This cast concludes our guidance explaining the One-Third Planning Rule: when assessing and assigning work to your team, never take more than 1/3 of the available time to do so.

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This guidance explains the One-Third Planning Rule: when assessing and assigning work to your team, never take more than 1/3 of the available time to do so.

Mark's brother once sent him a joke memo, about all the ways managers DON'T motivate their teams. One of the items was, "always wait until 5 o'clock to give me important stuff to do — I like surprises right before I go home." "In all humor, truth," unfortunately. Lots of bosses are inconsiderate when thinking about how much time they need to think about something versus how much time their directs need to actually DO something.

Your team wants to know NOW when you get a requirement or job or project or new tasking that they're going to be involved in. They do NOT want you to wait one second longer than you have to. Surely not until they're about to go home!

But wait. You want some time to think things through, right? You don't want to assign something and discover an hour's worth of your thought would have saved 50 of their man-hours. So, it makes sense to spend time to get things right, think through the issues, risks, etc.

Who's right?

Both are ... and the way to manage your responsibility is to follow the One-Third Planning Rule.

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This cast concludes our recommendations on developing your directs by always having them have more to do than they have time to do…by assigning and delegating more work than they think they can do.

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This cast continues our recommendations on developing your directs by always having them have more to do than they have time to do…by assigning and delegating more work than they think they can do.

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This guidance recommends developing your directs by always having them have more to do than they have time to do…by assigning and delegating more work than they think they can do.

Great bosses assign more work than their directs can do. It's that simple. Great bosses don't try to figure out what each of their directs' comfort level is. They don't negotiate a balance. They don't start small with an amount that anyone could do, and then develop a gradual plan of improvement.

Nope. They intentionally give everyone more work to do than they think or know or believe or hope they can do. They OVER-ASSIGN. They OVER-delegate. They don't try to get an exact right balance – there is no such thing. What is true of communications is true of work responsibility assignments: you're either going to do too much, or too little, but the chance you're going to do exactly the right amount is marginally ZERO. So, the only question is whether you're going to be above or below what your team is capable of. What most managers do is try to balance two largely unrelated factors – how much work the organization seems to be demanding of you, and how busy your directs say they are.

We are tempted to call this cast the Peter Drucker Productivity Guidance. Why? Because Drucker once said, the productivity of the worker is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.




The productivity of the worker is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.

— Peter Drucker


Isn't some of what the organization asks of you and yours largely unnecessary? (Of course it is: you're not doing it and not getting in any trouble). And isn't it likely that your directs are over-stating how busy they are? (Of COURSE they are – no one, we'd bet, has ever said to you, hey, I'm not that busy, give me some more to do.) So, effective managers realize that the way to address this is to have the right, best work efforts force out the work that is least likely to be valuable. And that means over-assigning…and teaching triage and prioritization to your team.

Here's how you can get more productivity. Because you do NOT want to disappoint Mr. Drucker!

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This cast concludes our discussion on how to assign tasks to your directs.

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This guidance describes how to assign tasks to your directs.

One of the great examples of the utter lack of clarity regarding the teaching of management is the lack of guidance provided about how to assign work. Here's something we do every day, sometimes 20 times a day. But has anyone ever suggested to you there's a right way, or a better way? We'd bet money not.

Seriously, what kind of sense does this make? This is something we do a LOT. A LOT. And no one has taught us to do it right? We're not aware of a single source of information about how to be effective at assigning a work task to someone. Not one single one. If you know of one, please let us know.

We may be wrong – we're so frustrated by this that we know we're not as clear-minded as we need to be – but we think this boils down to the widely-held and completely wrong-headed idea that management is a personal choice, born out of personality and individual style. We'd like to repeat here for the eleventy-billionth time that leaving the system of managerial influence in a firm to individual choices and personality is perhaps the systematically dumbest thing we know of. Managerial influence – the practice of managing others' outputs – is the biggest, most important system in every organization. We continue to be amazed that after spending billions on systematizing purchasing, logistics, materials handling, accounting, safety, costing, vendor relations, expense reporting, site security, strategy formulation, enterprise requirements planning, information technology adoption, capability maturity models, and compensation decisions, to name just a few, we still have left the biggest lever of all unaddressed.

Somebody ought to teach this stuff. ;-)

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This cast concludes (Part 4 of 4) our guidance on how to respond when, through any number of factors, you and your team are OVERWHELMED with lots of new work. Perhaps it's a layoff, perhaps it's a re-organization, perhaps it's because you're GOOD. Regardless, what do you DO??

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This cast continues (Part 3 of 4) our guidance on how to respond when, through any number of factors, you and your team are OVERWHELMED with lots of new work. Perhaps it's a layoff, perhaps it's a re-organization, perhaps it's because you're GOOD. Regardless, what do you DO??

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This cast continues our guidance on how to respond when, through any number of factors, you and your team are OVERWHELMED with lots of new work. Perhaps it's a layoff, perhaps it's a re-organization, perhaps it's because you're GOOD. Regardless, what do you DO??

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