Liz Strauss.com

PERFECT VIRTUAL MANAGER

To see and to know.
That is the baseline. The measure to which those who work are able to see what they see and know what they know reveals the level health in any enterprise.

To See and To Know

It’s simple. Those who work see what happens and know what drives an organization. When the organization asks them to behave as if they don’t see or know, it sets up conflict and dysfunction.

The focus shifts from the work and the customer to an attempt at understanding the complicated pretense and its motivation.

The environment becomes negatively political. Truth and information become traded as commodities. Suspicions threaten the core of the organization. The effect is polarizing.

On the other hand, when those who work can see what they see, and know what they know, a trust environment is established. Focus can be centrally placed on the work, and leadership can be positive. The people doing the work can trust in their own perceptions. They have a place to stand.

Given a place to stand, workers can contribute with strength of their convictions. Customers can give valuable feedback. Management can offer helpful guidance. Everyone is more likely to risk in pursuit of the common goals and to support a team environment.

Positive risks do not occur when folks are surrounded by fear of pretense.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog

PERFECT VIRTUAL MANAGER

Meaningful Work.
Meaninfgul work is work that is useful.
It has a purpose other than to use up time.
Meaningful does not make more work. It often makes less work.
In other words, meaningful work is not stupid.

The Right to Do Meaningful Work

Intelligent people like to do work that makes sense. All people who work are intelligent about what makes sense in their job. I have asked this one question to folks in jobs at all levels, including Vice Presidents and folks who work driving a cab.

Would you work for less money, if it meant that you never had to do something stupid again.?

To a person, every answer has been an elaborate and emphatic, “Yes.”

My favorite answer came from Cindy. Cindy works on the shipping line in the warehouse. She was talking to her boss, the VP of Operations. She described what I’m talking about most perfectly in one sentence.

“What I like about working for you is that you don’t ask to move a box over there today, and then come back tomorrow to ask me to move it back exactly where it was the day before.”

Meaningful work allows people to get engaged in their jobs and to feel that they’re investing their life’s time in something worthwhile. Stupid work wears people down. No need to elaborate on that.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog

PERFECT VIRTUAL MANAGER

Quality.
Quality is an elusive term.
Who gets to define it?
Quality can’t be written into a contract or fully delineated on a spec sheet.

Yet, an expectation of anything less wears down the folks who are doing the work.

Right 5: The Right to Choose for Customers

Quality is what meets the unexpressed needs and desires of customers in ways that please and delight them. Any thing, any detail, any enhancement that a customer cannot see or would not miss is not quality. It is cost.

In essence, quality is the right to choose for customers always and every time.

Choosing for customers is a complicated thing.

Customers rely on us to know what will serve them best, to watch for their point of pain and for their dreams. Choosing for customers is so much more than merely asking what they want.

• It’s having the vision to see what they will need and want even before they have imagined it.
• It’s looking at simple, daily decisions and asking “What would our customers want us to do? Who does this solution serve? If we do this, will we be serving our customers even more fully?”
• It’s knowing that our customers get to decide what is meaningful and what isn’t.
• It’s understanding that knowing customers comes from more than spreadsheets and focus groups. It comes from listening to their experiences and understanding how they think. It is the ultimate empathetic endeavor.
• It’s taking care of our business so that we can continue to meet their needs effectively and efficiently. In other words, it is not offering customers what we cannot afford to offer.

Quality is choosing for customers by having a relationship with them that is authentic and transparent.

Who are our customers? Every person that touches our work inside and outside of our businesses.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog

PERFECT VIRTUAL MANAGER

Budget and Schedule.
Some folks see budgets and schedules as limiting, but in reality they are freeing. Without them, the people doing the work cannot move. Every action outside a budget requires permission in order to begin. Every task outside a schedule will lose priority.

Budget and schedule, when understood and handled well can be powerful tools.

Right 4: A Budget and Schedule by Those Doing the Work

In context of any project, it’s rare that those who are not doing the work think through the time and costs of accomplishing the tasks involved. For this reason and for outright accountability, those who do the work have the right and responsibility to generate and manage the budget and the schedule for the project.

As with any quantitative measures that describe the future, budgets and schedules are built upon assumptions that certain information will be fact, that certain human and non-human resources will be available, and that the plan and process for a project won’t change significantly. The budget and schedule, in fact, are business controls that formalize the project plan in order to keep the project within agreed parameters.

Entry level professionals have the right to participate in the basics of building, reading, reporting on budgets and schedules, and the responsibility to understand how they work. They need to know that going over budget or missing a schedule deadline can be a positive, when the resulting outcome is a far greater return on investment. The same folks need to realize that completing a project well under budget and well ahead of schedule can be a negative, when the resulting outcome is an opportunity missed — one in which there might have been a greater return on investment.

Budgets and schedules need to be realistic within the context of the overarching company goals. That means that whatever is driving the company will also drive these two documents.

The fact that they are generated to predict the future immediately reveals the impossibility of a budget or a schedule that will be or should be perfectly met.

Differences in interdepartmental time/goal orientation make these working documents difficult to generate and are often the source of conflict in a political sense. That is the greatest argument to explain why the folks who do the work need to be the folks who generate these documents.

Building the budget and the schedule gets the interdepartmental team to think through and communicate the process before the project begins. Ongoing status meetings to update and manage the documents keep that line of communication open.

Three key points:

• Budgets and schedules give project teams room to work.
• Budgets and schedules get project teams to define and communicate the process before the work begins.
• Ongoing review of budgets and schedules keep lines of communication open.

Why then, do budgets and schedules too often get handed down from management, when the tasks of budget and schedule belong in the hands of those doing the work?

How many reasons can you think of?

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog