For some time, MBA majors like cheung kong graduate school of business and China Europe Business School have been very popular in China. Many business managers are busy with the big and small affairs of the company from Monday to Friday. On weekends, they will gather in MBA classes of business schools to learn all kinds of knowledge and strive to improve their management level.
But many middle managers who came to class later found that it was not easy to love you for attending business school courses. Why? Because most of these MBA courses may be more oriented to CEO-level senior managers. Many of the courses are about global vision, strategic vision, entrepreneurship and even Confucian philosophy. Middle-level managers are generally just department heads or cadres at the metre level. They play a connecting role in an enterprise organization-it is their duty to do their own work well, and at the same time, they should teach others to maximize their work performance. For these people, what they are eager to know is actually what they should do to improve the efficiency of their team. For example, how to hold the meeting, how to implement the performance appraisal and so on. Then these subtle but important questions are answered in the practical manual "Grove's First Lesson for Managers".
The author of this book, andy grove, is a global supplier of computer chips and the founder of the famous Intel Corporation. In this book, he innovatively introduced the concept of manufacturing "output" into general enterprise management activities and creatively put forward the method of "high leverage management". From the aspects of meeting, decision-making, planning, organizational structure, employee recruitment, motivation and training, this paper analyzes how middle managers can really improve productivity and obtain the most effective input-output ratio.
Andy grove co-founded Intel Corporation in 1968 and served as CEO of 19. He has led the successful transformation of Intel many times, and helped Intel develop from a memory company on the verge of bankruptcy into a large semiconductor company and computer CPU manufacturer in the world. When personal computers became popular, Intel successfully formed an alliance with Microsoft, which almost dominated the entire PC era. In addition to being active in the front line of enterprise management, Grove also served as an honorary professor at Harvard University and taught strategic management courses in stanford graduate school of business for a long time. He was also named "Man of the Year" by Time magazine from 65438 to 0997.
In addition, Grove is not only an outstanding management expert, but also a scientist with many patents on semiconductor technology. As a manager with a technical background, he used computers as examples many times in this book. The style of the book is also different from the general management case. Whether it is the division of content or the elaboration of concepts, there is a rigorous and meticulous style of a science and engineering man.
In this book, Grove shared his experience with us. Middle managers in enterprises can get the maximum output with the most effective input, and they can make a fuss about three key words: output orientation, team consciousness and performance appraisal.
First of all, if middle managers want to get the maximum output with the most effective input, the first key word they should pay attention to is: output orientation.
What does the author think is output orientation? Take Intel Corporation as an example, it has about 20,000 employees, of whom about 25% work on the production line, 25% are supervisors, maintenance personnel and engineers, 25% are responsible for arranging production time, management personnel and depositing and withdrawing funds, and the last 25% are responsible for product development, marketing and after-sales service.
Grove believes that no matter which department these employees are in, they all have different outputs, and the primary responsibility of middle managers is to try their best to improve the output ability of the whole team with "maximizing output" as the starting point.
For middle managers, his output is equal to the sum of the output of the organizations he leads. Every management activity that middle managers engage in has more or less an impact on the whole organization, and this impact depends on the leverage ratio of middle managers in this activity.
In this book, Grove with technical background introduced the concept of "leverage" in physics into enterprise management. We've all heard of leverage. Archimedes once famously said, "Give me a fulcrum, and I can move the earth".
Then, the leverage ratio that Grove thinks is actually the ratio of the output of middle managers through their own management ability to the early management cost of each specific work activity. In my opinion, if the leverage ratio of a management activity is relatively high, it means that with the same input, this activity will have higher output than the activity with low leverage ratio. For example, if a waiter in a breakfast shop can cook two breakfasts at the same time, then his leverage ratio is higher than that of an employee who can only cook one breakfast at the same time.
How to do it specifically? The author believes that every manager must consciously find out the "limiting steps" of the whole production process, which is the key to determine whether the management activities can have high leverage. The author gives an example: suppose you are a waiter in a restaurant, and your daily duty is to prepare a breakfast for the guests, which includes eggs, bread and butter and coffee cooked for 3 minutes. When you bring breakfast to the customer's table, everything should be freshly baked and hot. In order to satisfy customers' wishes, you can either leave the kitchen idle and wait for customers to come to your house, or you can always keep this breakfast in stock, but neither of them is practical.
You can see which breakfast combination is the most time-consuming to prepare first. There is no doubt that the answer is boiled eggs. Because the coffee has been cooked in the pot, it only takes about one minute to bake bread, so we should take the longest time to cook eggs as the limiting step. Boiled eggs are not only the longest, but also the most important breakfast combination for most customers. The formulation of process plan should pay attention to the most critical limiting steps. As the saying goes, if you hit a snake seven inches, you will lead the cow by the nose. In order to improve the output of breakfast shop employees, it is necessary to give priority to the time of boiling eggs, and then consider the output time of other projects and arrange them alternately in the production process. Boiling eggs here is actually the limiting step of the whole production process.
In daily life, we often find restrictive steps. For example, when recruiting fresh graduates, in the past, Intel's practice was: HR first went to the campus to recruit, invited outstanding candidates to visit the company, and the company was responsible for the meals and travel expenses of these students, and then after continuous assessment, finally hired those students whose comprehensive quality best met Intel's needs.
In this process, in order to maximize the output, we must focus on the limiting step, that is, the most expensive project design process. Because the cost of students' meals and travel expenses is the highest, Intel asked some HR to go directly to the campus for recruitment, so as to minimize the overall cost. In addition, in order to reduce the recruitment cost required for each position, before inviting students to visit Intel, they will screen candidates by telephone interview, which not only saves money, but also improves the employment rate of job seekers invited to visit the company and reduces the expenses of inviting job seekers to visit the company.
Then, besides finding out the limiting steps, is there any other way to achieve high leverage and maximize production capacity?
The author really gives several reference methods. First, middle managers use their special skills or knowledge to influence many people at the same time. These skills can be specialized knowledge and technology, or they can have unique insights into trends and market conditions. Every time middle managers impart knowledge, skills or values to their subordinates, it is a highly leveraged activity, especially when these subordinates impart what they have learned to others, the leverage ratio is further improved.
Another way is to influence others with simple management skills. For example, performance evaluation, middle managers' performance evaluation of subordinates will have a great impact on their actions. Of course, some small things of middle managers can't be done well, and there will be negative leverage. For example, if middle managers often have negative emotions or delay decision-making and excessively interfere with subordinates' work, then subordinates will be negatively affected and the output of the whole organization will be reduced.
What is said above is basically how middle managers lead others to increase output and how to improve their leverage ratio. The author summed up several dry goods from more than ten years' personal experience: for middle managers, there are some activities that must be done and put on the agenda, which are the steps defined by middle managers themselves. After you know what you must do at a certain time, you can improve your work efficiency by inserting other relatively unimportant activities.
For example, if similar work is done together, if there are a pile of reports waiting to be read or a pile of performance evaluations waiting to be reviewed, the best solution is to set aside a period of time to read them one by one, which can greatly reduce the preparation time spent switching work scenarios. In addition, in the face of the same thing, we should try our best to make the methods of dealing with the same thing more consistent, that is to say, we should establish standardized procedures, turn irregular things into laws, and establish a fixed mode of dealing with problems, which can also improve our work output.
Finally, the author also gives a suggestion: establish inventory. What do you mean? In other words, middle managers should save those projects that are not in a hurry to complete, such as some projects that improve the long-term productivity of the department. Although these projects are not in a hurry to be completed at one time, they are of long-term significance to the development of the whole organization. After middle managers deal with urgent and important things, they use their spare time to think about finishing them. Otherwise, as soon as middle managers have nothing to do, they will involuntarily want to interfere with their subordinates' work. It is estimated that when it comes to this, many middle managers will feel stabbed.
Grove said that the output of a middle-level manager is the sum of the work achievements of subordinates he manages and influences. In order to maintain the continuous creativity and fighting capacity of the whole group, it is essential to exchange opinions through meetings, reach an understanding and further form a sense of team.
But in fact, meetings are almost famous, and endless meetings are just one nightmare after another for middle managers who cherish time. Some people have done research and found that middle managers spend more than 50% of their time in meetings.
Drucker, a management guru, once said that if a middle manager spends more than 25% of his time in meetings, there is probably something wrong with the organization. But in the author's opinion, the meeting is useful and necessary. Meeting is the only medium of management. Middle managers can't avoid meetings, but they can make them more efficient.
Why do you say that? Because a very important part of the middle manager's job is to provide information and technology, and to impart efficient and high-quality ways of doing things to people under his jurisdiction or influence. In addition, middle managers must make decisions or help others make decisions. These two responsibilities can only be better fulfilled through face-to-face meetings.
How can we make the meeting efficient? The author gives a few tips for everyone to listen to. In my opinion, middle managers should regularly convene subordinates to hold one-on-one meetings. By discussing specific issues in the meeting, middle managers can impart their skills and experience to their subordinates, and they can also give suggestions to their subordinates in the way of cutting into specific issues. For subordinates, he can also report the problems encountered in his usual work to middle managers at the meeting and ask for help.
Some managers may ask, I often meet my subordinates in the company's tea room and elevator and say something casually. Is it necessary to have a one-on-one meeting? The author's answer is: Yes. Because meetings are completely different from this kind of work report anytime and anywhere. Before a one-on-one meeting, subordinates will prepare an outline of the meeting, which will prompt him to carefully consider the topics to be discussed in advance; At the meeting, subordinates will be responsible for the progress of the agenda and the atmosphere of the meeting, which not only allows subordinates to think deeply about the problems they face, but also can assess the comprehensive quality of subordinates in all aspects.
One-on-one meetings have a huge leverage ratio, because it allows bosses and subordinates to establish the same information base and similar ways of doing things at meetings. In this way, the whole team will have a sense of unity and the efficiency will naturally be high.
Not only that, one-on-one meetings are actually very helpful to our family life. When you communicate with your parents or children one-on-one, face-to-face approach allows you to talk about some subtle and complicated things seriously in a quiet environment. In this case, the topic and conversation atmosphere are different from other occasions, and the knowledge you can finally achieve will be more quality.
So, how to have one-on-one talks? We can start with some performance figures, such as orders, output, project progress, etc., as assessment indicators, report the current situation, make a comparison with the previous situation, and predict the general trend of the next stage. One-on-one meetings should cover anything important that happened after the last meeting, but more importantly, subordinates should be responsible for asking potential questions.
What are the potential problems? Anything that bothers you or is unknown needs to be discussed. These problems are often not obvious, and it will take some time to surface, but if they are not discovered promptly and keenly, when they really appear, they will be caught off guard.
How often is the meeting held? In fact, the frequency of meetings mainly depends on the familiarity of subordinates with their work. If subordinates are satisfied with this project, then managers can reduce the frequency of meetings appropriately. If he is dealing with a new project, then the middle manager should increase the frequency of meetings with subordinates, communicate the latest progress in time, and give suggestions and guidance as soon as possible for the problems found.
For example, there is an army stationed on the battlefield. At first, there may be no war to fight. As long as soldiers practice on time every day, officers can rest in the office and keep a relaxed relationship with soldiers. Because of the high maturity of the whole army's work, the supervision of superiors has been greatly reduced. However, if one day the enemy suddenly appears and the bullet attack begins, the chief executive's management style will immediately make a 180 degree turn and become highly organized, and specific combat tasks will be clearly arranged. He may constantly yell at every soldier, give orders, tell them what to do, and tell them exactly when and how to do it. Maybe he will ask the soldiers to repeat it. If this state continues for a period of time, the enemy will continue to attack and the maturity of the troops in the battle will be re-established. At this time, there is no need to shout. The work maturity of subordinates will change with the change of working environment, and the management style and related meeting frequency of middle managers should also change accordingly.
During the meeting, in addition to the normal work report, middle managers should also let their subordinates speak freely and tell their difficulties. How do we do this? The author's trick is to ask one more question. Middle-level managers feel that their subordinates have finished what they want to say, so they should ask another question and further communicate with their subordinates through asking questions until they feel that they have "know everything and talk about everything". For the * * * knowledge and conclusions obtained in the meeting, you must write them down, not just keep them in your mind. Why? Because the act of writing down itself is a promise, just like shaking hands. If the middle manager sees his subordinates record these conclusions, in a sense, he can acquiesce to see the progress of things in the future. For those things that can't be understood at the moment, or some important but not urgent matters involved in the discussion at the meeting, they need to be included in the archive for the next discussion. This can reduce the interference of unexpected situations to the meeting and concentrate on solving really important and urgent things. Every efficient meeting will continuously strengthen the understanding and cohesion of the whole team.
To sum up: team consciousness, that is, middle managers should establish the same information base and similar ways of doing things with their subordinates through one-on-one meetings. With team consciousness, work efficiency will naturally be high.
As the feedback from middle managers to subordinates, performance appraisal is often used to decide the reward for subordinates, whether it is promotion, salary increase or share distribution.
Performance appraisal is very powerful, it will have a great impact on subordinates and will last for a long time. Through performance appraisal, on the one hand, we can examine the skill level of subordinates to see if they lack some skills, and if so, we must find ways to enhance them; On the other hand, we can strengthen incentives to enable people with appropriate skills to create higher performance.
Because of this, the author believes that good performance appraisal is the behavior with the highest management leverage. So, is it only those large enterprises or organizations that need performance appraisal? No, whether it is a studio with only one or two people or a startup company with more than a dozen people, performance appraisal is essential as long as you pay attention to the effect of operation.
How to evaluate the performance of subordinates is a good performance appraisal? The author gave his suggestions. For example, when evaluating subordinates, we must weigh whether their performance is long-term or short-term. An engineer may try to catch up with a product design scheme to help the company make money on a project, which is a short-term performance; If he can find a way to formulate design standards and processes, so that future designers can learn from the experience when receiving similar projects, so as to be more efficient, this is a long-term performance. When evaluating, middle managers must consider both performances. As for which is more important, the author has a universal judgment rule, which is to see which of these two performances can finally help the company make more money.
It is also very important for middle managers to make it clear that they are evaluating the performance of their subordinates, not their potential. The so-called potential is those things that have only form but no substance. Some subordinates have great acting skills, giving the impression that they are well-informed and capable, but at first glance, their performance is very poor. The performance evaluation of such subordinates, regardless of their social skills and personal charm, must be based on performance in the end, because we want to evaluate the real output, not those superficial phenomena.
For another example, if the evaluation object is a middle-level manager, is it only to evaluate his personal performance, or does it include the performance of his subordinates who are responsible for management? The author's answer is both. Because the middle manager's duty is to find ways to add value to the whole part, when evaluating the middle manager, it depends on what added value he has, what he has done for his subordinates, whether he has hired capable new people, how well he has trained new people or other subordinates, and whether he has done something that will help improve the team's future output. These are all considerations when evaluating a middle-level manager.
However, although performance appraisal is very important, if we do not pay attention to flexibility, I am afraid there will be problems. The author shared a story about Columbus's discovery of the New World. I guess everyone has heard of this story, but the author's version may be different from what we see in the textbook. In order to enrich the national treasury, the Queen of Spain invited Columbus, hoping that he could lead a team to the sea for foreign trade. After Columbus promised the Queen, he made several suggestions to her, including finding a new route to the mysterious East. After repeated discussions, the Queen and Columbus decided to have a big fight and set their goal on finding a new route to the East.
The goal of the Queen and Columbus is obvious. The queen wanted to enrich the treasury, and Columbus wanted to find a new route to the East. When the subordinate achieved his goal, so did the boss's goal. After the decision was made, Columbus began to plan how to achieve this goal and find what the queen needed. He began to build a fleet, train sailors, and set an acceptance time for each achievement. Later, although he successfully accepted one achievement after another, in fact, he didn't find a route to China until the end, so in fact, he didn't achieve his ultimate goal. However, if we look at it from the other side, after all, he discovered the new continent and brought countless wealth to the Spanish royal family.
The question now is, if judged by strict management by objectives, is Columbus' performance appraisal good or bad?
In the book, the author affirms Columbus's achievements and draws a conclusion from this story: even if his subordinates fail to achieve their original goals, his performance appraisal may still be rated as excellent.
Because the author believes that the purpose of target management is to enable people to do things according to the set timetable, but it is not the standard to decide rewards and punishments. If the boss only uses target management to determine the quality of his subordinates, so that his subordinates only focus on the set goals and miss other better possibilities, it will often lead to the consequences of seeing only the trees but not the forest.
When evaluating an organization, although we do pursue overall performance, this overall performance obviously depends on each individual's work skills and whether they work hard or not.
Management is a team activity. No matter how strong the coach is, it still depends on the efforts of the players. Just like dribbling on the basketball court, the layup depends on the player's performance. If these players don't try their best, even the best management tricks are useless.
The production capacity of the company is the sum of the production capacity of each small team. Only when everyone in the team tries their best can this team have the highest performance. Therefore, if middle managers want to improve the team's performance, the first step is to train and improve their subordinates' knowledge and skills, and the second step is to make self-realization become the working motivation of each subordinate, because only in this way will they spontaneously solve the problems in their work and the working motivation will last.
Tell a short story about the marathon. There was an employee who was always tired at work and everything was in a muddle. When he took part in the marathon, he rushed to the finish line like a different person.
Why is he like this? Because he has an opponent and a stopwatch in the game, this is a simple self-realization mode. People try their best to advance towards their dream goals. This kind of motivation makes them willing to sweat like rain and try to run faster and farther. They are not for money, but with the determination to admit defeat, they challenge the distance and time. This motivation for self-realization is more effective than any reward or punishment.
Turning the office into an arena can cultivate the sportsmanship of subordinates, strive for victory but not be afraid of failure, and challenge their limits at any time, which is the main driving force for a team to keep moving forward.
Intel's middle managers simply put the competitive spirit in the field of sports into their work, first formulated the rules of the game, made clear the standards for employees to measure their performance in the future, and then let them do it. Intel's internal cleaning competition is such an example. For a long time, Intel's department responsible for factory cleaning performed poorly, and even members of the cleaning department were indifferent to various punishments and inducements. It was not until the company organized a cleaning competition between factories and office buildings that the situation suddenly changed. Overnight, the environment of every building and workshop has completely changed, and it is much cleaner than before.
In this competition, the company did not actually provide bonuses or other rewards to employees in the cleaning department. They only have one arena. If you are a cleaner, the factory you are in charge of can win the first prize in the competition, which is definitely a strong incentive.
Therefore, in order to improve the performance of each individual in the organization, all middle managers need to look at their subordinates' work from the standpoint of their subordinates, introduce competitive spirit, help them set measurement indicators, find good opponents, and make a runway. Subordinates will naturally be self-driven and keep moving forward on this runway.
Three key words for middle managers to get the maximum output with the most effective input.
The first point is the output direction. Grove believes that all management activities of middle managers should focus on maximizing the output of the whole team. Because of this, middle managers need to constantly improve the leverage ratio of themselves and the whole organization, and the key is to find out those restrictive steps.
Second, team consciousness. In order to maintain the continuous creativity and fighting capacity of the whole organization, it is essential to exchange opinions and reach an understanding through meetings, and then form a sense of team. One-on-one meetings have a huge leverage ratio, because it allows bosses and subordinates to establish the same information base and similar ways of doing things at meetings.
Third, performance appraisal. Good performance appraisal is the behavior with the highest management lever. If middle managers can integrate the competitive spirit in the field of sports into their work, formulate competition rules for employees, define the scale for measuring performance in the future, and then let them do it, it will greatly stimulate employees' motivation to realize themselves.
After reading the business management experience shared by Grove, I'm afraid it's not just us middle managers who are inspired.
For everyone, we are not employees of any boss, and everyone is actually the boss of his own business. We must be our own master and realize that our master is yourself. No one is obliged to provide us with a good job. Only by constantly improving their productivity and work leverage, and improving their added value and productivity, can we win the battle of defending the workplace.