I trust you enjoyed a nice Christmas day doing whatever makes you happy with people that are special to you.
It’s Boxing Day, so I trust you’ll enjoy today as well.
“I want to be micromanaged”, said no-one ever.
This week I conducted some recruitment interviews for a client.
One of the questions I ask is, “How do you like to be managed?”
The answer to that gives us a clue as to how to work with them rather than taking 6 months to work it out during probation.
In all the interviews I’ve conducted, not one person has ever said, “I want to be micromanaged”.
In fact, most start with “I don’t want to be micromanaged”.
So how do you manage and supervise to give yourself a level of comfort that your people know what they have to do and are doing it correctly?
The answer is a special type of job description known as Key Performance Indicators and Key Behaviour Indicators. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to this in my book, “The Loyal Lieutenant: How The Second-in-Command Brings the CEO’s Vision to Life”.
People want to know what they have to do, to what standard so it’s your responsibility to make it clear for them.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) describe the outcome for the role. Why is the role important? For example, one KPI for a property manager could be “a maximum of 2% of tenants in arrears”.
Key Behaviour Indicators (KBI’s) are the tasks the employee does to achieve the outcome, including the standard to be met. For example, “Generate a Weekly Arrears Report”. The employee will either do it or not. One advantage of using KPIs and KBIs is that you get to set the standard. If you want weekly, then it’s weekly. Another advantage is that it is measurable. They either do or do not generate the report weekly. This takes away any subjectivity for you. Performance is based on competency.
If the report is not generated weekly, look for the reason. Is there a system problem that caused them not to do the report? Are they unable or unwilling? If unable, do they need more training?
If they know what to do and they know how to do it (ie. you have trained them) and there is no system problem, then it’s a case of unwilling.
In my experience, KPIs and KBIs are much better than the generic job descriptions that state responsibilities because job descriptions don’t generally include the specific measure, e.g. responsible to ensure tenant payments are made on time.
KPIs and KBIs also ensure you revert back to your policies and procedures by including something like, “Follow the company policies and procedures to complete the below” before listing the KBI’s.
This way you can change the way you do things (your procedures) without having to update the KPI/KBI. It simply means, in this example, the employee is using a different procedure or app to generate the weekly arrears report.
That’s how you can make it easy for yourself to supervise and manage without micromanaging whilst making it absolutely crystal clear what the employee is expected to do, to what standard.
Let me know what you think.
Reach out if you’d like more information or some help to prepare your own KPIs and KBIs.
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