Brilliant Manager, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 6

Organising

your team

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Organising yourself

T

he principles of time management are well known to most

of us and, if not, there are many good books on the subject.

However well the techniques of good time management

work for you, I would give the following words of warning:

No matter how well you manage your time, you cannot do

everything you want to do.

This means that you must employ techniques to actually reduce

the number of tasks that you do, such as:

 delegation;

 dropping low-priority tasks.

brilliant

timesaver

Reduce your level of perfectionism on appropriate tasks. I have seen

a number of managers work themselves into the ground because

they had no notion of doing a job well enough. Put bluntly, a lot of

the work you will spend your time doing is not vitally important to

the future of the team. You need to discipline yourself to identify

work that can be done less well and then ruthlessly limit the

amount of time you put into such tasks.

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122 brilliant manager

Before looking at team organisation I will say a few words on the

second item on the list above.

Dropping low-priority tasks

I once conducted an experiment: I was getting buried by the

volume of emails from other parts of my organisation demanding

answers of various kinds. I ignored them all and waited to see

how many people chased me. Approximately 90 per cent never

chased me. Of the remaining 10 per cent I replied as briefly as

possible to about 80 per cent and then dealt diligently with the

remaining 20 per cent I thought important. Result: I dealt with

about 2 per cent diligently.

For fear of incriminating myself further I will not go on to

describe other experiments I conducted into which jobs I found

that I could ignore without getting into trouble. I am not recom-

mending that you copy my somewhat irresponsible behaviour;

the reason for describing these experiments is that I would

suggest you think carefully about

your priorities and consider whether

some of your lower-priority jobs can

be left undone so that you can give

more time to the really important

jobs.

One aspect of identifying which tasks cannot be dropped safely

is to be aware of which tasks your boss is particularly interested

in. Being brutally cynical, it is worth finding out which of the

tasks you do could impact on your boss’ bonus, because you

drop those at your peril!

Management tasks

Before looking at possible ways of organising your team it is

worth reviewing a typical list of the major tasks the average

manager has to do:

some of your lower-

priority jobs can be left

undone

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Organising your team 123



firefighting – people queuing up to ask for your help in

resolving problems;

 business strategy formulation;

 staff management issues (such as staff appraisals and pay

setting);

 staff and other resource allocation;

 operations management (finance, accommodation and all

the other niff, naff and trivia of running a team);

 interfacing with the rest of the organisation (both routine

and special initiatives);

 head of state (someone needs to wheel the boss out);

 emissary (setting up links to other groups inside and outside

the organisation);

 sales person;

 negotiator;

 schmoozing with customers;

 reviewing the outputs of the team.

Controlling the team’s finances

To manage your team effectively you have to organise and

control the finances of your team. There are plenty of training

courses on the basics of finance and it is likely that your organi-

sation can recommend an appropriate one. Likewise there are

plenty of books, and many very useful resources available on

the Internet. You need to understand the concepts that underlie

the ‘balance sheet’ for your team’s activities. Not understanding

the financial status of your team is like flying a fast jet, in fog,

at low level, in the mountains, without instruments – potentially

fatal. Personally I find this aspect of a manager’s job incredibly

boring, but if asked if I mind doing it I would answer ‘not when

you consider the alternative’.

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