Supervising an employee’s work and coaching improvement are hard to accomplish on a consistent basis, but they’re critical to an organization’s operations and even its survival. And frankly, we owe it to our staff members to periodically assess their work and provide feedback that lets them know how they’re doing and gives them an opportunity to finetune their performance. The last place for an employee to learn of any deficiencies is on an annual evaluation or, perish the thought, at the point of termination. That’s just poor management, in our opinion.
While you may agree with this, you might be wondering how you can possibly add another – albeit important – task to your already full schedule. It may not be easy, but it does need to be a line item on your to-do list. You might begin by analyzing your work day as a manager: on what do you spend your time? What interruptions occur? Do you ever encounter mistakes and just fix them because it’s easier than working with the employee who made the error?
When bogged down with periods of intense work but seemingly little accomplishment, our consultants will track their activities on a given day. It’s tedious, for sure, and probably imperfect, but a few days of this will start to reveal patterns. So, we suggest you start there. Once you can see the things that occupy your time, you can determine if these are tasks that you, personally, have to do. While they may be “easy” and “don’t take a lot of time,” if they’re not managerial tasks, you’re squandering your brain-power and time. We’ve also seen managers hide from facing big things because they’re busy on minutiae that other staff members can do. Make sure this isn’t you….but what if it is?
If you find that you’re doing things others can do, develop a plan to transition those responsibilities to others. Maybe you can split them up and redistribute one task to each of several people. You’re not doing this to sit in your office and play video games, but to be more effective in your primary role as a manager and to develop others on your team. And lest you think everyone else is “too busy” to take on one more thing, give it a try and let the worker come up with a plan to get things done. The same way that paperwork expands to fill the empty parts of our desk (say it isn’t just me LOL), you may find that the amount of time it takes to complete work expands to fill the time allotted. Maybe others can learn to be more efficient in performing their tasks if you give them additional responsibilities.
What will you do with the extra time?
Join us for the second half of this two-part series where we’ll answer that question and also tackle the topic of staff interruptions and remediation.