Working Smarter : Be a Better Manager

How Org Charts Will Help All Departments in Your Business

Rich — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:22:00 GMT

In most organizations, org charts are used for a single purpose – to give new employees a visual representation of the company’s hierarchy. Beyond that, most companies don’t utilize the power of org charts for much else.

Most companies view org charts for simply that purpose and that purpose only. But did you know that you can use org charts to improve virtually every area of your organization? Using org charts can lead to sales proposals closing more quickly, marketing initiatives producing augmented results, and the enhancement of the overall business intelligence and management of the company.

Here are three org chart tactics that will help you improve your organization’s productivity.

Using Org Charts in the Sales Department

Sales people are in a constant state of flux. Data turns to leads, leads to opportunities, opportunities to deals. Along the way sales teams and agents are collecting additional data to help close the sale. Although every prospect has different needs that the sales agent must attend to, the sales agent’s most important piece of information is to know who the decision makers are within the organization. An org chart is a simple way of tracking that information for better, smarter results.

During the sales qualification process any sales person involved should create and update an org chart for a visual representation of the customer’s organization in order to better understand who needs to be persuaded in order for the sale to actually go through. By building an org chart with this information on it the agent now becomes better equipped to find and contact the appropriate person for decision making and future return sales opportunities.

Org charts also have the added benefit of being able to help sales people rapidly communicate all of the information they’ve gathered during the communication process to each other should multiple sales people need to be involved. An org chart should be part of every client file you open.

For example, say you are a sales agent for a company that sells web analytics tools to track web traffic on websites. Your primary client relationships that you forge within various organizations would be the Marketing Director. But if the Marketing Director, Bill Jones, of one of your biggest clients named ABC Company leaves, will your relationship with the company remain intact? You may find that transitioning the client relationship to the next Marketing Director might be far less turbulent if you have an org chart of the entire marketing department and have developed relationships with some people on the team. In fact, one of those people may be the eventual person who assumes the role now left vacant (see below).

Using Org Charts in the Marketing Department

The marketing department of your organization should employ a similar tactic as the sales department using org charts to track the hierarchy and organizational structure of clients. Marketing departments are constantly challenged with communicating the benefits of the company’s products and services in order to create a pipeline of leads and opportunities for the sales department.

One of the ways to achieve this is to look for additional opportunities among your existing pool of clients. So, why not create a clear picture of your clients’ organizational structure by creating org charts to identify other cross-selling and undeveloped relationship opportunities?

Again, these client org charts provide terrific business intelligence to understanding your clients more thoroughly, how each one functions, what roles the individuals play, and, what opportunities have yet to be realized.

For example, say you are an intellectual property attorney at a large full service law firm and one of your clients is a new video game maker. Currently, as the attorney for the company you are the only one that serves their legal needs, but your firm marketing director creates an org chart (below) and together you realize that the company has grown in size in a short period of time and may have some employment and labor law needs like employee handbooks and policies that your firm could handle on their behalf. Because of the org chart, you now have a possible cross-selling opportunity to pitch and potentially have a larger scale client than previously though.

Click to see a larger version of this image.

Using Org Charts in Executive Management

As previously mentioned, org charts provide a unique source of business intelligence which is the crux of the decision making process for members of the executive management team in a company. While the sales and marketing teams are tracking prospects and clients with org charts, the executive management team can plan organizational change of the business with org charts.

This is expanded in greater detail in two previous Working Smarter articles entitled “Playing ‘What If?’ with Your Organization” and “What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done”. The executive management team of a company benefits from knowing the hierarchical structure of the business and the functional relationship with each member. Org charts allow them to look into how lean the organization is or not, and how to plan for growth. Bloated departments may be trimmed, and other departments that may be under realized can be bulked up for the betterment of the organization.

In summary, if you begin using org charts for more than the hierarchy of your own company, your business will augment the overall intelligence regarding prospects, clients, competitors and strategic partners.

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Is Your Organization Built to Last?

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:13:00 GMT

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras is a book that I read in college, and it changed the way I looked at business. In the book Collins and Porras analyze eighteen visionary and long-standing companies (3M, Disney, and Wal-Mart for example) and compare them against their top competitors.

Their goal was to determine what makes these companies different. Why do some companies fail and why do others last for decades after their founders have left?

Built to Last contains all of their research, analysis, and conclusions and I wanted to discuss some of the points that are highly relevant to what we’ve discussed at Working Smarter.

Don’t Tell Time, Build Clocks – Institutionalize Knowledge and Process within Your Organization

One of the major themes throughout Built to Last is the concept of Time-Telling vs. Clock-Making. A time-teller is a key employee – whenever someone in your organization needs to know what time it is they go and ask the one time-teller in your organization that always produces an accurate time.

But what happens when that key employee leaves your organization? Nobody in your organization will be able to tell time, query the customer database, build a new version of the product, or do any of the other million things that are fully known only to a select handful of experienced, key employees. If a business has to spend all of its time reinventing the wheel instead of innovating its products and services, then it probably won’t be very successful in the long run.

So what do truly exceptional companies do? They don’t tell time, they build clocks. They stop reinventing the wheel and institutionalize knowledge. They develop business processes and document them in a central location such that the organization no longer depends on knowledge being passed down from employee to employee orally – instead that specialized knowledge becomes part of the organization’s inner-workings. That institutionalized knowledge forms a clock that enables every person in the organization to tell time on their own.

Ask yourself: are you a time-teller or a clock builder? If you’re not building clocks already, then you should get started by learning how to document your organization’s processes.

Preserve Your Core Values, But Try New Things

Truly exceptional companies have a set of core values that are fundamentally unalterable – everything in the company can change except for their core values. They can make different products, they can enter different markets, they can be run by different people, but they never waiver from their core principles and values.

Built to Last uses IBM as an example here, showing their three core principles (give full consideration to the individual employee, spend a lot of time making customers happy, and go the last mile to do things right), the success IBM had when they followed them (up until the mid-1980s or so), and the failures after they started adhering to secondary principles, like corporate culture and such. (Source: The Simple Dollar)

Companies should always be trying new things, but they should do so within the parameters of their core principles. So what’s an easy way to try new things and preserve the core? As Fred Nickols explained, the best way to do that is to use a goals grid when planning any new initiative.

A goals grid is a simple way that allows you to balance all of your concerns and goals – it allows you to have a complete landscape over what you want to preserve (core values, successful old initiatives), what you want to eliminate from your organization (waste), what you want to steer your organization away from (extraneous values that contradict the core), and things that you want to achieve (growth, profitability.)

How Else Can You Build Your Company to Last?

The first thing you should do is get a copy of Built to Last! The second thing you should do is look to making some improvements within your company’s culture, operations, and philosophy:

Determine areas where you have “key employee” problems and try to mitigate them by institutionalizing knowledge with processes, information management systems, and training programs;
Determine your core values and make sure that every person in the company understands what they are;
Use goal planning tools, such as the goals grid, to help you get a clearer bearing on your company’s direction; and
Communicate often and clearly to your team regarding the company’s culture, direction, goals, and bearings. Let everyone see the forest from the trees.

We cover a lot of these topics in our Working Smarter Learning Center, so please check that out if you’d like to read more.

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Four Tips for “Beefing Up” Your Problem-Solving Tool Box – Part Four

Rich — Mon, 04 May 2009 09:25:00 GMT

This is part four of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #4: Draw pictures of the structure of the problem

A picture or model of the elements and relationships in a problem situation will help you to more quickly and more completely grasp the situation and figure out what to do about it.

Consider, for example, the diagram shown in Figure 4. It depicts the structure of a general-purpose work system. The elements of this system include inputs, a processor, outputs, a controller, and two control loops. On the front end of this system is a task initiation loop and on the back end is an evaluation and termination loop (the dotted lines). The relationships among these elements are such that inputs to the work system interact with the processor. The interactions between inputs and processor, which typically consist of prefigured routines, are referred to as “processes.” These processes produce the work system’s outputs. All this occurs under the watchful eye of the controller.

If the outputs of the work system are faulty, several possibilities are suggested by the structure of the diagram in Figure 4. The inputs might be faulty. The processor or the controller might be malfunctioning. Perhaps one or the other or both of the control loops is open and no information is getting through. Whatever the contributing factors, the diagram provides guidance regarding places to look for what might be causing the problem and for what might have to be changed in order to solve it.

The use of diagrams or schematics as an aid to problem solving is not new. Technicians have been using schematics as troubleshooting aids for years. Computer programmers and systems analysts are familiar with, if not dependent on, flowcharts and data structure models. Industrial engineers have relied on process flow diagrams ever since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Diagrams and schematics should be found in your problem solving toolbox too.

Most important, get in the habit of visualizing the problems you tackle.

More Information

This is an edited excerpt from a longer piece titled “Ten Tips for Beefing Up Your Problem Solving Tool Box” that appears on Fred Nickols’ articles web site (www.skullworks.com). Many other articles dealing with problem solving and additional workplace-related subjects can be found there as well. Fred can be contacted by e-mail at nickols@att.net.

Be sure to read the previous three parts of this article from Fred Nickols.

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Four Tips for “Beefing Up” Your Problem-Solving Tool Box – Part Three

Rich — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:28:00 GMT

This is part three of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #3: Think of problem solving as a “cover-the-bases” activity

Information does not make itself available to suit the requirements of anyone’s problem solving process. Solving a problem in a complex organization has much in common with detective work. We are forced to follow leads and unearth clues. Further, it is generally the case in complex organizations that no one individual possesses all the information necessary to solve a given problem. Vital information appears in bits and pieces. We have different backgrounds, perceptual filters, and value priorities. Different people seek and assimilate information in different ways.

Consequently, if you listen carefully to almost any discussion of a problem in a group setting, what you’ll hear is conversation that shifts from problem to symptom to cause to solution and back again, often in no particular order. Such “bouncing around” is natural. Don’t worry about it. Above all else, don’t try to force yourself (or others) to follow some lock-step, linear process. The task of problem solving is very much a type of intelligence work, a matter of piecing things together.

A systematic approach is necessary but the point of having one is to make sure you tend to all the things that need tending to, that you “cover the bases,” not trot around them in a 1-2-3 fashion. Figure 3 depicts a set of 12 “bases” to be covered or tasks that typically need tending to in the course of solving a problem.

Ordinarily, bases 4 and 5 are mutually exclusive; you do one or the other but not both. If you’re dealing with a problem where something has gone wrong, then your best bet, at least initially, is to focus on finding and fixing the cause of the problem. On the other hand, if you’re out to achieve some state of affairs never before attained, or if the cause of the problem has been found but can’t be corrected, then you’ll have to design and engineer a solution to the problem. In either case, you’ll have to settle on a course of action and carry it out.

Be sure to check back for part 4 from Fred Nickols. To read part one click here. To read part two click here.

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Four Tips for “Beefing Up” Your Problem-Solving Tool Box – Part Two

Rich — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:46:00 GMT

This is part two of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #2: Be clear about all of your goals and objectives

Ultimately, the aim of problem solving is action. To engage in problem solving is to search for a solution. A solution is a course of action that produces the solved state. To actually solve a problem is to implement the solution that has been found and demonstrate that it works. Solving problems requires intervention as well as investigation.

Intervening in complex organizations requires of us that (a) we are clear about all our goals and objectives and that (b) we carefully think through the likely effects of any actions we are contemplating.

Actions taken in an organizational context often “ripple” outward from the point of intervention, sometimes having unforeseen and unintended consequences. Our goals and objectives, therefore, are typically multi-dimensional; that is, we seek to eliminate some conditions, and to achieve others. There also are conditions we seek to preserve or avoid. (See Figure 2, the Goals Grid).

If we don’t want something that already exists, our goal is typically one of eliminating it. If we want something that doesn’t exist, our goal is ordinarily one of achieving it. Four categories of goals and objectives can be derived from the interplay of our perceptions and preferences: Achieve, Preserve, Avoid, and Eliminate.

For any problem situation, it is useful to ask the following questions as a way of clarifying all your goals and objectives:

What are we trying to achieve?
What are we trying to preserve?
What are we trying to avoid?
What are we trying to eliminate?

These same questions are also useful in examining any contemplated course of action. For example, if you’ve decided to solve the problems with a legacy accounts payable system by replacing it with a popular commercial version, you are well-served by asking the questions above in relation to that new accounts payable system.

Be sure to check back for parts 3 and 4 from Fred Nickols. To read part one, click here.

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Four Tips for “Beefing Up” Your Problem Solving Tool Box – Part One

Rich — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:54:00 GMT

This is part one of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Introduction

Problems come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. There is no guaranteed step-by-step or “by the numbers” process for solving every problem we encounter. We must instead configure or adapt our problem solving processes to fit the problem at hand. As problem solvers, we have more in common with the cabinet-maker than with the assembly-line worker. What we need, then, are plans and blueprints, high-quality materials, a decent place to work, a well-stocked tool box, and the knowledge and skills necessary to properly select and use the tools in it. Toward that end, here are four tips for “beefing up” your problem solving toolbox.

Focus on clearly defining the solved state.
Be clear about all your goals and objectives.
Think of problem solving as a “cover-the-bases” activity.
Draw diagrams and otherwise picture the structure of the problem.

Tip #1: Focus on clearly defining the solved state

Pay at least as much attention to the solved state as you pay to the problem state. As Robert F. Mager’s fable of the sea horse reminds us, “If you’re not sure where you’re going, you’re liable to end up someplace else—and not even know it.”

When solving a problem, we typically wish to do more than simply rid ourselves of some unacceptable situation. More often than not we are trying also to achieve some other, more desirable state of affairs.

Conceptually speaking, we’re trying to move from the problem state (a) to the solved state (a’). We do so by traversing what is called “the solution path” (see Figure 1).

It seems obvious that if we do not focus some of our attention on the solved state, the likelihood of attaining it is diminished. Unfortunately, the problem state typically attracts all our attention. The squeaky problem state wheel gets the grease. On occasion, this is an appropriate response. If the roof is caving in, then discussions about where to go can wait until we’re safely outside.

But, if we’re not in an emergency situation and if we still have nothing more in mind than doing something to rid ourselves of the problem state, we can create situations where the solution to one problem creates one or more new problems. Solutions that create new problems are “inefficient” solutions. An “efficient” solution is one that creates no new problems.

Perhaps the best-known step in any problem solving process is the one most people think of as the first step: “Define the Problem.” This is probably the most misunderstood and poorly executed step in the process. For many people, “Define the Problem” means simply to provide a written statement of the problem. There is much more to it than that. To define means to establish boundaries, to encompass, to enclose, to locate, to isolate, to distinguish, to differentiate, to set apart. To define the problem state (or the solved state) means, at the very least, to do the following:

To establish boundaries; to delineate (Locate).
To give distinguishing characteristics; to differentiate (Isolate).
To state the nature of; to describe precisely (Articulate).
To state the meaning of; to provide a definition (Explicate).

Rarely are definitions of the problem state or the solved state crystal-clear up front. Clarity typically develops over time. In many cases, the definition of a problem may be considered complete only after the problem has been solved. Until then, it is a shifting, evolving, changing part of the process. Thus, although “Defining the Problem” is a good step with which to begin the problem solving process, it is only a starting point and it must be revisited on a regular basis. This also is true of any definition of the solved state.

There are several ways of focusing on the solved state. One is to define it the same way we would define the problem state. Another is to list possible measures or indicators of its attainment. Ask yourself questions like these: “How will I know the problem has been solved? What will I accept as evidence? What does the solved state look like?” Yet another way is to be clear about all the goals and objectives of the problem solving effort. (This last point is so important that it constitutes a tip all its own—the next one.)

Be sure to check back for parts 2, 3 and 4 from Fred Nickols.

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The Four Most Common Marketing Mistakes Every Manager Makes

Rich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Mistakes result in lost business, time, and resources. Nobody is perfect, but it is everyone’s responsibility to minimize errors and make the best decisions possible.

Below are examples of routinely made poor decisions and big picture blunders that you can avoid as a manager, marketer, or business owner. How many of these do you routinely commit?

Failing to properly understand your market – Don’t think that because you have found success in one geographic region that the same plan will have the same or better results in other regions.

Take the time to understand your target market, how your product is positioned in that market, and how to properly communicate the benefits. Seems simple and logical enough, but even big companies make this mistake.

Legend has it that when a large American manufacturer of baby food first decided to introduce their brand in Africa, sales were sluggish. After looking into the matter, the company discovered that their trademark baby picture on the label was a hindrance because most products sold in Africa with pictures on the labels were used to communicate the contents of the package because of the low literacy rate. Whether legend or an enormous management mistake, it does serve as a reminder that not taking the time to understand who you are selling to can be disastrous.

Resisting change – Sometimes your routine and the your team’s routine need to change. In one of my previous posts, “In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics,” I describe this in greater detail, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that as a manager you constantly need to evaluate your processes and projects to determine if they are still viable. If not, and yet you continue to proceed with them, the results may not meet your expectations-.

You should keep your fingers on the pulse of your business so that if there is a shift in your market or industry, you can notice it, understand it, and make the proper adjustments.

Thinking “my product is so good it sells itself” – I think of that line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” when I hear a business owner or sales person say that their product sells itself. It’s great to be confident and proud of what you sell, but are you sure you want to hang your hat on your confidence alone? 80% of small businesses fail within the first year of opening and I bet that none of these failed owners would have opened the business in the first place had they known it would fail by year’s end. And what is the most common mistake these failed owners make? They don’t invest sufficient time into marketing their business.

Never documenting processes (or anything else) – Let’s face it we live in a “what have you done for me lately” business culture, and as a manager you have to keep up with the competition or your business can be in serious trouble. However, the need to document and communicate processes is vitally important to the survival and growth of your organization, yet it is routinely passed up for other matters.

Documenting processes gives you the ability to standardize procedures which will help you work more productively and efficiently and train new employees. If the processes are not documented, this becomes far more difficult to facilitate. For example, perhaps you hire a new employee to work as a staff copywriter and proofreader. To begin getting the person experience and up to speed with your companies processes, you task the person to proofread all of the copy developed from the staff writers. You share the flowchart below with the new employee to understand how the copywriting process proceeds and so that he knows what to do next when he receives material for his review.

Because you have taken the time to properly document the process, the employee now has a visual representation for him to reference when the task needs to be performed. By doing this, you will find that you will spend a lot less time explaining company and team processes, and the delegated tasks will be done the correct way each time cutting down mistakes. Also, new employees will get up to speed more quickly, and seasoned employees will remain focused.

Producing results, minimizing errors, and making informed decisions are the centralized responsibilities of any manager.

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How to Prevent Mistakes Before They Happen

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Over this past quarter my team at SmartDraw worked on a slew of new and experimental initiatives – nobody had any truly applicable prior experience with this particular type of work. As a result there was confusion amongst the team regarding responsibilities which led to a lot of trial and error which delayed the completion of several of our new projects.

After a few weeks of this we found the source of the confusion and worked together to help prevent errors from delaying any future initiatives of this same type. Here is what we did to prevent errors before they happened:

Decompose projects with mind maps to cover all of the bases

How often have you had a project come to a grinding halt as a result of a minor detail being overlooked? There’s the housing contractor who forgot to bring the right kind of nails to a construction site or the salesman who forgot to bring a stack of business cards to a trade show. A “small” detail like business cards at a trade show can explode into a much bigger problem, like lost sales opportunities and less revenue.

One way my team and I prevent “small details” from becoming “big problems” is to decompose our projects ahead of time with a mind map. I’ve written before about using mind maps to decompose big tasks in order to schedule projects accurately, and the decomposition method also applies when used to prevent errors.

Consider an example: if you’re planning an orientation program for new employees (a bi g project) you might start off with a simple mind map like this one:

You’re going to use the mind map to try to anticipate problems with the content of your orientation program. You add a few sub topics to your mind map to go into more detail on each aspect of your orientation program starting with your explanation of the company’s IT systems.

And one more level of sub-topics to go into more detail on the specific systems.

If you’re a HR person, this might be the level of detail you need to start with to anticipate problems with your “New Employee Orientation” program. Perhaps your customer-facing departments like sales and customer service use a different phone system than internal departments like the IT team.

If you taught all of the new employees only one phone system they might fumble the ball the first time they needed to transfer a call to another internal extension if they weren’t using the same one included in the orientation materials. This is a “small detail” that you might overlook were it not for decomposing your entire orientation program using a mind map. The act of thinking through all the details helps you anticipate problems in advance.

Build “blueprints” of all of your projects

I use the word “blueprint” instead of “plan” because a blueprint contains details about how every piece of the project fits together. It’s a schematic for all of the separate components in a project, rather than just a broad overview, which is what plans often are.

One of the things that my team at SmartDraw did was get into the habit of using blueprints to illustrate how everyone’s work came together in the form of a completed product.

When I built my blueprints I used web page annotations (we work in web marketing) to communicate what needed to be done and mind maps to illustrate how individual pages fit in with into the big picture, and this technique has proven to be a reliable method to eliminate most of the confusion surrounding our projects.

Here’s an example of a real blueprint that we used to help plan an eCourse that we launched back in December:

Click here for a full-sized version of this image.

The blueprint is extremely simple, but it proved to be extremely effective for my team. However, the big reason that we could use such a simple blueprint like this to sufficiently clarify a much larger project was because we also developed standard processes for streamlining projects similar to this one.

Develop standard processes

We beat this subject like a dead horse, but that’s only because it’s a subject that needs to be iterated over and over again in order to make people more productive. All of your team’s work should consist of standard processes – they help eliminate errors, but they also help you ensure that your team is following the most efficient methods possible and they make your output more consistent, which makes it easier to measure the quality of your team’s work.

If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your team’s work using processes, click here to sign up for our free eCourse entitled How to Optimize a Business Process.

Go through your blueprints, processes, and other planning materials with your team before you begin work

If you’ve gone through the trouble of decomposing your project, building a blueprint, and developing standard processes for your work then it’s a no-brainer to simply run all of those things by your team. Have some extra sets of eyes and minds comb over the details of the project - they might see things that you didn’t or couldn’t see yourself.

Although it’s impossible to prevent every possible error that could surface during the course of a project, you can take steps to drastically cut down on the number of likely errors that may occur with a bit of careful planning. Decomposing a project with mind maps, building a blueprint, developing standard processes, and brainstorming aloud with your team are four effective ways to help anticipate and mitigate problems before they begin – they’ve helped me and my team and they can certainly help you too.

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Three Ways to Empower Your Employees

Rich — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

How many times have you handed a project off to your team, only to have many of the tasks delegated back to you?

You know how it goes – you hold a meeting to introduce the project, you delegate responsibilities to the team, and before you know it your team bombards you with questions about detail-level decisions. So what happens? You end up handling a bulk of the details yourself.

So why do your team members bog you down with questions? Perhaps some team members need help staying on the right track for the project; maybe they’re unclear about the goals of a few particular tasks; or perhaps they simply don’t feel comfortable making decisions without your explicit approval.

In any case, the point of delegating is to remove the manager away from much of the detail-oriented work and to empower the other team members with a sense ownership over the delegated tasks. All of this is done to allow the manager to handle the big picture items of the overall project without constantly worrying about the details.

But sadly, that’s often not the case. More often than not you find much of the detail-oriented work kicked back up to you, the manager. So, who’s to blame when tasks are delegated back up? As the manager – you are to blame.

If you follow these three simple tips you can avoid these delegation gaffes by ultimately empowering your team to make their own decisions without constantly needing validation from you.

Provide as much information as possible from the start – As a manager you know that questions will always come up and you also know that many questions typically mean work stoppages until they’re answered, thus there is always a burden on you to answer all questions as fast as possible to keep the project moving. One thing you can do to cut down on the number of questions is to simply provide more details as well as the generalities from the start. Have your team understand the importance of their roles and processes and how they fit in relation to your ongoing projects. Give them the means to answer their own questions!

Brainstorm together and encourage innovation – The old adage that “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” is absolutely true in projects that encompass teams of people, so encourage your team to brainstorm together on the best possible ideas and solutions. If your team finds a great solution that works for a particular problem, then document it as part of a standard process for your team that can be followed the next time the task needs to be carried out. By doing it in this way you now have a standardized procedure that can serve as a guideline for future projects. The best part of this process is owned by your team members and that helps them feel more empowered and increases their emotional investment in the project, and they may even feel like more of a stakeholder (not to be confused with shareholder) in the company.

Establish boundaries - A common pitfall managers make is to micromanage competent employees. The whole point is to have your employees contribute in order to get more done for the department, and for the company, so don’t waste your time by overseeing all of the details when your team has proven to be independent. As the manager, be sure to clearly establish appropriate boundaries from the beginning which will keep everyone on task; including you.

To illustrate this, below is a process development diagram for a new marketing campaign with a manager who micromanages his team and the project details. All of the tasks colored in the dark blue are performed by the manager:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

Now, if the manager begins to practice the tips above, the process is cut down by a few steps, and the manager relinquishes some of the detailed tasks to his team therefore freeing him up for his other responsibilities outside of this one project:

Click here to see a larger image of this visual.

You will find that a more empowered team is more productive, functions more cohesively, and finishes what they have started – as opposed to you finishing what they have started.

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