Sports
The Myth of the Working Manager
In this episode of Manager Tools, we debunk the myth of the 'working manager'—the belief that managers are too busy with their own tasks to effectively lead their teams. We explore how pri...
The Myth of the Working Manager
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to Manager Tools.
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The Myth of the Working Manager.
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Here we go.
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This cast answers these questions.
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How do I get my work done and have time to manage?
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How can I find time to get my own work done?
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What can I do to stop working so many hours?
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Well if you want answers these questions and more, you must.
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I say again, you must listen to this podcast.
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If you enjoy our guidance about the management trinity, get it in your people's mind.
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People talking about performance, asking for more, pushing work down.
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And our tools are helpful, one-on-ones feedback, coaching and delegation.
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The ideal way to learn about implementing them is to come to one of our effective manager
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conferences.
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One day we cover all of the major topics.
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You practice feedback, you practice coaching, you practice delegation.
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I can't tell you the number of times people have said to us, wow, I thought I understood
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the tools.
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And then when I had to practice, I realized I've taken it to another level.
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Come to the website, check out our conference schedule.
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See us all over the US, and in Europe, and in Asia, and in Australia.
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See you there.
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I got to believe, and you spend more time in the field than I do certainly these days,
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that it used to be, at least for me, that the one question we always got, right?
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It was in the private, the biggest objection to our method of managing.
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The manager's trendy, right?
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One-on-ones feedback, coaching, delegation.
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And the things we talk about in terms of how to manage is that they don't have time because
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they are a working manager.
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They just have too much to do.
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They have real work to do, real work that's important to the business, and they just don't
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have time to manage.
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Yeah, but I'm a working manager.
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And as if I'm the only manager in the world working, right?
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It's even, it has that tone to it much of the time.
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Yes, exactly.
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And it's a myth.
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It's a total myth, and we'll explain that.
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So first we're going to explain the myth of the working manager.
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Then we're going to talk about how to address it, and there are three things you need to
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do.
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First of all, you need to prioritize your managerial duties.
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Most managers who have a time problem tend to prioritize their personal work duties.
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In part because that's what they used to do before they became manager.
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And then you've got to do two things, basically about delegation.
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You've got to delegate more of your work, the work that you do, the individual work
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that makes you a working manager.
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And you can also delegate more managerial work on a scale of zero to 100.
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If we assume that the amount of delegation that's supposed to happen is 50, I'm just going
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to make that up as a standard.
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The amount of delegation that happens among managers in large organizations today is
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probably 20.
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It's not even close to being what it needs to be.
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And you can delegate both your own work and managerial work too.
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All right, so let's talk about the myth of the working manager.
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Just tell me why all the things I said are completely wrong.
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So first of all, we're not saying managers out there that you don't have your own work
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to do.
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We understand that you do.
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What we're saying here is the idea that it is somehow a special case is wrong.
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The fact that you have your own work to do is normal.
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There are no managers now.
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And here's what people don't get.
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And there have never been managers ever who only just managed.
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Being a manager has always included your own individual work and the work and time it
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takes to manage other people.
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So when you say, Mike, I'm a working manager, you imply that that is somehow a special case
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that somebody else, somewhere else, other companies have more money and they have people
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who sit around and just supervise and just coach and just delegate and just measure and
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report and so on.
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This is not so.
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You were not at the one cheap company that says, oh, you have your own work to do.
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Sorry, we didn't make that clear.
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I think for a lot of people, part of the myth of the working manager is that they thought
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they didn't know that managers had their own work to do.
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And so when they get promoted and they have their own work to do, they're like, I didn't
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know that I would have special cases to handle myself that I wouldn't want my people to
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do.
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And so they seem surprised by how much of their own work to have to do.
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They've got decisions to make.
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They've got plans to come up with.
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They've got projects to plan all kinds of stuff that doesn't feel particularly managerial
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in terms of oversight or supervising other people.
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But every manager that has ever existed has always had managerial tasks to do and his
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or her own work to do.
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So it's not a sign of how busy your firm is.
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It's not a sign that you have your own work that your company overworks you.
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It's not an indication that there are other people in your company who have a relatively
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easy job of only having to manage other people and not having to do the kind of work that
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their directs do, but perhaps at an elevated level and more complex because you've probably
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done that work before and we expect you to be able to handle more complex stuff.
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And guys, it's folly to think that when you become an executive, you're going to only
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have to manage other people.
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That's all you'll have to do.
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And the best example of that is if you assume it's more and more management, less and
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less your own work as you go higher, is the CEO.
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That's the best example.
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The CEO has a singular responsibility to chart strategy for the company.
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She doesn't just manage her directs.
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She has to lead a process for plotting the future of the company.
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That's not management.
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That's an executive responsibility.
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It's her job.
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Yeah, she manages people now.
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Most CEOs probably undermanaged people enormously.
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And the reason for that is at that level, the executives are fairly self-managing.
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One would hope.
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We don't want our CEO to spend too much time having to manage people.
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We want them to have good relationships, obviously.
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And that takes time.
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But we don't want to have them spend time managing people.
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If those hours are taken away from the one or two or three things, the CEO and only the CEO can do.
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And look, even if you say, well, I still have a special case.
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The idea that you have your own work to do is definitely not a reason to not handle well your managerial duties
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or to not try to improve upon your abilities as a manager.
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Too many managers prioritize the work portion of their working manager.
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And the problem with that is the more you do that, the more insular you become,
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the more your people need managerial guidance and so on.
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And the more you become a firefighter.
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And in fact, a lot of managers I've talked to have said, you know, I'm doing my work and then I'm constantly fighting fires without the people.
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And then you hear in their voice that they're really good at fighting fires and you realize they like being a firefighter.
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It makes them feel good.
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I'm doing my work and then I have to go proof of these Yahoo's who work for me that I can do their work too.
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But I'm always solving their problems.
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I'm like, dude, the only reason you're solving other people's problems is that's how you're defining the world you're in.
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And if you want to stop doing that and have more time to do your own work to the level to a quality that you're proud of,
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then stop fighting their fires.
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Well, you know, they can't solve their own problems.
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We would probably see that differently.
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You know, I think there's another thing about managers, just particularly inexperienced managers going around complaining about about being
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quote, a working manager having too much of their own work to do is right to to the other more experienced managers.
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It just I like the fact that they're a rookie.
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I mean, it's yeah, you're not going to get a lot of sympathy.
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I mean, they may, they may give you some sympathy verbally, but inside their head, they're going like, and this guy didn't get it.
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They're basically saying, I don't like this.
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And the experienced managers are thinking, dude, you ought to know that that's the way things are.
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That's the way things always have been.
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And you're so naive about your own role that frankly, you're not met ready for more responsibility, right?
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They're not.
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Yeah, rookie mistake.
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We're just exactly.
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Okay.
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So that's the myth of the working manager, folks, and you have, you have to understand that.
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Assuming you do it this point, what do we do about it?
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What is what is the manager now understands as due to, you know, have enough time to do,
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to do the very important manager responsibilities?
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If a typical manager is struggling with his workload as a working manager, it's usually because of misunderstanding of priorities,
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he would probably describe himself as a working manager, meaning he spends most of his time, he focuses his attention on his own individual work,
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and does his best to fit in what managing he can do.
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Now, to be honest, there's another sort of insidious thing that's working against us here that will cause all managers who aren't given the basic principles about how to manage and how they're evaluated and so on to continue to be working managers.
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And what that is is nobody teaches them these basics.
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As long as you don't know the basics, as long as you don't know how to manage, you get promoted.
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They say, hey, by the way, you're still going to do some of that work you did before, but we also need you to manage.
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And oh, by the way, you're really good at the work you did before, but we're not going to tell you anything about how to manage.
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So whenever you're managing, you're going to find yourself feeling uncertain, making more mistakes.
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It's not a positive, a virtuous cycle.
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It can easily become a vicious cycle where you get joy, you get satisfaction, you get accomplishment feeling from the work you're doing,
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but you get frustration and friction and misunderstandings and emotional responses to the managerial stuff.
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And so what happens over time, all things being equal is people are driven to this manager driven to this working manager sort of mentality.
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It just leads to more work for yourself, less managing.
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And of course, if you're going to manage less, at some point, the crisis is going to come up and it leads to more time necessary to manage,
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which is just a vicious, vicious cycle.
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And it's why a lot of people hate being a manager.
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And literally this mispronetization, this focusing on your own work is why they people become firefighters.
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They're too busy to get everything done.
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They get crises.
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The manager begins solving ever more urgent problems.
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And the time it takes to solve them just accelerates the cycle.
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And really what was down to is the final stage of that sort of potentially invisible death spiral you're going through
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is that manager, like I said, who literally brags about being a firefighter and therefore justifies his mispronetization.
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And it's ineffective and inefficient and the manager actually feels good about it and it's dumb.
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So the answer to the prioritization problem is one of emphasis.
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Instead of becoming a super individual contributor with some managerial duties tacked on to your super individual contributor role.
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In other words, a working manager, we recommend a shift in focus and to begin to see yourself as a working manager.
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Meaning one's managerial duties take precedence over one's individual tasks.
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Now what happens when you do this, even when you struggle to do it well on the managerial side, if you don't know how to do it,
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if you don't know to create relationships and give feedback and measure people and tell them how they're doing and
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coach them and delegate and so on, it creates a different cascade of events.
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By prioritizing the appropriate work managerial, your directs will become more effective.
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The way to consider that is to recognize that if we have a choice between improving our own productivity by 5%
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and improving every single one of our directs productivity by 5%,
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if we have more than two directs, it makes more sense to focus on our directs.
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As they get better, we get less and less crises and we actually are able to spend less and less time managing.
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It's a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle.
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I can see some percentage rodents coming like, oh crap, that means I have some pain in the short term
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because I can't make them more productive by 5% tomorrow.
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You tell me Mark, I'm going to have some pain.
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The firefighter manager, that's the classic defense.
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Right now, if I had to spend a bunch more time, we'd either have to work a bunch more hours
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or simply let slip some of my mini individual tasks.
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In a way, simplistically, that's correct.
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Simplicity is true.
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It's true.
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Exactly.
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So, the simplest thing is just it won't work.
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Is great advice that sounds like it just won't work.
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It just won't work.
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Yeah, the slimmest of reads.
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If you really believe something, really believe it.
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If you're a true believer, the slimmest of reads will sustain you, basically.
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So, first of all, let's eliminate the first option, working a bunch more hours.
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More hours worked is never a sustainable long-term productivity strategy, guys.
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It's not.
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And it's the same, nothing of the fact that it belies the first rule of priority management,
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which is your family comes first.
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Now, you're making my case more and more and more now.
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Like, hey, don't have more hours like you're working things.
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And this next thing is going to, I'm going to break your case, but you're not going to like it.
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So, we're going to be, we're going to have a standoff here.
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The answer is letting slip some of your individual tasks.
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What?
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You're really, you're really, you're really good to see.
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Anarchy, right?
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Oh my gosh.
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Cats and dogs.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Um, look, here's the way to think about that.
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Okay.
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Ask yourself a simple question, folks.
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Do you go home every night with all of your work done?
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No.
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You don't.
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Nobody does.
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No.
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Yeah, in fact, and that only gets worse throughout your careers.
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You gain responsibilities.
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So the point of that question, that little self-test is, you're already choosing what work of yours,
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individual work of yours gets done, and what gets delayed.
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We all do this every day.
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As long as our jobs inherently carry work that cannot be finished daily,
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or we have the ability to take home work, we're already doing what needs to be done,
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meaning under prioritizing certain things that aren't getting done, and maybe we're missing
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some deadlines.
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I haven't got fired yet.
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So I think that's absolutely okay.
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There's apparently there's no negative consequences, and it's people feel guilty about it,
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but they keep doing it.
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I've never had somebody raise their hand and say, I get all my work done every day.
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So we just need to do it some more.
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In fact, you could argue that what we wind up working on is the opposite of whatever we get
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in the least trouble for not doing.
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Meaning, we take a look at all of our stuff, and the stuff we put aside that we decide not to do
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is the stuff we're not getting in trouble for.
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Consequently, what we end up working on is the stuff we fear getting in trouble for.
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That applies to you know what your priorities are.
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I mean, you said prioritization management, right?
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That's the key.
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That's the key.
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Of course, you wouldn't stop working on your most important project,
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because you know that's what you get in trouble for.
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I assume.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So our recommendation is absolutely we want you to delay some projects a little bit
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to take some risk.
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I'm not asking your family to take the risk.
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I'm just being clear about what I know will happen when I, when we ask you to spend more time
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on management and your time is limited.
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That means in a zero sum game, you're going to spend less time on your individual tasks.
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Now, you're going to get all that back and more, as we've said many, many times in
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cast and conferences and so on, that anytime you spend on one-on-ones, manager tools,
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guarantees you will get back in your calendar.
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After you go through the 12 week period, you will get more time back in your calendar
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than you actually spend in the one-on-ones.
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It's so effective and efficient a tool.
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If you do it our way, we recommend you delay a project or two.
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You miss some meetings.
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You don't go.
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I mean, please tell me.
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Somebody email me and say, Mark, no one ever misses a meeting in my company.
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If that's the case, if no one, if everyone is always there on time for every meeting,
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okay, fine, don't miss a meeting.
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Shoot every, it seems like once a month I have somebody said, Mark, I'm busy.
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I'm triple booked.
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Oh my gosh, the arrogance of that, the idea that you're in Hogwarts and you have a time
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turner or something.
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Tighten up your calendar discipline.
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There's all kinds of things you can do there.
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Put off that longstanding project you've been getting ready to launch.
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That's probably about your team's work anyway.
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Learn how to handle all of your email in 90 minutes a day.
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In other words, crunch your email down.
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Manage it.
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Don't spend your day in low grade email anxiety.
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And there's a cast for that.
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All right, stay in all the minimized amount of time.
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Or actually stop checking Facebook and Instagram.
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Yeah.
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But even if you want to do that, if your job has some social media impacts or relationship,
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fine, put that into your email time.
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I do.
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I check Twitter three times a day.
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And I now started checking LinkedIn three times a day when I do email.
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Okay.
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If you do that, that will free up all kinds of your time for managerial work,
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like one-on-ones and staff meetings and morning stand-up.
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And for the record folks, all of which one-on-one staff meetings, morning stand-up,
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there's all podcasts to explain what to do, how to do it, when to do it,
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and exactly what will happen in detail because this is manager tools.
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And that's what Mike, when I wanted 30 years ago,
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there's a cast for all this stuff.
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And I would even argue that you don't even really need to do that.
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People's understanding of their efficiency at work is wildly out of whack.
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When I follow executives and managers around,
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I am amazed at their belief that they're effective.
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When in fact, they're just busy and they're really inefficient.
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And full disclosure, I feel the same way.
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I'm not saying I'm some icon of efficiency.
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We're all human and we're all inefficient in our own ways.
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But if you just start doing one-on-ones,
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if you start listening to podcasts even at work,
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and then you start doing one-on-ones,
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and you don't do any of these other things to free up the time,
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plop one-on-ones down in your calendar.
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And what you'll discover is you have a little bit of less time,
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but you will figure out how to get everything that you want to get done
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that's important in the remaining time.
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Because Parkinson's Laws work expands to fill the time allotted to it.
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Well, Horseman's Corollary to Parkinson's Law
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is work can contract to the time we give it.
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So don't schedule an hour for the meeting.
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Schedule 45 minutes or schedule 30 minutes.
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Don't schedule two hours to work on that project.
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Schedule an hour and a half.
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Or schedule 45 minutes.
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And have the courage the self will,
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to say, no, I'm going to get it done during that time.
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And how much better would the project be if you spent an hour and a half versus an hour?
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I don't know.
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Maybe if that's the case, we should spend 85 hours on it.
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Because at that point, we'll really be good at it.
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We've all done this many, many times.
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Every time we go on vacation, we figure out how to get our email done.
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We figure out how to get all our work off our desk.
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It can be done.
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Well, we've all done it every time we prove it.
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Yeah.
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And by the way, if you start doing it this way,
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you see yourself as a working manager.
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When you start delegating, you're in discover that you can go on vacation and not
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dial in to all the conference calls.
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Not check your email.
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Incessantly, not have a low grade anxiety between you and your spouse about,
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whether you're present with your children at Yosemite at Half Dome,
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you know, on the beaches in Florida, in the south of France,
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wherever you're going.
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Decide.
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That's what prioritization is, folks, is making decisions.
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Decide what part of your job is most important in the organization.
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You're going to find its managerial stuff.
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And then the most important things you do individually,
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you're probably going to find that it's hard to do that because your team's work is
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not always easy to value or to measure.
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You're probably going to have to clump efforts and projects together
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with some technique like our managerial Pareto principle.
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You know, 80% of your value comes from 20% of your work.
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But make some choices.
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Yeah, that's what you're paid to do is make choices.
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And one of the first choices you can make is to delegate more of your own individual,
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the non-managerial part of your job to your directs.
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Yeah, you have too much work.
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Give some of it away.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Think of prioritizing all of your work as making a list of all the tasks and projects you work on.
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Everything.
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Both work you do in your somewhat individual contributor role and in your managerial role.
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I'll give an example.
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It's personal to me.
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I at managers, I write a podcast every week.
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It takes two to three to four hours every week.
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That's individual work.
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Work that isn't related to my managerial work to my directs.
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Or put differently, I would have to write the guidance each week
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whether I had direct reports or not.
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Also though, I conduct one on ones with my directs.
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I write their reviews.
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I give them feedback.
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I review their work.
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These are all managerial duties.
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I wouldn't have to do any of that if I didn't have any directs.
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Prioritization means drawing a line on the task list at some point on the list.
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And generally, we recommend you move those managerial duties up.
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One on one's feedback, reviews of their work,
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guidance, coaching, delegation, and so on.
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We recommend you move those managerial duties up on the list so that they're above the line.
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I'm thinking of a list of say 100 things in line is at 60.
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And anything below 60 doesn't get done.
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But then you go a step further guys.
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Your list doesn't have to have only two parts.
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Stuff you do and stuff that doesn't get done.
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You can actually have three sections.
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Stuff you do.
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Stuff you're responsible for managerial or work rise.
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That you delegate to others.
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And then stuff that doesn't get done at all.
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And when it comes to stuff to delegate, one way to think of it is that there are two categories
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of your work.
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There's a work that you're related to your team's job and there are your managerial's tasks.
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Both can be delegated.
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But we do so for different reasons.
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If you can imagine, since we recommend that you think yourself as a working manager,
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we recommend delegating some of your non-managerial work first.
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Pretty straightforward.
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And if you follow our delegation guidance and there's a cast for that,
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you would choose task based not on.
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And this is an important distinction that most managers, I would say 90% of managers don't get.
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You would choose to delegate things based not on your level of interest in that thing
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or your level of dist interest in that thing or your level of skill in that thing.
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But rather on your direct desires and skills and abilities.
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Rather than asking yourself what don't I like, what don't I want to do, ask yourself what is each
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of my directs want to do?
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What do they express interest in helping with?
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What do each of my directs need to do in terms of development and so on?
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Maybe what do each of my directs like to do in terms of what they enjoy doing?
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There's a saying I've said it frequently in the last couple of years since I learned it.
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When you love something, it reveals all of its secrets to you.
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If you don't love something or even if you do, but one of your directs loves it more than you,
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they just totally get into it.
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Delegate that to them.
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Yes, you're better at these things than your directs.
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That's not the standard.
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It's not the standard that, oh, I'm better at it than them.
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That's not standard.
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I'm going to come back to that.
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Another question you can ask is what are my directs good at?
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Whether they like it or not.
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And seeing it that way and being able to look at each one of your directs and thinking of them,
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more of them pulling stuff from you, rather than you having to push it down because you don't like
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it because you're not good at it, is a way more powerful way to delegate.
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We can talk for hours about delegation we have and we have hours of podcasts on
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delegation that folks, if this doesn't all ring true to you, you really should go listen to.
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There are a huge number of reasons why delegate is such a good thing.
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One of them, for example, if you want to promote somebody,
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they have to be able to do your job at some point and how do adults learn how to do stuff.
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They do it.
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Yeah.
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And the standard for delegating is never that the direct can do it as well as you can right now.
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The standard is only that they can do it as well as you did the first time you did it
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in this role and they didn't fire you for how poorly you did it.
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Apparently, however poorly you did do it wasn't a career-ending move.
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So that standard has already been met and why not teach your directs to do it now before
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they have your job so that if they ever do get your job, then by the way, jobs are always
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devolving down levels and organizations.
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When they finally get your job, they'll be at least familiar with the portion of it.
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Otherwise, they're going to be struggling.
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So we recommend you start with delegating your own work versus managerial task because
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when you delegate more of your own work, not your own managerial stuff, that frees up more
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time for managerial work and there's a portion of managerial work which of course only you can do.
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Reviews, budgets, one-on-ones, feedback, succession planning, but there's another reason for this.
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You're too expensive.
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If one of our directs can do it, okay?
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This is managerial economics 101.
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There's a podcast for this as well.
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If one of our directs can do something that we also can do, they ought to be doing it because
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they cost less generally speaking.
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Now, some of managers are listening going, well, that's all great.
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That's the logical approach, but Mark, you don't understand.
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I see my job as protecting my people.
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Now look folks, I respect that, but I want you to understand, you're wrong.
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That's like saying, I see my house as a muffin, okay?
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My house is not a muffin.
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Your team is not for you to protect.
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It's not.
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Yes, every once in a while, you have to be iratious at the bridge.
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I get that.
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You have to say, nope, my team is fully busy.
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They can't do anything more.
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But too many managers think that one of the sneaky ways they can build a relationship with their
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people is to go around acting like they have a flaming sort of vengeance and defense and no one
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gets through, no work gets to you without going through me and I'll tell them, no.
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Well, as you probably know privately and you know, in 3 a.m. in the dark night of your soul,
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you don't have that much power and it is not your job to protect your team.
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It is your job to grow your team to get them to achieve results at the highest possible level.
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While knowing them well enough to do so in a way that's sustainable so that you can retain them.
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How did you come up with an analogy of your direct as a muffin?
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No, that is just a, like I got to protect my muffin.
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Did you not get fed?
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Well, as a child, you had a muffin, you put your arms around it and did look people getting there.
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That is just cruel.
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That is a cruel, you're attacking me in a very cruel way.
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I was trying to think of, as I'm sitting here at my desk here in Pebble Beach and we're recording,
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you're in California as well, that how different can I make something?
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I thought a house in a muffin were fairly different.
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I mean, I did.
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So my point is not that directs are muffins, but rather the idea that your job is to defend your
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directs is as off as calling your house a muffin.
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Oh, I missed.
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Okay.
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I missed.
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I thought you were saying directs are muffins and you had to protect your muffin.
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That's okay.
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All right.
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Good.
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Good.
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I feel better.
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Oh, my God.
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And a lot of our audience is feeling much better about follow your guidance.
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It's okay.
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That's good.
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Yeah.
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Plus, it's been our general observance that managers far overestimate their superior
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audience skills relative to non-managerial work you're doing versus your directs.
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Guys, trust your directs to try.
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The worst that can happen is you'll have to take it back.
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That's not a big deal.
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The best is that you'll never have to do it again.
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That's a pretty good risk reward equation.
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Also, keep in mind the delegation cascade which we profiled in our juggling
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co-on guidance.
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There's a cast for that.
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It's called the juggling co-on.
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One of my all-time favorites suggests that we don't have to not delegate
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because our directs are already fully busy.
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If that were the case, then your boss would ask you, hey, how busy you are.
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I'm really busy.
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Oh, okay, then I won't delegate this to you.
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I'll give it to somebody else and I'll develop them.
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We delegate our work to them.
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When we do that, when they're fully busy.
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We help them perhaps reprioritize things.
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And sometimes they end up delegating their work to the floor if they're an individual contributor.
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And that should happen and it does happen all the time.
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It has to happen.
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We've given a tons of stories of experiences about this.
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But folks, you don't agree with our report.
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The Greenwire report.
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That's right.
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So folks, go listen to the podcast on delegation.
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It's very instructive.
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And after you've listened to those, you will absolutely be convinced it's the way to go
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and go to work at it.
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I'll go a step further.
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The single biggest difference between managers and executives in day to day work is that executives
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delegate effectively and managers don't.
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The single biggest reason that junior executives fail is because they haven't learned
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how to delegate before as a manager.
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They thought their job was simply to get all the work done themselves.
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They become heroic.
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They strain their their home life and so on.
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They work all of this stuff out.
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They do all the stuff themselves,
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impressing their bosses with the quality of their team's work.
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When in fact, the team is not doing their work and this person is basically not managing his or her team.
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And when they get promoted and they haven't developed their team and their team can't
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stay up and take their, uh, take, become the manager, the position you just vacated.
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And your workload triples because that's what happens when you become an executive.
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And they take away a third of your time because now you're in meetings all the time
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because you can't get anything done by yourself at the top of the organization.
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It's all politics.
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It's all collaboration.
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It's all meeting and trading favors and log rolling and horse trading and so on.
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And you can complain about that all you want,
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but that is the nature of human organizations.
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Suddenly, you can't get your work done and you end up getting fired because you're not
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getting stuff done because you're thinking you can do it all yourself and you cannot.
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Yeah.
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Solve that problem now.
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Wow. It's a small one because it will get big later.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Yeah.
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So then the next thing we've already talked about delegating our individual work.
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We also need to talk about delegating more managerial work.
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And look, we recommend you be concerned if you can't find some of your individual
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contributor work to delegate.
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The chances you're the exception to this guidance we just gave is probably about one in 20.
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I have never sat next to a manager and watched him or her work
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that he didn't find 20 to 40%.
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I was asking him questions and so on.
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His work of his managerial time was spent on things that could be delegated or even not done.
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I mean, I routinely asked, why are you doing that?
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Oh, I feel I need to.
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I had a CEO client once say, oh, I need to, I need to establish the menu for this offsite meal.
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I remember you coming back and telling me that.
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Yeah.
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I just thought, I love you, man, but no, you can't do that.
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But even if you could prove to us that you can't delegate your own individual work,
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you're too smart, you're too specialized, your director to green,
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there are still likely some managerial tasks that you could offload to your directs.
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And there are two of them, two tasks that are no brain or delegations,
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and two that are surprisingly easy despite what most managers think.
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The two easy ones are meetings and reporting.
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The two perhaps surprises, but are doable are presentations and projects.
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So let's talk about each of those.
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First of all, meetings folks, you running meetings as a manager because it's your meeting
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and therefore you have to run it somehow.
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And then you creating the reports that your boss and boss and other C
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is crazy, crazy, crazy, and efficient.
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It's just wrong.
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It's dumb.
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It's bad.
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Okay.
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Look, when it comes to meetings, if you're running it,
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you're trying to do three things or if you don't know it,
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you should be trying to do three things.
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You should be facilitating the agenda, which is what running the meeting is.
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You should be contributing content about whatever items are on the agenda.
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And thirdly, you're listening to and observing your directs, evaluating them,
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considering them, paying attention to their relationships, how well they know their stuff,
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and so on.
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With three things to do, you're probably doing only one or two of those things well.
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And like you're not, you running your own meetings while also trying to do those other things
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that are way more important, like contributing content and listening to and observing your
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directs, is one of the reasons meetings run long.
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You have too much to do when you're running the meeting.
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You're not running the meeting crisply enough because you're trying to juggle three balls
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and you really can only handle one or two.
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I would take a bet, a significant bet, that I could teach a 12-year-old.
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How to run most organizational meetings I've ever seen.
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I would give them an agenda.
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I'd have them listen to the podcast and I would say, okay, this is my meeting.
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You're going to run it.
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You're going to start us on time.
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You're going to keep us to the agenda.
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You're going to make sure we take notes at the end of each agenda item.
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You're going to cut people off.
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You're going to put things in the parking lot.
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And now this 12-year-old is running the meeting.
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And I'm focusing on content and on my team.
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Yeah. My daughter would love to do that, by the way.
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If anybody wants to take us up on that, my daughter would love to do that.
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I love she's 14, so I guess that doesn't work.
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Yeah, but actually she's like 18 in terms of smarts, right?
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Yeah, so if a 12-year-old can do it, guys, you doing it is a waste of time and money and talent.
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I just want to add one other thing.
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If you're a, say, a first-level manager, at some point,
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one of the things you have to do is manage your run meetings.
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And again, if you don't delegate that responsibility ever to your tracks,
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they will never learn how to run effective meetings.
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And so they become manager or they're putting position where they have to run a meeting
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and they fall flat on their face because they've never done it.
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So yeah, help your drugs.
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Give them some more responsibility so they learn to do the things that are important,
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right? That they will be judged on later in their career.
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Yeah, that's embarrassing.
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You're a manager a week soon.
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You got promoted because you know what you're doing and you can't run a meeting.
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Come on, I heard this guy worse than one, say a 12-year-old could run a meeting.
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But my boss can't.
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You ruined it for everybody now.
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For everybody who runs a poor meeting.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Okay, as far as reporting, okay?
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The creation of the reports, the co-lating of the data and looking at it and put it in the form
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that your company wants and so on adds no value to the data in the report itself.
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Yes, the reports have to be created.
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But if they're reporting on the status and results of your work,
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there's only a small chance that there's confidential information in there that can't be
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shared with any of your team.
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And frankly, why wouldn't we want our team to know what standards our boss is used to evaluate
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their performance? Get out of the business of creating the reports you owe your boss.
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Delegate it, okay? Help your directs.
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Maybe perhaps you're most likely to be promoted someday, directs.
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Help your directs learn what things are measured and how they're reported on.
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Tell whomever you delegate it to to copy you on what they send up to your boss unless what
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they send is shocking and then send it through you in those rare cases.
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And remember, reporting is not to describe what's happened.
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It's to help us make decisions about the future.
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So you want your directs to know what reports are being forwarded.
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Always worries me when reports are confidential.
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So presentations and projects as well.
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They're both areas where managers often mistakenly believe that what rolled downhill to them
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from their boss or hire was meant only for them and can't be further delegated.
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And the key part of that is mistakenly believe.
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Trust your directs more.
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Oversee their first couple of projects in presentation.
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And they'll learn faster than you did.
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Plus, presentations are great vehicles for showing off your best direct
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to people who provide input to promotion discussion.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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So summarizing, you being a working manager is nothing special.
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The idea that there was a manager before that was just an overseer, a supervisor who didn't
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have his or her own work to do is a myth.
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So therefore, the working manager trope is a myth too.
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You're not the only one.
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Okay.
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You're not a special flower.
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You're not a unicorn.
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Change your focus to being a working manager.
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And you'll discover that much of your time pressures are going to ease.
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And your directs will prosper in a rising tide.
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Lift salt bulbs.
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Excellent.
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This is an important one.
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I hope folks listen to this and heat it.
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Thanks, partner.
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All right, my friend.
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We'll see you later.
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Thanks, everyone.
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That's it.
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We'll see you next week.
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Have a great one.
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If you enjoyed this podcast and you want the How To's
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