Manage by Exception
YOUR MOST PRECIOUS resource is your time. If you are like most people in management, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time to do it in. Every hour of every day, more tasks come in; it’s like a broken production line that you cannot stop or turn off.
To achieve your full potential, you must use every technique possible to get more things done in less time. One of the best of all techniques is called “management by exception.”
In the normal course of management, your job is to get things done through others. You think through the task, assign it to the right person, and then supervise and monitor to make sure the task is done on time.
With management by exception, however, you can minimize the monitoring, controlling, and reporting associated with any delegated task. Once you have clearly determined the job to be done, when and how it is to be done, and how it will be measured, you then assign the job completely and only require that the employee come back to you if there is a problem, delay, or difficulty of any kind.
You make it clear that if the job is on schedule and on budget, no reporting is necessary. The subordinate is free to work. “No news is good news” is your motto.
Management by exception (MBE) is a tremendous time-saving tool for the manager. The way you use it is simple. You simply say, “If everything is going fine and on schedule, there is no need for you to report to me on a regular basis. Just keep me informed with an occasional e-mail, and other than that, I will leave the job completely to you.”
Set Financial Goals
For example, if the job is to sell $1.2 million worth of products over twelve months, that works out to $100,000 worth of products per month. If the sales are consistently at $100,000 per month or more, there is no need to report back. However, if sales drop to $80,000 or even $90,000, this is a variance from the agreed-on standard and needs to be reported to the person who is ultimately in charge of sales results.
Making Plans and Appointments
You will often have situations where you feel that you or the other person needs to confirm a particular time, place, and date of a meeting, or the completion of a job of some kind. In this case, you manage by exception. You simply say, “Let’s plan to speak at 3:00 p.m. by phone on Thursday. If, for any reason, it’s not possible to keep that appointment, one of us can contact the other. Otherwise, I will talk to you on Thursday at three o’clock, okay?”
Rather than checking back and forth, agree to a particular time or result and then suggest that you manage by exception. “I will call you, or you only need to call me, if there is an exception to what we have already agreed upon.”
MBE Works Most of the Time
It is amazing to discover that when you manage by exception, in 90 percent of cases, no further contact or communication is necessary and everything works out on schedule. As a professional speaker and seminar leader, I have booked engagements in sixty-one countries. Traveling to so many places, and speaking on a great variety of subjects, requires a tremendous amount of coordination, especially when it comes to booking flights that get me to the destination on time for the seminar.
In each case, I give myself a margin of safety in terms of timing, but I always tell my clients not to worry. I assure them that if there is any deviation from the agreed-on schedule of arrival, I will let them know well in advance. And I do. By managing by exception, I am able to work smoothly with dozens of clients in dozens of cities all over the world each year.