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Overview
Do you want to become invaluable to your company? The unparalleled key to achieving that notoriety is to learn how to boost your managerial skills and bring out the best in your people.
If that sounds simple, that’s because it is! Great managers are made, not born. Renowned success expert Brian Tracy has written Management, a handy, easy-to-follow guide to help you improve yourself as a manager and a professional in general.
In Management, Tracy shows how anyone can easily:
- Set performance standards
- Delegate productively
- Define key result areas
- Concentrate attention and resources on high-payoff activities
- Hire and fire effectively
- Build a staff of peak performers
- Hold meetings that work
- Communicate with clarity
- Negotiate successfully
- Remove obstacles to performance, and more!
Filled with practical, proven techniques and tools, Management is an essential guide that shows you how to bring out the best in your people—and be seen as an indispensable linchpin by the leaders of your organization.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400222179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AMACOM |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2019 |
| Series: | The Brian Tracy Success Library |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.95(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
MANAGEMENT
By BRIAN TRACY
AMACOM
Copyright © 2014 Brian TracyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3419-2
CHAPTER 1
The Key Questions for Managerial Effectiveness
THE STARTING point for achieving greater effectiveness is asking and answering the right questions, over and over. Answering these questions will help you keep your eye on the ball. Excellent managers are highly aware of the answers to the important questions.
The key questions for managerial effectiveness are:
* Why are you on the payroll? Good managers are extremely results-oriented, instead of being processor activity-oriented. They are always focused on the results they have been hired to produce. What have you been hired to accomplish?
* What is the unique contribution that you can make? What can you and only you contribute to your organization that, if done well, will make a significant difference?
* What are you trying to do and how are you trying to do it? Analyze your work and ask why you are doing something and not doing something else. Most people spend 80 percent of their time on the 80 percent of their work that only contributes 20 percent of the value of what they do. Top-performing managers always concentrate on the few things that, if done especially well, will make a real difference.
* What are your assumptions? Your assumptions must be questioned. What if your assumptions were wrong? What would you do then?
* Could there be a better way? Whatever you are doing today, there are probably many better ways to achieve the same goals. Keep your mind open.
Continually asking these questions deepens your perception, expands your range of understanding, and brings you answers, ideas, and insights that help you to be more effective—and make a more valuable contribution to your organization in a shorter period of time.
CHAPTER 2Focus on Key Result Areas
YOUR KEY result areas are your most significant areas of contribution. In the field of managerial performance, the focus on key result areas is the key to your effectiveness, your future, and success in your career.
There are seven key results areas for managers. Each is important, and, whatever your position, one of them is probably more important than any other at a given time. With changing circumstances, one key result area will rise to prominence and one will decline in importance. But you must be cognizant of what they are if you want to improve and perform at your best in each area.
Customers Count
The first key result area in a business is customer needs. The customer can be defined as "someone who depends on you, and someone you depend on for your success in your career."
It turns out that every manager has three "customers" to serve in order to be successful. The first customer is, of course, your boss. Managers must give their bosses what they want and in the form that they demand it. As long as you please your boss, your job will be secure and your future will be assured.
The second customer that you have to satisfy is the external customer. This is the customer who uses what you produce. It could be an outside customer in the marketplace, or it could be another department within the organization. This customer must be satisfied for you to be deemed to be doing an excellent job.
The third customer is your staff. Keeping them happy and focused on the most valuable uses of their time is absolutely essential for you to get the most out of each staff member.
Profit and Loss
The second key result area in business is economics. All organizational success is determined by economics. Managers are continually striving to either increase revenues or to decrease costs. As a manager, you think continually about the cost of inputs relative to the value of outputs.
Economics always refers to "maximization." You are always trying to get the highest possible return on the amount of money, time, energy, and emotion invested in a particular course of endeavor.
Focus on Quality
The third key result area of management is quality. The quality of your work largely determines your future in business.
As an executive, you set the standards for your area of responsibility, so the standards of quality that you set for your products and services, as well as for the work that you do, are especially important. For this reason, you must emphasize quality, discuss quality, and continually encourage others to think about how you could improve the quality of what you do for your internal and external customers.
Produce More with Less
The fourth key result area in business is productivity. The most successful companies use their resources efficiently and well. They achieve a higher level of output per unit of input than their competitors. They are continually seeking ways to do things better, faster, or cheaper.
A focus on increasing productivity requires clear goals, plans, checklists of essential activities, and a never-ending focus on getting more and more important things done in less time.
Innovation and Creativity
The fifth key result area in business is innovation—developing new products, services, and ways of doing business to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of your customers in a competitive market.
Innovation requires that you create a culture that encourages people to generate new ideas. These new ideas include better ways of getting things done, new approaches to the business, new products, new services, and new methods and processes for operating your business. A top executive wrote, "Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to learn and apply new ideas faster than our competitors."
One of the best examples of the power of innovation is the ongoing smartphone battle between Apple and Samsung. When Apple released its iPhone in 2007, it quickly revolutionized the entire world of mobile phones. Within a year, Apple had sold tens of millions of units of its new product, with gross margins of almost 50 percent profit per unit.
At this point, Samsung, a manufacturer of consumer electronics and laptop computers, decided that the smartphone market was an excellent area for innovation and expansion. While Apple began introducing one new version of its iPhone every twelve to eighteen months, Samsung began offering three to five versions of new smartphones each year.
Within five years, the Apple iPhone went from a 50 percent market share to a market share of 12.9 percent in 2013. Samsung, because of its furious rate of innovation and new product offerings, moved from the "new kid on the block" to holding 69 percent of the world market for smartphones by 2013.
Grow Your People
The sixth key result area in business is people growth. How much time and money do you invest in training and developing the people upon which your business is dependent?
According to the American Society for Training and Development, the top 20 percent of companies, in terms of growth and profits, invest 3 percent or more of their gross revenue back into training the people that they depend on to generate those revenues in the first place.
According to an article in Human Resource Executive magazine, the payoff in people training is extraordinarily high, ranging from $10 back to the bottom line to as much as $32 back for every dollar spent in training people to become even better at what they do.
Organizational Development
The seventh key result area in business is organizational development, which entails thinking about and doing the things that create a positive and harmonious organizational climate. These are the aspects of your business that make people feel happy to work there and fully engaged, enabling them to produce at their very best.
You should continually be asking yourself what you could do to improve in each of the seven key result areas: customer needs, economics, quality, productivity, innovation, employee growth and training, and organizational development. What are the 20 percent of activities that account for 80 percent of your results? What are the 20 percent of problems that account for 80 percent of your stress or underachievement? What are the 20 percent of things you can do that can enable you to take advantage of 80 percent of your opportunities in your field?
Excellent managers have clarity. They continually focus their efforts on key result areas of their businesses.
CHAPTER 3Set Standards of Performance
ONCE YOU have determined your key result areas, the next step is to set standards of performance for each one. As Yogi Berra said, "You can't hit a target that you can't see."
For you to perform at your best as a manager, you must set standards of performance, and even standards of excellent performance for each job and for each function in your area of responsibility. People need to know exactly what you expect and to what level of quality.
These standards need to be specific, measurable, and time-bounded. Remember, "What gets measured gets done."
When you ask other people to do a job, you must also tell them your desired schedule of completion and how, exactly, you are going to measure whether that job has been done properly.
Perhaps the greatest leap forward in business in recent years is the concept of "measurement-based management." This is where you assign specific numbers, benchmarks, and standards to every area of activity in your company, right down to how many times the phone will ring before it is answered.
The Hawthorne Effect
There is a principle in psychology called the Hawthorne effect, which comes from the pioneering work on labor productivity conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in 1928. What they found was that when people are clear about a particular number or target, they continually compare themselves against that number and both consciously and unconsciously improve their performance in that area. This process of continuous improvement starts with you and your employees being clear about the number in the first place.
The achievement of standards of performance must be the only basis for rewards in an organization. Rewards in a top company go to performance, excellence, increased sales, and measurable achievement. Rewards must be based on performance and results alone.
In his wonderful book The Greatest Management Principle in the World, Michael LeBoeuf says, "What gets rewarded gets done." The key question you have to ask yourself continually in your work is, "What is getting rewarded?"
Are you rewarding the performance you desire or require? Whenever you see an organization or a department that is performing below standard, you will almost always find that the wrong things are being rewarded.
Perverse Incentives
In one company I worked for, the telemarketers received a reward or a bonus for each potential customer that they could talk into attending a live sales presentation of the company's services. This system ensured that several hundred people would come to a large presentation each month. However, the number of those potential customers who actually bought the company's services was quite low. The managers discovered that they were rewarding the wrong things.
They then changed their compensation system to a base salary plus a commission on the sales made to the people who were invited to the presentation. The telemarketers, responding to the new incentive, became much more careful about inviting only qualified prospects who could become immediate customers. The company's business doubled and then doubled again within the next few months.
Inspect What You Expect
Once you have set performance standards, you must inspect what you expect. When you assign a task and set a standard of performance, also arrange to check back with the employee regularly, to be sure that the job is being done on schedule and to the previously agreed-to standard.
Employees value the importance of their work much more when they know that the boss cares enough to set standards and then check with them to make sure that the standards are being met. The reverse of this regular inspection is when the boss assigns a job and then turns to other things, leaving employees alone to perform without measurement or feedback.
Delegation is not abdication. Even though you have assigned a job to another person, you are still responsible for its successful completion. When you inspect what you expect, only then will people believe that you consider the job important enough for them to strive to meet the standards that you have mutually set.
Clarity Is Essential
In business and in life, clarity is one of the most important words associated with success. Thousands of employees have been surveyed and asked about the characteristics of the best bosses they have ever had. They universally agree on this point: "I always knew what my boss expected me to do."
The reason you must be clear about key result areas and standards of performance is that, without them, neither you nor your employees can perform at high levels. If you cannot perform the job in an excellent fashion, you cannot earn recognition and promotion. You cannot perform with distinction. As a manager, the people under you cannot do their very best unless they know exactly what that is and how it will be measured.
The kindest thing you can do for your staff members is to help them to be absolutely clear about what it is you need them to do and to what standard of performance. When people are clear about the target they are aiming at, they will often amaze you with the quality and quantity of their production and output.
CHAPTER 4Concentrate Your Powers
WARREN BUFFETT, Bill Gates Jr., and Bill Gates Sr. were chatting together at a social event when an executive approached them with a question. "What would you gentlemen say is the most important quality for success in business?"
According to bystanders, all three of these highly successful businessmen turned to the questioner and said simultaneously: "Focus!"
In a world of nonstop distraction, from telephone calls and voice mail to text messages, the Internet, and the people all around you, your ability to focus single-mindedly is absolutely essential for your success. In fact, all real success in life comes from developing the ability to concentrate your time, attention, and talents on those few tasks that can make all the difference to your success in your work. This is the real purpose for defining key result areas and setting standards of performance.
All of time management boils down to asking and answering a single question: "What is the most valuable use of my time right now?" Perhaps the best definition of time management is that it is "your ability to choose the sequence of events." Your ability to organize your time in sequence so that you are clear about what you do first, what you do second, and what you do not do at all, is the key to doubling and tripling your productivity and the productivity of the people who report to you.
The Law of Three
Through more than thirty years of studying and teaching time management, I have discovered a powerful principle that is potentially life- and career-transforming. This Law of Three says that no matter how many tasks you perform in the course of a month, there are only three tasks and activities that account for 90 percent of the value of the contribution you make to your business.
In this sense, the word contribution is quite powerful in determining your success in your career. The more valuable your contribution to the achievement of the overall goals of your business, the more valuable and important you become as well.
Three Magic Questions
How do you determine your "big three"? Simple. You ask the three magic questions.
1.If I could only do one thing, all day long, what one task or activity would contribute the most value to my business? Make a list of everything you do in the course of a month, and then you review this list. The one activity that you engage in that contributes the most will probably jump out at you. Put a circle around that one task.
2.If I could only do two things, all day long, which would be the second activity that would contribute the greatest value to my business? Usually, this item will jump out at you as well. You may have to compare and contrast different things you do to be sure that you have the right answer, but it is usually not difficult.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MANAGEMENT by BRIAN TRACY. Copyright © 2014 Brian Tracy. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Key Questions for Managerial Effectiveness 5
2 Focus on Key Result Areas 7
3 Set Standards of Performance 13
4 Concentrate Your Powers 18
5 The Vital Functions of Management 22
6 Management by Objectives 28
7 Management by Exception 32
8 Delegate Effectively 34
9 Build Peak Performers 39
10 Achieve Managerial Leverage 44
11 Hire the Right People 49
12 Fire the Incompetents 54
13 Hold Effective Meetings 59
14 Build Team Spirit 64
15 Make Good Decisions 70
16 Remove Obstacles to Performance 74
17 Become a Role Model 78
18 Brainstorm for Solutions 81
19 Negotiate Like a Professional 85
20 Communicate with Clarity 90
21 Achieve Personal Excellence 95
Conclusion 98
Index 101
About the Author 105