The unwritten rules of management

Management is not leadership (although it includes leadership). And it’s not tactics (although it involves tactics). Management is a process that runs organisations and parts of organisations. It’s that simple — and that hard.

Here, SmartCompany Plus distills advice from the most successful managers and business coaches in the world.

Manage the pieces with metrics

“Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers, or artists. They are engineers. They see their organisations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them,” writes entrepreneur Ray Dalio in Principles: Life and Work.

“They create process-flow diagrams to show how the machine works and to evaluate its design. They build metrics to light up how well each of the individual parts of the machine (most importantly, the people) and the machine as a whole are working. And they tinker constantly with its designs and its people to make both better. They don’t do this randomly. They do it systematically, always keeping the cause-and-effect relationships in mind. And while they care deeply about the people involved, they cannot allow their feelings for them or their desire to spare them discomfort to stand in the way of the machine’s constant improvement. To do otherwise wouldn’t be good for either the individuals on the team or the team that the individuals are a part of.

“Build great metrics. Metrics show how the machine is working by providing numbers and setting off alert lights in a dashboard,” says Dalio.

“Metrics are an objective means of assessment and they tend to have a favourable impact on productivity. If your metrics are good enough, you can gain such a complete and accurate view of what your people are doing and how well they are doing it that you can almost manage via the metrics alone. In constructing your metrics, imagine the most important questions you need answered in order to know how things are going and imagine what numbers will give you the answers to them. Don’t look at the numbers that you have and try to adapt them to your purposes, because you won’t get what you need. Instead start with the most important questions and imagine the metrics that will answer them.”

Trust and support

“Managing a small team is about mastering a few basic fundamentals: developing a health manager-report relationship and creating an environment of support,” writes Julie Zhuo — former vice president of product and design for Facebook, who started with the company as its first intern — in her book, The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You.

“The issue, of course, is that if your reports don’t tell you how they’re really feeling, you can’t help them. You may miss early warning signs that lead to bigger problems down the road. People’s dissatisfaction will fester beneath the surface until one day they surprise you with their resignation. And most of the time when that happens, they’re not just quitting your company, they are also quitting you.”

Zhuo says that you know you have a report-manager relationship based on trust when these three statements are true:

The three statements

My reports regularly bring their biggest challenges to my attention.
My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally.
My reports would gladly work for me again.

Differentiating between personal touch and micro-management

“Don’t confuse personal touch with micro-management; they are not the same,” explains management researcher and writer Jim Collins in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0.

“Micro-management — a horribly destructive behavior — is illustrated in the following description of a certain CEO’s management style: Our CEO tries to control and direct every single little detail. Instead of feeling like you’re competent and trusted, you feel that you are being ‘watched over.’ He nitpicks everything and it drives us all crazy. Some of our best people have left for other companies because he’s so demoralizing.

“You know the old saying about seeing the forest for the trees? Well this guy is so far down in the trees that he’s trying to control the direction and size of each pine needle. This CEO’s style is clearly oppressive, but how is it different from personal touch? Are we being consistent? At first we admonish you to ‘know what’s going on’ and to ‘reinforce values with specific details’; then we admonish you to not ‘micro-manage.’ How do these fit together? The difference is simply this: A micro-manager doesn’t trust his people, and seeks to control every single detail and decision; he believes that ultimately only he will make the right choices. A personal-touch leader, on the other hand, trusts his people to make basically good choices; he respects their abilities.”

If you don’t have anything nice to say, it still needs to be said

“It’s brutally hard to tell people when they are screwing up. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings; that’s because you’re not a sadist,” writes Kim Scott, former CEO coach at Dropbox and Twitter in her book Radical Candor.

“You don’t want that person or the rest of the team to think you’re a jerk. Plus, you’ve been told since you learned to talk, ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’ Now all of a sudden it’s your job to say it. You’ve got to undo a lifetime of training. Management is hard.

“When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticise one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being “nice” is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.

“Rather than focus on “giving feedback” to my team, I encouraged them to tell me when I was wrong. I did everything I could to encourage people to criticise me, or at least simply to talk to me. After a false start … the team started to open up. We began to debate openly, and we had more fun together.”

Be ruthless, eliminate what you can

“Most leaders have a multitude of duties they perform that are at best unnecessary, and at worst counterproductive. Many of these tasks are done for no other reason than the fact that we have always done them,” writes Randy Grieser in The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization.

“To help determine if you can eliminate something from your workload, ask yourself:

Why is this task needed, and how does it contribute to the functioning of our organisation?
What can I eliminate completely from my schedule? What distractions can I avoid?
What would be the worst-case outcome if nobody did this task?

“If the answer is nothing, or nothing significant, then simply eliminate the task. Always eliminate first. Never delegate something that can be eliminated, or you are just wasting someone else’s time.”

Helping without taking over

“You’re a good person, and you’re doing your very best to let your people thrive. You want to ‘add value’ and be useful. You like to feel that you’re contributing,” writes Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever.

“However, there’s being helpful, and then there’s ‘being helpful,’ as in stepping in and taking over. And way too often, you get suckered into doing the latter. Then everyone — you, the person you’re helping, the organisation — pays a price for your attempted helpfulness.

“Your good intentions often end up contributing to a relentless cycle of exhaustion, frustration and, ironically, reduced impact. Edgar Schein has untangled the paradox of being helpful in his excellent book Helping. At its crux is the insight that when you offer to help someone, you ‘one up’ yourself: you raise your status and you lower hers, whether you mean to or not. This idea seems counterintuitive, I know, because so often our desire to help comes from genuine caring. But the insight rings true when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who is being offered help. When you think back to times when ‘help’ has been thrust upon you, you’ll probably notice a curious mixture of reactions that include resistance, frustration, disempowerment and annoyance.”

“The unwritten rules of management,” as listed in an idiosyncratic and pithy style by the former chair and chief executive of Raytheon Company, William Swanson, in his book The Unwritten Rules of Management.

The rules, written

Learn to say, ‘I don’t know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be often.
It is easier to get into something than it is to get out of it.
If you are not criticised, you may not be doing much.
Look for what is missing. Many know how to improve what’s there, but few can see what isn’t there.
Presentation rule: when something appears on a slide presentation, assume the world knows about it, and deal with it accordingly.
Work for a boss to whom you can tell it like it is. Remember that you can’t pick your relatives, but you can pick your boss.
Constantly review developments to make sure that the actual benefits are what they are supposed to be. Avoid Newton’s Law.
However menial and trivial your early assignments may appear, give them your best efforts.
Persistence or tenacity is the disposition to persevere in spite of difficulties, discouragement, or indifference. Don’t be known as a good starter but a poor finisher.
In doing your project, don’t wait for others; go after them, and make sure it gets done.
Confirm the instructions you give others, and their commitments, in writing. Don’t assume it will get done!
Don’t be timid; speak up. Express yourself, and promote your ideas.
Practice shows that those who speak the most knowingly and confidently often end up with the assignment to get the job done.
Strive for brevity and clarity in oral and written reports.
Be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements.
Promises, schedules, and estimates are important instruments in a well-ordered business.
You must make promises — don’t lean on the often-used phrase, ‘I can’t estimate it because it depends upon many uncertain factors.’
Never direct a complaint to the top. A serious offense is to ‘CC’ a person’s boss on a copy of a complaint before the person has a chance to respond to the complaint.
When dealing with outsiders, remember that you represent the company. Be especially careful of your commitments.
Cultivate the habit of boiling matters down to the simplest terms. An elevator speech is the best way.
Don’t get excited in engineering emergencies. Keep your feet on the ground.
Cultivate the habit of making quick, clean-cut decisions.
When making decisions, the ‘pros’ are much easier to deal with than the ‘cons.’ Your boss wants to see them both.
Don’t ever lose your sense of humour.
Have fun at what you do. It will reflect in your work. No one likes a grump except another grump!
Treat the name of your company as if it were your own.
Beg for the bad news.
You remember 1/3 of what you read, 1/2 of what people tell you, but 100% of what you feel.
You can’t polish a sneaker. Don’t waste effort putting the finishing touches on something that has little substance to begin with.
When facing issues or problems that are becoming drawn-out, ‘short them to the ground.’

When faced with decisions, try to look at them as if you were one level up in the organisation. Your perspective will change quickly.
A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter — or to others — is not a nice person. (This rule never fails).