Rules Of Management

RULE 33 - Be ready to say yes

“Silicon Valley has developed a ‘genius’ business model. You find a genius. You build a business around them.”

Gordon Bell and Heidi Mason,

‘The Care and Feeding of “Intrapreneurs”’

The good manager – that’ you – tries to stay completely fresh. Not to get stuck in the same old ways of doing things. That means not having a default mechanism of ‘No, we don’t do it like that’. Instead replace it with, ‘That’s an interesting idea. How do you think that would work?’

What’s more, you need to encourage people to come up with new ideas, as well as coming up with them yourself. Try ideas out. Take one new idea each week and give it a go. It might be Fairly simple, ‘We’d like more choice of biscuits with our morning tea, please’, or something radical, ‘Listen up, guys, we’re going to try a completely new approach to sales and distribution’.

Obviously it makes sense to try out smaller ideas first to make sure your team can cope well with change, and then move on to the more radical ones later. Break ‘em in slowly.

And as fast as you are introducing new ideas, get your team to do the same with their own individual jobs so that they don’t grow stale either. If everyone has a new idea each week, that’s whole big bunch of new ideas by the end of the year for themselves and for the whole team. “I just thought I could speed the process up if I…’ ‘Wow, I could take that idea and adapt it to my work station and then I could…’ ‘Yeah, and I bet they’d be really interested in this in accounts because it could speed up the whole…’ And so on.

“If everyone has a new idea each week, that’s whole big bunch of new ideas by the end of the year.”

Biggest challenges? Getting your team onside – everyone is resistant to change initially. If you flag, the whole team will also flag. If you maintain the passion, the whole team will be infected and become addicted to this. Believe me. Trust me, I know you already have enough to do, but we’ll move on to delegating in a bit and that’ll free up some time. Then you’ll have more time to so this, which, in a way, is part of your real job – managing.

Encourage innovation. Reward good ideas. Create culture where ideas are recognized (even if not adopted) and valued.

posted by Right Ranger @ 6:50 PM