Important, but not Urgent

A college textbook on management teaches that management encompasses the following functions: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Typically, the aspects of management that creates the majority of problems for managers – and, coincidentally, are the areas in which managers have little or no training – is leading and controlling.

Dealing with people.

I doubt that anyone would argue the assertion that developing employees is a sure way to improve the performance of any team, department, or company. Capitalizing on each employee’s strengths, improving their skills, and empowering them to use their abilities, creates more potential for the organization.

Of course, a second critical part of leadership is ensuring that those individuals are working together as a team and are focused on doing the right things. As has been said, management is about making sure people are “doing things right”, while leadership is about making sure that the people are “doing the right things”.

As a dear friend of mine likes to say, “I’m telling you something important here.” Your employees can be incredibly busy and still be doing very little to improve the performance of the organization. Managers MUST ensure that employee energies and creativity are being directed towards the activities that will produce results consistent with the company’s mission and objectives. Being busy is not the goal – reaching critical objectives is the goal.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker

With Drucker’s quote in mind, what exactly is most important thing a manager should be doing at any given time? Usually, it is the URGENT things that become “critically important”. However, further examination should reveal that the vitally important items for a manager are 1) strategic planning, and 2) developing people. However, since these functions do not hit the radar screen as “urgent” – i.e., MUST be done today or the planet will implode – they are consistently delayed and/or ignored.

Customer problems, project deadlines, meetings, budgets…our days are filled with emergencies, and our time becomes occupied with putting out fires. Ironically, a manager will complain of a lack of time to get anything done when more effective planning and more capable people would make a real difference – in both performance AND time availability.

Is it time to reassess priorities?