At university, while studying international business management, a dry title for an even drier topic, they made me read several books that appeared to spend a lot of energy, ink, paper, time and effort to stretch basic common sense, that should be able to snugly fit into a few dozen pages, into hundreds of them. And several volumes. And new editions.

And paperbag versions of the third edition - now with a new foreword by someone who writes even longer books.

By the time the author could be bothered to get into the technicalities of offering the reader models and tools that are easy to apply and remember, you’d have been forced to trawl hundreds of pages of stuff that typically started with sentences like ‘In my work I often encounter companies that are unable to align internal strategies to external challenges...’ or ‘Trudy works at an accounting company and is challenged to come up with a way to improve employee satisfaction in the workplace - now let’s look at how to achieve this over the next 90 pages’. I don’t mind strategy questions and I can imagine Trudy feeling that the task at hands totally demands 90 pages of prose to get to the solution.

But really, is this what you want and need when sitting in your office and looking for solutions to the many problems management can throw at you? Probably not, but if the answer is yes, you are either 1) a librarian or 2) a being of super-human patience and stamina, who experiences time differently to us, kinda like Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen fame (a movie I will surely write about at a later date).

In the UK and Ireland (possibly other countries) the public health authorities run a 5-a-day campaign. The goal is to get folks to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetable a day. A noble cause, that while entirely functional in its message, is dramatically lacking any sex appeal in its execution. However, in my opinion it succeeds in one clear objective: Deal efficiently with something that should be common sense, is important, yet tends to be sidelined and neglected or you simply forget. What if we were to treat basic day-to-day management into the same principle? Have you looked at your 5-a-day today?

When I started managing at Google, there was a lack of formal book-based information, and while that may surprise those joining the outfit from the book-heavy environments of university, it’s not needed. At all. A director once sat me down and gave me his view on things - I have been following these basic principles ever since, and they never failed me. The 5-a-day is actually a sandwich (please do not close the page at this time, I am actually building up to make my point)

The sandwich consists of your 5 food groups:

1) Provide

2) Communicate

3) Control

4) Customers

5) Team

Provide, Communicate and Control are your tools. These are sandwiched between your Team and your Customers. I am willing to wager that most of the work you as a manager are supposed to perform and own, can be placed in one of these categories. See handy picture guide on this page for those of you who feel reading is overrated. Let’s break them down one by one:

Provide

This is where you get to be the dad - the Charles Ingalls kind, not the Al Bundy one. You are the provider for your team, whether it be budget, training, seating space, headcount, information etc. Remember that the team relies on you for all of these things. Managers often leave it to the team to figure many of these things out, either due to laziness or thinking that you are empowering the team in some way, but that will posssibly result in at least two highly undesirable outcomes: 1) the team will rely less on you, despite your seniority and closeness to potentially critical information to decisions staff now makes on their own - mistakes will happen as a result, and 2) folks will start to question whether your role is one worth hanging onto. You are the manager for a reason - keep your team stocked with everything they need to perform at 100%. It is fine to leave decisions to the team, but it is imperative that it is always understood that providing these things ultimately falls on your desk. Take stock daily for 30 minutes to see what needs to be provided. Where do we stand on training? Space? Budget for new quarters sales competition? Meet with stakeholders who provide stuff or services for the team, understand where you’re running low and act accordingly. Remember: An unstocked fridge is useless, but when filled with the right ingredients regularly, cooking is made consideraby easier.

Communicate

And communicate often! You communicate everyday, on targets, strategy etc. and most of the time you probably think of it as talk, not communication. When you are in the lunch room and talk to your guys about what happened at the last management meeting, you may think you are talking but your team will think you are communicating -- you are providing information they would otherwise perhaps not get. When you talk to your team in the workspace you are in fact never talking. Ever. You communicate. Perception is reality, and a loose comment made over lunch can turn into a bad case of you having ’communicated’ something you should not have, to someone you should not have.

The golden rule is that you stick to 2 basic values: 1) When you communicate, do so clearly. Always. No mumbling, etc. If you’re not sure, don’t guess. In fact, be 100% pure, grade-A crystal clear. Be crystal clear on what the targets are (share them immediately after these being aproved by your manager), the deadlines, the QA, everything in the work process that needs to be done in a certain way needs to be clearly laid out for everyone. If the team fails its target due to know knowing what the target is, or otherwise lacking information needed to achieve the goal, you’re the failure, not the team. 2) Make comms part of daily work. Don’t wait until next week’s staff meeting to get the message out, get a huddle going on the floor and get it off your chest there and then. Same goes for metrics and targets, the more often you talk about them, and the more clear they are and part of daily life, the less of an issue they will be. Why was Alien scary? Because you rarely saw the monster and even then if was in the shadows. If you only communicate on metrics/targets at the quarterly review, the KPIs will be scary, yes, but if they are part of everyday discussions and the staff in engaged and involved with how to achieve goals, they become part of work, not only a result of it. In other words, check metrics daily, and check-in with key personnel and workflow leads daily. Provide daily comms from you on where we stand, either in a huddle or a daily e-mail. Make sure folks expect your comms at a given time.

Control

This is the one folks think they got covered (and many do). This covers your ability to control the business in a manner that is efficient, yet covers all aspects of business - this includes your staff. Control does not have to be perceived negatively by the team, but it often is, as managers stick to (or hide behind) their dashboards. When you think about how you control the business, you probably think dashboard, weekly/daily/monthly report, MBR, QBR, vendor audit etc. and all these are certainly part of the process, but you already know and use these, right? But what other checks and balances are at your disposal? Metrics and results are the result of the work done by people, the output, if you will. Hence it makes sense to try to control future output as far upstream as you can, and ideally at the source. That means talking to your team at every stage of the process! I see control as far more as looking at reports, the weekly 1:1 for instance is key here. To control your business you need to meet every direct report weekly. 30 minutes for team members and ideally longer for those who have direct reports themselves.

A model I always use, is the following one: At every 1:1 you spend ⅓ of the time talking about overall developments. Here you look at the individual’s dashboard and discuss the good and the bad. ⅓ time talking about blockers and stuff he/she needs you for (remember: you provide. A 1:1 that does not touch on your role and what you can support with, is pointless), and ⅓ talking immediate and tactical future and what results are to be expected from the staff and from you. Every fifth session is dedicated to a career chat that looks at where the person is at, and what is needed for the next level. This sounds touchy feely, but if you want full control over your business, you need to be able to impact the machine that produces the output. You need to know what this machine is supposed to produce tomorrow and next year. My experience is that the more diligent you are in the daily/weekly work with the individual, the less you need to rely on reports etc. Remember, once you see a bad result in a weekly report, the damage is already done. Had the employee told you candidly the week prior that trouble might be brewing due to X or Y, you’d have had a fighting chance to rectify or prevent altogether. Taking a harsh view of things, reports really do little more than tell your superiors that your business is not under control.

Nip it in the bud: weekly 1:1 sessions every week, daily huddles with the team with a recap of what happened yesterday and daily feedback from your team to ensure that the report next week merely confirms what you already knew.

Customers :

Which brings us to the aspect most managers find most frustrating to deal with. I worked in operations for many years and whenever a person was promoted out of core work and into a supervisor or manager role, they’d get really excited. Like REALLY excited. Excited as in running naked through the woods, while drinking champagne out of the skull of their old job. Reason for this madness? The fact that you will never have to talk to another customer again. Ever. You go to the management meeting of any sales or support operation and ask the room who has talked to a customer in the past month, and few will reach for the sky. And those who do, will likely be those who handle complaints.

No, you do not need to know the customers as well as your team. No, you do not need to have your portfolio to command respect. But it helps to try! I’d walk the floor, and when not going anywhere or having anything particular to do, I’d sit down and talk to whoever was available at that time. If you do not have time to shadow a call, ask them to show you a few of their e-mails from that morning - have them talk you through the solution or sale they offered. Got a packed day? Ask your QA lead to include you in the next few sessions and listen to the recordings or read the e-mails together at a time that suits. What does the customer want? What does he expect? Are we even offering a matching product or service? There are tons of scheduled, customer centric activities going on in your organization and you probably only know of half of them. Set yourself a target to read 3 inbound e-mails per day (this can be done in tandem with having your morning coffee), shadow 3 calls per week and sit in on calls and meetings with customers once a month.

The second you stop understanding your customer, you stop understanding your team as your team will adapt and respond to what the customer wants and expects in order to do a good job. Whatever their motivations are - bonus, promotions etc. - is irrelevant. What matters is that the team will try to model their effort to get the best result. You can only correctly appraise their work when you understand the customer.

Team:

Hire the best folks you can get, obey the first 4 components and get out of their way when your rock stars give it their all every day. For recruiting, ensure you hire people better than you. Hiring folks at your level or below will not aid in your own growth, and you want to grow, right? Talk to everyone in person each day, and ditch the office. Even if you’re forced to sit in one, leave it empty when you can and work from the floor with your team. Key here is that you’re part of the team, even if it it technically ‘your team’. Become part of it where possible and suitable.

If you made it to this point, you probably think this was all common sense and bordering on the simplistic. Good news is that you’re right - and no, you did not miss any sections on hard science behind these thoughts as there aren’t any. But trust me, you’d be surprised by some of the questions and concerns I got from managers both those senior and those junior to me - they were often not exactly driven by hard science either. Focusing on these 5 things each and every day and you cannot fail (not a legal guarantee, and I cannot be sued should you fail in your endeavour and lose your house, trophy wife and sail boat) and your team will know what to expect from you and the other way around. And for the love of all that is holy, stop trying to make management look harder than it is. The athlete that the competition fears the most at a marathon is the athlete who makes it look easy. Those who look they are struggling probably are.

Thoughts and criticism is highly appreciated. Send it through the usual channels and thanks for reading!