Managing officially

By: Ron Ashkenas

Many people envision the upper rungs of the corporate ladder as an inspired, innovative place where leaders spend their time on stimulating projects that shape the organisation’s future.

But this vision is not always a reality. In many companies today, even the most tenured individuals are just as bogged down with policies and procedures as their entry-level colleagues, if not more so…

To make way for innovative and big-picture thinking, managers need to clear the underbrush that often chokes productivity… Pick up the phone. Sure, having an email chain to document interactions can be useful to reference, but it frequently takes more time to write an email than to simply explain details in a live conversation.

If you find yourself struggling to organise your thoughts in an email, stop and ask yourself if it would be quicker to vocalise the situation.

Ask: what meetings can we eliminate? What reports can we stop doing? What steps in a process can be removed right now? Make it clear these suggestions won’t be taken as complaints but, instead, viewed as creative ideas for improving productivity…

If you’ve hired good people and trained them appropriately, you probably don’t need to review all revisions of their assignments… All organisations are slowed down by unnecessary underbrush that reduces productivity.

From “To Simplify, First Clear the Underbrush”