Management Quote Archives

Beware – The Time Terrorist

23rd February 2017

When it comes to work-related difficulties with a team member, more often than not, the person falls into one of two camps. Firstly, you may have someone who is trying really hard to perform at the level required, but for some reason they just aren’t able to deliver. They are not a bad person – they may just need more coaching, or, ultimately, they may just not be suited to that role. Within this broad category, granted there can be a vast range of potential challenges. And then, secondly, there are those who, just by their very nature, go to extraordinary lengths to be obstructive against what the business requires of them. They seem to lose sight of the fact that they are paid to be productive; not to spend their time plotting against their manager’s requests or business goals. It’s this latter group that I want to focus on here. Thankfully they don’t occur that often, but when they do – oh my word, they can cause a whole team to go totally off the rails.

“My boss calls them, Time Terrorists”, a team manager recently told me. “They take up so much managerial effort that you are disabled from giving other, more valuable and more deserved members of your team a fair apportionment of your quality time.” My reply was, “Well your boss describes them perfectly. That just sums it up in so many ways.” So let’s now explore, briefly, what we mean.

First of all, as a manager you only have so much time to devote to getting the job done. Even if you take work home and graft all weekend, there are only limited hours in any week when you can interact directly with your people, and therefore coach them, assist with technical queries, encourage and motivate them etc. etc. It’s challenging enough trying to fit all of this around your other responsibilities, including the tasks handed down to you from your own boss. And then, BANG!, someone in your team, not for the first, or even the second time, starts going ‘full steam’ down a road whereby they are requiring so much more of your attention than either they warrant, or is proportionate to the issue raised. All of a sudden, all of that valuable quality team time disappears down a sink hole, from which there appears to be no escape.

It may be a fairly straight forward change in someone’s duties that has resulted in them becoming, once again, awkward. You end up having to manage the person’s expectations, take time to try and enable them to see that the change is not as bad as they are perceiving, and deal with fallout as it creeps across other team members. It sucks you up. And not just during work time! You go home and you spend time reflecting over what is going on. It frustrates you that there could be lots of positive things happening for others in the team, had the Time Terrorist not decided to once again push things beyond what would be normally acceptable. I am, most definitely, not saying that an employee should never raise concerns, or challenge their boss or the business. In many respects that’s part of the manager’s role to deal with such occurrences. But in reality these instances are rare per capita.

Call me old fashioned, but we get paid to work because our employer needs a job done. We don’t get paid to create a conveyor belt, taking people off on unproductive tangents, and creating even more work for someone else. Then in doing so, the very reason for our jobs existing in the first place is still sitting in the backlog, and adding even more pressure on our team mates as they are left making up the shortfall created by the “It’s all about me” campaign.

So what can be done about it? Well let’s first consider the perspective from someone who is on the verge of being a Time Terrorist themselves. Think about why are they at work, and what are they expected to achieve. Think about the impact on all of those around them. It’s not just the management or the business that will suffer, but also those team members who are supposedly their colleagues. Are they really being fair to everyone, and are they really doing themselves any justice? They need to get some perspective. Rise above it, and take one for the team. Tomorrow someone else may be getting asked to do something that will make their life easier. After all, they are here to work – so get on with it! It’s not supposed to be ‘full on’ fun, or filled with personal preferences. If it was, it would be called ‘leisure’ and they wouldn’t be getting paid for it! Now that would be something to moan about!

What about if you are the manager? OK, you need to be fair to all of your team, and balance that against what the business needs you to deliver. At times certain team members will warrant more of your attention than others. Your team is full of people, and they all have ups and downs along the road of life. So think long and hard. Is this really a ‘Time Terrorist’ you are dealing with, or is it just someone having a bad day? If it is the latter, then part of your role is to manage what’s in front of you. You have to be as supportive as the business allows you to be, and as considerate as the situation requires. Conversely, a ‘Time Terrorist’ is someone whose very character and regular approach (i.e. poor attitude) to their workplace, creates issues that vacuum up your time to the detriment of others and the business. Quite frankly, someone like this is of little value, if any at all, in your team. They are holding you all back, and it needs to be dealt with. The person should be made aware of their impact upon those around them, and they need to be given ample opportunity to develop their energy in more positive and productive ways. Ultimately, having tried as much as is ‘more than reasonable’ to improve the situation, if they can’t do this, then you may find yourself needing to raise the temperature somewhat. As managers we never want to go that far, but when faced with such scenarios, and in order to be fair to the business, and the rest of the team, you have no choice. In fact, if you don’t deal with it, it could be construed that you are inadvertently discriminating against the good people, as they struggle to get your time. Not that any of them would ever complain – they are too busy working on the backlog, and focusing on what they are getting paid to do! But they are the ones who really are deserving of your time and attention – BOOM!

Communicate – It’s Really That Simple

12th November 2016

As managers and project team leaders we reside over complex tasks and scenarios that need a considerable amount of thought, planning and ultimately, effective delivery. Despite all of this effort however, sometimes; somewhere; somehow; something goes wrong. And when it does, you need to get it fixed. But that is just the beginning, as you also (arguably more importantly) need to explore how to avoid a recurrence. Or indeed, many recurrences – hence why arguably more important.

So following on from the ‘incident’, you then investigate more thoroughly what went wrong so that it doesn’t happen again. Surprisingly, a huge percentage of the time when mishaps do occur they are caused, quite simply, due to poor communication, misdirected communication, or worse still, no communication at all. If you think about any failures in task delivery you have been involved with, I bet that the majority of time communication has been at the heart of what went wrong. Either that, or, at the very least, better or faster communication could have prevented or reduced the impact on those affected.

As a leader you should encourage (not strong enough Neil – this stuff is important. OK change ‘encourage‘ to ‘insist‘) your team to communicate everything they come across that could impact, not only upon their own responsibilities, but those around them and the project goals overall. And when they do come across things you need to be receptive to them telling you about it, as opposed to you creating an environment whereby they are apprehensive about doing so. Getting the communication right, at every level, means that life becomes so much simpler, as many avoidable mishaps are dealt with before they actually become a ‘mishap’ in the first place.

I once had someone in my own business saying to me; “Neil, all of this communication is wasted energy. Nothing bad ever happens!” “And why the blazes do you think that is?” was my response.

Profit Is Not Cash

11th December 2015

It is important when running a business to fully understand that there is a huge difference in practical day-to-day terms between profit and cash. This is because a profit is recognised as having been made when your overall income for the business exceeds expenditure (i.e. outgoings). All of this is as determined by accountants following one of the key cornerstones that they must adhere to when preparing a company’s annual accounts. This cornerstone (the accruals principle) relates to the fact that income is recognised when it is earned (e.g. the date when an invoice is issued to a client) and not when the cash has been received (e.g. when you actually receive the money in your bank account), which could be many months later. Likewise expenditure is recognised when it is incurred (e.g. when you have received an invoice from a supplier), not when the money has physically been transferred from your bank account to theirs.

As such, following the accruals principle it is easy to begin to see that a company can be showing a strong result in terms of profit, but at the same time may not actually have that much money in their bank account. Let’s say you are a small business with only a handful of larger customers. You may have £5k in cash sitting in your bank account, and this morning you may have issued one of your clients with an invoice for £25k. As profit is recognised when it is earned, that £25k is now appearing on your Profit & Loss Account (The Income Statement), but you haven’t received the actual cash as yet. If you now (the same day) receive an invoice from a supplier for £10k, that item goes onto your Profit & Loss Account as expenditure (therefore reducing your profit), but irrespective of what is occurring in relation to your profitability, in practical terms you don’t have enough funds to pay that supplier their £10k until such time as your customer has paid you.

So, all of this potentially becomes problematic when those owing you money are taking their time to pay you, but conversely those to whom you owe money are applying pressure to get paid from you. Matters can very quickly begin to get highly pressurised as you find that you are not sitting with enough cash to pay other suppliers, vehicle fuel, staff salaries etc. All of this because you are waiting for some large invoice to eventually turn into physical cash in your bank account.

It is therefore paramount that you do a number of things to protect your profitable business from having a cashflow crisis. Namely: cashflow monitoring; chasing invoices promptly; agreeing preferential terms with suppliers; resisting the temptation of over-trading … In any business cash is king – ALWAYS. The well coined saying that, ‘Turnover is vanity; profit is sanity and cash is reality’ is so very true.

Beware – The Time Terrorist

Communicate – It’s Really That Simple

Profit Is Not Cash

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