Plan to Do Nothing
The premise behind the philosophy
Rule 1. Plan to Do Nothing and You Will Certainly Achieve Your Goals.
This rule started out as a bit of joke, along these lines: if your goal is to do nothing, you can always achieve that goal, but of course you might not be successful. But then I noticed something, the busier I was, the more activity I was doing every day, the less effective I was. At first, it seemed like a wicked problem, with no real solution. (I may write on some real wicked problems later, but for now, you can check out this somewhat depressing treatise.) Unlike actual wicked problems, managerial busy-ness has a cure, planning to do nothing. Posh you say, the speed of today's work means that the manager will always be busy. Managers are the hardest workers of all, if they are to be successful, or so we are told.
That view fails to answer “What is the work of management?” And the answer is primarily “planning.” The manager must be working very hard at planning! And what is he planning? TO DO NOTHING! This doesn't mean that the organization is doing nothing; the mission and the work remain and must be accomplished. But the rule should look like this: Every predictable aspect of the team's effort should be planned as to who has responsibility for execution. Further, the responsibility for any routine work should NEVER be allocated to the manager. This allows all routine and predictable work to flow to the correct performer.
Does this mean the manager is doing nothing? Of course not. Unpredictable new tasking is always arriving. The changing environment is always causing work to be re-planned. There is always a crisis. But if your day is filled with executing routine work, where is the time to handle the next crisis? Not that each crisis is predictable, or you would have planned for it. But it is predictable that there will be crises. And some crises do become predictable; so we PLAN to be ready for them.
A short aside on a predictable crisis. I once went through a period where we were tasked to produce a "stop-light" chart with detailed notes to show what additional funding we needed to get our portion of a major defense program to green. We put the brief together, it was presented by our program manager, and we congratulated ourselves on a job well done. But then a funny thing happened. We didn't get all of the funding. And another opportunity to brief came up on short notice, late on Friday with a Monday deadline. And this happened again. Third time was the charm; we just started keeping our charts up to date because the short notice tasking wasn't going to cease, and didn't for about 9 months. But as manager, I didn't keep up the charts, my project controller did, so by corralling necessary input from product leads on a weekly basis.
Once the routine work and predictable crises are planned, we can start to do our real job, which is making things BETTER, for ourselves, our customer, and our team. Some like to call that "continuous process improvement," but that sounds way too bureaucratic and non-value add. Making things better is just asking basic questions over and over to make sure your team is performing well.
1. Is the team fully productive? If not, who is under-performing and how can we help them improve.
2. Do my reporting processes give me the right, TIMELY, information for decision making? Do they give my bosses the correct and TIMELY information they need to make decisions?
3. Do we have the right people on the bus? (H/T Jim Collins.) Who do we need to hire or fire?
4. Are we organized effectively? Is work flow efficient? Do we have the right tools?
5. What is the next threat or opportunity? How do we get ahead of it?
Answering these questions may not feel like "real work." But if you don't plan to have the time to answer them, you will lurch from one crisis to the next, and always be busy and ineffective.
All the rules that I hope to flesh out in future posts:
Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.
Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all.
Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.
Hiring is the manager's most important decision.
Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.
The commodity in shortest supply is management attention.
Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no."
Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.
Don't fight market forces.
Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.
If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.
About me:
I have been a manager for well over half my life. I currently work as a project manager for the U.S. Navy as a government employee. I have been awarded the Civilian Meritorious Service Medal and a Project Management Excellence Award for my work. My education includes a master’s degree in Telecommunications Systems Management and a Bachelor’s in Physics. I am married with grown children and grandchildren. It is important to me to be successful enough to have time for family and my church. I am writing this series to help the people I care about have success as leaders in big organizations.
YMMV:
You may be old enough to remember the phrase “your milage may vary.” That applies to my advice on this platform as well. I think if you are in a large corporation or in a management position in government in the Anglosphere, I think this advice travels well. A friend who was hired into my group in the U.S. government from Ford remarked at how similar the two big bureaucracies operated. If you are reading this in Japan, maybe not so much, as the cultural norms are too different.