How Easily Are You Replaced?

by: stacey - December 26th, 2011   Filed under: Leadership, Planning Add Comment

How easy would it be for your company if you never showed up to work again? This may sound like a silly question. Setting a goal for yourself to be easily replaced sounds like a quick ticket to the street. How about a quick ticket to the executive suite instead?

Consider this question: If you have made yourself indispensible to your company, in the position you are in right now, how can you ever be promoted?

There are two ways to handle this. The first (and the more commonly taken road) is to document what you do each day and cross-train others to your job if possible. This is a good first step. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, the company would be covered, which is another good reason to do this, and a good reason for your company to support you doing this.

The second way to do this is to eliminate your job. That’s right, I said eliminate it. Most jobs involve a large number of repetitive tasks. Find better, smarter ways of doing what you do every day. Work towards finding a way to streamline things so that you and the people involved in the workflows that you are involved in have to do less to accomplish what they do today.

If you can’t automate, at least simplify. Document what you do with decision-making flowcharts and procedures. Between automation and documentation, you should be able to reduce your own workload. Now you can go to your boss, point out what you’ve done to make things easier, and ask for more responsibilities. While you’re at it, work your way towards being allowed to delegate the most simple of the processes you do each day. By simplifying, delegating and eliminating the lowest 20% of your work constantly, you should be picking up a new 20% that has more challenges and responsibilities all the time.

If you don’t like your new tasks, accept the challenge of making them so simple that you can automate or delegate those, too. Keep working your way upward through responsibilities. Pretty soon, you will get noticed by those higher than you in the company food chain.

You might even get promoted… and whether or not they can replace you will never come up when they consider promoting you.

POSTED BY Stacey Douglas

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Never Be Afraid to Challenge

by: stacey - December 23rd, 2011   Filed under: Leadership Add Comment

Your company probably has a healthy share of rules and bureaucracy. Most do. All of it is there for a reason, to be sure. Some of those reasons, though, may not be good ones. Procedures have a way of lagging behind business needs and business environment. Sometimes things change and a rule that used to be very important to protect business integrity no longer applies. Sometimes a rule that used to be all about protecting the business now actually endangers it.

Here’s some advice: if you don’t know why things are the way they are, ask questions. If you don’t agree with the answers you receive, don’t be afraid to challenge the policy. Challenge it until you either get a good answer or get the changes needed for the business.

The rules that make up your company’s policies were written by and are owned by employees of your company, employees just like you. If confronted with good reasons and solid evidence why the rules should be different than they are, it is very possible that whoever is responsible for making that policy will rewrite and improve it. It’s possible that there may not even be an owner anymore; sometimes “We’ve always done it this way” is a terrible enemy. Even if you don’t get the change you seek, you may get it waived in certain cases where it no longer makes sense and get your work through faster. The change to the rules that you spark may improve the company overall.

What if you find out that the rule had a good point? Did you waste your time bucking against bureaucracy? Not at all. The explanation of the rule will teach you more about the business. It may explain processes in a context that you’ve never considered. They may teach you something about the company and about business that explains why the rules are the way they are. The change in your work as a result of this new understanding will be worth the effort.

Never be afraid to challenge. One way or another, you have everything to gain.

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Why Is Everyone Working So Hard?

by: stacey - December 22nd, 2011   Filed under: Leadership, Management Add Comment

Does it seem like everyone in your organization is always overworked? Is it a struggle to get resources from other groups, or worse, within your own group? There are many possibilities for why this occurs. One of them may be how your organization validates the hiring of employees.

Most organizations hire full-time employees based on full-time work. That is, if you can prove that there is a constant 40 hours a week of work for a given position, you may have the position. If the work is temporary, i.e. project-based and will end when a project ends, it’s much harder to hire. You know at some point the project will be over, and when it is, you will not (in theory) have work for that person.

If your company validates positions in this way, you should consider the basis of the work that your company or department does. Is it primarily project-based, or is it more standardized? If your IT department is like most IT shops, for example, you have some people who are responsible for continuous tasks- supporting applications, for example, or systems administration, and you have some people who are responsible for completely project-based work. The project-based people are constantly executing one project after another. The work they do on a project ends in time, so they are temporary, yet at the end of that project there is always another project. You also probably have some people who do a percentage of each- some routine work, some project-based.

If this is the case, you should be careful to examine how you are justifying time when you hire people. If the nature of what the position does will consist of 50% project-based work, include that. Fight HR and anyone else you have to in order to stick to this, but do so. If you hire all your people to fulfill tasks that must be done, then you will always be overrun when the temporary, project-based work comes around. Resources will always be too tight. Project deadlines will always be threatened. Management will become a group of competitors jockeying for resources to finish their projects instead of working together as a team. You will create overworked labor that resents their bosses and their conflicting priorities, a management team that competes with each other to get what they need to do their jobs rather than helping each other, and an executive team that looks inept from the ‘trench’ view because they have failed to plan labor right and appear to demand the impossible from their employees without providing enough resources to accomplish things. Your company is a team competing with other companies- don’t let your hiring processes reduce it to competing with itself.

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