Four Things That Keep Managers Up at Night (And how to sleep better)

The Inevitable Challenges Every Manager Must Face with Surprising Regularity

The research shows that the overwhelming majority of the seemingly inevitable problems that vex managers almost always flow from these factors:

• Staff discontinuity. People come and go. That’s always been true. But employment relationships today are far more short-term and fluid than they have been before in the modern economy. So you are always losing good people. And you are always trying to get new people on board and up to speed. On top of that, one great employee is worth more than 2-3 mediocre employees. Sometimes you have to go to great lengths to effectively reward, retain and develop the very best employees.

• Constant change coming at you from every direction. Technology. The markets. The weather. Geopolitics. Micropolitics. Customer requirements; vendor requirements; employee requirements. Change regularly forces rework, often involving lots of moving parts, and therefore lots of counterparts here, there, and every where.

• Inter-dependency. Again, more and more of our work involves lots of moving parts and therefore lots of counterparts here, there and everywhere. Most people must rely on many others within and outside of their immediate work group in order to do their own work.

• Employees being human. Human beings have strengths as well as weaknesses. Humans are not always great a self-management. They have habits, and not always good ones. Not only that, but everybody has bad days. Some people have bad weeks, months, and years. Productivity and quality of work are highly variable, sometimes due to employee performance. On top of that, humans have attitudes, and not always good ones.

How Managers Spend Much of Their Time

Many managers spend too much of their time on four insidious time drains.

1. Attending Too Many Mediocre Meetings

Group meetings, team meetings, cross-functional, special projects, committees. Meetings are a big time suck for managers. Ask any manager.

Most of us work in highly interdependent workplaces where we all must rely on each other on complex projects with lots of moving pieces. With more and more people working interdependently, there are more and more meetings.

A well-run meeting can be good for:

• Communicating in-person information that everybody needs to know.

• When multiple people need to discuss and solve a problem together.

• Shared experiences to build cohesion, commitment and motivation.

But so many meetings are not very good. Too many people attend too many meetings in which they neither add value nor take anything valuable away. Five people in a room for an hour—that's five hours of productive capacity in the room. You better make those meetings good.

Meetings (Unless intentionally designed for it) are also not very good for creating real accountability. It’s too easy to hide in a team meeting. It’s even easier to point fingers and divert attention.

2. Wading Through A Never-Ending Tidal Wave of Email

Electronic communication is at everybody’s fingertips all the time. You inbox pulls you in and demands you reply. It’s so hard to resist.

At its best, email is great for:

• Communicating remotely information that everybody needs to know.

• Documenting verbal communication.

• Maintaining asynchronous conversation in between scheduled conversations.

But so much of email is unnecessary, duplicative, and/or sloppy. The pernicious thing about all that email is that mixed in with all the bad email is important information, and we want to assume that, because we sent it, the recipient had read and understood it. Even worse than a message never sent is a message sent but never received.

3. Touching Base, Checking In, and Shooting the Breeze

“How are you?” “How’s everything going?” “Is everything on track?” “Are there any problems I should know about?”

These are questions managers most commonly ask their direct reports, yet they tell you very little about what’s really going on. They are gestures, mostly. You might as well say, “Tell me you are fine.” “Tell me everything is going fine.” “Tell me everything is on track.” “Tell me there are no problems I should know about.”

The worst thing about managing by “touching base” is that it makes you feel like you are staying on top of things, but it takes a lot more than rhetorical questions to really stay on top.

The right questions are: “What did you do? How did you do it? What steps did you take? What step are you on right now? Questions like that can’t be asked and answered in a meaningful way if the conversation happens just in passing.

4. Interrupting and Being Interrupted

Something pops into your head, you interrupt them. Something pops into their head, they interrupt you. “Do you have a minute?”

When you are interrupted, you are not at your best. Most likely you were in the middle of something. You have to break your attention. Pull yourself out of whatever it is you were doing. Try to focus. But you are not prepared. And what you really want is to get back to whatever it is you were doing before you were interrupted. Your responses to your direct reports (and anyone else) when you are interrupted are never going to be as thorough and accurate as they would be if you had time to prepare. The same is true for your direct reports and other colleagues when you interrupt them.

So what’s a manager to do? 

What do the very best managers do? The managers whose employees consistently deliver the highest productivity and quality, with high retention of the high performer and high turnover among the low performers, with the best business outcomes and high engagement/morale and team spirit, whose direct reports are most likely to describe the manager as “one of the best manager I’ve ever had.”

What is the common denominator among those managers? An abiding commitment to the fundamentals—relentless high quality communication. Consistently engaging every direct report in an ongoing, structured, content-rich one-on-one dialogue about the work that person does and the internal and external customers they serve. Things go much better when managers consistently make expectations clear and provide candid feedback for each individual every step of the way. Use team meeting only for what team meetings are good for—and make the most of them.

When managers build and maintain high-quality one-on-one dialogues with their direct reports, they almost always increase performance and engagement and achieve significant measurable improvements in business outcomes.

Check out these related posts: 

The Single Biggest Mistake A Leader Can Make

Keystone Habits: The Hyperlink to Accelerating Your Leadership Impact. 

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

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