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The 30-70 Rule in Leading and Managing

July 30, 2009 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

July is quickly coming to an end. When I looked at my calendar earlier this week, the 07.30 numbering for today triggered a thought: I have not yet told you about the 70-30 Rule in managing and leading, have I.

‘Rule’ is a short, compact, easy word to remember and so that’s what we call it, but it is more of a guideline, and a goal Alaka‘i managers will commit to achieving. It goes like this:

A manager will both manage and lead. They will be most effective at achieving results which matter when 30% of their time is dedicated to leading, and 70% of their time is devoted to managing.

We manage and lead every single day. What constantly shifts is the amount we will be working at each one, devoting X amount of time to managing, and Y amount of time to leading.

When we feel we are compelled to curtail our management actions a bit and start leading more, we are beginning to get impatient ”“ the good kind of impatience (in contrast to the not-as-good impatience of micromanagement.) We have an idea about something, and it is about how we want the future to be different in some way than how things are right now.

Something else has happened as the idea grew in intensity: We can no longer come up with any good reason to wait.

— Leadership is Why and When

We have spoken of the differences between management and leadership at length (as we define them in our Managing with Aloha ‘Language of Intention’). As we think about the 30-70 Rule, let’s keep within the context of what we have most recently discussed here:

Leadership is Why and When: Leading is about acting on your good impatience for a new idea, one you fully realize will lead to change. Dedicate 30% of your time and effort to this leading.

Management is What and How: Managing then, will be about the execution of what it takes, and how it must be done for your visionary idea to become our new reality.
Dedicate 70% of your time and effort to this managing.

Learn to measure effort

I’m guessing your first question might be, “Why 30-70? How did you come up with that?”

Very early in my management career it became crystal clear that I had to learn to measure using a variety of expected business metrics. Many of us will learn to measure results (sales reports, profit and loss, ROI) and we will learn to measure work performance (annual performance reviews, incentive and commissioning programs). However there was always a lot of frustration woven in all these systems and processes of fairly standard business measurements for me. It is a frustration I see play out over and over again across industries and at all managerial levels within organizational hierarchies. We measure what we are expected to, not fully understanding why we bother, and how it can really help us.

We learn these metrics connected to financial results and work performance as industry or corporate rules and conventions: They are given to us as expectations. However we will rarely learn enough (if anything) about the cause and effect chain reactions which lead up to the results we get: The frustration stems from feeling that so much ends up happening by trial and error.

Worst of all, that trial and error is often packaged up and dismissed as learning we must attend to as part of “paying your dues.”

Well, it took me a while (I paid those dues), but I eventually figured out that to be effective with achieving GREAT results and work performance, what I had to learn to measure was the effort put toward making them happen correctly. I also had to qualify that effort. So I qualified it as the “great business calling of Managing with Aloha” and I categorized that calling as both managing and leading by specific, values-based definitions.

I then learned that those categories would best complement each other in a certain proportion over years and years of tracking them within my work performance teams. 30-70 evolved as our golden rule for the best reason: It consistently delivered the best results when it came to our vision of what Ho‘ohana (worthwhile work) should be.

WorkTools

Start by knowing where you stand

Greatly improve your effectiveness by doing more leadership (creating energy) and less management (channeling energy). Management matters and will always be necessary to a certain degree, but the constant goal of the Alaka‘i manager is to lead more and not less.

—How to Stop Micromanaging, Part One

Most of us will manage way more than we lead, regardless of our position on that conventional role progression from supervision to middle management, to upper management and owner/director leadership. Even the guys and gals at the very top of the org chart lead too little and manage too much, regardless of the industry or sector they are in.

President Obama is a highly visible example to watch right now: He led a lot during his campaign, talking about his ideas for the future constantly so he could share his vision and get us to buy in, and say so with our votes, but most of what he does now is manage. His day-to-day managing includes repeated statements of his leadership intentions, but now into the 7th month of his presidency, he is not yet back to the consistent new idea generation we spoke of in “Leadership is Why and When” for he has found that more management is being required of him. He must delegate it, or do it himself.

The practical application of “learn to measure effort” is that you must also come up with how you “qualify that effort” and then “categorize it” too: As I asked in my last post, “Who is in charge of you?” That’s not to say that you can’t get help, but be deliberate in making your choices. You can use what I suggest by way of the Managing with Aloha sensibility for work, and the leadership/30 ”“ management/70 categories/metrics, or you can come up with something on your own, but you must make it tangible and measurable, and meaningful to you, so that at any given moment you know where you stand.

Once you know where you stand, you know where you need to go.

Because I have clear definitions for management and leadership (as my Language of Intention), I can measure the specific activities I associate with each one. Who cares if the dictionary, or a new business book by a famous management or leadership guru says something different? What is important is my own definition if I execute and act that way, because I then have a consistency of actions I can measure, knowing which one goes in my leadership/30 bucket, and which one goes in my management/70 bucket.

At the end of each week I look at my calendar (as it actually happened), and I assess in a very simple way: I use a green highlighter for my leadership activities, and a pink one for my management activities, then I look at the ratio of hashmarks now color-coding where I stood in my week’s effort: Was it the 3-7 I need, or did I come in at 2-8 or 1-9 instead?

Next, plan ahead for better

Now that I know where I stand, I need to adjust, and move toward where I should be going. So I look at next week’s calendar and measure the ratio I have already penciled in: Will each appointment be about a leadership initiative, or about a management one?

I look at the available blocks of time I have left and can proactively plan better with: How do I fill them in to get the most out of my efforts?

  • If they are at 20-80, I need to lead more to achieve my 30-70.
  • If they are at 40-60, I need to manage more to achieve my 30-70.

Management and leadership get so much guru-speak tied up in them, and they begin to seem unreachable. They aren’t.

The 30-70 Rule in Managing and Leading gets them to be activities that you have qualified in the way that matters most to you (as your Leadership Why and When) and that achieves the best results (as your Management What and How.)

I like practical and useful, and I’ll bet you do too.

Let’s talk story.
Any thoughts to share?

Photo credit: Work Tools by stryder10464 on Flickr.

For those who prefer them, here are the Talking Story copies of the links embedded in this posting:

  • Leadership is Why and When
  • Management is What and How
  • Two Gifts: Values and Conversation
  • What’s your Calling? Has it become your Ho‘ohana?
  • How to Stop Micromanaging, Part One
  • “What’s in it for me?” is a Self-Leadership Question
  • What the heck do you mean by ‘Achievable?’
  • Your Alaka‘i Language of Leadership

Article originally published on Say “Alaka‘i” July 2009
The 30-70 Rule in Managing and Leading

How do you use your manager?

April 21, 2009 by Rosa Say for Say “Alaka‘i”

~ Originally published on Say “Alaka‘i” April 2009 ~
How do you use your manager?


Upolu Windturbine

Asked another way, How useful is your boss?

I had an interesting conversation with a young man yesterday about all the drama going on where he worked, because a bigwig manager from their regional office was coming for a visit, “unannounced, but of course we all know he’s coming.”

It is a scenario that is probably familiar to a lot of us, those hoops we all jump through to convince some higher-up that “this is the way we always work” when in fact, it isn’t that way at all. And I hate to burst your bubble, but one of the things coaches like me will teach the executives we advise is how to see through your façade to what the real deal is. It doesn’t take all that much.

This time though, I was talking to one of the hoop-jumpers, and he was the one I wanted to help.

So I asked him, “How important is this person? What kind of things can he influence for you, and help you shift or change for the better? Can you make sure that possibility is what he sees during his visit?”

He looked at me a bit blankly at first, but then he slowly smiled and said, “To be honest, I’m not really sure. I know what he does, but I have no idea why he’s coming, and why he’s coming now. I’m not sure if he wants to see some things for himself, or if he’s really the messenger for someone else. Could be” I guess it could go either way. As a matter of fact, both things could happen.”

I didn’t respond right away, for I could see the wheels turning as he considered all the possibilities. Then he thoughtfully added, “So are you saying to let him leave a hero, making a decision where we both win?”

Smart young man!

If you’re going to go through hoops for someone, why not make it count and worth your efforts? As Stephen R. Covey says, “Begin with the End in Mind.”

Say this was happening to you: How would you want such a visit to turn out? If you’re going to ‘stage’ something, stage the result you want to see happen.

I’m going to be a broken record here about something that is so, so important. I asked a question in my last two posts, one I am not willing to let fall off your radar yet. If you don’t want to answer it here in the comments publicly, please be sure you answer it for yourself and come up with a proactive plan, one that is useful to you. Here it is one more time:

  • If your manager offered to give you some help in grooming a new habit within your organizational culture, would you know what to ask for?

The bigger question is this: Do you know how to best use your manager?

How do you work WITH your manager, as opposed to without him?

There are far too many people with the primary tactic of avoiding their manager during the course of their work day, preferring to be left alone to their own devices, and I think that is such a shame. We get enough alone time, and not enough partnership and collaboration time.

Or similar to the beginning of this story, people create diversionary tactics. What a waste of everyone’s time, brain power and energy.

Imagine all you could accomplish with this shift in your attitude: Use your manager wisely, and use them to your benefit. Ask them to work with you in the way you feel you will both win. Don’t work around them, or in spite of them, or even ‘for’ them: Work with them.

If you need more help with the possibilities, review this post about how and why managers can be useful and make a big difference in the workplace: How Managers Matter in a Healthy Culture. Then, make it personal. Make it about you and your partnership with your manager.

Let’s talk story:

  • Say you’re due for a corporate visit. How can you find out more about why the visit is happening? What are the constructive, partnership-building questions you could ask?
  • Think about all those reasons an exec’s visit to a workplace might be unannounced: Are any of them truly valid in a healthy organizational culture?
  • And one more time! If your manager offered to give you some help in grooming a new habit within your organizational culture, would you know what to ask for?

Any thoughts to share? Comment here, or via the tweet-conversation we have on Twitter @sayalakai.


More reading from the Say “Alaka‘i” archives:

  • Do you ask Good Questions? (March 19th)
  • Who gives you your Second Opinion? (March 17th)
  • How to Better Honor past Histories: Collect Stories, Dispel Myths (March 12th)
  • Want different? Be a Squeaky Wheel (February 10th)
  • Desire Always Precedes Change” and the 10 Steps to an Organizational Culture of Change Agents (January 11th)

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Be Proactive; Values by Choice as Your Habit – updated.

November 6, 2005 by Rosa Say

I have mentioned Stephen R. Covey several times here on Talking Story, sharing with you what a lasting influence his teaching has had on me, my years of management practice, and my work philosophy of Managing with Aloha.

After a presentation I had done yesterday afternoon, a young woman came up to me and said, “I have been one of your silent Ho‘ohana Community on Talking Story for several months now, and I finally decided to take your advice and read Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m about halfway through it, and I’m seeing a lot of the connections in Managing with Aloha. I was wondering; out of his 7 Habits, which one do you think has made the greatest impression on you?”

I had my answer ready before she had barely finished phrasing the question.

Without a doubt, it has been the very first habit, Be Proactive, which Covey calls the Habit of Personal Vision.

For me, this is the one which is the catalyst for the other 6 Habits (7, now that Covey has written The 8th Habit), similar to how Aloha is the catalyst and rootstock for the other 18 values of Managing with Aloha.

One reason is that Responsibility (Kuleana) has always been such a strong driver in my own value system, and Habit 1, Be Proactive is very much about taking initiative and seizing responsibility.
The other significant reason is that Be Proactive is about our ability to choose.

As human beings, we have the incredible power of choice, and we need not be purely reactive creatures, bouncing through our lives like the balls in a pinball machine. Covey made a huge impression on me in this regard: We can choose our personal vision, and almost always, we will have choices to choose from. This is both the privilege and distinction of our belonging to the human race. Coupled with our ability to learn, it can be argued that the power of choice is the defining significance of our species.

This is also not a one-shot deal for us, in fact, we make choices daily. The question is, do we use this ability to choose, and do we exercise our right to do so, always choosing a greater good? Do we develop this ability, this privilege, and this honor into a personal habit?

One of the things we can choose, one of the most important things of all, are our values. We choose them for our lives and our families, and we choose them for our work and our businesses. We choose them by choosing where we will live, and how we will play. We choose our values by choosing our friends and our mentors, and by choosing relationships with others who potentially will play significant roles in our lives.

We choose the values we will live by, and we make either reactive or proactive choices in regard to how they are harnessed, and how they justify and amplify our thought processes.

At this time of my life, my first, and my most proactive choice is Aloha.

What is yours?

11/07/05 Update:Thank you for your comments, and if you are reading this in an RSS feed reader, I encourage you to click in to the trackback by Stacy Brice. I also offer you this related link to a recent October post which has dropped off my main page:
Choose your values, honor your sense of self.

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RSS Current Articles at Managing with Aloha:

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