Useful Management Techniques for More Effective Leadership
In an unprecedented crisis, anything and everything that can help us be more effective and more efficient as leaders and managers is worth considering and trying.
Here are a few strategic leadership concepts and techniques I’ve found useful:
Goal specificity. Unclear goals, too many goals, shifting goals—these inevitably get in the way of delivering peak performance and required results. Make sure everyone on your team and in your organization knows exactly what the company needs to deliver right now to win in this crisis.
Strategic clarity. Business strategies are choices, specific choices to achieve specific goals. Again, make sure everyone understands the very few choices your company or organization is making to deliver required goals.
Repetition works. Reminding the group every week what the goals are and what choices we’ve made to deliver those goals will increase the odds of success.
Shorten communication, reporting, and work cycles in a crisis. In many businesses I’ve worked on, we planned and executed on seven-day, 30-day, 90-day as well as half-year, full-year, and two-year work cycles. Major capital projects and major innovation and technology initiatives often took longer.
In natural disasters and other emergencies, we moved to even shorter work cycles, reporting several times a day, and continuous communication, to read and respond to rapidly changing circumstances in real time.
PDCA. Plan, do, check, and adjust is a straightforward planning-to-action “rinse and repeat” work cycle that makes good sense at all times, and particularly good sense in crisis.
After Action Report (AAR). Used in the U.S. military, an AAR is a simple report of what happened, why it happened, and how specifically the plan and execution can be improved the next time. It is equally applicable to the business and nonprofit world. It is a powerful way to create a continuous-improvement culture built on fast-cycle learning.
Experimentation, aka “make a little, sell a little, learn a lot.” We took this approach to customer experimentation and fast-cycle, low-cost test marketing at Procter & Gamble. Openness to improvement and trying new things can make an important difference in crisis. Customers and employees are rich sources of new ideas to improve the business.
Smart delegation. In crisis, who will make what decisions is a very important decision in its own right. As CEO or managing director, which specific decisions do you want to make? Make sure everyone knows which ones they are. There are other decisions you may well want to delegate. There are different ways to delegate effectively, depending on the type of decision. You can delegate a decision to a specific manager, supervisor, or employee, and ask her/him to confer with you before deciding, inform you after deciding, or just go ahead and decide and execute.
RIDE. Recommend. Input. Decide. Execute. With any decision, you and your decision makers will benefit from clarity about who in the company may recommend a certain decision or action, who may provide input at the request of the decision maker, and—very important—who is ultimately accountable for execution and delivery of the expected outcome or result.
Clearer, simpler, faster. More adaptable, agile, and flexible. All of these are better in times of crisis.
Simple business management concepts, techniques, and tools that set clear expectations for what to do and how best to do it actually help adaptability, agility, and flexibility. They also enable both rapid response to changing circumstances and the continual innovation and improvement needed to get better results.
About the author
A.G. Lafley is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble, who worked for decades in and with large public companies. Over the last 15 years, he has turned more of his attention, energy, and time to small businesses and nonprofit organizations. He currently serves on the boards of Omeza, Snapchat, Tulco, Hamilton College, and as the founding CEO of the Sarasota Bay Park Conservancy. A.G. is the author of two best-selling books, The Game Changer about innovation and Playing to Win about strategy, as well as numerous articles on leadership, management, and business strategy for Harvard Business Review.