Managerial leadership practices - The task assignment

Speaker A This is probably one of the cornerstones of records of our age. The whole idea of master science, clarity around task to sign. Sandy mentioned the whole idea. When I assign you to do something, if I'm not clear about that, you may leave with an expectation. You may do your best to meet that expectation. Yet that wasn't the same expectation that I, as your boss, had of you. So in the end, you have two frustrated people. You have the person that did their best to meet that expectation. You have the manager that doesn't see the results they expected. So one of the simplest acronyms qqtr quality targeted completion time and the assigned resources. And as a manager, I know many times you get familiar with your staff and you more or less get them to do something because they've done it many times and you're not very clear about it. But if you want to be successful, if you want to be successful as a manager and you want your staff to be successful, the important thing is to think about this each time you assign a task. And you may have to be more precise depending on what the task is or less precise, but that's something that you will roll with. But if you think about the Qqtr each time you do it, then your opportunity for success for both you and the worker are going to be greatly. The other part of this, I said I spent 30 years in the nuclear power industry, so we use this Qqtr. But because of the nuclear energy business, we put an S in front of it. So we added another symbol and you could say it's inherent quality, but we call it safety. So the first thing we want to do from a nuclear point of view, anytime we enjoy assign a task is what are the safety considerations then? The quantity, quality, target time with what resources? And when you go through that, the quantity, what is the output that you want, what do you expect, the quality, what are the standards that you're going to work to the targeted completion? A lot of times you'll say it's sort of unidentified. If you talk to the manager, they can very precisely tell you what they expect. You say, you have a month to do that and they say, no, I expect it done in two weeks. Well, if you know that, they give that up ahead, identify that right off the bat. You have two weeks to complete this task and I'm going to check in with you after a week to see what the status is and then what resources? Resources don't just mean bodies. It also means what tools, what processes you have available to you to be successful in doing that. So Qqtr, simple formula, but one of the best tools that a manager has of being successful in assigning tasks and getting back to desired outcomes. So by doing it this way you're going to reduce the frustration the manager has and the worker has because the worker also has the accountability to say I don't understand when the task is being assigned. Can you clarify that to me? Because remember, it's a two way working relationship. So at this point the manager should assign the task and then check for clarity. Clarity and trust. Those are the things that we want.

Speaker B To keep reinforcing in task assignment. What I have discovered in working with managers is that task is another one of those interesting words in the United States in particular, it's like the word subordinate. And when we work with people on task, we've had to give it a new name, which we'll see in the next slide, which we call key accountabilities, which help to link it back to some of the other systems that we were talking about in terms of performance management. You will not find the word key accountability in any of Dr. Jack's work, but you will find it for the purists in the room, you will hopefully find it as a useful way of talking about it embedded that notion of accountability and what is absolutely critical in a role. But it starts with the essence of task assignment, as Terry was saying, the quality, quantity, time and resources. So the way that we look at key accountability is because in the US. There are things that are called job descriptions or role descriptions and they're written basically, I believe, as a compliance document to keep us compliant in terms of what the United States regulatory groups come and look at, in terms of how we put work together and how we define the work of the roles in the US. Related to what we call affirmative action. And they're not very specific around what are the actual accountability and authority of a particular role. You will have job description documents, you have a strategic planning document that may or may not be appropriately cascaded down through the organization. And then sometimes you'll have a performance appraisal document, often written in our experience by someone from human resources and those three things do not line up and it becomes very confusing to managers who are trying to implement the system as well as employees who are trying to live in the system. So we hit upon this notion of key accountability to try to get that alignment in place so that if you remember one of the slides that Terry went through, the strategic planning piece and then it begins to cascade down in terms just like a funnel in terms of what do I hold that role particularly accountable for? And so we talk about it in terms of this way. They are the most important tasks in a role and the deeper you get in the organization, the longer and more succinct the list gets. Because if you think about it, when you're getting into stratum, one kind of work it's very much applied and hands on. So the folks that are in those roles need things that are very much like a list or we call it the checklist. As you get, you go up in the organization, the accountabilities can be very wide and have something that's the two, five or ten year kind of a task and so it changes how they are written and applied. But the accountabilities of the role help you this process helps you tie the work to the corporate goals. It helps you define them in terms of Qqtr and it sets up the process for establishing employee feedback. Because I, after doing this for ten years, absolutely believe that this is the essence of good requisite organization managerial practices. Once a manager learns how to do this and become very, very clear on establishing task assignment, the rest of it is not easy. But everything flows back to here. How they structure roles, how they do performance and feedback, all of it flows back. So I spend and Terry and I spend a lot of time in organizations doing just we're going to cover in the next few slides what we have in key accountability. Again, they're the most important tasks in a role. They define the work of the role as it relates to the corporate goals and they will define those tasks with the Qqtr. The next page, which we put in here, and I want you to stop and think about it for a minute as an individual exercise. Think about a particular task. If you are a manager, think about a particular task that you may be assigning to someone. And we'll take five minutes and do this and write it down in a way that would identify the Qqtr of it. It does say to take ten minutes to complete the planning sheet and then discuss it with an assigned partner. And when we actually do this for managers, we have them do that. We have them stop and do that as an exercise because we find as we pair them up in duos, they may or may not know how clear they are in terms of the task assignment. So it's a very good way to begin to level set that process in terms of clarity. So what I have on the next page, and it seems very simple and with apologies for how things are structured differently. Grammarically across Language what Terry and I find is very, very useful is making sure that the manager understands what is the verb related to that task and to go back again to what we call job descriptions. In many cases in the United States, they're written as the individual in the role or the role is responsible for. I don't think responsible is a verb. And so when I work with managers to understand what is exactly clear and what they need to do, I will work with them to identify the correct verb, which the next page has a list of those kind of things in English that it absolutely ensures, if you can begin the sense. And again, with apologies to how it's appropriately structured in other languages, but if you can find the verb, you can find the clarity. And that is something that we have found that is very, very useful in constructing, because the verb will get you the essence of the quality or quantity. And we call it the what by when, what is it that you want them to do and by when do you want them to do it? And so if it's structured as a verb and you want them to achieve something or advise or perform something, you can then get very clear in terms of that actual task that you're giving to that particular role. And as Nancy and Terry and I have worked over the last 1015 years, we have found that to be incredibly useful in terms of getting to the appropriate sentence structure. The other thing, this is the elementary school English teacher in Me. The other thing is that I make sure that the accountabilities are constructed in complete sentences. Because when a manager is new to the task of writing accountability, they will often start with just create this bullets. They love bullets because bullets is an easy way to get the task complete, but it doesn't create the clarity that's needed. So if you go back to Qqtr, what is it that you want me to do? By when do you want it done and within what time frame? And do you have resources? So sometimes it turns into a little bit of a grammar session sometimes, but you're helping them construct a complete sentence around the clarity because the bullet doesn't necessarily get it. So it's been a very useful tip as we've worked many years with managers in terms of how to do this, because a bullet works okay in strategic planning, because you can do the high identification of the focus of the organization. But actual path clarity assignment I absolutely believe requires a verb. What by when? What do you want me to do? By when do you want me to do it? And do I have help? Which gets you into the resources. The resources may in fact be someone from another department. We won't talk today much about cross functional, but we've actually had managers right then and there. The next slide talks about how managers will complete a task. And Dr. Jack spent a lot of time with this as requisite organization in terms of delegating direct output, direct output, all these things. But it's important that manager also spends the time in understanding the tasks that they will keep for themselves if they will delegate part of it to a subordinate or they delegate the whole thing to a subordinate. Because I observed a manager in one of my manufacturing companies and for many years he was very good. He was very high level and would walk down the hall and as he was walking maybe to another office, he would give three or four people an idea as he was walking down the hall. They all thought, you know, this manager and they all thought it was a task. And I would watch their faces as he was going down the hall and he was actually brainstorming as he walked. But he was not giving assignments. But I had to say his name was Mark. Mark, did you need to give an assignment because they all think you've just given them something to do or are you just brainstorming and do you want them to come back later with some ideas for you? So it was very good managerial learning for him because he was the kind of a gentleman that could come up with about ten ideas a day. And so he was creating chaos in the organization because of his level of capability. He was creating chaos while they thought they had direct assignments and they really didn't have an assignment, they just had an opportunity to discuss an idea with him. So this is very critical when we work with managers. Do you want to keep that task yourself? Particularly as something is being cascaded down through the strategic planning process? Are you going to give part of it to another manager or to one of your subordinates? Are you going to delegate the whole task? And so there are exercises that we've actually had managers that's coming up here next. This particular exercise will help you help them define if it's whether or not it's going to be a complete assignment that's completely delegated, you're going to keep part of it. Budget is a very good example because a manager normally has the complete accountability for managing a budget in their particular area. But they will very often delegate to a subordinate what I call spreadsheet management. And the subordinate may say I'm doing the budget for the manager. Essentially what they're doing is putting the numbers in the spreadsheet so that the manager can review it. And so they might be completing the spreadsheet and getting all the numbers together but the manager has the accountability for reviewing the budget and approving the budget. You can think of different kinds of tasks like this where a manager may actually give an assignment, where they're going to have them do part of it. I used to have my folks in training and development sometimes create some of these slides for them. For me, they're not accountable for directly doing the presentation but they can sure help me in terms of getting these kinds of things ready. And so that kind of clarity and particularly with a new manager because I find with new managers they're on one end of the spectrum. They're either very loose in terms of how they're getting task assignment or they create a real checklist and they don't necessarily need to. I would say the answer is the middle. But it's right here in terms of what are they going to keep for themselves and what are they going to delegate in terms of the right level of accountability. Because with accountability, folks, remember, comes authority. And so if I'm going to give an assignment to do something, for example, let me go back to the budget. If I'm accountable as a manager subordinate for getting all that information in a spreadsheet, then what is inherent in that is that I can go to other members of my management team and get that data from them in order to do that. And so I need to be able to have the authority to go and ask my fellow team members to do that. And so that becomes very important in the delegation of a task like that. Otherwise people may say, well, I don't have to give that information to them. They don't have the appropriate authority to do it. So with the accountability comes the authority. And it's all done with the clarity. We spent so much time here because it's really what it says in the little boxes. It's called no surprises. Because when you're talking about trust and you're talking about fairness, which is, I absolutely believe why Dr. Jackson spent his lifetime doing this work, his work, it was really about trust. And so if I'm a subordinate in an organization, I have to know what I'm accountable for. And then I have to be able to come and talk with my manager in a way that builds trust and says, okay, manager, there's no surprises here. I can't get this done because there's a time constraint or there's a resource constraint. And to be able to have that conversation, I can tell you from years of doing this if you construct that kind of a system. I've had many people tell me it was the best conversation I ever had with my manager because I now am not struggling for my own priorities or my own use of resources because I really can come in there. And as long as the manager has the appropriate temperament, we run into those situations. But if they're clear and they have the appropriate temperament, they will set up a situation like this where a subordinate can come into the office and say, these aren't my problems. Help me fix them. And so it becomes a very much of a no surprise environment. The next slide talked about how managers decide priorities. Because again, at the essence of the system, if you remember this morning when Jerry was talking about bureaucracy or know, somewhere in the middle here, there's an ability to understand. And why this is also so useful as a managerial system is that managers do decide priorities because at the end of the day, they have the accountability for the appropriate use of the resources of the organization. And it doesn't matter whether it's three people, 300 people, or 3000 people that they have that accountability and authority. So the ability to make the decisions around priorities is something that managers find very useful in this system based upon their own ability to get clear around the task. If managers cannot get clear around the task, which is where Terry and I spend a lot of time, back to those previous slides, they will not necessarily be able to get clear about the priorities. And when you speak to subordinates in most organizations, this is one of their, what I call points of pain, because they don't necessarily understand about priorities, because a manager has not necessarily been clear related to Qqtr. So Dr. Jacks was incredibly clear about this in all of his writings in terms of managers and subordinates will sit down and discuss the situation. The subordinate will come up with some possible actions, but at the end of the day, the manager decides what is to be done and any changes to that task assignment and the priorities in determining what the new Qtr will be. So I think that this is right at the essence, again, of how work is done in a system like this. And if again, a manager is appropriately of the appropriate temperament and they're very much about demonstrating fairness, they will understand this and the essence of this in terms of prioritization. So helping managers get clear and helping them understand prioritization is very critical in the system. So we often talk about what is managerial work. I start with new managers and organizations. I often start right here and say when you agree to be a manager, you agree to do these things. And I've actually had managers look at me and say I'm not so sure I agree to this. I like my new title, I like my new pay, and in some case I like my new office, but I'm not sure I agree to do these things. And we talk about this as the accountability of a manager. This is what they're agreeing to do. They're agreeing to make sure that they're clear about their own work, that they do in fact, work with their manager to develop a plan to get it done, that they will create subordinate key accountabilities and tasks from that plan. They will make sure that they are within that subordinate capability, because sometimes that is the problem and you make the accountabilities for the role, but then you need to make adjustments with the person who's in the role. They will discuss the task with the subordinates before finishing so that there's complete clarity. They will set context and they will set up a process for employee feedback and task reporting procedures, which is where we're going to go.