Monday, May 10, 2010

My Favorite Management Acronyms – Part 1

My Favorite Management Acronyms –Part 1

As I plan my upcoming meeting with a green management team, I find myself returning to acronyms proved useful with other groups that struggle with the demands of product management, sales and marketing, customer satisfaction, employee supervision, and personal and professional success. The two I describe below will be familiar to many of you and new to others, so use them as reminders or as additions to your portfolio of easy-to-remember tools.

The first acronym and management guideline: If you want to succeed and you want your work groups to succeed, you must GROW.

GROW: Goals, Reality, Options, Will

1. Goal: What do you want to achieve?
2. Reality: What is your current situation in the form of money, time, energy, and resources available to achieve those goals?
3. Options: what are the best choices to make given your reality?
4. Will: do you have the determination to do this?

 The first three can be figured out sitting at your desk. The fourth one, Will, is the kicker and the key. Without will, without motivation, or without desire, your goals will gather dust on the shelf labeled “Good Heart and Kind Intent.”

The second acronym and management guideline: Creating objectives that are SMART comes next if you want to move forward.

SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-framed.

1. Specific: Is the result you want to achieve, concrete, explicit and not open to interpretation by anyone?
2. Measurable: What evidence will you present that proves you have accomplished what you set out to do? “Some,” “a few,” “many,” and “most” won’t hold up when you think seven new customers is “some” and your employee thinks “three” is some.
3. Achievable: Can you actually do this within the resources you have available, such as money, time, energy, people, and money? It's good to set stretch objectives, but not impossible ones.
4. Relevant: Will the accomplishment of this objective make a difference to you or your organization in the long run? Learning to play a guitar can be a worthy achievement for an individual, but it likely is not fitting to spend organizational training dollars to pay for the lessons?
5. Time-framed: What date do you plan to complete this? “As soon as possible,” “quickly,” “within the next day or so” are not tight timeframes, leave too much wiggle room, and will not get the job done.
6. My test question: Can you prove to me, an outsider, you have done this? Can I see it, touch it, taste it, hear it, or smell it? Kind heart and good intent sound terrific, but don't get too far with me when it comes time to demonstrating you actually have accomplished anything.

In Part II next month I’ll talk about several other acronyms I find useful. One refers to a music genre and another to a popular beverage. Can you guess what they are? Do you have favorite acronyms? Comments are welcome.

Posted by Bernice Johnston at 7:19 pm

Labels: communication practices  leadership  managing/supervising  personal & career development  success factors  transition to management  work challenges