This blog talks about the individual behavior and technique expected of the manager, excerpts taken from the book " The Unwritten Law of Business".
1. Every Manager must know what goes on in his or her domain : This applies primarily to major or significant developments and does not mean that you should attempt to keep up with all the minor details of functions assigned to subordinates. It becomes a vice when carried to the extent of impending operations. Nevertheless, the basic fact remains that the more information managers have, the more effective they can manage their business.
2.Do not try to do it all yourself : It's bad business: bad for you, bad for the job and bad for your employees. You must delegate responsibility even if you could cover all the ground yourself. It's part of your job to develop your staff, which includes developing initiative, resourcefulness, and judgement. The best way to do this is to load them up with all the responsibility they can carry without danger of serious embarrassment to any person or group.
3. Put first things first in applying yourself to your job : Since there usually isn't time for everything, it is essential to form the habit of concentrating on the important things first. The important things are things for which you are held directly responsible and accountable. Assign these responsibilities top priority in budgeting your time; then delegate as many as possible of the items that will not fit into your schedule.
4.Cultivate the habit of "boiling matters down" to their simplest terms: The faculty for reducing apparently complicated situations to their basic, essential elements is a form of wisdom that must usually be derived from experience. Make it a practice to integrate, condense, summarize, and simplify your facts rather than expand, ramify, complicate, and disintegrate them. The mental discipline which instinctively impels one to get at the heart of the matter is one of the most valuable qualities of a good executive.
5. Cultivate the habit of making brisk and clean-cut decisions: Decisions will be easier and more frequently correct if you have the essential facts at hand. The application of judgement can be facilitated by formulating it into principles and policies in advance. You do not have to be right every time. So take a definite position and see it through. It is futile to try to keep everybody happy in deciding issues involving several incompatible points of view. By all means give everyone a fair hearing, but after all parties have had their say and all facts are on the table, dispose of the matter decisively even if someone's toes are stepped on.
Leadership in Practice
When the new CEO assumed the company's CEO role in several years ago, he inherited an organization paralyzed by competing priorities and a culture where executives hoarded information and responsibilities. A major technology company had become a confederation of fiefdoms, with senior leaders personally involved in granular product decisions that should have been delegated five levels down. The CEO's transformation began not with strategy pronouncements, but with a fundamental reset of leadership priorities. He instituted a ruthless simplification protocol: every initiative had to connect clearly to one of three strategic pillars, and leaders were evaluated not on how much they controlled but on how effectively they developed their teams. The CEO personally modeled the discipline of "boiling things down," replacing verbose strategy documents with clear, simple frameworks that every employee could understand and apply. He pushed decision-making authority downward, making it clear that his role wasn't to approve every product feature but to ensure the company had the right people empowered to make those decisions. Over the following years, the company's market capitalization had doubled, but more importantly, employee engagement scores showed dramatic increases in autonomy, clarity of purpose, and leadership trust. The transformation wasn't about working harder-it was about 150,000 employees finally working on the right things, led by managers who had learned to prioritize, delegate, and simplify.
Leadership Framework
**The Priority-Driven Leadership Framework**
**Step 1: Establish Your Non-Negotiables**
Identify the 3-5 outcomes for which you are directly accountable-not activities, but results. These become your priority filter for every decision about time allocation. Write them down, share them with your team, and review them weekly. Critical success factor: Ensure these align with what your organization actually rewards and measures.
**Step 2: Create Visibility Without Interference**
Design information systems that provide early warning of significant developments without requiring your involvement in execution. This might include weekly scorecards, skip-level conversations, or structured pulse checks. The goal is intelligent awareness, not control. Warning: If your team is spending more time reporting to you than doing the work, you've crossed the line into micromanagement.
**Step 3: Delegate with Intent**
For every responsibility outside your non-negotiables, systematically transfer ownership to the lowest competent level. Provide context, establish boundaries, define success criteria, then step back. This isn't abdication-it's investment in organizational capability. Critical success factor: Create safety for responsible failure; punishing mistakes after delegation destroys trust and initiative.
**Step 4: Practice Radical Simplification**
Before every meeting, presentation, or decision, force yourself to articulate the core issue in one sentence. If you can't, you don't understand it well enough to lead others through it. Train yourself and your team to strip away tangential information and focus on essential elements. Warning: Simplification requires deep understanding; superficial leaders confuse simplicity with simplemindedness.
**Step 5: Protect Your Priority Time**
Schedule your non-negotiable priorities first, treating them as immovable commitments. Everything else fits around them or doesn't happen. This requires saying "no" frequently and comfortably. Critical success factor: Your calendar is a moral document-it reveals your true priorities regardless of what you say they are.
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." - William James
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