10 ways to become an 80/20 manager

The work is exhausting. Do you think so too? Mountains of documents pile up on your desk and in your inbox. It seems to you that you do not have time for anything. You are trying hard to close all items on the to-do list. You work late. You are constantly called on your mobile. At work, you feel like you're drowning, and at home you feel guilty. You think you will never be able to handle this amount of work. You suspect that the management does not understand this and does not care. If so, at least in part, I have good news for you. The work does not necessarily have to look like this. I will not deny: these problems exist, and for most managers they are growing

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of managers find their work exhausting: it irritates, disturbs, keeps in constant tension, complicates life, tires and demoralizes. But a small number of leaders managed to reverse the trend. They are optimistic and confident, they feel free and happy. They do not complicate their work and their lives.

So, how to become an effective manager, spend less time and achieve greater results.

 Method № 1: Curious manager

Curiosity is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein

An inquisitive mind. Opens the door to the world. Children learn to ask questions from an early age. These questions help them to reduce the idea of the mysteries of life into a single whole and understand their place in the overall picture of the universe. The speed of their personal development depends on the quantity and quality of questions and persistence, in the desire to understand the essence of what is happening around. If you have young children, you can watch this amazing, wonderful and very productive process every day.

As we grow older, we stop asking questions and begin to offer answers to others - usually not the most original. We stop thinking. Our amazement in the face of the mysteries of life disappears. We consider it a given opportunity to control what is happening, although this opportunity is very limited. When we stop asking questions, we lose the ability to open new horizons. Mysteries in life become less, and boredom in it appears more.

 Managers must be the same. To act on the 80/20 Principle does not necessarily mean automatically accepting answers to questions and agreeing with everything you are told. In other words, we are talking about an inquisitive mind. It allows you to achieve unexpected enlightenment, which turns the idea of what is happening and allows you to move to another level of existence.

Method № 2: Superconnector manager

Surprisingly, people get the most important information from those whose existence they no longer mention. Professor Mark Granovetter

Creativity is born in casual meetings, in free discussions. You come across someone, ask what he does, say "Wow!" and very soon you start to rage with ideas. Steve Jobs

Weak connections, powerful effects

Who do you think can be most useful to you in your work and personal life? Colleagues? Relatives and friends? Or those you hardly know and rarely see? The answer will surprise you. Sharp advances in our lives, such as a great new job or gaining an understanding of how to rebuild a business, are likely to happen quite unexpectedly, involving casual acquaintances rather than close friends and colleagues.

Method № 3: Manager-mentor

The desire to share wisdom is one of the human traits.

Jack Canfield

"Mentoring" and "engaging with a mentor" seem to be just good substitutes for the words "teach" and "learn", the only difference is that these processes may be much more individual. Think about how and why you studied in your past jobs, including in various positions in the same company. Most likely, the most valuable knowledge you received from your boss or colleague.

No one can achieve brilliant success without the participation of a mentor or teacher, even if these people are not called that. Of course, you can make some progress on your own. But to shine and maintain a high level of their results, people need mentors and teachers. For the last 40 years, no athlete has come to the Summer Olympics without a coach. Why? Yes, indeed, coaches have some experience and ideas that take over their wards, and in addition, their presence adds a sense of responsibility. But probably the main thing is that they inspire.

WHO INSPIRES YOUR PEOPLE? IF YOU DON'T DO THAT, IT'S MOST LIKELY, THEY WORK WITHOUT INSPIRATION. AND IF YES, YOUR TEAM DOES NOT EVERYTHING IT CAN DO.

Most managers hold their positions because they have done well in previous positions. But this does not mean that they have become good managers, and this is usually the case. Too many people think that when they become a leader, they depend only on themselves. Quite the opposite: from the moment a person becomes a manager, nothing depends on him anymore - everything depends on the people he manages.

Anyone can draw up a budget or a strategic document, and the real job is to work with people. Despite all the technological advances of the last fifty years, business is still dependent on people.

So the question is: are you ready to invest in your people?

Their development is more important than marketing, strategy, finance, technical skills, industry expertise or customer knowledge. If you are not sure about this now, this knowledge may be too expensive in the future.

 The best are especially needed in mentoring. They want to hear your success story, but your mistakes will also teach them a lot.

Method № 4: Influential manager

Give me a foothold and I will turn the world upside down.

Archimedes

In this article, we will look at seven levers that will help increase your influence. Some of these ideas may seem strange, but they are all tested in action.

  Seven levers to achieve outstanding results

1. A sense of responsibility and the power of the subconscious A sense of responsibility and involvement are so obvious that their effectiveness is often overlooked. If it is a serious determination to achieve a goal, it remains in the field of our thinking, even when we think of something completely different. From time to time you are enlightened by unexpected ideas. They do not appear out of nowhere - they are generated by a deep focus on a task, which becomes an invisible but constant background of conscious activity. Subconscious thinking fits well into the 80/20 Principle. It is very economical, because it deals with your problems on its own, without distracting your forces from solving more prosaic tasks. It gives birth to new interesting and unusual ideas that do not appear as a result of the usual linear processes of thinking about the question.

2. Self-confidence

Confidence helps to succeed where others do not think about it. Confidence is able to create a positive force field, multiply vitality, stimulate creative impulses that can take you beyond the impossible. It can be a source of emotional uplift and infectious enthusiasm. It provides courage and makes possible what seemed impossible or even beyond ordinary comprehension.

3. Ideas Business starts with ideas. For it to be successful, the idea must be good. But any idea can be refined, and each product or service will inevitably change and improve over its life cycle. And then they are replaced by something new, based on a new or better idea

4. Solution Solution is the most powerful lever. They are based on the 80/20 Principle, as one decision made as a result of an hour of serious reflection can replace months of hard work or years of hard work. But most decisions do not belong to such. They are quite everyday and devoid of serious consequences. So focus on what's really important that can change your business and your life, and don't mess with others.

5. Trust Every manager knows what an employee who does not enjoy trust is. He is not entrusted with important and responsible matters. It makes little sense, but you spend a lot of time trying to test the work he has done. You spend 80 units of effort on 20% of the result. If you believe in an employee, the exact opposite happens. You can set him complex tasks that he would otherwise do himself. They show high performance with your minimal involvement, as there is no need to keep them under constant control. You get 80 units of result for 20 units of effort, and maybe no effort at all. When you trust team members and give them every reason to trust you, your influence grows exponentially.

6. People Invest any money and, more importantly, time, effort and persuasion to recruit the best of the best. Gathering such people is as important as attracting the best customers, and even more important. The best customers will not be able to help you recruit the best staff, and the best employees are certainly the most important resource for attracting the best customers.

7. Money

Money is the last of the seven wonderful levers of an 80/20 manager. All these simple tools can be used by any manager, but not everyone uses them to their full potential.

If you are immersed in unproductive activities and want to find a nice way to achieve more with less effort, put these powerful levers at your service.

REMEMBER: WITH THE RIGHT LEVER, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Method № 5: Liberation Manager

You cannot be loyal to the organization, and the organization cannot be loyal to you. All manifestations of loyalty are a purely personal matter between people.

Jim Lawrence, CEO of Rothschild North America

The manager-liberator must be absolutely honest with his people, kind, friendly and at the same time very demanding. He must surround himself with first-class employees with attention, confidence, determination, trust and ability. But the concept of liberating manager includes not only the ability to use different methods and levers. This requires a certain worldview and personal qualities that can be successfully in demand in any area of life.

  The liberator reveals the best sides of each of his employees for their own benefit and for the benefit of the company, stimulates the development and improvement of creative qualities of each team member, encourages small manifestations of character and skills that could contribute to brilliant results without undue effort. When this is achieved, the team will be free in its actions based on the 80/20 Principle.

Lisa Manuel believes that it is very easy to motivate people with freedom.

Her approach is based on friendship, honesty and trust. Most firms in its business sector are managed on the basis of fear. This distorts the companies themselves and deprives people of healthy ambitions; this creates an atmosphere of mistrust. She tries to make everything the other way around and opens energy channels in people. When she hires staff, she wants to find friends with whom she can build a lasting, long-term relationship based on mutual support. This is unusual. In a culture of management based on fear, it is only about money: you need work and insurance, so you are ready to give up your own "I".

It gives people freedom of expression and provides space for creative thinking.

She hires sensitive, friendly and socially mobile people. They may be angry or anxious, but they should not be negative. She needs smart and experienced employees, but she also looks at the individual as a whole: she needs people who like the diversity of cultures and who are not inclined to control everything and everything.

If you have respect for people, you can become a good leader. Your attitude to employees as friends with whom you will have to work for a very long time. You say what you think. And that's all you need. Make creativity work for you. In other words, you need to unleash their full potential: identify their particularly excellent "chips" and then encourage them to develop and apply these skills for the benefit of the team and the firm as a whole. To do this, you must know them very well, in a sense even better than they know themselves. And you will need to convince them to get rid of the ballast. Do not do what they do not just brilliant.

Often, even the smartest and most creative employees, especially if they are young and inexperienced, are prone to excessive modesty. One of the best publishers she had ever talked to admitted: “When I was just starting out, I was sometimes not sure if a idea was good or bad, and as a result I just didn't do anything about it. What he later regretted. And I just needed to be pushed from above and said: "OK, try it, let's see what happens. Even if nothing, not a problem!" But I received such shocks very rarely, and my career is several years crawled with tortoiseshell speed - until one of the bosses commanded me: "Forward! And do not doubt!".

  Becoming a manager-liberator requires serious progress on the path of self-knowledge, because before you can dismiss others, you need to free yourself. But the following method will take you even deeper into the essence of your personality, because it explains how to become a better manager by starting to search for the meaning of your working life.

Method № 6: Manager in search of meaning

To make a dream come true ... to be able to create is the most important thing. Money is just a sauce.

Betty Davis

 What I like about the work is that it gives us the opportunity to find ourselves.

Joseph Conrad

 There is nothing more important than understanding your life purpose.

 Full disclosure of people's potential is good for the economy and society. And at the same time it is the only way for a person to acquire the meaning of his existence.

The basis of true success is a unique achievement. It cannot be measured by the amount of the balance on bank accounts. Unique achievements are based on understanding the importance of their work, which brings benefits in the form of a comprehensive awareness of the purpose of life. True accomplishment gives a sense of pride and demand. Sometimes it is followed by complacency, but more often it encourages people to acquire higher meanings through even more outstanding achievements.

If you are looking for meaning, and meaning, as we have seen, is essential for satisfaction and high performance, take a different approach.

Here are five of his criteria:

1. The field of activity should get you started.

2. Work should give you the opportunity to gain rare knowledge.

3. The company should be lovingly inspired, not managed by fear.

4. You have to like your colleagues and managers, and you have to like them.

5. The company must be successful.

Be the master of your career

 "Regardless of where you work, you are not an employee. You are the owner of your business with the only employee you are, says Andrew Grove

Become a unique professional.

If you are the sole owner of a business called I Corporation, does this mean that the general rules of business strategy development apply to your career? Yes of course. Success will come when you take a dominant position in a fast-growing industry with a market share of 95%. The concept of competitive advantage can be applied to the manager as well as to the firm.

  Find your essence.

Successful, inquisitive managers understand the importance of defining the nature of the firm in which they work, and this process is no less important for managers who are determined to work meaningfully. They will agree to work only in a company that clearly understands its purpose and what it is able to bring to the world. Such a company knows who their main customers are and understands what it (and only it) can do for them, making full use of its key resources - unique opportunities and assets.

To work meaningfully, you should constantly improve your core qualities, honing your skills and making it more and more valuable in the eyes of others.

Method № 7: Manager with unlimited time

For primitive man, space was something mysterious and uncontrollable. Time plays the same role in the life of a person of the technological age.

Marshall McLuhan

 As in almost any other case, the value of time can be explained by the Principle. More than 80% of welfare is created in less than 20% of total working time. And we are talking not only about those activities whose results have a monetary value, but also about those that determine the level of civilization of society: for example, the development of education, the progress of social protection or the creation of works of art.

 To work in 80/20 mode, you must first determine the most valuable aspects of their classes. And then you need freedom and self-confidence to focus on them, ignoring everything else. First of all, this will require the ability to restrain yourself and the unconditional skill of premeditation. They are needed to confront distractions and work only on what is really important and necessary.

Eight ways to become a manager with unlimited time There are eight easy ways not to sit at work, while achieving the best results.

  1. Give yourself the maximum degree of freedom Work to get the same freedom from your company in the use of time that you enjoy in everyday life.

  2. Choose something and a priority for the day and deal with it in the first place The importance of this can not be overestimated. If you follow this basic rule, the efficiency increases exponentially.

3. Think about your actions in advance Many actions will be unnecessary and you will be able to get rid of them.

4. Identify the reasons for the success of your unit or the whole company Understand the essence: the main customers, the main resources and the main actions that determine your success. What can improve doing in this sense in your unit?

5. Listen to your main customers Be able to talk to 20% of customers, who give 80% of your profits. Ask what they would like to have from what they are not getting now. And give it to them.

6. Make your subordinates 80/20 managers Given the Principle and the 5-day work week, the benefits to your team members will quadruple when they all become 80/20 managers. But don't skimp: give them as much freedom and as much time as you have. Give them concessions and help them from time to time with advice. Their effectiveness will begin to grow.

7. Identify 20% of work that provides 80% of your satisfaction and efficiency Gradually add the time spent on these activities until they make up the bulk of your working time. And identify 20% of your classes that provide 80% of your dissatisfaction and inefficiency - and give them up

8. Gradually reduce the length of your working day If working hours continue to decrease, I am sure that the level of satisfaction will increase and unemployment will decrease significantly.

Method № 8: Manager for simplification Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

 This is our approach. It's very simple ... Company management, design, advertising - it all comes down to one thing: let's do it simply. Really simple.

 Steve Jobs

The best strategies in business are always the simplest: face the main consumers, deepen the relationship with them and do for them only what they want.

How to simplify your work.

The meaning of simplification is to understand what is important and what is not in the complex of phenomena, and then reduce it to something recognizable and understandable without much effort.

The principle is that most things are not important. Therefore, the difficulty of the task is to identify in the whole complex of small elements that are really important and recognizable, and then formulate an idea in the form of a short clear phrase or product, simple enough for intuitive use.

Rethinking reality.

 In reality, everything is very complicated. It randomly intertwines huge amounts of information, life stories and their variations - despite constant attempts to organize the chaos. A skilled narrator, editor, and politician manages to simplify what happened in the past and now. Great leaders are distinguished by the ability to simplify things so that each person in his audience has mastered for himself some one important idea and begins to act accordingly. Such simplification inevitably leads to distortions, but these distortions, inherent in leaders, are aimed at a constructive rethinking of reality and show the audience how to overcome obstacles.

Simplification is not just about big problems in our society and business. It concerns us - everyone personally. It involves understanding and rethinking the past, drawing conclusions about the future, getting rid of the rubbish that accumulates in everyday life, and understanding that our minds are capable of perceiving very few simple things. If we want to become super, we need to pass simple messages through our minds.

Organizational simplicity Simplicity is important both in the organization of the company's work and in how managers treat their colleagues. Senior managers almost always complicate the organization, trying to sit on all the chairs at once and control the maximum of what is happening. They require frequent detailed reporting from junior managers, which is time consuming and demotivating. They set up committees and working groups to identify cross-functional synergies that may not exist at all and distract everyone from what is going really well.

By learning to simplify effectively, you will become a great leader. Simplification runs counter to the prevailing business culture, but many managers can at least appreciate its benefits.

"WE BELIEVE IN PEOPLE, NOT IN PROCESSES. THE MOTTO "HIRE GOOD, MANAGE A LITTLE" SUITS THEM AND ME. " "Warren Buffett."

Method № 9: Lazy manager

For people to be happy in their work, three things are needed: they must have the ability to do it; they should not try very hard in it; and they must have a taste for success in it.

John Ruskin

No one has died from hard work yet, that's true, but why take the risk?

Ronald Reagan

"THE WAY TO HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY IS THROUGH ORGANIZED REDUCTION IN THE NUMBER OF WORK."

"BERTRAN RUSSELL."

The quintessence of the 80/20 Principle in action. This is a distinctive feature of visionary managers: lazy, thoughtful, resourceful, self-confident on the verge of the most constructive manifestations of self-confidence.

 Selectivity also goes hand in hand with laziness. A lazy manager has to be selective, and a selective manager can afford to be lazy.

Laziness, selectivity and self-confidence complement each other and are very similar to a short recipe for outstanding achievements.

Laziness is really useful, even if you are unlucky and you were not born with it. Of course, you can't show it at any job. You need to find one where you can manage your working hours. This is one of the reasons that many successful lazy people start their own businesses. In addition, laziness is difficult and requires determination and determination in its constant manifestations. But they are worth it: lazy managers achieve outstanding achievements.

Method № 10: Strategic manager

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

 Strategic managers create the greatest values by rethinking and re-creating the industries in which they operate. By inventing new ways of doing business, they offer consumers unique products or services that they are willing to buy at higher prices, or reduce costs without compromising quality, or, ideally, combine them with each other, selling more expensive but at a lower cost. The new way of doing business is becoming highly profitable - it is a result in the spirit of the 80/20 Principle.

The main characteristics of a strategic manager. Strategic managers often set themselves the most ambitious tasks, but strategic management can be applied to goals at any level. The main thing is that it brings unusual results with the most ordinary efforts.

And yet, of the ten ways to become an 80/20 manager, the strategic manager's method is most in line with the Principle: a huge amount of benefits, including considerable satisfaction, are created with relatively little effort, simply thanks to a great initial idea.

We've covered all ten ways to create an 80/20 manager. Now you can start applying them.

 Manager 80/20. The main principle of highly efficient people. Richard Koch.

The book I recommend!