Hello and welcome to module one. In this module we're going to learn about management exactly what that is, what does it cover? What are you as a manager responsible for? What should you be aware of? How can you improve as a manager? I look forward to helping you understand management, what that means and how that can help you as you're working in a business or running your business. Welcome to [inaudible] module one. We're going to talk about the definition of management, what it is and why we need it. Wikipedia tells us that management is the administration of an organization. According to Indeed, there are five basic operations of a manager or five basic responsibilities that a manager has in an organization. Setting objectives is one, organizing another, motivating the team. I see that's part of leadership. I'm going to talk about the differences between management and leadership, devising systems of measurement and then developing people. I say that developing people is also a component of leadership. As I divide out management versus leadership, management is relating to tasks and functions and leadership is related to people. Management versus Leadership. When I talk about management, that is really task related. We're setting objectives, were organizing and we're measuring. This is the doing in an organization and leadership which we're going to talk about in module two, is really people related. How is it that we coach people and develop people so that we can be a better organization. As managers, the first thing that we need to do is set objective. It may be that we have objectives from our supervisor that we're going to bring down into our component of the organization. Our division, we're responsible for making sure our objectives align with the objectives of the organization. Then we need to make sure that we find a way for each team member to know what those objectives are. Then proceed with actually accomplishing those objectives and then measure. How do we make sure that we accomplish those objectives? As a manager, it's your responsibility to make sure that you know what the objectives of the organization are and that you align your division with the objectives of the organization. That begins with organizing. How do we organize? Well first, we communicate to the staff what it is, what the objectives are. Then we identify the individual tasks that need to take place in order to complete what our responsibilities are. We do that in the planning process. Not everybody is good at the planning process. If this is not something that's a good skill-set of yours, that's something that you need to work on. It's critical to be able to improve your planning abilities. Task by task, what is it that needs to happen in order to complete your component of accomplishing the objectives of the organization and then set the timing. What needs to happen when to make sure that you accomplish what it is that needs to happen from your division. Organizing is the first part of accomplishing the objectives. As a manager, you need to make sure that you have determined or learned how to properly organize. Let's look at what that means through communicating, planning and setting the timing. As the manager, you're responsible for communicating the first part of organizing. Communicating. Now, there are a couple of different ways to communicate. We can communicate verbally or in writing. When we communicate verbally, how is it that that is heard? Well, people hear things different ways. We may, when we're communicating, want to say things, a couple of different ways to make sure that people understand. What we're doing is communicating the organization's objective. What that means to us specifically? What that means to our division? I'm going to do that verbally. I'm going to try and say it a number of different ways for people to comprehend what I'm saying. I'm also going to communicate in writing. Some people are better at understanding something verbally. Some people are better at comprehending if they read. I need to do both. I need to communicate verbally and I need to communicate in writing. The writing needs to be clear and concise. Then when I'm communicating, I need to be repetitive. I need to save what I want the staff to hear and then I need to say it again. Some of you may be rolling your eyes but this is really important because we all have different ways of hearing and understanding something. As a manager, you need to be a bit understanding of how your staff is understanding so that you communicate to accommodate that staff. Then after you've communicated, asked for understanding, ask your staff what they heard, so you can do that in a conversation. You don't have to just abruptly say, "What did I just say?" But you can have a conversation around what you just communicated. What does it mean to them? How do they think it's going to happen? It's good to have a conversation around what you've communicated to make sure that the staff understand what you just said. In addition to communicating, part of what I need to do as a manager is to plan. I need to figure out what tasks need to be done and by when and who is supposed to do those tasks. As I am working with my group, I need to identify the timeline thinking of each individual. Everybody has a different time horizon, as far as how they can think. Some people can think about the next hours, some people can think about the next weeks, some people can think about 10 years from now, but everybody has a little bit different. As you are delegating the tasks, you need to consider each individual's timeline horizon. Some people, I'm going to give them a task that needs to be done today or even in the next hour. If I have somebody that's at professional, well-educated, or well-trained and there may be a project that we talk about that is an annual project, something that's going to take a year to accomplish. Some of my responsibility is to plan out how that's going to be done with that individual. Naturally, when I do the planning, it doesn't mean that I plan it out. I communicate, I plan, and then I leave that person to do whatever. I need to have regular check-ins with that individual so I can make sure that we are on track with whatever task that needs to be completed. Part of planning as a manager means that I need to make sure that I find a way to bring my product or service to market for my division, whatever that is, I should understand profitability. What's the gross profit I need to achieve to be successful for the organization? Then what are the resources that I need? Is that supplies? Is that staff? Is there something that I need to do to improve my efficiency? That's part of my responsibilities as a manager. Let's look at an example of resources. This happens in business all the time. Say I have our production process and I have a machine that I'm looking at that's going to cost $500 thousand to buy. As a manager, I need to decide, should I buy the machine for the business. I look at some factors. It's going to reduce 6,500 labor hours a year at $40 an hour that's factored into, is it going to be worth purchasing this machine or not? Maybe it will provide a safety factor for the employees. When I'm making a decision about buying a piece of machinery or not buying a piece of machinery if safety comes into play, that ramps up the decision-making a little bit, because we cannot allow our employees to be in an unsafe environment. Then how long will this machine last? If it's going to last for 10 years without breaking down, that's a significant factor. As the manager, I look at, if I don't buy this machine and I have three breakdowns in the next month, that costs me money. How much does that cost? How impactful is that to the rest of the organization? I use those factors when I'm considering whether or not to purchase the equipment. As a manager, you should be able to either work through that process or get somebody from the organization to help you work through that process to make a decision. I need to make sure I have sufficient resources from my division to be able to make that product that I am making or that service that I'm providing. This is another example, I've got a component for a key product that's made in India. The Supplier has been really great in the past, really been coming through on time, providing me quality product. But over the last several months, the quality has started to deteriorate and then I find out that the CEO is leaving that company and another person that I know is not as good as going to take that CEO's place. Therefore, as Manager, what would you do? Well, what I would do is start looking for other opportunities, other resources. Maybe I can buy the same component in Japan or China, or even in the US, or maybe I can make that same component internally. I have to look at all of the factors in order and make a decision. I cannot let the quality of that component continue to deteriorate that affects the quality of my product, that affects overall the profitability of the company and so to be complacent about something like this is not a good management practice. As a manager, it's your responsibility to make changes, to improve the processes, people, profitability as your division. As a manager, you are responsible for looking at your processes, your people, your profitability. Part of our review process every year was to ask the managers to tell us what they had done during the year to improve their division. I actually had one Manager that told me that he had actually not made any changes, made no changes, and I was just amazed that somebody thought that was an okay answer as a manager. It is not okay if you're a manager you need to continually look at the way that you run your organization. If your processes are great, are they documented? If they're not documented, then they should be documented. Maybe your profitability is amazing, but your people are getting stale in whatever they're doing, so maybe their skills need to be updated, maybe they need better training. It's your responsibility as a manager to make sure that you look at your processes, your profitability in your people, and make some changes every year. You cannot tell me there is nothing that needs to be changed in your division and because there is. Look at that as your responsibility, you need to look at all of these processes of profitability and your people, and look at what you can change to improve your performance. For that person that said that they made no changes, what's your opinion of that person? Are they a good manager or a bad manager? I would say not such a good manager. How can you ever improve your business if none of the management staff are looking at ways of improving their individual divisions or their individual staff? It really is up to every manager to look at their area and look at ways to improve it every year. Part of your responsibility as a manager is to set timing. So if I have a product that needs to be delivered or a service that needs to be delivered at the end of the month. What do I need to do to make sure that I can deliver that product or service? I have to make sure I have the materials that go into whatever product I'm making. I need to make sure I have the people to be available for production or a service. One of the ways to make sure that I accomplish that is by backing into the process. When do I need to start? Many times and I've seen this again and again people do not think about the materials that they need for a product or a service until they need it. Such a bad idea, because that means what's going to happen, you will probably either pay a lot more money for that material or a lot more money for having that delivered to you at the last minute. One of the things that you can do as a manager is to have checklists for the materials that you need for your product or services. Have a checklist, for everything that you need to make sure you accomplish your product or service and then scheduling people. Again, so many people are a bit short-sighted on ensuring that they have the right people so they don't wait to hire until it's absolutely necessary. That is something that can also be done in advance. At the beginning of a quarter, I might look at how many people that I have for my process or a service, and I may start hiring to make sure that I have sufficient people. Even though nobody has told me that they're leaving, it does not necessarily hurt to continue the hiring process, or the recruiting process. It depends upon how many people that you have. If you have 100 people, you probably should be recruiting constantly. If you have five, that's not necessarily the case. But our responsibilities as managers is to look at when we're going to need something and then back into the timing that it's going to take for materials and people and processes to make sure that we have what we need to be able to deliver our product or service. People planning. One of our responsibilities as a manager is to make sure that we have the right people on the right place. That means recruiting, recruiting, recruiting, and that is something that many people really do not like to do in addition to hiring, training, and coaching. But it is part of our job as a manager. Now, how frequently you recruit really depends upon the size of your team, and the amount of turnover that you have. Running a business, I had one manager that really hated hiring. She would avoid recruiting at all costs until the last minute, which usually put us in a bit of a bind. It's much better to recruit on a regular basis so you can make sure that you have the right people in place. Then you've got to hire and train and coach, which takes a lot of time. One thing that we did as an organization, is we had a hiring manual. What did that include? You can do this for your division or your organization. The hiring manual had that job ads. What did those job ads look like? Where they enticing? Do they invite people to work for our company? I would have the job description, so I would not have to re-make the job descriptions every single time. What were the job functions that I needed? What were the educational requirements? Did I want somebody with experience or not? Also in the hiring manual, I had what the HR process was. How soon would I need to let HR know that I needed to hire somebody? How far in advance would I put an ad and indeed or is it a recruiter or whatever I used to hire? Again, what was the hiring process? For California, you usually need a letter of employment to go to the person. What did that look like if it can be made in advance with a few spaces for the salary and what that job was. Great. Whatever you can put in that hiring manual to keep down the repetitive functions, the better to make it a little bit easier for you as a manager to do that process without too much pain and agony. Also planning for expansion. If I'm going to grow the business, I'm going to have maybe a new division in the next month or next quarter, I need to plan for that, so I need to start putting people in place prior to actually expanding, so I have time to train those individuals. Then contraction, what am I going to do if for some reason bad economic times and I need to contract the business? Is there something that I can do with the people that I have in place that is fair for them? Or is there some work share process that I can put in place to keep everybody working. There are some things that you can look at as far as different options, but you need to do that in advance. Managing people is not an easy process. We're going to talk a little bit about motivating leadership module number two. But managing people as a manager, you do need to be responsible for training, and regular training again, it's so critical and I think that this is something that people forget about and do not think it's necessary. Maybe somebody's been in a job for 20 years. Why would you need to train them? However, we had salespeople in the same position for over 20 years and we would provide training on a regular basis, and I would on a regular basis hear from somebody that has a tremendous amount of experience, "Thank you so much for the training, I had forgotten that. I really needed to be reminded about this, that, or the other things." Even people with a tremendous amount of experience needs to be reminded about what they should be doing as far as completing their job the right way or even being better at their job. Training can be internal or external. When I say internal, that means that I'm going to be training people within the organization. External means, that I'm going to find some resources outside of the organization, I might bring them into the company, I might bring somebody like me into the company to train the employees, or I may send the employees out to a seminar on management skills or a seminar on how they can do their job a little bit better. But internal, it's always helpful to have the people on your team leading some of the training because what happens when you have to train, you actually learn something a little bit better. Training can be done by you, the training can also be done by the individuals on your team. You would want to assign whatever those people would be training on, and then make sure that they had ready and good training presentation, and then follow up. Did your individuals actually pay attention to the training or were they doing something else or were their minds elsewhere? As we're doing virtual training, what I have learned is that people can check their email while they're on zoom. What we did, what we have done to make sure that isn't happening, is every few slides I would come up with a question, we're going over some of the topics that I covered. If somebody is checking their email there, they're not going to know the answers to the questions that I come up with, as far as reviewing the slides. So follow up on making sure that people are learning as you're training, it is important, and then consistency. I want to make sure everybody on my team has the opportunity to have the same training, and then how we learn. As I'm doing training, I need to remember that people learn by hearing, they learn by reading, and they learn by doing. So when we have done training in the past, it's a variety of, maybe it's PowerPoint, or somebody is standing in front of a group and talking about whatever process, or maybe it's a demonstration of a process to help people remember. Again, everybody has a little bit of a different ability and way to learn so it's really good to provide the verbal, the written, and the demonstration for the learning process. That's internal. Now external, I'm going to ask my staff, I've always asked my staff, "What is it that you want to be more proficient in? ", so I might look for resources to provide that individual, either an outside seminar, or a book, or an audiobook if they don't like reading books. But I'm going to look for resources for that employee if they want to learn more, and even if they don't want to learn more, I used to have my poor managers roll their eyes when I told them they had to read a business book. But at the end of the day, they realize that they knew so much more than their fellow managers. When they would go to a seminar or an outside management training, they knew so much more than the other people in their class because of some of the reading that we require them to do on and during their training process. Now something about training as being a manager, it's great to be proactive. I had a training plan for the entire group at the beginning of the year that handled both monthly training and quarterly training, and then outside seminars for the individuals and I budgeted accordingly. Training is such an important part of your responsibility as a manager. I hope you think of it that way so that you can make sure that you grow and develop your people, but you can do that both internally or externally, I say both is important. Internal is important because you've got the knowledge and you've got the skills. However, let me tell you what happens when you do a lot of internal training and no extra, you do a lot of internal training. Eventually, it becomes a blah blah blah blah blah because people have heard your voice before and they discount your knowledge for some silly reason. You might tell your people the same thing over and over again, and then you have somebody from the outside come and train on the same topic, they will say the same thing that you have said before and your people will act as though that's a revelation, and it's amazing that this person is training and what they said and, like they've never heard it before because a lot of times they just will stop hearing you so this is why it's good to have internal training and external training for your people and for their development. Measuring for success. We have a lot of measuring tools that we can use. Financials is one of the most common measurement tool, but financials are a lagging indicators. In other words, I know what I have accomplished or how well I've done, but it's over. Whether it's quarterly or annually, my profit quarterly, I'm not going to be able to change once I learn what it is. That means it's lagging, it tells me after the fact. But some of your KPIs can be based on leading indicators. Your KPIs should be based on some leading indicators. What are those? Maybe that I'm providing my services in a timely manner, very low error rate, high customer satisfaction. Some of those things would be leading indicators, low waste, accomplishing my objectives piece by piece and I need to look at these measurements on a weekly basis. I might even look at them on a daily basis. If I have a group, of sales people, I need to make sure on a daily basis that they're making calls and setting appointments. On a weekly basis, I may look at production and what's my output for labor hours, that's a KPI that I might measure. I certainly need to look at a weekly, monthly, quarterly for some things. Then as far as my KPI's, it's really great as a manager, if I let everybody know how well we're doing. By that, I mean that I show my KPIs to the staff as we go along. What does that look like? Well, I might have a thermometer that shows that our goals for our KPIs for the month are, like I said, 5,000 units. I'm going to produce my KPI's on a daily basis number of units as I go up the thermometer to show how close we're getting to that goal of units for the month. That really helps everybody see if we're succeeding and, or if we're struggling with accomplishing our KPIs. Measuring profitability is part of your job. Are you getting or keeping the revenue at low margins? What does that mean? Do you even know what that means? Are you driving market share in areas that don't make sense? Really, I don't need to be going into that market because it's not going to help my business and then the long-term impact of the decision. If you are a referral based business and you're cutting on your service to your people by cutting the number of people providing those services, you could be impacting your long-term business by a short-term savings. I actually had a vice president in my business that did that. My business was very much a referral business and this Vice President decided that it was his job to cut costs. So where did he cut costs? He cut cost by reducing the number of people per service, which impacted our ability to get referrals. Not a good idea, but that Vice President didn't understand the impact of his decision on our long-term success. I'll give you another example of one of my clients that was struggling because cashflow was really awful. She was really struggling month by month to even pay the bills. But when we looked closely at the business, I realized that there were some clients that she had at low or negative gross profit. What does that mean when you have negative gross profit? It means that you are serving that client at a loss from the beginning before you even do anything, you are losing money. You really don't ever want to have a client at a negative gross profit and unless there is a good reason for you to grow your market share. I would not look for running a business or having clients at a negative gross profit. If this was you and this was your business, what would you do? There is a difference between management and leadership. As I talked about before, management includes tasks, where we're organizing, planning, and measuring, but we're looking at a function. Management is a title, you are designated as somebody to lead in a division of an organization or the organization but it's a title. Then leadership is different, it is the people part of your business. It's guiding, coaching, training. I talked about training as part of management. But training also can be part of leadership as far as how you are training and how you're developing people. Then motivating; are you helping people to want to do something for the business? In module 2, we're going to talk about what that looks like with different types of leaders there are out there, good and bad and you can be a leader, but not a manager. You can be a leader, but not a manager. I had the same administrative assistant for about 15 years and she was a leader even more than a manager. She was very much a leader in the organization. Even though she was a manager for one part of the organization, she was a leader for the overall organization. Because she has very good people abilities as well as some task development abilities. You can be a manager and not a leader. You can be really good at tasks and organizing and planning, but not a very good leader. I have been very lucky and working for some great leaders, but I had an experience working with the manager in a retail environment. This person was so good at tasks and organizing. If something went wrong, he was really good at identifying what it was that went wrong and how can we fix it. I can still hear him saying, "Let's identify what went wrong so we can fix it, so it doesn't happen again." Great. But he was not a leader, he did nothing as far as the people part of it, was not a very good people person. Just remember being a people person doesn't mean that you're outgoing and extroverted, it means that you have a care for the people that you're working with and you have a desire to help them in a positive way instead of just getting a task done. Management and leadership are two different things. You should learn both to be a good manager and a good leader will help your business, but to be one or the other will create a deficiency in your ability to perform. What are your strengths? Are you great at setting objectives and managing processes and measuring? If you are weak in any of these areas, you really need to look at, how can I improve in setting objectives? Am I able to think of the total organization's objectives overall and align those with my division? Do I even know what the organization's objectives are? If I don't, have I ask? Very important that you're proactive in asking about that so you can make sure you're in alignment. Am I good at managing the processes? You need to stay on top of things, I've had many people think if they delegate a responsibility, they just leave it and go on to the next task, but as you're delegating, you really do need to develop a process for follow-up to make sure that the task gets done. There is a whole training that I have on the delegation process. If this isn't your strength, then you can certainly learn how to be better at delegating and managing processes. Then measuring. Do you have the analytic skills to measure? If not maybe somebody in the financial area can help you develop some tools to measure so that you know if you're accomplishing your objectives for the organization. Then we're going to shift over in the next module, to what it means to be a good leader. How do I motivate people? What's the importance of coaching and developing and then growing the team? These are all important components of module 2. If there is anything that is unclear, there is quite a bit covered in the Wikipedia reading that I've assigned, as well as the indeed definition of management that also covers some leadership, but there is a lot of good information in there. I hope this helps your understanding of management, and what it is, and why. Thank you.
