• Director - I work 16 hours a day to make sure this facility runs properly;
  • Me - Oh wow! What happens when you’re not there?
  • Director - The hell breaks loose, everything stops, nobody does anything;
  • Me - I bet you don’t sleep well when you go on vacation…

Stop saying what time it is. Start building the clock. (quoted: J. Collins)

Micromanagement = active management. Processes = passive management.

The first “watchdog.” The second “stock title.”


THE 3 BENEFITS OF DEVELOPING PROCESSES

Although it may be difficult to understand the concept—especially for some senior managers/administrators, since they’ve been trained all their lives to do it this way—the benefits of replacing micromanagement with process development are:

1) They increase revenue and profits

Defined, stable, and autonomous processes mean scalability.

1, 10, 100, or 1000—nothing changes. The process is always the same, but the units increase: volumes, people, parts to produce, or signed-off offers. It’s modular.

In addition, a defined and optimized process guarantees the maximum output with the best efficiency. Instead, micromanagement is subjective management based entirely on the individual human being, with all their virtues—but also all their limitations (noise, lack of ubiquity, etc.).

2) They solve details you’ll never be able to know

We could stay on site even 2000 hours a day, but we would still never know how all the different activities work.

Not knowing how things work is the same as making wrong decisions.

If, instead, we were superhuman and knew everything in every tiniest detail, our brain wouldn’t have the computational capacity to manage all the data available—so making the right choices would be impossible.

3) They’re more responsive when it comes to making decisions

Has it ever happened to you that you had to wait for your supervisor’s approval? Probably many other people are waiting for a decision too. This means one thing: a bottleneck (political, in this case).

But if processes and objectives are well designed, staff will be able to make the right decision on their own and in a timely manner—under any circumstances. Even without you.


CONCLUSION

Design defined processes, without too many details so you don’t lock everything in—but with clear guidelines.

Set measurable objectives with specific strategy-oriented KPIs and monitor whether they are correctly achieved.

Your time will be dedicated only to strategic activities, such as designing other processes, long-term goals, and the company’s profitability.


You can learn and apply the productivity methods from the content mentioned with the following training courses: