Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

  Managing the people. Using practices to make sure you have the right “other people” to get things done for you may be the single most important lever you have, and yet it’s the area most neglected by managers. We’ll discuss how to build a staff of superstars: hiring them, developing them, and making sure you hold on to the best and let go those who fall short.

  Managing yourself. The final part of this book explains how to apply to yourself the same rigor that you apply to your management of others, including using your time effectively, staying organized, working with your boss, and exercising authority. As a manager, what you do in this area sets the limits on or, we hope, removes the limits from, the results you can get.

  We believe that the practices in this book will help you build and lead a high-performing organization that achieves outstanding results over the long haul. And for nonprofits working to change the world, and the people who run them, that’s what it should be all about.

  PART 1

  MANAGING THE WORK

  Whether you’re managing a single team or an entire organization, there’s going to be more work than you can handle on your own. And if you accept the fundamental premise of this book—that managing effectively is about getting results in your realm—then you’re going to be feeling a lot of pressure to get things done, and to get them done well.

  In Part One, we’ll talk about how to manage the work—ideally, how to transfer some of the weight on your shoulders to your staff members. If you do this right, your staff members will feel energized because they will have responsibility, your team will get dramatically more done than you would have been able to on your own, and you’ll be freed up to focus on areas where you’ll have the biggest impact.

  So how do you do it? Whether the work you’re trying to get someone to do is as straightforward as handling logistics for a meeting or as complex as raising your organization’s visibility in the mass media, the same basic principles apply: you have to be clear from the start about what you expect, stay engaged enough along the way to increase the likelihood of success, and hold people accountable for whether they deliver.

  In Part One, we’ll look at how you can apply these principles of expectations, engagement, and accountability to manage different types of work:

  The most common thing most managers do is hand off specific tasks or projects. In Chapter Two, we look at how you can do this through strong delegation. Once you’ve mastered basic delegation, all the other ways in which you’ll manage work follow easily, because the same principles apply.

  Ultimately, you’ll maximize your impact when you can hand over not just specific tasks, but broader responsibilities. In Chapter Three, we look at how you do this by creating meaningful roles on your team and setting and reinforcing clear, measurable goals for what your team members should accomplish. Doing these pieces in tandem will enable you to fully share the pressure (and joys!) not just of day-to-day tasks but also of driving your organization forward.

  Whether in pursuit of specific projects or broad responsibilities, your staff members are going to perform thousands of tiny activities that you never discuss explicitly, but which will be key to the quality of the results you attain. In Chapter Four, we look at how you can create a powerful culture that will guide how your staff members approach and execute every aspect of their work.

  Finally, in Chapter Five, we’ll look at two systems that will help you bring all of this together—how in the real world with multiple staff members each handling a range of projects and responsibilities, you can stay on top of it all to ensure great results.

  As you’ll see, the details vary depending on the context, but the basic principles of making sure people know what you expect of them, engaging with them to maximize their chances of success, and holding them accountable are the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  MANAGING SPECIFIC TASKS

  Basic Delegation

  Does either of these scenarios sound familiar to you?

  You ask your staff member to write a fundraising appeal for your new campaign. When you review the draft, the emphasis is on the wrong points and key pieces are missing, so you start editing it—and soon find that you’ve rewritten the entire piece. Your staffer is frustrated because it’s not her letter anymore; it’s yours. “Why didn’t you just do it yourself to begin with? ” she wants to know.

  The next time you assign your staff member a piece of writing, you try to give her more leeway so she doesn’t feel micromanaged. But when you look at what she’s written on the day it’s scheduled to be mailed out, the tone is off, the pitch for funding isn’t strong enough, and it doesn’t feel compelling to you. You’re frustrated and unhappy with it, and when you tell her, you can tell she’s frustrated too.

  If you’re like most managers we work with, one, if not both, of these will ring true. In fact, many managers we know go back and forth between being too hands-on and too hands-off. Frequently a manager will start off at one extreme, discover that it doesn’t get the desired results, and react by moving to the opposite extreme, only to find that doesn’t work either. For instance, after giving staffers a great deal of leeway to run with a project and not having it go according to plan, a manager may vow to be involved in every step of the next project. And managers who get feedback that they’ve been too intensively involved will often start suppressing their natural desire to sit in on crucial project meetings and get interim project reports, inevitably to find out at the end of the project that they should have listened to their gut. At that point, it can be tempting to throw up your hands in exasperation and feel that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  It’s no wonder managers get exasperated, because neither extreme works. In this chapter, we discuss how to get the balance right and will walk you through each step of good delegation.

  EXACTLY HOW HANDS-ON SHOULD YOU BE?

  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy answer to the question of how hands-on to be? (“Finally! Now I know that I should be 58 percent hands-on!”) Although there’s no one-size-fits-all formula, we’ve come to a paradoxical-sounding belief from our work with managers that most managers need to be more hands-on than they are—but also more hands-off.

  Huh?

  Contrary to the popular belief that managers just need to empower their people and let them go, we believe managers need to be significantly more hands-on in key respects. They need to be more hands-on in clearly communicating their expectations for the outcomes of the work, making sure they and their staff are on the same page about how the work will proceed, checking in on ongoing work, and creating accountability and learning at the end.

  At the same time, managers need to be more hands-off in actually doing the work. For every manager we see who’s too hands-off in making expectations clear on the front end and in monitoring ongoing work, we see another (or often the same) who’s too hands-on in pushing the day-to-day of the work forward and often doing much of it herself. The point of managing other people is to get more done than you would on your own, but too often we see managers fail to gain the benefit of having other people make the work happen.

  Guide more so your staff is more likely to succeed, and you’ll be able to do less yourself.

  We can sum up our advice in this way: guide more, do less.

  You might be wondering whether following our advice won’t actually take more of your time. In the long run, definitely not. Guiding more means that you may spend more time than you otherwise would in explaining a project at the start. You also might spend five minutes more than you did in the past reviewing data on progress along the way. But you’ll radically increase the chances that whatever you’re delegating will be a success. Everyone will be happier, and you’ll ultimately get to do less because you won’t end up redoing the work (and dealing with an unhappy staff member). Over time you’ll be able to delegate bigger and bigger pieces of work and know that they’ll come out successfully. When that happens, you can focus your en
ergies on the work that only you can do.

  THE COMPONENTS OF GOOD DELEGATION

  What does guiding more and doing less look like in practice? As we mentioned in the introduction to this part of the book, there are three key steps to managing work generally and in the delegation process more specifically:

  1. Agree on expectations. Ensure that your staff member understands what you want achieved.

  2. Stay engaged. Make sure the work is on track to succeed before it’s too late.

  3. Create accountability and learning. Reinforce responsibility for good or bad results, and draw lessons for the future.

  How exactly these principles apply depends on the context, so we’ll discuss a fourth principle, which most people do intuitively: adapt your approach to fit the person and project. Figure 2.1 summarizes the basic process.

  FIGURE 2.1. The Delegation Cycle

  Ultimately this process is about setting your staff members up for success in their work. We’ve seen a lot of managers who think of delegation as consisting only of the first part of this cycle, that is, asking someone to complete a piece of work. But if you skip the next steps in the cycle, you’re likely to find yourself in the situations we described in the opening of this chapter: frustrated that the work doesn’t look like you’d envisioned it or doing too much of it yourself.

  When you’re assigning work, look for opportunities to make the assignment truly a conversation, as opposed to simply dictating every element. For instance, if there’s flexibility in what the finished project should look like, ask the staff member what she thinks the outcome should be. You can also ask questions around the other pieces of delegation, such as, “So who else do you think needs to be involved? ” and “Do we have samples that might be useful here? ” and “What timeline makes sense? ”

  Now we’ll walk through each of the four steps of the cycle.

  THE FIVE W’S AND AN H

  Teach your staff to ask about the five W’s if you haven’t already communicated them:

  Who: Who should be involved?

  What: What does success look like on this?

  When: When is the project due?

  Where: Where might the staff member go for resources?

  Why: Why does this work matter?

  And a little bit of . . . How you should approach the work.

  Step 1: Agree on Expectations

  The first step in launching the work is for you and your staffer to come to a clear, shared understanding about what results you expect. It may sound straightforward, but it can be harder than you might think to get to the point where you and your staff would give the same answers to questions like, “What are you trying to accomplish? ” and “What does success look like? ” Just giving a quick rundown of the project usually won’t get you there.

  One way to do a better job of communicating your expectations is to remember the five W’s from your high school English teacher, who probably taught you that every good news story begins by laying out the who, what, when, where, and why. When you’re delegating, think about each of those W’s, as well as a little bit of the How. We’ll look closely at each piece, although we’re taking a bit of creative license and covering the what before the who. And Tool 2.1 at the end of the chapter provides a worksheet to use when you are delegating work to your staff.

  What Does Success Look Like for This Assignment?

  Most managers we know hate being labeled micromanagers, and with good reason: micromanagers tell staff exactly how to do a project or, worse, do (or redo) the work for them. What will let you delegate effectively while not micromanaging is setting clear expectations for success. By being extremely clear about what you want achieved, you free your staff up to figure out how to get there, so you’ll start by agreeing on what success will look like.

  Sometimes identifying what success will look like is easy. For instance, when you are putting a staff member in charge of organizing a gala event, you might have a predetermined aim, such as raising net revenue of $250,000. But in other cases, the definition of success might not be as clear. In those cases, you might ask your staff to take the lead in proposing what a successful outcome would be, saying something like this: “You’re in charge of logistics for this event. What do you think doing that successfully should look like?”

  In either case, the outcomes that you and your staff agree to should be as specific as possible. Quantitative targets are often ideal, since they leave little room for misunderstanding. But quantifying outcomes isn’t always feasible, so you can also agree on qualitative aims. In these cases, you should be as specific as you can about the qualitative target, that is, how you will know it when you see it. For the staff member you put in charge of logistics, the qualitative aim of having an event run smoothly might more specifically be, “Everything is set up and ready to go on time; if we run out of supplies, we have extras at the ready; we anticipate basic needs and provide for them; and we have someone ready to deal with extraordinary requests.”

  But sometimes even qualitative outcomes are hard to pin down. In these cases, making sure that your staff member understands the full context of what you’re trying to accomplish can go a long way toward defining the outcome. For instance, in delegating a funding proposal, you could explain what the funder cares about and what will turn her off (the context), and you could explain that the finished document needs to resonate emotionally with the donor and convince her that the project is in line with her interests and goals (the outcome).

  Finally, don’t define the task too narrowly. For instance, let’s say you’re preparing for an upcoming meeting and you’d like your assistant to help make it go smoothly. Many managers in this situation will give the assistant specific tasks to do, such as, “Please check that there are enough pads and pens in the conference room, and make sure people are offered water and coffee.” But a broader, and often much more effective, approach is to tell the assistant that she’s in charge of all logistics preparations for the meeting. The first time you do this, you’d agree on what that should look like, but from there, she’d take on the broad responsibility of ensuring smooth logistics. That way, she’d presumably take the initiative to clear the unrelated papers from the conference table that you didn’t even realize were there, ensure the speakerphone is set up and ready to go, and do all kinds of other tasks that you might not have thought to assign. This broader approach will make the assistant’s job more challenging and your life easier, and it will get the job done better than if you’d assigned it more narrowly.

  So when you’re addressing success, go broad, not narrow.

  USE SAMPLES AND TEMPLATES TO CLARIFY

  When possible, offering samples can be an incredibly useful way to give your staff a clearer idea of what you’re looking for. For example, if you and your head of communications agree that the Web site she is developing should look “clean and crisp,” you might send her links to sites that you feel look that way. Similarly, you could give your new development director a successful grant proposal from a previous year to show her the tone and style she should be striving for in this year’s report.

  If the assignment is a new type of work, providing a template can help structure the work in the way you’re envisioning. For example, rather than simply asking a staff member to give you research about other organizations working on a particular issue, you might create a chart with the specific headings you are looking for (for instance, organization name, mission, budget, and so forth) and have her fill it in.

  “Make sure your staff members can answer the question, ‘What do I have to do to delight my boss?’”

  PETER B. LEWIS, CHAIRMAN, PROGRESSIVE CORPORATION

  Who Should Be Involved?

  However broadly you define the task, be unambiguous with your staff member that she is ultimately responsible for it. Too often we hear managers say, “Can you help me with logistics for the meeting?” when what they really mean to say is, “You’re in charge of making sure logistics for
the meeting go smoothly.” The key here is to make sure your staff member understands that she is the owner—a word we love—of the task. She might call on you or others for ideas or even help with the task, but she is the one making sure that all of the helpers do their jobs and that the task is done well.

  One way to instill the idea of ownership is to use a simple tool we call MOCHA, an acronym for the different roles for a piece of work. We developed it because we had a lot of clients who rightly placed a high value on inclusion, and therefore had projects that ended up involving lots of people. Too often, though, those projects devolved into confusion when people were not clear on their roles and the project lacked a clear driver or decision maker.

  In projects where a number of people are playing roles, then, being clear about the who is key. MOCHA helps solve the who issue by providing a standard vocabulary within the organization for describing how people might be involved. (You can remember “MOCHA” because if you get this right, your job becomes easier and you can sit at a café all day sipping mochas.) Here’s what the different pieces of MOCHA stand for:1

  Manager Assigns responsibility and holds owner accountable. Makes suggestions, asks hard questions, reviews progress, serves as a resource, and intervenes if the work is off track.

  Owner Has overall responsibility for the success or failure of the project. Ensures that all the work gets done (directly or with helpers) and that others are involved appropriately. There should be only one owner.