How to manage fulfulling two roles in the same organisation 3

[epoisses_]

The company I work for is slowly converting itself to a matrix organisation. Since we're relatively small, we don't have all that much overhead and almost everyone in the upper half of the pyramid has at least 2 caps on (roles to fulfill). Behind the impressive matrix structure it's the same handful of people that try to do all the work invented for them

Since a few years I have been product manager as well as sales manager to a few key accounts. Maybe it's just me but I have a lot of difficulty finding the right balance and even finding the big picture back in all the work I'm supposed to do. I get all dispersed in spite of trying various ways of working. In one role I have important things to do, the other role brings urgent things and as always the urgent to do's dominate and what is important never gets done.

Tried to attribute certain days to one job and the other days to the other, but such concepts are usually overthrown by every day events, meetings, business trips and what have you.
Tried the Outlook to do list for all the things I should not forget. It's a major stress factor having all those red flags in front of you and I tend to get lost in detail and lose focus completely.
Tried the opposite, deliberately forgot the smallest/least important of actions and focus on what my brain can contain -- made the stress level drop somewhat but not really satisfying in the end.
Right now management wants me to take a more worldwide product manager role -- obviously the rest of my work remains and noone to shove it to because they're all out of their depth.

So I'm wondering how to get cleverer and more efficient and get more done -- or at least get more done of what is important. I'd be thankful for any helpful hint

 

[Mr168]

You're not really managing if you're doing everything yourself.

Is it that the work is truly "out of their depth", or is it that you assume your employees can't handle the work, and consequently, have never so much as tried to delegate it to them? It's difficult, especially as an engineer, to assign work to subordinates, knowing they will fail initially on some percentage of it. This is part of a mental safety mechanism that a lot of engineers have, and can be a tough habit to break.

If you're not really managing people, and everyone there just has a "manager" in their title, then the company needs to evaluate their staffing needs, especially if there is no "plan B" for someone quitting, taking medical leave of absence, etc.

 

[gerhardl]

I was once in a situation where the top management reorganized the company into a matrix organization.

This was a sales company with 30 plus factories supplying us with different products, with 10- 15 product groups, 5 customer groups, and 15 managers partly to do the daily work and partly to do (different) managing work.

This was organized in two-dimensional matrix, about 15x20=300 'boxes' to be managed and reported on. (In reality this is actually a 3- dimensional matrix times at least 5).

The company had less than 50 employees. The result was nearly disastrous. I warned against this when the organization was proposed, and became of course very unpopular with the top management. (I got my revenge when the GM was sacked half a year later, and his second replaced.)

I suspect perhaps you are hooked up in a similar organization, fit for a company about 100 times larger than the actual, too much reporting, and complicated and unclear cross-connections, and unfit for the actual work.

Some top managers are more concerned about reporting and managing system than how people doing the work can perform, excel and be happy by working together.

My thought is that you are OK, the company organization and top management not.

In this way, your way out is the front door. The difficult alternative is to get the leadership to 'see the light': search the net for 'best place to work' philosophy.

Good luck!

 

[epoisses_]

@Mr168 Yeah I only have manager in my title but no team to manage, I can only delegate sidewards or upwards :'(
You are right, part of the solution will be more delegation (needs some study as to how to), more saying "no", less time spent reading/writing emails...

@gerhardl Thanks for that, I feel better already! A friend of mine who is a management consultant once told me, from a size of about 500 employees, an organisation can keep itself permanently busy without any external stimuli. It seems like with a 3D or 5D matrix structure, you reach that point already with less than 50 employees. Scary

Re front door, this was always a great place to work, in the middle of nowhere -- engineers are not supposed to find work in this rural area. And I think it still is, in spite of the unfortunate matrix plan. I can't change that anyway I just need to get more time-efficient.

 

[zdas04]

I can't really relate to the pressures of a sales/marketing role but I've frequently had multiple "full time" engineering jobs. To deal with conflicting priorities, I would start every day by asking myself "Are any of today's tasks safety or environmentally critical? If not, which priority will make the company the most money if done or cost the company the most money if not done?" The task that won got the primary space on my desk, on my computer, and on my mind. If that task was seriously time critical then I turned off my phone and e-mail and shut my door (when I had a door, when I didn't have a door I relied upon a practiced snarl to drive off distractions). I would work on that priority until it got to a place where it was waiting on others (i.e., a review, a reply to an RFQ, etc.) and then started over with the priority question. I found that (for me), putting a monetary value or opportunity cost on the work focused my thinking.

I also found that many things that I really wanted to think about that may have a huge future value, but were very speculative never got done and a few months later I would realize that either my hare brained idea had less value than my initial enthusiasm had cooked up or (after some subconscious thought) the idea had matured to the point where it could (and should) get priority.

An anecdote as I'm wont to do: I was once working 70-90 hours per week and killing myself. My boss walked in and threw yet another urgent, must do, ultimate priority project on my desk. I asked "which of my other projects can slip their due dates?" He gave me the classic "we have nights and we have weekends" line. I walked out of the building at quitting time that day with nothing but my lunch box in my brief case and went to join a gym. For the next year I worked EXACTLY 40 hours/week. Never worked weekends. Never took work home. At the end of that year I had a very similar backlog to what I had when I was working 2 weeks/week. That made me realize that the more I did, the more would be expected of me. The less I did, the less would be piled on. My performance reviews said that I was still performing above expectations, so my mini-strike didn't hurt me. At the end of the year I was kind of bored so I gradually went back to my old ways, but I never felt bad about missing other people's arbitrary imposed deadlines again (while being very careful to always meet the deadlines that I negotiated).

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[SandCounter]

I've found you get the best ROI on the first 85%. No matter how much time you spend, the last 15% will always invite opinion and re-work. At 85% send it on for review by the circular firing squad. When the dust settles, take the final buy-in and wrap it up . . . or let someone else. There are plenty of people who are more than willing to do the last 15% and take full credit. It's all about creating momentum.

I used to count sand. Now I don't count at all.

 

[hendersdc]

Your employer will always take as much time as you are willing to give them. It sounds like you are overloaded and need to have a talk with your boss. They need to reduce your workload or hire/find someone else to do a portion of it if it all really needs to get done.

I don't think the constant overloading of people is done on purpose, it seems that more often people assigning work just don't realize you are killing yourself to get it all done or think you are like David and enjoy the work enough that extra hours above 40 isn't an imposition.

 

[zdas04]

The key to my way of working is to enjoy it. The SECOND you feel like people are imposing on you (i.e., you feel like a victim), STOP. You are getting paid for whatever your contractual obligation is (usually 40 hours/week, but not always), any work beyond that obligation must be compensated some way. As long as I'm having fun and no one is acting like my time is theirs, then the enjoyment has always been adequate compensation. If someone tells me I have to work extra for the same money, I get stubborn and go limp. I never fight with them, I just start calling the boss and asking for their input and waiting patiently until I hear back. If they ask why I'm working on a non-priority task (there is always a stack of training, or surveys, or HR feedback or some other time-wasting nonsense) I just say that the main project is waiting on their input, do they have it yet? For me it has worked every time.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[Terratek]

What I read is that you are doing all these things and don't have time for it all. You can't delegate because those you could delegate would be out of their depth. Here are some solutions:

1.You work more hours. (probably not sustainable)
2.Your company hires another you. (direct competition for your pay and promotion)
3.You learn to train and/or trust these "out of depth" people. (it gets harder before it gets easier)
4.Fire "out of depth" people under you and hire competent ones. (also gets harder before it gets easier)

If you are interested in advancing to the top, you'll find a way to make 3 or 4 work. If you love to be the worker bee who knows and does better than everyone else, stick with 1 or 2.

 

[IRstuff]

I guess the elephant is, "why are they out of their depth?" As a manager, you should be training your subordinates and delegating. And yes, that's yet another thing on your plate. If they can't, or won't, be trained, then you need to do something about that. I know it's very painful to let go of these sorts of things, but if you are really expecting to move up, then you need to give up most of those fun things that you do better than others. The alternative is that you slave until 8 pm every day, trying to do two jobs in a single shift and not see your wife or kids until the divorce.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[epoisses_]

No I don't work 80 hours, that's for 25 year olds. That's 2 decades ago. Got close to divorce a year ago but realized just in time that work is only my number 6 priority in life.

The problem with being in (technical) sales is that you can't be as assertive to a client as to a co-worker. (Or can you?? that may be another elephant). I'm in an organisation that never says no to a client. Or to anyone really. I think we should really consider sending our worst customers to the competition (the competition has probably done the opposite until now ). It would be a major cultural change. Here it's like, every client is important, everything is important really, prioritizing is hard.

As for delegating, we have a bunch of sales assistants to delegate operational work to, but these people have always been deprived of the slightest responsibility. This company was run by micro-managers until recently. 15 years ago the assistants used to be only just good enough to type a hand-written letter and then have someone else filter the spelling mistakes out. I'm not exaggerating. They come from so far away and have gone a good distance, but some of them just can't or won't OWN things, they insist on me and others checking their work. In practice they would like send me a draft invoice, which I would be reading on my phone somewhere in a line at an airport without any actual data at hand, and they would then expect me to approve or point out the booboo they left in there. That is obviously not working as I keep telling them. It's an ongoing battle to change the situation and have them own their own work and get the trivial stuff off my desk.

I could for sure share some of the technical part of my job with R&D. I just takes a lot of time to talk it through and get better organized, in order to gain time later on...

 

[epoisses_]

@Terratek
option 3 definitely

 

[CWB1]

Engineers are only supposed to wear one figurative "hat?" That's a new concept to me.

JMO but I would start by making a list of your duties and responsibilities to define your position. You can then use that to look for overlap or opportunities to delegate work to others and try to focus on the core aspects of your role. You might also review a few job descriptions/postings to understand what is expected of others in similar roles. Your titles sound rather strange to me given the brief description of your roles given, it might be irrelevant but incorrect titles might be pushing unnecessary work your way as well.