Finding the Time

Where do we find the time to manage our businesses? During my years of HME consulting, it has been apparent that some companies struggle with this question. In searching for an answer, the repeated conclusion has been that the management and supervisory roles at these companies had evolved to be more complex than they needed to be. The answer is that the time is in the management process.

There are three things that managers and supervisors can do to reduce the time it takes to foster more effective management.

• First, compartmentalize the management process and the way it is described. All of the tasks associated with management can be put into one of four compartments: (1) monitoring results, (2) allocating skills, (3) allocating resources, and (4) developing strategies. These four compartments represent the four responsibilities of a manager.

  1. Monitoring results is about getting the right information at the right time. The information that is “right” is pertinent to the other three compartments. It should help the manager determine whether his allocation of skills, resources and strategies is producing the desired result.

     Timeliness makes a difference in how efficient a manager may be. If information is slow, there is a greater likelihood that small problems will have become large problems before they are identified — and correcting large problems generally takes more time than correcting small problems.

  2. The objective of allocating skills is to put the right person in the right seat for the right amount of time and, conversely, to remove the wrong person — that's the hard part. Being delinquent in removing the wrong person is a big time-waster. With the wrong person is in the seat, mistakes are made, interpersonal conflicts occur, and managers have to deal with them.

  3. Resources to be allocated are the company's assets, i.e., cash, vehicles, equipment. The objective of allocating resources is to create as much profit per dollar of assets as is practical.

  4. Strategies are the collection of actions that must be taken to achieve a goal. For example, a billing supervisor might set strategies to achieve a certain DSO, while a CEO might set strategies to achieve a certain return on assets.

  By compartmentalizing tasks and focusing on these four responsibilities, a manager can eliminate less productive efforts from his schedule.