Slacker Manager

Strategy for Making Changes

by Phil Gerbyshak on May 21st, 2008

This is a guest-post from Stephen Smith, who is the editor of Productivity in Context, a resource for articles on Productivity and Leadership, New Media Studies, and tools for organizing. Click here to read more about improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

If you’re going to be a Slacker Manager, you had better have a strategy. Otherwise, you’re going to wind up in the unemployment line.

One of the most frequently-asked questions that I get as a manager and trainer is how to go about making changes. Whether it’s staffing, processes, systems or methods you need to go about it in a disciplined and carefully crafted manner.

Just don’t look like you’re being careful and manipulative. That’s the Slacker key. Here are some tips for making changes without looking like a manipulative bastard:

• Make good use of your time. Come in to the office early, drink your coffee and get your act together. Then when the rest of the team come rolling in, lolly-gagging around the coffee pot and water-cooler, you can walk by, look at your watch and say, “There are going to be some changes around here.” This will set the stage.
• Ask your poorest performers to come up with a solution to a vexing problem, publicly. A problem that your better-performing staff has. Likewise, ask the high-performers to solve a problem for the deadwood. Now each “team” knows that they have to come up with a solution that they would be comfortable implementing for themselves. Use this for the minor things that cause lapses in productivity and efficiency.
• Draw people out of their fortresses. People like to create barriers that protect them from you, from extra work, and from communication. Set up some chips and dip in an office, and do not give them an extra assignment. Instead ask them for a suggestion on how you could do something better. Think it over. The next day, assign it to them.
• Keep it gradual. Making small, incremental changes over a comfortable (for you) period of time is much easier (for them) to accept.
• Keep it steady. Make the changes on a fairly regular schedule. Map out a plan for change in advance, and keep to it. Change something every six or eight days. Not every Tuesday at the staff meeting, even the most disconnected of your staff will catch on.

Being a Slacker Manager is all about controlling perceptions, creating a certain level of anticipation, and making sure that you don’t have to do all of the work.

All images courtesy of Productivity in Context

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