76 - Being Easy To Manage - Output Oriented

A focus on delivering vs doing

I’m writing about being easy to manage. How it has a critical impact on the performance of a team, as well as a huge impact as a virtuous circle superpower for a person’s career learning and growth. This is the advice I would have benefitted from early in my career. There was not being a yes man or woman. Then there was symbiotically lucky. Next is output oriented.

Output oriented means quite literally a focus on outputs vs inputs. A focus on delivering as opposed to doing. The person is focused on the outputs they are responsible for delivering as opposed to the tasks they feel they have been told to do. There are concentric levels to this. The zenith is that the person thinks from the largest concentric level of what the organisation is attempting to achieve down. It’s like the builder analogy of building a cathedral down to building the lower North wall to the input task of laying bricks.

Why is this important to someone being easy to manage? If a person is not output oriented, then the manager needs to take sole responsibility for assessing whether the inputs are the right ones. This requires more management bandwidth and reduces managerial leverage. Now its not to say that a manager can or should abdicate responsibility for a report’s inputs altogether. But two heads are better than one, infinitely so when one of those is on the frontline of doing.