In July 2010 I wrote an article on my Canonical blog about five management truths.
My head is swimming with my viewpoints on management today. I thought I’d pen some down for others to comment on. Here are five of them:
- I believe it’s 80% positive mental attitude and only 20% what you know that really decides and defines the person. “Leave it with me and I’ll get it done” is what every employer wants to hear.
- The cost of the employee is not their salary. The true cost is the “per task cost” in terms of time, teaching & learning curve, and rework. Cheaper is not always better. As an employee, internalize the Doctrine of Completed Staff Work. (Something I’m not very good at any longer I must admit.)
- There are only two states to a deliverable: Done and Not Done.
- If your task isn’t done I’m going to ask “When can I have it?” “Percent Complete” is meaningless. “Time to complete” is not. 80% complete for four weeks means nothing to me. Four days to complete does.
There is a difference between Done and Done Done. (i.e. I’ve completed this deliverable vs the deliverable is ready to ship to clients)
I had an interesting conversation with JML recently about the Doctrine of Completed Staff work and he suggest I post something further about it. Here’s a slightly modified version of our dialog.
- Q: I find the Doctrine of Completed Staff Work interesting – I can’t readily form an opinion about it. It seems to me that there are other highly productive modes boss/employee relationships that don’t leave such a wide gulf.
- A: I understand. The main thing to consider is that it’s based on the assumption that your boss is very busy and just wants enough information to make an informed decision (almost always strategic or tactical). If your boss isn’t like this, it still shows that you’ve thought about the problem and possible solutions.
- Q: I would like to hear your thoughts on the Doctrine more fully: whether you think it’s a good idea; whether it’s good for all situations; what the cost of encouraging such a doctrine might be etc.
- A: For an engineering manager it’s not going to have a really big benefit. The employee providing the information to the manager could even be accused of not doing what he/she needs to be doing. e.g. “You were writing up this information about ways to fix Blueprint statuses instead of fixing those 3 archive bugs I assigned you.” So the caveat here for engineers is to stay on an approved topic. For directors and executives though it would have a profound effect. I think it’s a required trait for dealing with most execs at the C level or higher.
- As the consumer/manager, the easiest way to encourage this behaviour is to make it a request: “Hey Joey, you mention that privacy isn’t working for you. Please contact Bob, John, and Sally and build me a set of options on how to address it, along with pros and cons. I’d like to have this back from you by December 10th.”
