First:
Think & Communicate Clearly.
Practice and encourage the policy of only using words and
acronyms you are prepared to define. You needn’t be a surgeon to
discuss “brain surgery”, but you should to be able to define ‘brain’
and ‘surgery’. If it is true that you can’t
effectively manage without measuring, you surely can’t manage what
you cannot define.
Second:
Be Decisive.
The
time for action and the decision to act are two different things.
The difference between Decisiveness and Impulsiveness is patient
and prudent timing of action. Decisiveness is
the ability to mentally adjudicate a matter so that it no
longer consumes your most precious resource - your
focus.
Third:
Don't be a "Bottleneck"
Successful follow-through takes a network of key
individuals and massively parallel (organized) activity.
If you try to do everything yourself, you will
limit managed work to your personal ability to process information
and make decisions.
Fourth:
Hold People Accountable For Things They Can
Control.
Properly apportion work and responsibility. An objective
division of labor is based on, product, process, decision-role and
human factors. Holding people accountable for the wrong things is
self-deceiving, self-defeating and the biggest destroyer of
productivity and morale. Make sure you
understand the difference between accountability and blame.
Fifth:
Build real processes.
Processes are intentional methods of achieving repeatable results at
a predictable cost. Many operations claim to have processes, but
upon examination they obviously don’t. If
every little undertaking is approached as a first-time initiative,
then a company only achieves a fraction of its potential for
productivity.
Sixth:
Pay Attention, and make every
day a real day of "job experience".
When we were young, we were told to "pay attention in
school", but at any skill level the essence of work is attention.
Learn and encourage the policy of learning
something new every day. Evaluate what you
learn. Call a bad theory just that; not a “good theory that doesn’t
work in practice.”