1
What Is An Effective Manager?

There's a lot of talk about good management. When someone tells you they know how to manage, or what it takes to "be" a good manager, ask them: "How do you measure what a good manager is, or does?" If you don't get a crisp answer (like the one we outline next), don't take what they tell you very seriously.

We suspect you've seen good and bad managers. What makes them so? Is it what they do? How they think? Their personality? What they feel? Where they went to school?

Think about it for a minute. How do you know someone is a good manager? Literally, what is the definition of being a Good Manager?

When we ask this at our public Effective Manager conferences, we get all kinds of answers.

• Their people like them.
• They communicate a lot.
• They're smart.
• They CARE.
• They listen well.
• They are respected.

These are good efforts, but they're still wrong.

Suppose a manager reported to you who did or embodied all of the traits just listed and, for the past 3 years, had never achieved a single objective the organization had set for him. Would you describe him as a good manager? Of course you wouldn't.

Your first responsibility as a manager is to achieve results.

This may be the most important concept related to being a manager. And we here at Manager Tools didn't invent it. A lot of business books reverse-engineer a rubric to define what managers are supposed to do in order to support what they teach to managers. But they don't have data to support it.

But management science has known for 70+ years what a manager's two responsibilities are-the dataset is huge. And the first thing the data say is: achieve results. Get your job done. Meet your numbers.

So, despite how nice it sounds, and how good it feels to be loved by your team, your first responsibility is NOT to your team of directs. It's NOT to your people. You do NOT worry about them first. It's popular to be a manager who is loved by her team, because, well, it's nice to be popular. But a manager who is loved by her team but doesn't achieve her goals isn't doing her job.

The military has a phrase that captures the connection between results and people beautifully: Mission First, People Always.

Your first responsibility is to deliver whatever results your organization expects from you. Whether you're a sales manager and you have to "meet your number," an accounting manager who has to "prepare the quarterlies," or a project manager who has to "deliver, on time, on budget, in scope," the thing that really matters is that you do what your company expects you to do.

For many managers, this first responsibility casts into sharp relief something you've known was wrong but probably didn't want to think about. You probably couldn't name your top three to five key results that you owe your organization this year. You couldn't tick off on your fingers, with ease, the key things for which you're responsible. You might be able to say, "My boss wants me to focus in these areas," but that's not enough because you couldn't quantify what was expected of you.

How does this work if our first responsibility is to deliver results, but our boss hasn't been specific with us? Well, it doesn't.

About the only way to really feel good about what your responsibilities are is to have quantified goals. Numbers. Percentages. "Higher than 92% call quality each week." "Achieve 1.6 MM in sales." "Maintain gross margins above 38%." "Reduce shipping losses by 2.7% cumulatively year over year." If not having these kinds of goals frustrates or worries you, perhaps you think that everyone else has clear goals. But don't worry-they probably don't either. Lack of objective goals is a huge problem in management all over the world, and it has been for 50 years.

The problem with not having clearly delineated responsibilities is that you can't make intelligent choices about where to focus. You begin to feel that "everything is important." You begin to "try to get everything done." But of course, you can't. And you probably know that already because you're working long hours and you never get everything done. You're not alone.

If you can't list your goals almost off the top of your head, make a note somewhere to go to your boss in the near future. Ask her: What results do you expect of me? What are the measures you're going to compare me against? What are the objective standards? What subjective things do you look at to round out your evaluation of me? (If you want to know more details about how to have this conversation, There's a Cast for That.T)

Take notes, and go back to your desk and figure out what actions you're going to take to deliver those results.

A lot of managers fear this conversation. The thinking goes, if there are no measures, they can't use them against me. But that's shortsighted. There are always measures. If you don't know what they are, they may be being used against you. Your boss is privately and subjectively evaluating you. That's not what the marketplace does to your company-the marketplace is public and objective-so it oughtn't to be done to you.

So results come first. Managers who produce great results have more successful careers than those who produce average results. But even reading that statement probably bothers you a little because you've met at least one manager who gets great results and does well and whom you despise. There are managers who put results so far in front of everything else that they can justify all sorts of behaviors to achieve those results. There are even industries-Wall Street comes to mind-that are more likely to tolerate this kind of behavior from managers. When the ends justify the means for managers, bad things happen to the workers who report to them.

A focus only on results far too often leads to abuse of workers. The worldwide labor movement-unions-in fact traces its beginnings to soon after the beginning of.management. Managers were told, "Just get results," and they did so, at the expense of the health and safety of their employees. And pretty soon, the workers joined forces.

Your second responsibility as a manager is to retain your people.

Effectively managed modern organizations now measure retention in addition to results when evaluating a manager. It's intended to be a brake against an unrelenting results focus. They want to ensure that your team members don't leave your organization.

Replacing employees is expensive. There's the lost institutional memory, the loss of the value of individual goodwill, the costs of interviewing in both money and time, the likely higher salary, the training time and expense, and the cost of less productivity until the new person can match the quality and quantity of work of the person who left.

For today's manager, it's not enough to get results. You must do so sustainably, by retaining your team.

The definition of an effective manager is one

who gets results and keeps her people.

In the best companies in the world, when executives get together to review the talent of their managers, the managers' results and retention are always at the heart of the discussion. When there's a discussion about who's best, who deserves a promotion, who is "ready now" or going to be "ready next," these two metrics come up over and over. How well did this manager do her job, as shown in her results, and how well did she keep her people?

In case you're wondering, no, you don't have to keep everyone on your team, all the time, forever. The retention standard you have to meet is not 100%, no errors. Generally speaking the standard to be considered effective in retaining your team is to have a higher retention rate than your fellow department managers, and the overall organization.

Alas, you may find it hard to know what those numbers are: that's competitive information and usually closely held by HR. But ask anyway, and track your own success.

How Does This Change in a Remote or Hybrid Environment?

It doesn't. At least, the standards don't change. It doesn't matter if your team is all collocated, all remote, some remote and some not, or everyone remote part of the time and everyone in the office some of the time.

Think about it: Doesn't your company do the same thing it used to do, before the widespread advent of remote work? Sure it does. Do customers say, "It's okay, ship late, and ship poor quality, and don't bill us on time, and don't give us accurate sales and service quotes"? Nope, they don't.

Since the standards demanded of your organization by its customers are the same, the standards of managers are the same: results and retention. Now, it's possible that your organization might cut you some slack on your retention numbers because it has learned that retaining remote workers is much, much harder. But the principle is the same; results and retention drive the manager's...