In my 40+ years of working and consulting experience, I have talked to thousands of managers about their work. There is a common theme of: “I am delegated too much work,” or, “I don’t have the resources I need,” and even, “I am not given clear priorities.”
And yet, during that same time period I have seen huge investments by organizations to improve systems and processes to try to be more effective and produce better results. But at the end of the day, managers still aren’t able to focus in on their most important work.
I launched Effective ManagersTM just over two years ago, to find out what was going on. We partnered with the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa on a substantial research project. We found that managers want to do a good job, but they are not clear about their accountabilities. As a result much of their time is spent on work they weren’t hired to do. How much?
20%? 30%? 40%? More?
If you said more – you guessed the average response! The research shows that managers spend an average of 45% of their time on work that they were not hired to do and low-level administrative work!
What a waste of time and energy! At the end of the day, managers must be able to focus on their most important work.
Free Download!
Need a bit of guidance? This free document helps to describe the Effective ManagersTM program: Helping Create and Sustain High Performance Organizations.
At Effective ManagersTM, we call this waste of human resources organizational churn. Managers are busy, they want to do well, but they are not focused. And organizational initiatives to solve this problem are typically wasted because they focus on symptoms and not causes.
These experiences I had first hand over so many years and in so many organizations inspired me to found Effective ManagersTM, so we can help organizations to improve the situation of managers. Since then, we’ve put together an entire program that addresses this.
Based on our research findings, we have created the Manager Effectiveness Audit, to find out the effectiveness of managers in organizations, and to identify the root cause of any problems. As part of this process, we work with the CEO and their executive management team to ensure that they understand the findings and help them to decide what to focus on changing.
We then work with the CEO and head of HR to implement a change process for the organization using the Effective Point of AccountabilityTM approach to ensure that everyone in the organization is clear about exactly what they are accountable for, the resources that they have to do it, and how they work with each other for the overall success of the organization. In other words, ensuring that the right people are doing the right work at the right time.
A Gift For You
As a gift to mark the launch of our updated website, here is a free download to the White Paper that describes our research findings, and provides you with a high level approach to how managers can be more effective. We do charge a small fee for some materials – this is an example of a paper we sell. We keep these prices as low as we can, but we do need to keep the lights on! I highly recommend them. This stuff isn’t available anywhere else at any lower price!
Want to know more?
The following are links to related articles where we describe the problem organizations are facing, why they can’t get results, and what they need to do about it:
