In these first weeks of retirement, I’m surprised at how little I think about the job that I left behind.  But, in quiet moments, I am definitely still mentally processing my management career, and I thought of a few more lessons that I want to share.

Don’t Neglect Cross Training!

One of the most common management mistakes I’ve seen is when managers become too dependent on one person on their team.  There are two versions of this.  One is simply neglecting to cross-train. I made that mistake early on.  We had a lot of invoices to process every month, and only one person on my team knew how to do it. 

Did I know that I should get someone else trained on that?  Of course I did.  Did I do it?  Nope. Did I even make sure that I got a good understanding of exactly what she did?  Nope again.  We were constantly buying other banks in those days, we were buried in the work associated with that, and I kept telling myself we’d get some cross-training whenever things slowed down.  Which, of course, they never did.  And then my invoice person took another job in the bank.  We muddled through, with the help of some friends in Accounts Payable.  But you can bet that I got TWO people trained on how to enter those invoices once the crisis was past.

Don’t let a psycho employee steal your power

The other way that management gets too dependent on one person is when they have a power-crazy employee who thinks her job depends on being the only one who knows how to do things right.  I had a co-worker like that many years ago, when I was still a software developer.  She did more work than anyone else on the team – and complained about it.  Often, She would even go to the extent of digging into other people’s code and “fixing” it, whether it was broken or not – and then she complained about that.  She constantly criticized her co-workers and blamed other people for her own mistakes.  Worst, she would keep important information to herself, so that nobody except her knew how to do certain key tasks. 

Then she used her power to bully our boss.  When she didn’t get her way about something, she would threaten to quit, and he would placate her because we would have had trouble functioning without her.  She made life miserable for our boss and everyone else on the team, and I learned a lesson from that.  Here’s what our boss needed to say the very first time she threatened to quit: “Gee, we’ll miss you.”  Take the pain up front, rather than putting yourself in a situation where you are not in control.

Do the up-front work to simplify processes

Another example of taking the pain up front is simplifying processes.  The ultimate solution to my invoice problem was to have fewer invoices.  But that wasn’t easy to accomplish.  We were doing business with 18 different suppliers for the same service, and had about 20 separate accounts with the main supplier.  That’s 37 invoices to keep track of, validate and tediously process every month.  No wonder my invoice person quit!  Once the frenzy of bank acquisitions was behind us, we embarked on a project to consolidate suppliers and accounts.  It took 4-1/2 years of tedious work, to close contracts and migrate boxes of records.  But, when we were done, we were down to 2 invoices per month.  The position that used to be nearly full-time invoice processing is now a growth position, where the incumbent gets an opportunity to learn our business and develop new skills by taking on stretch projects.  Oh, and we ended up saving $6 million.   

But are you really simplifying?

But make sure you’re really simplifying.  When my function reported to Supply Chain, I had a new peer manager who was determined to redesign the Purchasing and Accounts Payable functions.  His proposed new process was so complicated that the flow chart covered two walls of his office.  He somehow convinced our boss to spend several thousand dollars on a plotter-printer just to print all the flow charts.  If you have any experience at all with process improvement, you’ve probably already guessed that this master plan went exactly nowhere.  That manager was ultimately fired, and the plotter-printer lurked in a corner for many years, gathering dust.  I’m not a big fan of explaining everything in a few PowerPoint bullets (see my next post), but if you need a flow chart the size of a Lincoln Navigator to explain your plan, you need a better plan. 

Next week: Why the business world needs to fire PowerPoint