What is effective management? How to achieve effective management?

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Effective management is the goal pursued by enterprises. Through hierarchical management, enterprises integrate management into daily work and implement all-round management of the enterprise. Effective management can achieve the effect of responding to a hundred responses and prohibiting orders, making the enterprise a strong and powerful whole. Management must continue to innovate to be more effective. According to the development characteristics of the enterprise, we constantly seek management methods suitable for the enterprise, refine the management, concentrate the talents of all employees through effective management, and mobilize all positive factors and forces that can be mobilized. This is the source of the development and growth of the enterprise.

Six principles of effective management

Focus on results

Management focuses on pursuing or achieving results. One principle of inspection management is: whether the goal has been achieved and whether the task has been completed. Of course, this principle does not apply in all situations, and managers should focus their energy and attention on things that “work.”

Grasp the whole

The reason why managers become managers is because they see the overall situation, focus on the whole, and regard overall development as their own responsibility. Managers should understand their tasks, not from their own position, but from how to use the knowledge, abilities and experience derived from their position to benefit the whole.

Focus on the essentials

The key to focusing on the essentials is to focus on the few things that really matter. Many managers are keen to find the so-called "secret sauce", but in fact this is a risky behavior. If there really is a "secret recipe", then focusing on the key points should be the most important. Having the ability, skills and discipline to focus on key points is a typical manifestation of high efficiency.

Exploiting strengths

refers to taking advantage of existing strengths, rather than those that need to be re-established and developed. But in reality, many managers are always committed to the opposite aspect, that is, developing new strengths rather than leveraging existing strengths. If this is the case, even if the management methods are very skillful and seem scientific, the management errors caused are irreparable.

Mutual trust

How to create a harmonious and perfect working atmosphere within your own department or organization? Some managers strictly follow what the textbook says, but the results are not very good. In fact, as long as a manager can win the trust of others around him, the working atmosphere of the department or organization he manages will be harmonious.

Positive thinking

The key to positive thinking is to think in the right or creative way. The principles of positive thinking allow managers to focus on opportunities. In fact, discovering and seizing opportunities is more important than solving problems, but this does not mean that managers can ignore existing problems. Effective managers can clearly see problems and difficulties and do not avoid them. Instead, they first look for possible solutions and opportunities.

Five tasks of effective management

The first task: setting goals Setting a reasonable goal is half the battle to achieve our goals. Someone said that, and I believe it. Our task as managers is actually to find and set reasonable goals in the process of work. As middle managers, we need to assign tasks to our departments and subordinates. The key to a goal is its content, not its form. The key point in setting goals is to set personal goals. Set personal goals for a year, a quarter, or even a month. Because only when we break down our goals to individuals can we hope to achieve our goals. So how to set reasonable goals? The first principle is to set as few goals as possible. If there are too many goals, there will definitely be no way to achieve them. I found that companies that want to achieve many goals in one year will basically have few goals that can be achieved when summarizing next year. Setting a small number of goals also forces you to identify which goals are important. The second principle is to set challenging goals. What needs to be reminded is that we must pay attention to the reality of the goal. If our goal is out of reach even if we jump, then most people's reaction will be to "break the jar and smash it"! Since you can't achieve your goal, it's better to do something else. In fact, we cannot blame our subordinates for not working hard, but we as bosses do not guide and manage the team by setting goals. The third principle is to quantify the goal as much as possible. If a goal cannot be quantified, it will be difficult to achieve it. The fourth principle is that the goals must match your measures and resources. This is a very simple truth.

The fifth principle is that the more difficult the situation, the more short-term goals are needed. Give an example from life. If you are going mountain climbing with a child, it is very difficult to get him to climb with you to the top of the mountain at first. But you told him that we don’t necessarily have to climb to the top of the mountain, but that we take a break every 50 steps to see how far we can go? Then his attention will be on the easily achievable thing of walking 50 steps. When you achieve your short-term goals ten, twenty, or dozens of times, you will find that suddenly your big goal is achieved and you have really reached the top of the mountain! Therefore, the more dangerous and difficult the situation is, the more we need short-term, specific, and small goals. The final principle is that goals should be documented in writing so that it is easy to check whether they have been achieved. The second task: Organization and implementation Organization and implementation, that is, how to design your own organizational structure and processes. In this process, managers need to answer the following three questions: First, how should I design so that the organization can better realize customer needs. Second, how can I design so that my employees can better complete the tasks they want to complete. Third, how can I design an organizational structure that allows senior executives to complete the tasks they should complete. When a company starts a business, we don't need a complete organizational structure. It may be that everyone has to do everything. But when an enterprise reaches a certain scale, we usually divide each department according to different functions to form a functional organizational structure. When a company operates more products and fields, we will divide the company by product or business field department. This structure will strengthen each product or business field, but weaken the emphasis on functions. In further development, the company may adopt a matrix organizational structure, in which the horizontal lines represent products and the vertical lines represent functions. Then everything we do requires the coordination of the two lines. Of course, when the company develops to a higher stage, we may overturn the organizational structure and start over. All in all, we have to look for an organizational structure suitable for the company to complete its tasks at different stages. The large organizational structure is completed, so how do we make things specific to individuals? In fact, there is a very simple method called a transformation matrix. First, we need to list the things we need to do. Second, we design some positions with specific people to be responsible for them. The third thing is to find ways to match the things we need to do with these positions. Through such a transformation matrix, we can hand over the tasks to be completed to each position and each individual. As a manager, how do you judge whether an organization is good or bad? There are actually many signs of a poor organization. The first is to set too many levels. If we need to approve something at all levels, you can imagine that the efficiency of doing things will be greatly reduced. The second is a lot of cross-departmental coordination. Every time a small matter requires a large number of meetings to coordinate. The third is to convene a large number of people to hold a large number of meetings. A good organization should reduce cross-department communication to as little as possible. In other words, on the one hand, we must emphasize communication within the enterprise, but we should not communicate for the sake of communication. The fourth is that there are too many people in the same position, and three monks have no food to eat. The fifth is the increase in so-called assistants or coordinators. When there are many things to do, a boss or a department manager often does not assign things to fixed positions or specific people. Instead, they ask this assistant to take care of this thing and that assistant to take care of other things. The disadvantage of this is that the assistants have great power, but these people are usually not responsible for this matter. The more helpers you have, the messier things will get. The sixth is that some of the positions set up are unreasonable. This position is responsible for doing a lot of work, but each one is a little bit. As long as such bad signs appear, we will change our organizational structure, change our processes, and change our job settings, and then we will easily complete the task. The third task: making decisions When it comes to managers, many people will think that the first task of managers is decision-making. We need to make a decision and settle on some things. According to Nobel Prize winner Simon, management itself is about making decisions, making reasonable decisions, and making correct decisions. From this perspective, I think decision-making is a task for managers that is easy for everyone to understand. So the question is, how can we make this decision well? What we need to pay attention to are the following four points. First, we must understand the problem. We often make ineffective decisions because we don’t find the right problem.

Second point, we try not to make a decision under duress. Decisions made under duress are usually not good decisions. Third, we should know that there must be other choices besides the choices we know. Decision-making is nothing more than finding the one that is most beneficial to us and has the least risk among different options. If we try to find an alternative, we will usually find a better decision. We once had a client who was a long-term consultant—a paint company. When we started discussing his strategic choices, it was all about the paint itself. Is it positioned as a high-end paint, mid-range or low-end paint? But then, it suddenly dawned on us that there might be other options besides paint. For example, is it possible for us to enter the upper end of the paint industry as a supplier of raw materials? If we think about it this way, we will find that the opportunities in this market may be completely different. Competition in the paint industry itself is fierce, but competition among paint suppliers is relatively weak. From the perspective of paint usage, we also found that there is actually the possibility of new options at the lower end. Fourth point, the decision itself is important, but the implementation is more important than the decision. Finally, in the decision-making process, it is important to be aware of different opinions. The boss of General Motors Sloan once said, I hire a senior manager with a high salary just to ask him to give me different opinions. If they all agree with me, then what do I want these people to do? Therefore, the prerequisite for correct decision-making is that different opinions must be fully expressed. To make a correct decision, of course you must pay attention to the decision-making process. We need to find the right problems, understand the prerequisites for making decisions, know what choices there are and the risks and consequences after the choices, and make decisions based on the risks and consequences. After making a decision, there is implementation, and after implementation there is constant feedback. Based on this feedback, we adjust our decisions. In fact, to make a correct decision, we need to have such a complete decision-making process. We need to remind everyone that we should not refrain from making decisions because of the risks that they may bring. This is actually the biggest mistake. Drucker said: In successful companies, you will always see people making big and bold decisions. In fact, for many companies, their current operating conditions are relatively good, partly because of the bold decisions made in the past. The fourth task: supervision and control. Why we cannot implement many things is because we do not have enough monitoring tools and monitoring measures. I am often asked by friends in the corporate world: On the one hand, trusting one’s subordinates means trusting one’s subordinates in China means losing control. If you believe him, then you have no control over what happens next. What should you do? My answer is that trust and control should be looked at together. If there is only trust without monitoring, then this trust cannot go far. On the other hand, if a manager only monitors others and makes others feel that you have no trust in him, then this monitoring will actually be ineffective in the end. So on the one hand, we must learn to trust, and on the other hand, we must know how to monitor and prevent others from abusing our trust. This is a task that we as managers must complete. So how can we achieve effective monitoring? First, we don’t want to monitor too much, which means we only supervise and control the most important links. If you look at the dials and instruments on the car, they are actually used for monitoring. We find no redundant instruments on the car's dial. Why? Everything is useful to us. I don’t control or detect useless things. Management is actually the same. If we supervise and control too many things, we will end up neglecting the things that should be monitored most. Second point, from the perspective of supervision methods, we usually have to conduct random inspections, not necessarily one by one. Because checking one by one means that we have to spend a lot of time, and it also means that we do not trust our employees, and spot checks can play a very good role in supervision. Third, the purpose of our supervision and control is to achieve goals, not to collect information. I know that there are many managers who like to collect all kinds of information. They have a lot of reports and figures in their hands, but they are of little use. So from this perspective, we don’t need to collect information that is not relevant to my goals. The fourth point is that the purpose of monitoring is to change the future and make the future develop according to our wishes, not to make corrections afterwards. Let me tell you a little story about Afanti.

One day, Afanti asked his servant to go down the mountain to fetch water. He told his servant: You must not spill my water or break my bucket. If you spill the water or smash the bucket, I will slap you. After he said this, he slapped his servant twice. His friend felt strange and asked Afanti: Why slap him now? Afanti said: If he spilled the water or smashed the bucket, wouldn't it be useless if I slap him again? ! What this story tells us: The purpose of monitoring is to prevent unwanted things from happening, which means we want to control the future rather than make corrections afterwards. This is actually the essence of monitoring. Let me give you a very small example in reality. An entrepreneur and a partner made a good business plan together. After it was completed, his partner took the entire plan and did it himself. After spending millions, he ended up making wedding clothes for others! He asked me how to deal with his dishonest opponent? In fact, it is very difficult for us to change this matter afterwards, but if he had a good agreement with his partners at the beginning, then this matter might not have happened at all. Managers need to go through a closed loop to control well and complete six steps: the first step is to determine the scope of control; the second step is to determine the key elements to be controlled; the third step is to determine the control standards; the fourth step is to collect data and information; the fifth step is to measure the effect and whether our standards have been met; the sixth step is to make corrections. In this iterative process, the focus areas are cost control, business process control and risk control. The fifth task: Cultivate talents Talent is the most important intangible asset of an enterprise, but it is precisely in this aspect that Chinese entrepreneurs are very confused. Many friends have asked me this question: My market is very good, my products are very good, and there are many things I can do, but I don’t have enough people to complete these things. What should I do? The answer is often to recruit and develop talent. Managers let others help you complete tasks. Recruiting and cultivating talents may be the most important task of senior managers. We may be faced with a choice, whether it is better to recruit some airborne troops from outside or train them ourselves from within. On the surface, the benefits of recruiting airborne troops are obvious. You can just find someone to use them. And cultivating it yourself seems to be a long and ineffective process. But I believe that from the perspective of the company's long-term development, the best way is to cultivate talents ourselves. Maybe at a certain time in certain special positions, you can recruit one or two paratroopers. However, we must not expect these people to be effective right away. Because it takes about a year for them to become familiar with the company's environment. Maybe by the second year, they will have some feeling and know how to do this. It wasn't until the third year that his role could really come into play. And most of us entrepreneurs or managers cannot wait until the third year. If we understand that it takes time for an outsider to be effective internally, we will be more inclined to cultivate a person internally. It will take two or three years for him to be able to do something independently from the beginning. But you can believe that the people you have trained over the past two or three years are completely suitable for the environment of your company. Therefore, internally trained talents are actually more useful than external talents. If we want the company to develop in the long term, we must try our best to cultivate internal talents ourselves. One of P&G's corporate principles is not to recruit managers from outside. Of course, this involves another issue, which is that insiders are not qualified enough and must find outsiders. In fact, a person's potential is very great. If you give him a chance to unleash his potential, a person can do great things. A Western proverb says: When God gives a person a task, he usually also gives him a talent so that he can complete his task well. We must never underestimate the potential of our subordinates. Sometimes we may need to take a step forward, close our eyes, and give him a chance to see what he can do. But in most cases, I believe he will give you a surprise.