My First Time in Charge: Stop Worrying – Start Performing Practical Guide for New Managers

Copyright © 2019 Daniele Matteucci. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   11/16/2020

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9934-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-9933-2 (e)

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Contents

Introduction

Part I Rational

1 What Do I Mean by Rational?

1.1 It’s Time for Action

2 Tick Tock

2.1 Why Does the Team Exist?

2.2 Setting and Clarifying Goals

2.2.1 Stretch Goals

2.2.2 How to Communicate Goals

2.2.3 When to Communicate Goals

2.2.4 Where to Communicate Goals

2.2.5 Who to Communicate Goals

2.3 Priority List of the Month and Quarter

2.4 Next Immediate Action

2.5 Action Review

2.6 Action Chart

2.7 Action Line

2.8 It’s Time for Action

3 People

3.1 Idea-Action Matrix

3.2 How to Pick People

3.3 How to Manage People

3.3.1 Type 1: The Great

3.3.2 Type 2: The Poison

3.3.3 Type 3: The Great but Late

3.3.4 Type 4: The Solid Performer

3.3.5 Type 5: The Baby Champion

3.3.6 Type 6: The Bonus Achiever

3.3.7 Type 7: The Rich Baby

3.3.8 Type 8: The Timer

3.3.9 Type 9: The Late Bonus Achiever

3.3.10 Type 10: The I Only Do This Late

3.3.11 Type 11: The Late Rich Baby

3.3.12 Type 12: The Bonus Solid Performer

3.3.13 Type 13: The Late Baby Champion

3.3.14 Type 14: The I Would Like but I Can’t Now

3.3.15 Type 15: The Late Performer

3.3.16 Type 16: The I Would Like to but I Can’t

3.4 Delegation and Accountability

3.4.1 Delegating

3.4.2 Accountability

3.5 Rewarding Your Team

3.5.1 Common Rewards and Timelines

3.6 It’s Time for Action

4 Tracking

4.1 Reporting

4.2 Meetings: Timing and Types

4.3 Debriefing

4.4 It’s Time for Action

5 Keeping the Whole in Balance

5.1 The Business Circle

5.2 The Business Triangle

5.3 All-Chain Assessment

5.4 It’s Time for Action

6 Negotiating

6.1 Keep this in Mind when Negotiating

6.2 Types of Business Relationships

6.2.1 Solid Partnerships

6.2.2 Transactional Business

6.2.3 Friends Today, Enemies Tomorrow

6.2.4 No Interest at All

6.3 It’s Time for Action

7 Your Management Style

7.1 Which Management Style Is Right?

7.2 Avoid Complexity

7.3 Avoid Miscommunication

7.4 Avoid Misunderstandings

7.5 Avoid Banalities

7.6 It’s Time for Action

Part II Emotional

8 You

8.1 The Driver

8.2 The Magnet

8.3 You Are Building the Track

8.4 You Are the Conductor

8.5 You Can See the Future

8.6 Always strike: why, what, when, who, where and how

8.7 Squeezed like an orange every day

8.8 From Tasks to People

8.9 It’s Time for Action

9 Your Team

9.1 The Fantastic Four

9.2 Problems or Opportunities?

9.3 Skilled and Willed

9.4 Like and Will

9.5 Altruistic and Selfish

9.5.1 The Devil Type

9.5.2 The Silent Villain

9.6 Zeros, Ones, and Infinite Types

9.7 Are They Satisfied?

9.8 Pain and Pleasure

9.9 It’s Time for Action

10 A Successful Organization

10.1 From Strategy to Attitude

10.2 Formula for Success

10.2.1 The A-Team

10.2.2 B-Team (Group of soldiers)

10.2.3 C-Team (Group of people)

10.2.4 D-Team (Stressed individuals)

10.2.5 E-Team (Happy spoiled employees)

10.2.6 F-Team (Unhappy spoiled employees)

10.2.7 Z-Team (Nothing)

10.2.8 Consequences of the Formula for Success

10.3 My Self-Assessment

10.4 It’s Time for Action

11 Leadership and Management

11.1 My quote

11.2 It’s Time for Action

References

Introduction

T his book is a practical guide that offers pragmatic tools and frameworks to new managers. It is the book I wished to have when I started my journey as a new manager with business responsibilities. I wrote it based on my real-life management experiences. I took notes for about four years of the lessons I learned during my first field assignment. I struggled, but finally I have been successful. I wished during my beginnings to have a mentor to coach me and help me to speed up my learning curve. I wish this book can be a valid practical guide to help others to reduce the stress and worries that inevitably happen when taking on a managerial role for the first time. At the same time, I wish to also offer new managers some help to deliver better and faster high performances.

The book is divided into two main areas: rational and emotional. I believe that a good manager must first of all master the rational part, but to become an excellent and complete manager, he or she cannot forget the emotional part of the job. Blending the rational and emotional parts will be a recipe for success and fulfillment.

PART I

RATIONAL

1

WHAT DO I MEAN BY RATIONAL?

W hen I started as a manager, I thought my job would have been simple: apply tools and principles to reach a business goal. After years of education in business, I came across so many tools that I thought my job would have been extremely easy. Those tools and principles were part of the rational part of the business, such as: setting targets and goals, key performance indicators; planning and control; review and tracking; following up on plans and decisions; on-time delivery and execution; accuracy; sales; prices and quantities; costs; profits; cash flow; credit and debits; standard operating procedures and 80/20 rule.

I studied accounting in high school, business administration at university and business strategy at post-graduate master. At fourteen years old, for the first time, I studied profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Since then, I have always been increasing my understanding and knowledge of these business topics.

My first job, at twenty-five, was in finance. I was involved in business controlling in the headquarters of a multinational eyewear company. Since the beginning I felt comfortable. In fact, I was working with all the tools I had learned in ten years of school. I worked on P&Ls for several subsidiaries. I was checking sales, prices, volumes, and profits. I became familiar with budgeting, forecasting, analysis of actual results, and gap analysis.

After almost five years in finance, I moved to demand planning department. It mainly focused on forecasting worldwide sales. Sales forecasts were shared with production and logistics to make sure the supply chain was set to deliver those volumes. I was also supporting my boss to guarantee the business in all geographies of the world was under control. I felt extremely at ease. I had ten years of business education and five years of experience in finance. Fifteen years with rational tools helped me analyze all the aspects of the business.

That solid base helped me do well in demand planning. I was good at analyzing actuals and predicting future sales. In my last year as Demand Planner, my team achieved a 0.03 percent sales variance versus the forecast we submitted in August — on almost sixty million products sold. A remarkable accuracy.

I spent eight years at headquarters (five years in finance and three in business planning). I spent eighteen years on the rational part of the business (ten at school and eight at work). Those eighteen years taught me how to plan, track, measure, and forecast a business in its dry numbers.

To be a solid manager, you need to master the rational part of the business. You cannot be a successful manager if you have gaps in that part. In this book, I present the necessary and helpful tools for my success. Tools are infinite, and the more you have in your toolbox, the better it is. You must understand the tools and be able to really utilize them at work. However, my first suggestion is to focus on the tools that really help you deliver. Focus on mastering a few tools instead of trying to learn many and not being able to use them at all.

However, the second part of this book is related to the emotional aspect of being a manager. After my career in the corporate offices, I moved to a field assignment, and it has been there where I became a real manager. I understood that the rational tools were not enough. I learned that being manager is not as easy as I thought. I had to build other tools, emotional this time, not rational.

1.1 IT’S TIME FOR ACTION

■ Which rational tools did you encounter in your education and work?

■ Do you feel comfortable working with those tools?

■ Do you feel gaps? If you feel comfortable, that’s great. If you have some gaps, you must study, retrain, and close the gaps.

■ Start making a list of your weak areas. Determine who can help you and commit to a date to start your gap-closing plan. If you can fix them by yourself, commit to a regular time each week until you close the weaknesses. If you cannot fix them alone, find someone who can help you.

■ Which are the tools do you feel comfortable with? Write them down — and remember always to be confident when using them. Use them as much as possible.

2

TICK TOCK

T he clock does not wait for you. When you are a manager, time is the only resource you cannot influence. To be an effective manager, you have to follow a timeline. You cannot speed up or slow down time. The only thing you can do is make your projects happen in the expected window or earlier. You must shorten the time between ideas and actions . Key questions to ask yourself:

■ Are you fast at executing ideas?

■ Is your team fast at executing ideas?

■ How long will it take for an idea to become real action?

■ How can you shorten that time?

■ How can you generate excellent and applicable ideas?

■ How can you start practical actions?

You can shorten the time from idea to action by defining who is doing what, when, where, and how. That is the essence of the action plan. You will find similar advice in many management and self-help books. It is an excellent piece of advice. You need to build a healthy obsession with the definition of the action plan. It is not enough to define which action to do. You need to identify all the elements: why, who, what, where, when, and how. If you do not have those answers, you do not have an action plan.

Below the tools I use in my work:

1. the purpose: the why

2. setting goals and clarifying: the bigger what for the medium and long term

3. the priority list of the month and quarter: the what in the short-term

4. the action plan: who is doing what by when

5. the next immediate action: how to kick-start the action

6. the after-action review: reflect on the progress

2.1 WHY DOES THE TEAM EXIST?

When I started as a Country Manager in Thailand, I was clear on the business objective. I spent eight years in the company before taking on the field role with management responsibilities. I knew which sales and profits goals the company was expecting. I was good at building budgets and a three-year plan for the new subsidiary I was going to manage. I knew all the leading key performance indicators. I thought that was enough, but I was wrong.

Maybe it was enough for me, but it was not enough for the forty employees of the organization. I spent my first year struggling to understand why we were so slow, why things never happened, why we missed deadlines, why people did not understand what was expected to happen, and why people did not deliver as I expected. I had many whys and no answers. I had to learn fast how to become successful, as a manager and as a team.

After a few months of managing, I had to change what I was doing. Otherwise, a clear failure was waiting for my team and me. What did I do? I started with setting and clarifying goals; utilized a priority list for the month and quarter; deployed the priorities into practical action plans; and started with action reviews. Things began to improve, and every time I introduced a new tool, I saw positive results. However, something was missing. After a year, I discovered what it was. It was another essential topic taught at business schools: vision and mission! This is why I present this tool as the first one of the rational part of this book. It must be the starting point of everything.

The first time I spoke about why we existed as a team and company was with my management line in an off-site leadership team. I prepared a few slides to introduce how everyone has a challenging mission, and at least one why. I used an example to show how missions can be extremely challenging. I spoke about the moon landing in 1969 and showed a picture of the three astronauts: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. I said, "Those men had a mission to land on the moon, and