Continuous Management™ – A Competitive Advantage
What is Continuous Management
You’re probably familiar with some continuous patterns.
The idea is to act frequently and in small increments instead of seldom and in big batches. Consistency over intensity.
If you’ve been in the software industry before agile, you might remember the integration of work every 3 or 6 months, which was extremely painful, lengthy, expensive and resulted in errors and low quality. Continuous integration is about integrating small changes frequently, so they are easy to incorporate, reason about and revert quickly if necessary.
Similarly, continuous delivery makes sure that we can deploy to production at any given moment, without any politics, drama or special efforts.
Continuous deployment goes a step further and makes sure production is always up to date.
Continuous code review, a.k.a pair-programming, ensures focused work and prevents context switches and delays that the “pull request and code review” model requires.
In the mechanical world, vehicles have continuously variable transmission which is a transmission that has unlimited gear ratios. It differs from the common ones that provide a limited number of gear ratios in fixed steps. The advantages are smoothness, efficiency and a close match to the needs of the moment. It’s not popular as it still has some mechanical disadvantages.
Continuous improvement, Kaizen from Japanese, is the process of frequently reflecting and making improvements, unlike improvements that happen only after a major incident or once a year.
The very same principle applies to management or better yet – effective management.
While there are management styles such as “management by exception“, that interfere only when something dramatically negative happens, they are not very effective and have other drawbacks. The absentee manager, afraid of micro-managing, is even more neglecting.
We humans love shortcuts and magic solutions, don’t we?
Pay $4000 to quit smoking in a single session or buy this $19.99 book that will reveal the secret of getting rich. In most cases, they are Fata Morgana, and the hopeful individual disillusions and reverts to hard work.
What does continuous management look like in practice?
No shortcuts. No “managing” once per month in a town hall meeting or in singular dramatic “management moments” shown in movies, such as layoffs done by a third party.
Effective management is “boring and unsexy work” as repeated by Manager Tools. Examples:
Work on relationships with your manager, colleagues, stakeholders, vendors, customers – keep investing. Work is much easier when you know people. Have you recently received a “cold reach” from someone and easily ignored it?
Hold weekly 1:1s with your direct reports and occasional skip-level meetings with their directs.
Give constant feedback – positive and negative feedback to improve future behavior.
Coach your direct report – they will be able to do more: effectiveness, speed, quality, and business continuity.
Delegate – free yourself for higher-value activities.
Set psychological safety and maintain it, to encourage knowledge sharing, creativity and not hiding errors.
Use DiSC for effective communication – “communication is what the listener does”. If you want to be effective, you need to speak in a language they understand.
Measure important metrics such as OKRs, business outcomes, KPIs, quality, delivery speed, attrition, etc.
Keep thinking about both the strategy and the tactics – what needs to change? Carve out weekly thinking time, make a plan and lead changes for the benefit of the company.
Repeat, repeat, repeat: you may have been thinking about a topic for a while and it’s very clear to you. But this is not the case with others. You need to remind and repeat, whether the big “why”, the goals, the initiatives and the small tasks, the reasoning behind a process or agreements about the ways of working.
Continuous Management Conclusion
Management is not just a title and a salary, nor is it only the responsibility. Management is a work that the manager needs to constantly do in order to be effective – Continuous Management.