Some passages of this article are unfriendly; inhuman or otherwise impolite. Please accept my apologies, but I have a point to make
When walking around vienna, I saw the following scene:
I dont want your money, buddy
Basically, this is a store that just closed in the very second I passed by. Four customers were standing right in front of it carrying their wallets wanting to buy stuff. The clerk was still inside, but refused to move her hide and take the $$$.

This situation is typical for a pragmatic, micro-managed environment or an XXXX government agency full of lazy/desillusionated/annoyed/underpaid, pragmatized people. So, we can derive the following ‘rules of management’:

Allow for individual acting
The store clerk in the store mentioned above probably did just what the store owner told it to do. Close the store at 19.00 and go home. And he did just that…on to point two.

Don’t micro-manage
The store manager micromanaged his store clerk by telling him to close the shop at 19.00 shart. The clerk had an exact order in his mind, and was executing this(there probably was a load of other orders after closing down; else the clerk would have been running home and would have locked the store from the outside.

Avoid ‘gofor’ delegation
The essence of the two points above was: avoid gofor delegation. When you have to give your employee a detailled task list with a fixed sequence, you have already lost. An employee needs to act on his own, and you need to permit him to do so. This permit must also include the permission to make mistakes; if you dont permit your employees to make mistaes, they will eventually fall back to gofor mode.

Tell your employee something like: Jim, you are responsible for the banner, and it must be done by foo:bar and must look well on www.urpburp.com. Then, leave him alone. Give him your mobile number in case of emergency, but don’t bother him with micro instructions!

Align your staff’s aim with your own
Basically, your staff’s aim must be aligned with yours. So, if your company does better, your employee must go better too. Everyone does it with managers and salespeople, but nobody does it with other kinds of employees. If the store clerk from above would have received a tiny little percentage of the company’s profits, he probably would have sold stuff to each of the four – probably even trying to sell them more than what they originally wanted!

Offering a cut of the profits is a very simple and risk-less thing. Lets say that you have 10 employees-giving each of them like 2%(or more, dependant on how high the base salary is) still leaves you with 80% of the cash – and with a bunch of employees working like madmen to generate buck!

Overall, this advice obviously isn’t applicable everywhere(anyone thinking of the infamous subject teacher? Nope, I didn’t say that…its you thinking about it). Screaming at a librarian to boost it isnt the ideal way for a library, but doesn’t hurt the company. However, a unhappy designer/developer or an unmotivated customer service person can easily cost a lot of money-the image at the top says all..

Whew, what a long article! What do you think?

Related posts:

  1. On empowerment
  2. On annoying store clerks
  3. Perceived speed versus real speed
  4. Small user groups bring big money
  5. On constant vigilance