The one thing that managers reliably lack is time. They will often be doing their existing jobs as well as supervising others. They have bureaucracies to navigate—expenses to authorise, hiring requests to make—and mini-crises to solve. It is all too easy for the weeks to whizz past; suddenly it is September and the northern-hemisphere nights are drawing in again. But it is possible for even harried managers to ask themselves questions that force useful moments of reflection. For example:
“Would I hire this person again?” There is a whole category of questions that executives should ask themselves which are basically about regret. Peter Drucker, a management guru, urged bosses to reallocate scarce resources to more useful pursuits by asking of various activities: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?” To avoid meeting overload, it helps to routinely query whether get-togethers are really needed; some firms do a meeting detox by wiping calendars clean and forcing people to repopulate them.
The version of the regret question that is useful to every manager is whether they would choose to hire each member of their team into the same position. If the answer is a genuine “yes”, pat yourself on the back and reflect on why these people are successful. If the answer is “no”, you don’t have to get the axe out and start swinging. But you almost certainly owe them some awkward feedback, and should ask yourself why you hired them and whether there is a way to get more out of them.
“How often am I hearing dissent?” This handy question comes from Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School best known for her work on psychological safety. Most managers can recite the arguments for creating an environment in which team members feel comfortable disagreeing; some may even believe them.
If you do subscribe to this idea, Dr Edmondson’s question offers a useful way of working out whether the reality matches the ambition. If you say you want robust debate and cannot remember recent instances of people below you in the hierarchy saying why they think you are wrong, then it is possible you are actually a fan of psychological danger. (Do not include the office contrarian in your answer: they are incapable of agreeing with people and do not count for the purposes of this exercise.)
“What should we automate?” There is an obvious reason to ask this question now, when artificial intelligence offers new ways to rethink white-collar work. But it is one that managers should be putting to their teams routinely. The amount of time that people spend on needlessly repetitive activities, from filling out holiday-request forms to juggling calendar invites, saps productivity and morale. Spotting these sources of boredom and frustration can lead to more engaged staff and greater efficiency.
When different teams automate processes unilaterally and tech platforms proliferate within an organisation, overall workloads can rise rather than fall. It is hard to argue that more toggling is a big step forward for mankind. So if automation is needed, it should generally be done under the auspices of a central team. And even if you don’t end up handing things over to machines, you are likely to spot opportunities to improve the way things work.
“How many people are leaving my team?” “Everyone, as soon as they can” is not the right answer to this question. But “none” is not necessarily a good one either. That’s because one of the more malign diseases afflicting organisations is managers who hoard talent for themselves. Such behaviour is not just harmful to employees, whose opportunities for advancement are curtailed, and to firms, who may lose good people as a result. It also harms managers themselves.
A recent study by J.R. Keller of Cornell University and Kathryn Dlugos of Pennsylvania State University looked at almost 100,000 internal applications over a five-year period at a large American health-care organisation. They found that bosses whose subordinates were more likely to be promoted attracted more and higher-quality applicants for open positions on their teams.
This is not an exhaustive list; another obvious candidate is whether your team has clear goals. Some issues may not be in the gift of individual bosses to solve. But as a way for time-pressed managers to pause and take stock, questions like these are not a big ask. ■
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