Start with the premise that people want to be productive and take pride in their work.
As a manager, your day should start like this:
A topical example:
I recently volunteered my time with the Democratic National Convention Committee. I joined a group of eight other volunteers the past two days to help out in any way necessary. All of the volunteers have had a varying degrees of success in their career and yet we were all willing to drop what we had going on and perform the most menial of tasks. We wanted to be busy and feel useful.
In the past two days I’ve lent a cumulative 12 hours of my time (not counting the 3 hours in total driving time) to do exactly 60 minutes of work. I have an 8.5% utilization rate. And I was not an outlier. Of the nine of us we have contributed roughly 120 hours (yes, I’ve been on the shorter end) and performed approximately 15-25 hours of total work.
Would you want to go back tomorrow?
Morale of the story for managers:
Get your shit together. Come prepared each day so that, if nothing else, you can turn your people loose. You are not so important that one busy manager working an eight hour day will be more valuable than the rest of your team steadily working a multiple of the same eight hour day.
And if you’re lucky enough to have people volunteering. This holds doubly true. Don’t waste their time.
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