In my 40+ years of working and consulting experience, I have talked to thousands of managers about their work. There is a common theme of: “I am delegated too much work,” or, “I don’t have the resources I need,” and even, “I am not given clear priorities.”
And yet, during that same time period I have seen huge investments by organizations to improve systems and processes to try to be more effective and produce better results. But at the end of the day, managers still aren’t able to focus in on their most important work.
I launched Effective ManagersTM just over two years ago, to find out what was going on. We partnered with the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa on a substantial research project. We found that managers want to do a good job, but they are not clear about their accountabilities. As a result much of their time is spent on work they weren’t hired to do. How much?
If you said more – you guessed the average response! The research shows that managers spend an average of 45% of their time on work that they were not hired to do and low-level administrative work! What a waste of time and energy! At the end of the day, managers must be able to focus on their most important work.
At Effective ManagersTM, we call this waste of human resources organizational churn. Managers are busy, they want to do well, but they are not focused. And organizational initiatives to solve this problem are typically wasted because they focus on symptoms and not causes.
These experiences I had first hand over so many years and in so many organizations inspired me to found Effective ManagersTM, so we can help organizations to improve the situation of managers. Since then, we’ve put together an entire program that addresses this.
Based on our research findi