What do you manage best?

When you think about all the things an average person manages in a day - time, people, money, projects, etc - it gets downright daunting.  If you spend a little more time thinking about the management aspect of the work, you realize that there's a broad range of management skills and none of us can be excellent at all of these capabilities.

I started to write down recently all the "discrete" management tasks and realized that eventually one should consider a business as people managing other things.  That list of "things" includes:

- People managing themselves
- People managing other people (teams, divisions)
- People managing money
- People managing time
- People managing customers or partners
- People managing processes
- People managing projects

Now, you could argue that people managing projects is just a combination of managing time and resources and other people, and I guess you'd be correct.  However, if we break these management tasks down to their root form, we can begin to ask an interesting question:  What you are really good at managing?

It's hard enough in an interrupt driven society to manage your own work and time, much less to manage others, but most of us are called on to do that consistently.  Add in the management of projects and money, which most of us do regularly, and the complexity mounts.  Most of us with experience will say that we can manage most of these items fairly well, but clearly it is hard to manage all of these factors equally well.  Baseball scouts are constantly on the lookout for the mythical "five tool" player - one who is fast, can hit for power and average, who is an excellent fielder and who has a great arm.  Those Five Tool players are few and far between, but that doesn't mean that the game suffers.  Three tool and four tool players make up the majority of the players, and the managers seek to reinforce their strengths and camoflage their weaknesses.

So, in a fit of self examination I looked at the skills I possess and evaluated myself on these different management strengths:

- Managing myself - 4 out of 5 - still room for improvement
- People managing other people (teams, divisions) - 3.5 out of 5
- People managing money - 2 out of 5 - Never had a knack for money - that's why I'm in marketing not finance
- People managing time - 4 out of 5
- People managing customers or partners - 4 out of 5
- People managing processes - 4 out of 5
- People managing projects - 3 out of 5

So, needless to say, I like to surround myself with strong project managers who are detailed oriented, and prefer to have a strong, interested, capable budget analyst or financial analyst on my team.  Those are areas I've long recognized I have neither the knack nor strong interest in managing myself, and I seek to reinforce known weaknesses with people who like managing these factors.

To make it to the top, I think you probably have to excel at most, if not all of these management factors, but I think a great manager and leader can surround themselves with the right people to round out any weaknesses.  If you were to rank yourself on this spectrum, where do your strengths lie?

Comments

[Random Name]

This is one of your best postings. I've worked for several very bright entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, because they were very bright in many areas, they wee convinced they were bright at everything, including areas where they were not so bright.

One of the highest skills for smart people is recognizing when and where they are not especially adept, and bringing people strong in those areas and being willing to listen to them.