Management 001
Kim du Toit
August 22, 2007
6:25 AM CDT
About a year before I performed the Great Wetback Episode of 1986, I was offered a job as Group Marketing Manager for one of my retail clients. Oh hell, enough time has passed for me not to be coy about it anymore. The company was the OK Bazaars, a chain which had been in existence since 1929, and which contained several department stores, “super” grocery stores (large, wide range), neighborhood stores, small urban stores, and half a dozen massive hypermarkets: all told, about 180 stores doing about R2 billion in sales (about $1 billion in 1985 dollars).
The job required me to supervise the running of the advertising department (four ad managers, several clerks, all working with three ad agencies—yes, our account was that big), the research “department” (a research manager, the work being mostly outsourced to the various research companies), and the signage studio (twenty-odd artists).
I had worked at two ad agencies prior to this, and at the Great Big Research Company when I was hired away, so I had a general idea of where I wanted to go with this job. What I did not know was exactly how the departments worked, how the work was actually performed.
So I called in the advertising managers and the studio head, and gave them a little speech. From memory, it went like this:
“I don’t know how your jobs work, and I’m not going to learn how. I’m not going to ask you for progress reports each day, and I’m never going to ask you ‘How’s it going?’—I expect you to keep me abreast of things, at times where it seems appropriate for you to do so, or only when you have a problem. Otherwise, I will assume you are all doing your job, and everything’s running smoothly.
“Now, about problems: I’m not going to solve them for you, because once again, I don’t know how your jobs work. So if you come to me with a problem, I’m going to chase you out of my office and tell you to find the solution. I expect you to come to me with a problem with two or three possible solutions, and you can’t decide which one would be the best. (Obviously, if there’s only one solution, you don’t have to tell me anything.) If we discuss the solutions, and the ‘best’ solution still doesn’t present itself, then I’ll make the decision, because that’s my job, my responsibility.
“If anyone from another department is giving you any trouble, and you can’t resolve it, tell me and I’ll take it up with their manager. If it’s their manager who’s giving you the problem, tell me and I’ll try to straighten it out with him; or if I can’t, then I’m going to go to my boss, and let him straighten it out after hearing my suggestions—because he too, is going to want options and not complaints.
“Don’t send me memos, because I won’t read them. Talk to me, and if you feel compelled to put the results of our discussion onto paper, go ahead, and put me on copy. Give the memo to my secretary and tell her to file it wherever.
“The mark of a successful manager is how long he could be dead at his desk before any of his staff notices it. I’m shooting for two weeks.”
There were no questions.
The funny thing was, I was faced with a similar issue in my own job, and I had to go up the management chain for assistance, because my immediate boss had gone away on vacation. (His last words to me: ”Don’t call me unless the office burns down. On second thoughts: don’t call me then, either, because there’s not much I can do from the Seychelles.")
Because of the volume of printing we did (flyers, broadsheets, whatever), we bought our paper from various mills, and we had to order at least six months out so they could schedule production. The studio head called me up, to tell me that our supply was running low, and that we would need to order more, and the deadline to order was coming up. So I asked the studio manager what our paper options were, and they were as follows:
1.) Buy locally-made paper at a decent price, but the quality of paper was really kinda so-so.
2.) Buy paper from Finland (!) which cost a lot more, but was of superb quality.
The price difference was about half a million (not much by today’s standards, but in those days you could buy a VW Beetle for just over a grand).
A half-million price differential was above my pay grade, as the saying goes, so I had to go to the CEO of the group.
I laid it all out for him in about two minutes, pretty much as I did above—you never waste the CEO’s time with crap. He thought about it for a moment, and asked, “What do you think we should do?”
My response was immediate. “If I could make this decision, I would have made it already and not wasted your time. The problem is this: nobody ever got fired for saving the company half a million clams, but they have been fired for costing the Company half a million clams unnecessarily. My problem, as the man nominally responsible for the Company’s image, is that I can also make a good argument for producing ads on quality paper so we don’t look like some low-rent operation. I don’t know if anyone’s ever been fired for producing a so-so quality product in a case like this, and I’m not keen to find out. So, it’s saving money or quality—and I can’t make up my mind which is more important to the Company, because I actually like both options.”
He chuckled, thought for about five seconds, and said, “Go with the quality. Never mind the half-million.”
None of this is designed to make me look like some kind of superhero manager. But it is intended to make people think about the proper way to manage people:
1. Give them responsibility to go with their accountability.
2. Force them to live up to your expectations of them. Trust them to do a good job.
3. If they make an honest mistake in an otherwise exemplary job, forget about it, and cover for them if the Corner Office starts causing trouble.
4. Don’t sweat the little things. If someone needs a little extra time off to look after a sick child or have their hair done, let them go.
5. Eschew paperwork and bureaucracy (other than when mandated like for hourly workers and time cards). Show me a manager who demands constant progress reports from his staff, and I’ll show you an insecure manager who doesn’t trust them.
And feel free to use my little speech on your staff. If you don’t feel comfortable in delegating that much responsibility, you need to examine the reasons why you feel that way. And if your boss isn’t delegating the responsibility to you, it’s probably time to look for a new boss.
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