A development plan for a manager who has no time
You have 12 people in the team and each one wants something every 5 minutes, and your inbox is bursting with 67 unread messages. On Monday at 8:00 AM you enter the office at Półwiejska and you already know that the ambitious plan for this week has just collapsed. Instead of managing, you're firefighting at the coffee machine or looking for missing invoices from March that a client from Berlin had to have yesterday.
The trap of being a firefighter in your own company
We talked to 47 managers from Greater Poland companies last quarter and almost everyone said the same thing: training is usually too long and too theoretical. Who has time to sit for 2 days in a hotel on the outskirts of the city when a deadline for a major order is burning in the company? We at Poznań Progress Partners see that traditional methods don't work here because no one has a spare hour in their calendar to read smart textbooks. People are not Excel spreadsheets, you can't move them by a week when a crisis arises in the warehouse.
Being a boss is not a full-time job as a firefighter without a uniform, although that's often how it looks. If you spend 8 hours a day solving problems that your employees should handle themselves, it means the system is failing. We check facts, not promises – in one of the Poznań warehouses we worked with, the manager spent 14 hours a week correcting errors in orders. That's over a day and a half of work thrown in the trash. Without beating around the bush: it's not a lack of time, it's a lack of clear rules of the game.
If you spend 8 hours on employee problems, your system is simply failing.
The 11-minute rule – how to start without a revolution
Start with the 11-minute rule – this is specific time that you snatch from the day right after the second coffee, before you start answering calls. Don't look for an hour, because you won't find it between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM when the office is bustling with life. Set a timer on your phone and take care of one thing that really blocks your team. It could be a simple decision about buying a new printer for 430 PLN or approving Marek's vacation from logistics, who has been waiting for it since Tuesday. Straight talk for the board and for your people: decision made, topic closed.
Those 11 minutes are your investment that pays off with a surplus that same afternoon. If you devote this time to a conversation with one employee about his problem with the invoice program, you will save 3.2 hours of corrections on Friday at 4:00 PM. We have seen this with our clients many times. Such a short time of focus allowed one production manager to reduce the number of follow-up questions by 23% in just 8 working days. It's pure mathematics, not management magic.
Delegating without fear of the result
Managers often think that they must control every detail or everything will fall apart. This is a mistake that takes away remnants of energy and makes the team stop thinking independently. It's enough to introduce one small change in the way you assign tasks. Instead of saying 'do it as quickly as possible', which means something different for everyone, say 'I need this for Wednesday at 2:00 PM'. Precision is your best friend in the fight against chaos. When you give a specific deadline, you take the weight of asking 'is it ready yet?' off yourself.
The introduction of this one rule in a team of 7 people meant that the number of misunderstandings dropped drastically in just one month. You don't need expensive IT systems for tens of thousands of zlotys for this, a clean whiteboard in the office and a marker for 5 zlotys is enough. Each task written down with a date and a name is one less problem in your head. We check the facts: bosses who started using this method regained an average of 47 minutes a day for calm planning of company development, and not just surviving until tomorrow.
Thursday review of facts
Once a week, ideally on Thursday at 10:30 AM, do a quick review of what went wrong, but without looking for someone to blame. Looking for blame is a waste of fuel that you have little of anyway. Focus on what can be fixed in 4 minutes so the error doesn't repeat. If the complaint process is failing because someone is losing emails, change one line in the office instruction. Small steps give more peace than large revolutions that usually end in a return to old, bad habits after just two weeks.
Our proprietary development plan at Poznań Progress Partners lasts exactly 4 weeks and doesn't require any integration trips from you. We meet for 45 minutes online or at our office at Półwiejska 32. We teach how to separate the wheat from the chaff in daily duties. One of our clients, running a machinery service, regained 3.5 hours a week thanks to this. This is time he could finally devote to talks with new contractors instead of checking if the cleaning crew closed the office windows.
Looking for someone to blame is a waste of fuel. Focus on fixing the error in 4 minutes.
Building authority through peace
When the boss has more time and stops running through the corridor with his tongue out, the whole team starts working more calmly. This is a simple dependency we have observed for 8 years of our activity in Poznań. When you regain control over the calendar, you start to notice details that previously escaped. It could be a sad face of a lady from accounting who has too much work, or a broken handle in the warehouse that has been annoying everyone for 3 months. Fixing such trifles builds your authority faster than any certificate hung on the wall.
Remember that managerial development is not an arms race for the latest gadgets. If in one week you manage to introduce only one improvement in the flow of documents, that is already a huge success. On a scale of a year, that's 52 improvements that will change your office beyond recognition. No fluff – this is the only real path for someone who has the whole company on their head and 15 other matters to handle for yesterday. Start with small things, and the large ones will start to arrange themselves into a logical whole.
