Management – are you at the right level?

If you’re a manager, have you ever felt too stuck in the weeds? Ever been frustrated by the amount of time you’re spending on day-to-day problems? Do you occasionally feel that you’re just fighting fires and not really advancing the business in any meaningful way?

Yep, those are rhetorical questions – anyone who has ever been a manager has felt those things at some point. For most managers, prior to becoming a manager, they were actually doing the thing that they ended up managing; making it even more likely that they’d slip back into doing it again.

Usually, when I ask people about this, I hear excuses like “I can do it faster than everyone else”, “it’s really urgent” or “I really enjoy the work”. Now those statements may all be true. But it doesn’t change the fundamental problem. If you’re doing that work (in the weeds), then you’re not doing the work you should be doing.

Solving this problem, in my experience, starts with just recognising the true cost of the problem. And the largest cost of it is your failure to do the true work of management – that work which genuinely moves the business, or your team, forward.

Leveraging management

The work of management has the advantage of being highly leveraged and, therefore, more valuable. For example:

• An hour spent training the team will pay off for months or years to come as the team operates at a higher level;

• An hour spent designing a new and better process or system will pay off for months or years to come as the entire team uses it;

• An hour spent defining a strategy to enter a new market will pay off for months or years to come as your business succeeds in that market; or

• An hour spent creating a strong plan for your business will pay off for the length of the plan as it improves how well the team executes.

And this is not to mention other potentially even higher-value activities such as buying and integrating other businesses or raising capital.

Any or all of these things are examples of work that is uniquely part of management and simply creates more value per hour or work than almost anything else you’re likely to do in the operation of the business.

So perhaps your most useful lead indicator as a manager is simply how many hours each week you are investing actually doing the job of management. That is to say, how many hours are you investing in activities that will be done once and will pay off for months or years to come? How many hours are you investing in the truly important, but not urgent, activities that will truly build a great business, not just keep a business running? Or how many hours are you spending on activities that genuinely improve the capacity of the business, not just keeping it alive?

The answer to those questions will correlate very directly with how far your business is going to go. The more time you invest in actually developing it, improving the team and the operation, and genuinely taking it beyond its current state will necessarily dictate how far it actually goes.

The more you elevate your position into true management, rather than partial management and partial doing the stuff, the better off the business will perform. So get clear on what those things are, start measuring how much time you’re investing in them and increase that amount. It should be at least 50% of your working week. If you reach 70%, you will be close to best practice……and your business and team should be moving ahead in leaps and bounds!