A Quick Start-Up as A New Director

What do young new directors need to learn for a good start?

If the department is in decent shape without any urgent issues to attend to or impending disasters to cope with, here are five very basic but very useful things a young new director (manager) should learn first.

1. Always work with paper and a pen first. Write down your thoughts, sketch the plan, map the key steps to take, list essential conditions, and mark potential pitfalls and your solutions. This seems to be very simple but extremely difficult to cultivate into a habit. Nevertheless, this exercise is fundamentally important. It's been estimated by leading experts, about 50% of problems are solved or find the right solution at the end of this exercise.

2. Manage yourself first (the most important person to manage is yourself; the most important part to manage yourself is to manage your time; the most effective way to manage your time is to prioritize with intense focus).

3. Make sure adequacy proceeds excellence. Essential operations should be managed or maintained adequately before devoting effort to pursue any excellence. Remember the 1/5 rule -- for every one mistake or screw up you need five positive things to compensate for the damage.

4. For any proposal or task, make it a policy first to maximize its chance to succeed. My five Ps -- policy, procedure, process, protocol, and people. You need to go through the last four Ps to make the proposal a policy, which then in turn can guide enforcement on the rest.

5. Leadership by collaborating instead of leading. By collaborating strategy, your decisions tend to be more consultative, your efforts seem to be more supportive, and your assertions sound more considerate. In essence, you make changes or progress without risking being a loner, laboring to death, or being a target of jealousy.

Unfortunately, they seem to be too conceptually simple to be consistently adopted. Two methods may help the adoption - tie them to habits you already firmly cultivated and use reminders or checklist tools.

References

1. Harvard Business Review Press. The Harvard Business Review manager's handbook : The 17 skills leaders need to stand out. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press; 2017.

2. Drucker PF, Maciariello JA. The daily Drucker: 366 days of insight and motivation for getting the right things done. 1st ed. New York: HarperBusiness; 2004.

3. Su AJ. Whiteboard Session: Manage the Workload of Being a Leader. How to achieve your goals while keeping stress under control. In: Harvard Business Review Press. 2017.

4. Harvard Business Review Press. Getting work done: prioritize your work, be more efficient, take control of your time: Harvard Business Review Press,; 2014.

5. Mainwaring S. Lead with We: the business revolution that will save our future. Dallas, TX: Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc.; 2021.

6. Dierdorff EC. Time Management Is About More Than Life Hacks. 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/01/time-management-is-about-more-than-life-hacks. January 29.