Today’s topic is learning to micromanage your team, using only a few minutes each day. (Perfect for micromanaging when you’re traveling!)
Bernice, the owner of the Green Growing Things plant shop, has declared that the Goddess wants her to travel to Sedona to learn psychic energy-based cactus growing techniques from an ancient sect of energy healers. Unfortunately, her employees—despite being a political mastermind, an android wunderkind, and her IT-geek fiance—can’t seem to run the shop right without her. She loves them dearly, but let’s face it: she wants to spend her time focusing on her chakras, not hand holding her crew back home. They often need micromanagement, but that takes so much time. Luckily, she can get the benefits of micromanagement without the slow-down by using rapid-fire Madlib meetings.
Change Up Your Check-ins
Remember Madlibs? Madlibs is a game where you play fill-in-the-blank. You have a sentence like “The (profession)___ went to the store.” You ask your friends to yell out a profession. They say, “baker.” You plug it in an read the resulting sentence, “The baker went to the store.” Hilarious!!!
You can use Madlibs for much more serious endeavors. Use Madlibs to do daily micromanagement check-ins. To get started, set up daily 5-minute team meetings at the start of each day. Work with your team members to design a Madlib for each that relates to the work they should be doing on a daily basis.
Melvin, for example, might start his with a status update on the Green Growing Things harvest. “Yesterday I harvested (blank) rows of (blank), and fed the (blank).” The Madlib might also touch on goals for today. So he might add “today I intend to harvest (blank) rows of (blank).” This Madlib neatly gives Melvin a way to measure harvesting progress on a daily basis. Europa, whose current project is taking inventory of all the herbs and spices, might say “Yesterday, I continued the inventory up through (name of a spice).”
In your daily meeting, go around the circle and have each person fill in the blanks on their Madlibs. Call each employee’s name and have them share their filled in Madlib. Melvin would say, “Yesterday I harvested 3 rows of petunias and fed the Albanian Paisley Orchid hybrids. Today I intend to harvest 6 rows of carnations.” The structure of the Madlib puts his attention directly on the measure of what he should be doing.
Add Requests for Help
The Madlib can do more than just put attention on measurements. Add the phrase “Today I need help on (blank)” to the end of each person’s sentence. Now they have a built-in way to ask the rest of the team for help. Quickly. Europa might say “Yesterday, I continued inventory up through parsley. Today I need help with inventorying the ragweek because I’m aller… I’m aller… I’m ALLERGIC! Achoo!”
Once everyone has given their micro-status, give everyone a chance to respond to any requests for help that came up during the check-in. Notice that it’s taken about 15 seconds per person to check in with everyone. Bask in the wonderfulness of Madlibs!
Micromanagement now becomes as simple as designing Madlibs that get each team member to focus on the micro-details they should be paying attention to.
Bernice can now call in for a mere five minutes a day to run Madlibs with her team. First is Melvin, “Yesterday, I planted 8 rows of snapdragons, and fed the clover fields. Today I need help to harvest some honey.” Thomas chimes in that he speaks honeybee and can help with that. In about 20 seconds of meeting, Bernice knows Melvin’s on top of the harvest (surprising, since he’s usually more of a tech person), and that his honeybee problem is under control. In mere minutes, she hears from the rest of the team, and she can go commune with the cacti secure in the knowledge that the shop might survive without her.
Share with the Group
Making your Madlib meetings public also helps your employees manage themselves. Speaking publicly brings out something that one-on-one meeting can’t: that dark but powerful force called peer pressure. Europa doesn’t want to say “I finished the inventory up to ragweed” two days in a row, especially when everyone else is reporting great progress. So she’s more likely to keep her own laziness in check and keep moving.
Public meetings also help people get immediate help on the things they need. In a private meeting, Melvin would have had to tell Bernice that he needed honeybee help. She would have gone out to the group to ask, and come back again, adding needless delay. He might have ended up stalled, worse, he may been tempted to skip that step altogether. With a public Madlib meeting, that’s not an issue.
Also, there’s a convenient little psychological principle that say if you share your goals in public, you’re more likely to keep them. When Melvin declares “I intend to plant 15 rows of beats today,” she won’t be caught dead next meeting saying “yesterday I planted two rows of beats.” The three Ps—pride, peer pressure, and psychology—will keep her happily harvesting. That is, if she’s made her public Madlib declaration.
Stick to the Plan
The Madlibs format also helps you deal with those rogue mavericks who want to shake up your operation. On Bernice’s third day communing with the cacti, Europa’s report breaks format. “Yesterday I decided to investigate the feasibility of breeding a new strain of Audrey IIIs.” Her Madlib on inventory seems to have vanished completely.
Micromanagement now becomes as simple as designing Madlibs that get each team member to focus on the micro-details they should be paying attention to.
Instantly, Bernice knows that Europa is off track with her inventory. Maybe the new Audrey IIIs are a good idea, but maybe they aren’t. Bernice simply says to Europa, “Please fill in your inventory Madlib for today’s check-in, and we can discuss the Audrey IIIs off-line.” If Europa doesn’t want to do more inventory, she’d be refusing in front of the entire team. Not likely. So like it or not, she’s forced to refocus her efforts on inventory, until she and Bernice work out a new Madlib that reflects her changed responsibilities.
When Bernice returns home—wearing a tie-dye bandana, and carrying bags full of her new “spirit cacti”—the shop is as healthy as ever. But that’s no surprise. Thanks to daily Madlib meetings, she’s been able to get the uber-controlling benefits of micro-management with only a few minutes’ investment each day.
And the team has done well. They’ve pushed each other to work harder, by publicly committing to their tasks. They’ve given and received help when needed. And they’ve gotten the reality checks they needed when they strayed from the righteous garden path. So who knows? Even though she’s back in town, Bernice might just keep those Madlibs coming. And when you need to micromanage your team, a Madlib or two might be just what you need.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow Get-It-Done Guy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visitSteverRobbins.com.
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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