Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Do you want to help yourself in making more time for what is a priority in your day to day managing?

Here is an interesting insight that Tom Foster mentions when talking to a manager that doesn't have enough time to prepare for new hires.

She says, "It always seems like I don’t have time to prepare when we are interviewing candidates, even taking the time to write a job description for the open position. I know we are supposed to, I just don’t have the time.”

“Paula, whether you want to or not, you will spend the time,” I replied.

“What do you mean?”

“As the manager, you will either spend the time on the front end creating the job description, defining the necessary skills and behaviors, or you will spend the time on the back end trying to shape the person you hired into a role that you never defined clearly in the first place."

“You get to choose where you want to spend your time, on the front end or the back end.” 

Isn't that a simple solution? Where is the time savings then if you're doing on the front or back end? On the back end you will inevitably be caught up in something else that is important that could really cause you to be frazzled when your employee doesn't know how to handle a situation and has a customer waiting for an answer while you're dealing with another customer or important situation.

For example if you have a job description made, it is a one time thing to do. Oh you'll need to occasionally update it and adjust things, but overall, once it's done it's done. So from there you can give a new hire solid foundational input so that they can at least get off on the right foot in their job requirements.

Once they understand what is expected of them, your job, if they're a good hire, will be more involved with occasionally reminding them and then getting out of the way and let them do what they've been trained to do.

To me the front end is a much more efficient place to train an employee, and in the long run, gives you more time to do what your job is to do: manage.