Measuring Your Output as a Manager

So far we’ve looked at how classifying daily activities into buckets can help you to better reason on how you spend your time as a manager and feel productive doing so. But how do you actually measure your output?

The best rule of thumb is:

This is simple yet powerful: it can be used to make decisions about how to spend your time. Think about it for a moment and you may begin to see what framing your output in this way means:

• You are ultimately accountable for your team’s output. If they’re not able to perform well, then it’s your job to improve it.

• Your team’s output is more important than your own personal output. This means you should be spending more time delegating, coaching, and mentoring, rather than doing tasks yourself.

• You also do your work through those outside your team that you influence. This means all of that nudging and being a role model is important. It helps improve the rest of the organization too.

  Having this equation as a mental model to use when deciding how best I should allocate my time has time and time again made me a better manager.

  Look at the equation again, and then do the following:

  • Think about your previous week at work. With the equation in mind, would you have made different decisions about how to spend your time? If so, why is that? If not, why did your activities align with the equation?
  • Visualize the best manager that you’ve ever had in your career. Can you reason as to why they were the best by using this equation?
  • Keeping that manager in your mind, are you able to reason about their output using the four categories that we defined previously?
  • Now think about the worst manager you’ve had. Oh go on, you don’t need to tell anyone who it is. Why were they a bad manager in relation to the equation and categories of activities? What were they not doing?