A manager's two jobs, and why doing everything yourself failsA manager's two jobs,and whydoing everything yourself failsA manager's two jobs,and why doing everythingyourself fails

A manager in a business that already stands has two jobs. According to the source, any portion of another job that he takes into his own hands counts as a mistake, whatever it does to his energy.

Two phases, each with its own rule

The source separates two conditions. In the first, a new activity is being started, and the executive does the work himself while he trains his staff. Once he has people who are producing, functioning well and knowing their jobs, he moves to the second phase: running an established activity, where his task is to get people to get the work done.

By this the source means that the executive is the one who personally handles the work.

Notice the condition for crossing over. It is met when there are people who produce and know their jobs, and having employees on the payroll is not enough. That explains the most common failure: an owner hires people and still does everything himself, because he skipped the training and the condition was never met.

Suppose an owner hires two people and believes he has reached the second phase. He never trained either of them, so he is still in the first phase, with two extra salaries.

Or a clinic owner who put a month into training a receptionist, and answered no phones herself during it. From the second month she no longer picked up the phone.

And the other direction: an owner who kept doing everything until they learn. Two years later they still had not learned, because nobody had taught them.

The sentence that wrecks a working activity

The source singles out one sentence that wrecks an established activity: do all I can. When the executive in charge of a working activity holds on to that idea, the result, according to the source, is chaos, and an activity that was already formed will collapse. The one principle an executive can work from effectively in such an activity is “Get people to get the work done.”

The sentence sounds like dedication, which is why it is so hard to give up. But in an activity that already stands, every hour the owner spends doing the work is an hour in which nobody is coordinating, and nobody notices that it is missing.

Suppose an owner steps in to help pack orders at peak time. That week two orders reach the wrong addresses, since no one else was checking.

Or a manager who took on a difficult customer himself because he knows him. Everyone else had to wait three days for him.

And the other direction: an owner who resolved to stay out of the work through the busy season, though holding back was painful. For the first time it passed with no mistakes at all.

Two jobs and no more

Here is the wording that closes the core of the chapter. An executive in a formed organization “has only two jobs.” The first is policy, promotion and planning. The second is getting people to get the job done.

Two, and no more. Anything you do outside those two either belongs to someone else or is being done by nobody, and that is the thing to fix.

The source defines supervision as well. It means getting people to grasp what their jobs are, and handing them the responsibility and the means to carry them out. It also includes what the source calls granting beingness, which is letting someone truly occupy a role and treating him as the person genuinely in charge of it, and never as a stand-in using your authority for a day. Supervising is something other than doing the supervised job yourself.

Suppose an owner logs everything he does for a full week. Seven hours out of forty fall into one of the two jobs.

Or a manager who stopped correcting mistakes herself and began showing people how to check their own work. Mistakes went down, and the time she spent correcting them disappeared.

And a garage owner who supervised by doing all the final inspections personally. Twelve months on, nobody on his team could perform one.

Skimming the cream

A different volume of the source states this in its most extreme phrasing. An executive who attempts many actions personally, and fails to get people to get the work done, creates a leaderless organization. He is overworked and cannot cope, and he eventually goes out the bottom. More important, the people around him go out the bottom too, which he usually fails to notice.

From this the source draws a sharp conclusion: any executive who takes a slice of any job in the organization into his own hands is making an error, every single time.

It names two ways of doing this. The first is plain to see: the executive tries to fill several posts, meaning positions in the organization, which leaves many of them unsupervised and many details uncoordinated. The second is less obvious: he takes the interesting parts that call for a decision away from each post and leaves each one with petty detail only.

The booklet calls that skimming the cream, and it is the hardest diagnosis to accept. The owner keeps the interesting parts, such as the meeting with the big client or the design decision, and leaves the rest. That creates the very irresponsibility he complains about.

The fix, according to the source, is to have the person who occupies a post make the decisions of that post. Only a person who makes his own decisions holds his post responsibly. There is one boundary: executives can certainly pitch in on any job, to set an example or to show how it is done.

Suppose an owner handed collections to his team and took all the sales meetings. Collections slipped two years behind.

Or a manager who approved every design before it went out. The designer stopped bringing new ideas, since they would be changed anyway. Once the manager decided that the designer sends work directly and reports afterward, there were two changes in the first month and none by the third.

What the booklet has on this

The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: The two categories, and Skimming the cream. It also has a self-check, and it sits inside a full booklet about what the manager's job requires of someone who hired a first employee.

If you work harder today than when you worked alone, the cause may lie in which work you keep for yourself.

The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice on employment law.