“Management. The Art Of Getting Things Done”
Welcome back to TRIM.
TRIM
“Management. The Art Of Getting Things Done”
In the work context, it is almost inevitable that your aims and goals will depend to some extent on the success of your organisation – so, even if you were not being paid to do so, it’s in your best interest to make it work as well as possible. People will normally work harder to achieve their own goals than those of their employer – so if you’re in a position to do so, it makes sense to ensure that the goals of the organisation are as much as possible in line with those of the individuals working for it. This includes you. Management styles change, and different techniques might work well in different situations. Genghis Khan and Mahatma Ghandi were both superb leaders and managers, but they clearly didn’t go to the same management training school. Nevertheless, they both achieved great success by making sure that their followers shared the same goals as they did.
I define ‘management’ as being the skill of combining the information you have, the relationships which you are part of and the time you have available to ensure that you consistently achieve the most advantageous outcome for yourself. In fact, if you have the information and the relationships right, the management will pretty much look after itself. The TRIM tools provide a simple and reliable way of making sure everything fits together properly. This is the best way of persuading others to give more than they would otherwise give in the pursuit of achieving your goals – or if you like, getting them to do what you want them to do.
Look at it another way. Let’s say you want to meet some friends in the pub on Wednesday evening. To make this work, you have to mix in all the elements above. First, you need to check that you have no other commitments that evening – and maybe that the rest of your family doesn’t have any plans that affect you. That’s‘time’. Then you’ll want to find out if your chums are free and would like to get together. That’s ‘relationships’. Finally, ‘information’: you need to choose the pub and the time to meet, and make sure you tell everyone else. ‘Management’ means pulling all these different bits together so that all the arrangements work with no problems. Of course I’m not suggesting that you need to go through a routine to complete all these steps, simply to fix a visit to the pub. In a simple case like this, your brain does them all automatically and you hardly even need to think about it. But real life produces much more complex problems, all the time, and it is often helpful to be able to break them down into manageable bits which you can solve individually and then stitch back together. This is what TRIM helps you to do.
‘Efficiency’ is about getting things done. So in TRIM terms, it means doing what you said you would do, never letting people down, never forgetting things you have committed to do. Being efficient is absolutely essential if you want to achieve your goals – but it’s not enough. To really make an impression you need to be not only efficient, but effective too.
‘Effectiveness’ is about not only doing things, but using your abilities to accomplish them in the best possible way – the most useful, the most timely, the most economical in terms of time and money. Effectiveness is the result of combining all of your decisions about how you use your time and your abilities, to maximise the outcome for your and other people’s benefit. If ‘efficiency’ equals ‘quantity’, then ‘effectiveness’ equals ‘quality’ – and it is by effectiveness that you will be measured and judged by your family, friends and colleagues.
That is it for now.
Next week I want to cover "The Five Steps To A Better Life". The practical links between motivation & achievement
Until next week’s article.
In the meantime, more details on using TRIM to increase your effectiveness can be found in the TRIM book which is available to purchase at www.abmtrim.com
Best Regards,
Stuart
TRIM
The Practical Links Between Motivation And Achievement