Management and Productivity
I came across an interesting set of posts by Dave Gray on “http://communicationnation.blogspot.com”. The post is called ” The craftsman-to-manager paradox”
That discussion of the differing tools needed for different types of work reminded me of both the Peter Principle and some thoughts I’ve had about management and productivity.
My ideas came from an experience where I managed a team of people. A legal issue came up that halted all the work they were doing, but increased significantly the amount of work my boss and I had to do to set things back right. I think in pictures more than words, so this appeared to me as an “X-shaped” chart with the declining leg showing the amount of production work our organization did and the increasing leg showing the amount of management work needed to set things straight.
Then, I thought, you could use this chart to describe a job by making a verticle slice through any part of the x axis. Each job has varying amounts of production work and management work, but one must decline if you are doing more of the other. This also helps me understand the adverse impact of micromanagement - when I’m stepping in to do someone else’s job at the production level, I shift the intersecting point of my “job line” to the left. That necessarily means I cannot focus as much on the management part of my job and my effectiveness is therefore reduced. If less attention to my job doesn’t reduce my effectiveness in it, what does that say about my job or my performance in it?
