Hire People To Do What You Cannot Do, Not What You Don’t Want To Do
In any job, there are always things things that no one wants to do. If you work on a farm, no one wants to muck the stables. If you work in a restaurant, no one wants to clean the bathrooms. If you work in IT, no one really wants to write documentation (as a hypothetical example).
When you’re manager, you can hire someone to do all the things you don’t want to do. For example, status reports or collecting timesheets. Now, I’m not going to suggest to anybody that is a better use of a manager’s time to go and collect timesheets — a thing that would no doubt be more efficiently done (from a cost-effectiveness point of view) of some admin assistant. But, if as a manager, you want to maintain the respect of the people who are work for you, then there can be no jobs that are beneath you.
This is one of my management dictums: Hire people to do things you cannot do, not the things you don’t want to do. (And, yes, that’s the title of the post, too).
Think of what it would say to the person you’ve hired to do the job you don’t want to do. “You know, Bob, I don’t think your job is all that great or fulfilling. Now, go get out there and knock yourself out!”
To give a technical example, there are certain elements of Oracle database work I either don’t know to do or I don’t do well. Now, for someone who is put himself out as knowledgeable about Oracle, you might think this to be a bad admission, but I don’t view it that way even slightly. Oracle is a huge company with thousands of products; there is no way any one person can know all of them.
For example, I was asked recently to do some work with Oracle Financials. Well, I have worked with FinApps – back in 1999 (on 10.7SC). I was revisions and revisions away from being able to do a good job on this project. Now, I could have done this; I could have taken the time to learn the latest release, maybe even get certified and go do the work. However, in this situation, I would have been much better off finding someone who already is good at Financials and letting them do it, so I would then be able to focus on the things I do well (high availability, real time/TimesTen) as better use of my time.
Related posts (autogenerated):
