someone else) has put out a fire. Don’t move on. Keep working to fix the root cause and prevent that type of fire from erupting again. Now you’re acting like the fire marshal – not the fire fighter.

Takeaways:

• Decide you’re not going to be the firefighter
• Insist (don’t expect) that others solve the problems
• Then work to prevent those problems. Don’t worry there will be others.