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Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 2 of 3

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Goals and Boundaries

We’re going to use some diagrams to show you how this all works. In all of the diagrams, we use a target as a symbol for the goals of the position and an ‘X’ as a symbol for the starting place of the person in that position (they are about to begin to achieve their goals).


Figure 1: Manager’s Route to a Goal

Manager’s route to a goal

The first diagram, labeled Manager’s Route to a Goal, illustrates the path that you would take to achieve the goal. Perhaps you started the business or the department, or perhaps you already held the position responsible for this goal. Nevertheless, you’ve already acquired the skills and experience to achieve this goal, and you know exactly how to do it. To you, it’s a straight line – you do some activities in a certain way, and there you are at the goal. Simple.

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

Alternative Selection Best Practice 1 – Common Assumptions and Variables

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Alternative selection requires choices to be made between competing initiatives. Such choices necessitate a common comparative basis on which the value of each initiative is judged. Key to achieving this state is the application of common market and organizational assumptions and variables from which each initiative’s value is calculated. Without this commonality, initiative owners would likely apply assumptions favoring their initiative’s value calculation and thus diminish the leadership team’s ability to compare individual initiative values.

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Recommended Resource – Reviving Work Ethic

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Reviving Work Ethic: A Leader’s Guide to Ending Entitlement and Restoring Pride in the Emerging Workforce
by Eric Chester

About the Reference

Reviving Work Ethic by Eric Chester provides actionable methods organization leaders can employ to instill within their young workers the strong work ethic foundational to America’s market success. He begins by categorizing young workers on a cognizance and compliance scale; later revealing what leaders must do to imbue workers within each quadrant with a strong work ethic. Eric clearly defines this target ethic as being comprised of a positive attitude, reliability, professionalism, initiative, respect, integrity, and gratitude. He closes by highlighting the value proposition of a workforce characterize by a strong work ethic.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Reviving Work Ethic because of the actionable insights provided to imbue workers with a strong work ethic. Unique to this writing is the cognizance and compliance matrix that provides an excellent starting point from which leaders can specifically tailor their actions to individual employees. We further appreciate Eric’s deliberate definition and influencing actions associated with each aspect of work ethic. His attention to defining work ethic, employee conversation starters, action tips, and work ethic value proposition tables, contribute to the completeness of this book and make it ideal for new and experience leaders alike.

If we had one criticism of Reviving Work Ethic it would be Eric’s singular focus on new workers. StrategyDriven Contributors believe to varying degrees and for differing reasons workers of all ages and experience levels have a sense of entitlement. Furthermore, we believe workers from all generations can be found in each quadrant of Eric’s cognizance-compliance matrix. Thus, while we agree younger workers may be more easily influenced, we feel it is a leader’s responsibility to attempt to instill a strong work ethic within all workers and to take appropriate action to hold those accountable who do not demonstrate these desirable characteristics.

A strong work ethic is critical to individual and organizational success. Leaders must act to imbue their subordinates with these admirable characteristics. Because of its clarity and immediately actionable methods to instill a strong work ethic within workers, Reviving Work Ethic is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

StrategyDriven Available on LeadershipDigital

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StrategyDriven is honored to have our non-subscriber content included on LeadershipDigital, a topic hub that collects and organizes the best business and leadership articles on the web in order to advantage its audience of executives and managers. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregate content from a variety of sources, organize that content around keywords in the topic domain, and support both manual and social curation of the content.

LeadershipDigital‘s goals are:

Collect High Quality Content – The goal of a content community is to provide a high quality destination that highlights the most recent and best content as defined by the community.

Provide an Easy to Navigate Site – End users most often are people who are not regular readers of the blogs and other sources. They come to the content community to find information on particular topics of interest to them. This links them across to the sources themselves.

Be A Jump Off Point – To be clear all content communities are only jump off points to the sources of the content.

Help Surface Content that Might Not be Found – It’s often hard to find and understand blog content that’s spread across sites. Most users are not regular subscribers to these blogs and other content sources.

The site is a collaborative effort started by Tony Karrer. It is generously sponsored by Enlightened Leadership Solutions.

Leadership Inspirations – Accuracy

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“It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.”

Carveth Read (1848 – 1931)
19th and 20th century British philosopher and logician
Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University College London