Three Essential Management Skills

This post is a repeat from several months ago. I've cleaned up the formatting a bit to make it more presentable.

Three Essential Management Skills

The late Stephen F. Holbrook was a godly management trainer who went to be with the Lord about fifteen years ago. His work on the three key management processes was so clear and powerful, that after hearing him speak on them once in an one-day IFMA workshop in the late 1980’s I’ve used and taught his principles and processes ever since.

Here is the essence of what I understand Holbrook taught:

There are three essential management processes. When managers are doing management work, they are using one of these three processes.

The three processes are problem-solving, decision-making and planning.

It’s extremely important to know what kind of situation you have so you can use the right tool.

When you need to develop steps into the future, you have a “planning” situation.

When you have an unexpected result as the result of some action you’ve taken, you have a problem.

When you have to select a choice of action from a range of alternatives, you have a decision.

For Planning:

Planning is the thinking—the mental sequence of steps you go through—that helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, with a minimum of diversions. It’s a series of action steps to ensure the successful implementation of a decision.

Planning starts with a decision. Once the decision has been made, the process of thinking to implement the decision is planning. A normal plan statement would therefore be: “How to implement this decision to relocate the office.”

Planning implies a known goal, an explanation, a result, a target. Without it, there is no way of thinking through a plan adequately. You need a destination to do planning. Planning is not problem-solving or decision-making, even though it involves decisions being made in the process.

Planning is always done from now into the future. This contrasts with problem-solving and decision-making. Problem-solving is always looking back in time to find the cause of how we got where we are. A problem-solver is resurrecting facts out of the past. The time frame of a problem is, “the past—up to now.” The questions asked are different from planning.

Decision-making is in the present, choosing among alternative actions available to us or known to us. The questions are different form both problem-solving or planning.

When you’ve solved a problem or made a decision, the feedback and reactions are almost immediate, or at least they are timely. That’s satisfying to a manager, especially an action-oriented manager.

After you’ve planned a project, on the other hand, you’re faced with waiting to see if it works. On top of that, some things are sure to happen anyway, no matter how minor, to mar perfect results. And if that’s not enough, when the project or activity is completed, the planning has been long-forgotten.

When managers make decisions or solve problems, there is more of a sense of being active, of getting something done at the time. Planning seems anything  but an activity, it’s more like a “passivitity.” Without that sense of immediate payoff, it’s easier to leave undone and many do.

Six Steps of the D – A – F Process

DEFINE AND DETAIL

1.     Define what should happen

2.    Detail the sequence of action steps to get there

ANTICIPATE

3.    Identify areas of possible trouble or opportunity

4.    Take preventive action against/for the likely causes of possible trouble or opportunity

FEEDBACK

5.    Organize contingent action to reduce the seriousness if trouble occurs or enhance the opportunity if that occurs.

6.    Set up feedback to tell me I have the actual trouble or opportunity.

For Problem-Solving

Profits are up. Why? Sales are down. Why? Product quality complaints are increasing. Why? This department functions better than that one. Why? Attendence is exceeding expectations. Why?

Good managers are always asking why. When the question is “Why,” and you don’t know the answer the thinking process we use is called problem-solving. It is the search for the cause of an effect I can’t explain.

Managers, especially in people situations, tend to jump to a cause and act on it, without making the effort to find out why. This process incorporates a series of disciplined steps you can use to find out why something is happening.

Knowing where and how to start analyzing a problem is the first key step. We need to differentiate problems, for which problem-solving processes are appropriate from decisions. Difficult decisions are usually called “problems,” by most people. The steps to effective decisions are different from problem-solving, so we need to clearly separate the two kinds of situations.

The thinking needed for problem-solving has very different characteristics than decision-making. They start at different points in time, have different targets, different emotions and very different questions to ask.

Problems are situations where we need to know what agrees with what we expected, and what variables are deviating or disagreeing in time, place and circumstances from our expectations. A commonly accepted management definition, which dates from Socrates, says, a problem is a deviationfrom an expected norm, for which I don’t know the cause.

This definition implies that there was an expected or desired result that didn’t occur. A goal was deviated from. You expected 200 people at a new product introduction, only 150 came. It’s a problem if you don’t know “why.” If you do know why, it’s a decision. It may be a difficult, perplexing decision, but it’s a decision, not a problem.

The five steps in thinking clearly about problems are:

1.     Name the problem

2.    Describe it in detail

3.    Generate possible causes

4.    Evaluate the possible causes

5.    Confirm the tentative conclusion

This thinking process is basic cause-effect logic. It also uses inference. We move from a known to something we hadn’t known before, but we can infer it. We have an effect we do not know the cause for. We want to find that cause for this known effect.

·          The first two steps deal with known facts.

·          Step three steps out into hypothesis (inference) based on known facts.

·          Step four involves a disciplined separation of necessary missing data, by the use of compasason logic.

·          Step five gathers the missing data to confirm or deny the reasonable deducted conclusion.

The thinking process begins and ends on a factual basis. In the middle we use inference reasons to look beyond the known to find the unknown cause.

Decision-Making

Of those skills that seem to separate top managers from the rest, the ability to make more good decisions than bad ones is frequently mentioned.

Critical factors in effective decision-making are:

1.     Experience

2.    Intelligence

3.    Good judgment

All of these will help you, but unless you have a way of sensibly handling all of the information coming at you, your decisions may not be as effective as they could be.

When an individuals experience, intelligence and judgment are combined with his use of a visible and logical process for extracting relevant information from vast quantities of irrelevant and often misleading information, the coupling of ingredients allows more effective decision-making.

A decision is a situation that calls for a choice of action. It is usually associated with some uncertainty. Most people refer to these situations as problems. For example, “My problem is whether to give the job to Sam or Al.”  In the managerial sense, that is not a problem, it’s a situation that calls for a decision-making process.

Since a decision calls for action, it calls for a description that includes an action verb, such as select, choose, elect, change, improve, etc. (Choose a marketing promotion idea for the first quarter.)

Ten Steps of the O – A – R Decision-Making Process

Objectives

1.     State the goal (a simple statement of what I am going to do)

2.    List objectives (sometimes called criteria—time, money people, results, resources)

3.    Seprate objectves (required vs. desired)

4.    Weight the desired objecties (prioritizing with a scale)

Actions

5.    Develop alternative actions (possible choices, ways to DO the goal)

6.    Screen actions against required objectives (Does it meet the specifications?)

7.    Evaluate actions against desired bojectives (HOW well does it meeet the objectives?)

8.    Make a tentative decision

Risks

9.    Analyze risks (weigh seriousness vs. likelihood of occurring)

10. Make a decision (choose an action best balance objectives and risk)

I have handouts and PowerPoint for all three of these if you are interested.