by Dan Corcoran
So, you're a manager. The person looked to for guidance, wisdom, innovation, synchronization and answers. You're a leader, a mentor, an example, a coach...you're the person responsible for all the moving parts, and you are respected, appreciated and supported by your superiors, right?
Hmmm, you're thinking to yourself, it's supposed to be all that, but lately you're missing the mark entirely. Instead, you're feeling powerless, ineffective, pressured, disliked by your staff, and perhaps, even nervous about the security of your position.
If you're the manager of a work center that performs manual tasks with people in cubicles, you should have dedicated resources for training and re-training staff, people focused on continuous process improvement or at least available to update training materials to incorporate new processes your people should follow with existing or new products and services. You should have an employee responsible to randomly sample work quality. Oh, you don't? Lost some of that during the last round of cost-cutting? Ouch.
You should also have software and systems in place to measure and manage the work, so you can hold employees accountable. It's all working well, yes? Or, have your software and systems fallen behind what you really need to measure and manage your team, provide good customer service and reliably track that work gets done on time?
My company, ServiceSPAN, provides software and work center process improvement services that can make things much better, and I would love to sell you that software, but maybe you're at the bottom of your company's priority list to receive quality IT solutions and need something else for now.
Well, then maybe this blog is for you.
Come back here each week and take in some ideas how other managers are solving problems with or without any money or other resources. In some cases (if you're old enough) you'll be reminded how management was done before we had computer software.
We offer our blog as a resource that could improve your job and help you get ahead of your work to the point where you and your key staffers can head out Friday afternoons, maybe a little early, and kick back before you start your weekend. How sweet would that be?
No promises, but this blog just might be the ticket. Compared to print and internet media, this blog will not just post informative articles in management, but you will be able to read comments left by other readers that will validate or improve upon what was written, and you can ask questions to the writer, to me, or other readers to help clarify what was written and how you might apply it.
Starting from now, let's get you to ending your work week hopefully a little early every Friday, with time to spare and less stress heading into the weekend. Sound good? Maybe with that spare time you could even write an article for this blog. We will gift you $50 for each article that we accept to publish here, plus you get the thrill of watching us all respond to your written work.
p.s. About those comments you write on our articles. Let's be constructive and honest here at all times. Obviously these articles and comments are going to be about some form of pain or idiocy your experiencing and how to improve it. Please don't post anything you wouldn't want a co-worker or superior to discover. In fact don't use the comments to purge your frustration and anger in anyway. Instead, let the goal here be that we are all collectively participating in a lively community with a common goal of achieving management success measured in how the people, processes and customers that we touch each day are better than they were last week, and of course, how many Friday's we actually got to skip out a few minutes early.
Posted by Dan Corcoran on January 22, 2013 03:01 PM
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