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Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. Read More...
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Mon, June 9th, 2008 by Tom Foster
"You are right," Kristen relented. "I really am too busy. My priorities are focused on short term fires. I feel like all I do, all day long, gets consumed with management issues and keeping people motivated. I don't have time to work on basic stuff like writing job descriptions. When I look at doing that, it is so far down my urgency scale, I almost think writing a job description is silly."
"What would be the payoff?" I asked.
"The payoff? I can't even think about the payoff. I could write a job description and then I would have a job description, but I would be further behind dealing with all the crap," she explained.
"Kristen, you are not unlike most managers," I nodded. "If you could truly focus on getting the right people, most of the crap you deal with would largely go away.
"Stop working on crap and start working on systems. Your life will only improve when you start working on systems." -TF
June 9th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Tom,
Just a great reminder that it's not the people it's the system. You might say that working on the system turns crap into compost and it is amazing what one get when manages the garden well.
Ozzie
Vistage 29
San Diego, CA