Five Simple Habits of Management Success

The Internet is littered with lists of ways to be successful at business.  It’s littered with lists of ways to be successful at everything else in the universe, too.  I get over 2 million hits when I search for “How to win eating contests.”

Still, I’ve found five simple habits that have helped me massively in assuming my latest role in being a more effective leader and manager.  These things will all sound highly trivial, but if you are not doing them, I highly recommend you start- they are invaluable basics.  I thought I would share them here:

• Your email is never your to-do list.  Nevermind voicemail, phone conversations, meeting nots, and other possible sources of to-do’s.  Everyone recognizes those things.  More specifically, if your to-do list consists of only what is coming to you- emails, notes from others, voicemails, etc., then I maintain that you are not really leading.  You are being led.  Others are creating your departments’ to-do lists for you.  While this may be enough to say you are doing your job, it is not enough to do your job well.  Step up.  Look for root causes of the to-do items you are receiving.  Seek out problems that people have accepted because the people before you would not solve them, and take on those problems.  A leader is not led by others.
• Always have a pen and paper with you.  Ideas will come to you at unusual times.  Casual conversations around the water cooler or at lunch will lead to some of the most important problems in your company that you should be considering.  Don’t lose these thoughts.  Write them down.
• Pull your game plan together.  Every day.  Do it before you leave the building or before you go to bed at night.  Just make certain that you do it when things have settled down a bit.  Take the time organize your task list for the next day.  Choose a specific set of items to do the next day that you will accomplish in order to consider the day a success.  Decide what order you’ll do them in.  Pull your day’s calendar up and assign estimated times to do it.  Getting out of a meeting knowing that you are going to make your meeting notes then execute a specific task before you get to the next meeting will help you immeasurably.
• Always develop measurable, actionable items for all your goals.  Don’t put down “be a better person” as a goal and leave it at that.  Write down a defined, measurable set of actions that you will take that will make you that better person.  “Donate one hour a week to a charitable action” is measurable, and it will make you a better person.  Once you have that list, integrate it with your bigger to-do list and start putting items in your daily game plan.
• Name your projects clearly.  If you need a marketing name for your software project, that’s fine, make one up and use it to market- but keep it simple for your team.  The “Atlas Project” may sound fine, but I personally have worked on an “Atlas” project at six different companies during my career now (no, I’m not kidding).  They start to run together.  Besides that, if you say “intranet”, everyone knows what that is.  Atlas could be anything from an intranet project to a GPS project (and, in fact, I’ve seen both called Atlas).  Keep things simple enough that minimal communication and minimal thinking is needed to work out what’s going on.  Don’t overcomplicate your life.

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