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A lot of development has been done in business schools of “scientific management” considering the need for educated & trained managers. In reality, you can’t learn to be a competent manager in a classroom—beyond a few simple principles. Management is simple, but not excessively simple. In principle, Management is the act of coordinating a group of people to achieve a specific goal while accounting for ever-present Change and Uncertainty. It’s like taking the wheel of a ship during a storm: all you can do is move the wheel back and forth, which is simple, but it takes experience and skill to do it well.
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
Here are six simple principles of effective real-world Management:
- Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done fast and with high quality. Communication Overhead (the proportion of time you spend communicating with members of your team instead of getting productive work done) makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best.
- Communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and the specific parts of the project they’re responsible for completing.
- Treat people with Respect. A combination of appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important. It’s also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under supportive conditions, the more cohesive the team will become.
- Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. Provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work, the team is doing.
- Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance about the uncertainty. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works.
- Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. Effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, experiment with another approach.
Follow these principles well, and your team will be productive. This style of management practice is not the command-and-control style of Management most people think of when they hear the term. On TV and in most management literature, managers are high-status executives who spend most of their time telling other people what to do and making important decisions. In practice, those behaviors are tell-tale signs of poor Management.
In a 2012 essay, software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky explains why managers should stop calling the shots and start letting people do their jobs:
The “management team” isn’t the “decision-making” team. It’s a support function . . . You don’t build a [business] with one big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along.
Management is a unique skill that requires discipline, patience, clear communication, and a commitment to keeping everyone working together without unnecessary distractions. By recruiting a good team and eliminating as much friction as possible, you’ll achieve the results you’re seeking.
Performance Based Hiring
What if you need to build a team? What if you’re responsible for recruiting new employees as your company grows? How do you attract and retain the best employees you can find?
Hiring is a tricky business, and there’s no foolproof method to find, attract, and retain star employees and contractors. Mistakes in hiring are almost always expensive, and a bad hire can cost you precious time and money and your team’s limited energy and patience.
Good employees and contractors are not necessarily the people who have the fanciest résumé or perform the best on a phone screen or interview: the best hires are people who get things done and work well with other members of your team. Ideally, you’re looking for an individual who will contribute valuable work, who’s excited about the opportunity, and who you’ll enjoy working with every day.
Here’s the golden rule of hiring: the best predictor of future behavior is past performance. If you want to hire people who will perform well for you in the months and years to come, you need to look for people who have performed well in the past. That means digging deep into what the applicant has accomplished, as well as giving each serious candidate a short-term opportunity to work with you before committing to a longer-term engagement.
The steps listed below will help you during the performance-based recruiting process:
Step-1 (Job Description)
The first step in Performance-Based Hiring is to publicize that you’re looking for help. For most companies, announcing the job involves writing a job description, which is either published in a public format or used by a recruiter to search private networks. Either way, don’t write the job description like an advertisement: you want to describe what the applicant will do on a day-to-day basis if they work for you, with as much straightforward detail as you can share. You’re looking for people who are attracted to the work, and it’s difficult for applicants to determine whether or not they’ll be a good fit unless you describe what the job involves.
Step-2 (Acid Test)
The next step is to identify a basic “acid test” to screen applicants. In weak employment markets, new job postings tend to be overwhelmed with applicants, many of whom are poor candidates. You’ll need a way to identify the most promising candidates without taking too much time per candidate. Screening by degree or GPA is common but ineffective since these don’t tell you anything about the candidate’s current level of skill. In the application, ask a few basic questions that require a certain amount of specialized knowledge in the field to answer. The most promising candidates will be easy to identify.
Step-3 (Past Projects)
Once you’ve identified a few promising candidates, ask each one to show you examples of two or three of their best projects to date. These projects don’t have to be related to the job in question, but they should be work that the applicant is proud of and that they believe highlights their skills. The idea is to see examples of what the candidate has accomplished to date, which makes it easier to gauge their relative level of experience and work ethic. If a candidate claims that they have “five years of experience” in product development but can’t show you something they’ve created, that’s a red flag.
Step-4 (References)
Checking references at this point is a good use of time. Along with the project examples, request the names and contact information of people they worked with in the process. When you contact a candidate’s references, your questions should be simple: e.g., Would they work with the candidate again? If they hesitate or talk around the question, it’s a no. If you can’t reach a reference when you call, leave a message and ask them to contact you if the candidate is extraordinary. And if they are, you’ll receive a return call. If they aren’t, you won’t.
Step-5 (Scenarios)
Finally, give promising candidates a short-turnaround project or scenario to see how they think, work, and communicate first-hand. Small projects tend to work best for skilled technical employees, while scenarios work best for candidates who will be responsible for product creation, marketing, sales, business development, finance, and management roles. The outcome of the assignment should be a deliverable of some kind: a report, a presentation, an asset, or a process.
Step-6 (Realistic Environment)
Don’t put the candidate in an artificial environment: they should be free to use whatever tools or resources they’re comfortable using. They should be free to contact you if they have questions. On completion of the project, bring the candidate in to meet you and present their results. This presentation replaces the interview.
The purpose of the project or scenario is to evaluate the candidate’s actual work in a realistic environment. What does the candidate focus on first? What do they notice and what do they miss? How do they explain their choices and recommendations? How do they respond when you ask questions or disagree with a conclusion?
Assignments like these should be short, requiring no more than a few hours of work.
This general hiring process is a straightforward, effective way to discover and evaluate promising employees and contractors. It’s important to note that this process doesn’t rely on résumés or traditional interviews, which only test how well the candidate writes a résumé and performs in an interview. If you look for past performance and evaluate a candidate’s work first-hand, you’ll make much better hires. (Excerpt is from “The Personal MBA” by Josh Kaufman).
