Career Center: The world's shortest management course
Volumes have been written about how to run a successful organization and effectively manage people. In far fewer words, here's what I feel it's all about:
Hiring smart
The Gallup Organization interviewed 60,000 top managers. Consensus was that the most important thing a good manager does is hire smart. That means:
Get a large pool of applicants. Yes, advertise the position, perhaps on a niche employment website, but also tell everyone you respect that you're looking to hire. It's generally safer to hire someone who has been personally recommended.
Interviews should primarily consist of job simulations.
Generally, choose someone bright with drive over someone with experience and degrees.
Don't settle for an average person. It's worth holding out for an outstanding candidate.
Crucial: Most of those 60,000 top managers agreed that if you've made a hiring mistake, you should terminate the employee as quickly as possible. Rarely do weak employees become strong ones, and the longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to prevail in a wrongful termination claim.
Managing smart
Don't micromanage. Your supervisees will resent it, it probably won't change much anyway, and it will use up too much of your time. Especially don't spend much time working with your weakest employees. Spend as much time as possible helping to ensure your strong employees have what they need to do their jobs well.
Beyond supervision, managers have other responsibilities:
Vision: Communicate a vision exciting enough that your employees feel that they're working on something important and ethical.
Ambience: When you see someone doing something good—for example, staying past 5 o'clock–give an attaboy/-girl or thank-you note.
Standards. People—except for weak employees whom you should terminate—feel good about a workplace with high but reasonable standards. Develop those standards collaboratively.
Training. Where possible, have your own employees conduct training. They know the realities of your work group.
Modeling. Strongly encourage suggestions. When you screw up, make a brief apology and promise to do better. When you have to criticize, do it in private, gently, and, where possible, end with a plan for improvement, ideally one proposed by your supervisee.
Meeting smart
Time management expert Donald Wetmore estimates that 17 million meetings are conducted in the United States every day, and he believes they're "probably one of the top institutional time wasters."
Take care of as much as possible with E-mail and one-on-one discussions instead of group meetings. When a meeting is truly necessary, send attendees a draft agenda in advance. At the meeting, encourage honest disagreement, but keep people with hidden agendas from squelching others' good ideas. Tactfully quiet any excessive talkers and encourage capable but quiet attendees. Make every effort to finish each meeting by the scheduled time.
Evaluating smart
The most effective evaluation occurs between formal reviews. Evaluate mainly by walking around your supervisees' workstations, offering mainly praise and, occasionally, private suggestions.
When conducting formal evaluations, send your supervisees a copy of any officewide goals and their previous evaluations, and have each employee, in advance of the session, write a self-evaluation:
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