No One Said Managing Would be Easy

Over 30,000 books are currently available on the topic of managing. There are both great and popular thinkers and practitioners – Ram Charan, Harold Geneen, Peter Drucker, Jack Welch, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, and John Kotter among them.

My favorite read is Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. At 800 pages it’s a weighty tome, yet every page begs careful attention for the insights it contains. The book’s value increases as one gains experience.

Management theory, and its models, are prone to be complex. After all, marshaling one’s resources and shepherding them through a day in the life of the world toward some goal is no small feat. The sophisticated theories have their purpose. But they can mask the fundamental nature of what managing is.

I favor simple models. It’s far easier to flesh out a simple model to give it texture and applicability than it is to decompose some behemoth and distill it down into its essential elements.

So, here is a simple model – and it’s easy to remember. It’s specific to the management of people.

There are four things that can be managed in people: Knowledge, Skill, Attitude and Activity.

I’ll use the example of managing a sales person to illustrate.

Knowledge is a straightforward factor to manage. Knowledge can be taught, communicated, and acquired through reading, observation and experience. A sales person can learn product specifications, selling methods, how to fill out an order, and so on. Testing one’s know-how is equally straightforward. One either can – or cannot – demonstrate recall.
Skill is more challenging to manage. Skill is know-how – the capacity to convert knowledge into desired results. Effectively and repeatedly, such that the outcome is never seriously in doubt. Knowing 10 different closing techniques is one thing. Achieving a consistently high close rate is quite another matter. The more sophisticated the skill, the more complex the behaviors that comprise it, and the more astute a manager needs to be to determine which behaviors must be tuned and reinforced. But some factors, genetics being one, limit everyone’s ability to apply particular skills well, e.g. inherited muscle composition is a greater determinant of success in long distance running or sprinting than is weight training.
Attitude is, without doubt, the most difficult factor to manage. It’s often easily observable: winning attitude, own in the dumps, lack of confidence, success-oriented, customer-oriented. But attitudes are even more complex than skills to manage. Especially in a team or an entire organization. Get a group of managers in a room and ask them how important good morale is to achieving success. You’ll get strong and ready agreement. Next ask them how to achieve and maintain good morale. They’ll be all over the map. Good attitude is like good art: easy to spot, hard to create. Managing the attitudes and tenor of individuals and organizations comes with the territory. There are many formulas for coaching and developing skills, but scant little tried-and-true for instilling or rebooting good attitudes.
Activity is the appropriateness of an action relative to the result. Sales people engage in typical activities: prospecting, getting appointments, proving claims, making proposals, closing orders. Activities are concrete, observable, and measurable. Which is why activity management is the manager’s sweet-spot. A sales person may have enviable closing skill, but if that person avoids prospecting they’ll never got the opportunity to close. Most every sales, marketing or CRM statistic or report of any value measures activity relative to outcomes. Consider: qualified prospects, sales-qualified prospects, forecastable prospects, conversion rate, close rate. They each checkpoint an outcome relative to the activity intended to drive that outcome, and typically some comparative standard. Performing the right number of sales activities at the right time does not guarantee success; but not performing them will assures failure.

Knowledge can be acquired. Skill can be taught, coached, directed and reinforced. Attitude is the X-factor – easy to see, hear and feel, but inherently challenging to manage. Activities are the one concrete and measurable factor that managers can get their arms around.

Written by Michael

Michael Douglas has held senior positions in sales, marketing and general management since 1980, and spent 20 years at Sun Microsystems, most recently as VP, Global Marketing. His experience includes start-ups, mid-market and enterprises. He's currently VP Enterprise Go-to-Market for NVIDIA.