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.´
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