The Building Blocks of Success, Part 2

In my last article, I explained my definition of success for a manager, that you deliver the results expected by your organization…and then some.  I also introduced five Building Blocks for Success – activities that every manager, regardless of experience level, will need to perform:

• Establishing a set of personal values
• Clearly defining your objectives
• Organizing and allocating available resources
• Developing a plan to achieve the objectives
• Monitoring progress toward the objectives

In that article, I provided some details on the first two building blocks.  Today I’m going to explore the last three. If you have not read the first article, I recommend that you do so now, so you have the context for this post.  

Let’s jump right in.

Three More Building Blocks

Building Block #3: Organizing and Allocating Available Resources

As managers, we are entrusted with a variety of resources that we use to accomplish our objectives and deliver our results.  (And I’ve never met a manager who said they had enough of any of them.) The three most common types of resources available to you will likely be people, money and time.  Let’s consider each one.

• People.  These are your staff, your project team, or others entrusted to your care.  (This will be the first and last time I talk about “resources” and “people” in the same breath.  It’s important to remember that people are people and things are things. Machines can be standardized.  People are infinitely, wonderfully and frustratingly variable.) 
  
  Some of these people will report to you directly, but others, and possibly the majority, will not. The people who report to you directly will require coaching and mentoring. They will have individual needs and aspirations that they will want you to help address. They, and all the others, will need direction and effective delegation, timely follow up and honest feedback. Those people who do not report to you, but whom you depend on for results, will need to be influenced, as will their managers. Everyone will need to be appreciated.
  
  The results of the content survey reflect many different aspects of managing people, like recruiting and hiring, managing performance and building trust. We will spend a lot of time and energy exploring these areas.

• Money.  You will be responsible for your budget  and possibly the budgets of others who are contributors to your work.  Whether your budget is $100 or $100 million, it will often be largely up to you to determine how, when and where the money is spent.  You will need to develop some level of proficiency in estimating costs, forecasting expenses, creating and managing budgets and tracking your results against your plan. 
  
  I always managed budgets with the mindset of a steward, thinking that I had been entrusted with scarce monetary resources that demanded my careful attention.  I tried to spend the company’s money as carefully as I spent my own, and recognized that every dollar spent in my area was a dollar that could not be spent in other areas that also had pressing needs.  I wanted to ensure that I was getting the most “bang for the buck”.  
  
  You don’t have to be a CPA or a financial wizard to be able to effectively manage your budget, but you will need to become functionally literate about the basics of accounting so you can communicate with your new best friends in the Finance department. (Caveat: If you’re a manager in a Finance or Accounting department, you know the bar is set higher.) You’ll also want to understand the basics of financial reporting, so you can communicate to your boss and others about your results.
  
  We will explore these and other aspects of financial management.

• Time.  This is the scarcest of all resources, and for many of us, the most difficult to manage.  There are numerous techniques for managing your time, and we’ll look at a few of those.
  
  Here’s a simple exercise to test how effectively you’re managing your time.

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Building Block #4: A Plan to Achieve the Objectives

I once read a comment that “hope is not a strategy”.¹   It’s not a plan, either.  Nor are good intentions. You have to articulate a path from where you are today to where your objective says you should be in the future. You must be able to develop a step-by-step plan that covers everything required to achieve the objectives.  In some cases, your plan might fit on an index card. More complex objectives will require longer, more detailed plans, and perhaps a dedicated Project Manager to execute them.  

An entire library of books has been written on the subjects of planning and project management.  Summarizing that work is well beyond my scope here, but as a follow up to this article I will create a resource page to provide pointers to other authors and reference material.  For today I will offer a few actionable ideas.

• Planning is an exercise of the imagination, which is challenging because many of us don’t think of ourselves as creative.  You have to be able to envision the desired future state. This is easier to do if you have well-defined objectives that describe the end goal. With less clearly defined objectives, try asking “What will be different when we successfully meet this objective?”
  
  
• You also have to identify the possible obstacles in your path.  Throughout the planning process, you should ask yourself, and others involved, questions like these:
  • What constraints or barriers will we need to overcome to be successful?  How will we do that?
  • What gaps exist in our capabilities or knowledge?  How will we address them?
  • What other risks could impact our ability to deliver results?  How will we mitigate them?
    
    
• Write down your assumptions!  Let me repeat that: Write down your assumptions!  Every plan is an educated guess about how you will achieve your results.  To create a plan, you have to make some assumptions – about costs, staffing requirements, market trends, the weather, or any of dozens of other variables that could influence your activities and over which you have little to no control. 
  
  At the time the plan is developed, these may seem like eternal truths or common knowledge. But later – during a review next week or in six months – a question is sure to arise about why you thought you should do it this way.   I can almost guarantee that you won’t remember the answer.  But if you documented your assumptions, you can answer the question and then focus the subsequent discussion on the validity of the assumption. If the assumption needs to change to reflect new information, your plan can be updated. 
  
  
• Developing a plan should be an iterative process.  The intent is not to get lost in endless revision cycles.  After all, your real responsibility is to get things done, but doing two or three revisions at the outset will give you a better plan to start with, and doing periodic reviews (see monitoring below) will help keep the plan relevant, particularly if your environment changes.
  
  
• Planning should be a team sport.  You need to initiate the activity and you are accountable for having a plan, but you should not attempt to do it all yourself. Rarely is a good plan conceived by one individual working alone.  Getting 360 degree input is a useful part of your planning process. Your boss will likely have opinions that you should solicit.  Your employees should have input. After all, they’re the ones who will need to execute the bulk of the plan. Your peers and colleagues, especially the ones who you will depend on for some of your deliverables, should also be engaged in the process.  If you will be working with third parties, vendors or other suppliers, you will want their input. If any of your partners can’t deliver what you need, when you need it, or if they have a better, faster or cheaper solution, you want to know that as early as possible.
  

Each of those suggestions deserves more extensive treatment, so we’ll talk more about planning in future articles.

Building Block #5: Monitoring Progress Toward the Objectives

This last Building Block helps ensure that you are able to track your progress, identify when you’re going off course, and make real-time corrections.  There’s another old saying that “what gets measured gets done”. ²  So how do you know your efforts are moving you toward the goal of delivering results?  

Answer: You create a set of measures – or metrics or KPIs, pick a term – and track them over time.  The SMART objective model ensures that every well-defined objective includes one or more measurable parameters.  These are often things like cost savings, sales increases, software releases delivered, or product quality improvements. You don’t have to dream them up.  Just use the ones that flow logically from the objectives. Some suggestions:

• Make the measures and results visible to your team – on your wall, in your emails, as part of your team meeting agendas.  They’re not worth much if no one pays attention. Accurate measures give you the information you need to work with teams or individuals who are not delivering.  On the flip side, tracking your results against the major milestones can give you reasons for the small celebrations that help maintain morale and build cohesiveness across a team.
  
  
• Make the measures and results visible to your leadership and stakeholders.  A well-developed set of measures with up-to-date data makes the process of reporting progress “up the chain” much easier.

As you monitor progress, you will also want to monitor the health of your plan. Establish a pattern of conducting periodic reviews of the plan – with your staff, your manager, key stakeholders and other partners. This will help ensure that you anticipate areas where your plan needs to change.

There is much more in the area of creating effective measures and monitoring processes that we will explore in future articles.

Summary

In this article and the last one, we have covered a lot of ground, and identified a number of areas for further exploration.  To summarize:

• To be a successful manager means that you deliver the results expected by your organization…and then some.  You get things done, things that your company thinks are important.  And you go above and beyond expectations when you deliver.
  
  
• There are five Building Blocks, activities that every manager will perform, that provide the foundation for success.  They are:
  
  
  • Establishing a set of personal values.  I talked about the values of integrity, honesty and empathy as my starting point.
    
    
  • Clearly defining your objectives.  The objectives for your organization should be SMART and aligned with the overall objectives of your company.
    
    
  • Organizing and allocating available resources.  You will need to manage people, money and time.
    
    
  • Monitoring progress toward the objectives.  Establishing measures and a reporting system to ensure that you, your team and your leadership all know where you are as you execute your plan.
    
    
  • Developing a plan to achieve the objectives. Articulating how you and your team will meet the objectives and deliver the results, while overcoming obstacles along the way. 

If you’ve read this far, thanks for hanging in there with me.  These two articles will form the basis for much of the content that I create over the coming months, shaped, as always, by your feedback and comments.

To your success,

Mike

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Footnotes

¹ Who said it is not clear. See https://quotes.yourdictionary.com/articles/who-said-hope-is-not-strategy.html . It is also lumped together with “Luck is not a factor and fear is not an option”.  Both clauses may be motivational, but I disagree with both. That, however, is a topic for another day. 

² I am constantly surprised as I look into the origins of some of these old sayings.  According to one author, the saying has been variously attributed to Peter Drucker, Tom DeMarco (a software engineer and author), Lord Kelvin (a 19th century physicist and engineer) and even Rheticus, a 16th century mathematician, astronomer and map maker.  It’s easy to get lost in an Internet rabbit hole when chasing these things down. Much simpler just to accept the saying as true, proven by the test of time, and then move on!