Being mentored by Intel’s CEO

I’ve yet to have the opportunity of being mentored, of being taken under the wing of somebody I aspire to, someone who, demonstrating the skills of a honed leader, empowers me and gives me the perspective of a life of experiences, successes and failures.

I’d really love to find that, even closing in on 40 years and having made good progress in my career.

The closest I’ve gotten so far to having such an experience is through reading. A few weeks back I wrote about the art of leadership, where for a couple of weeks I became Max de Pree’s mentee, and was inspired by a humanist view of leadership that became transformational to me.

This time, I got to be mentored by Andrew S. Grove, former Intel’s CEO and somebody that, through precise execution and honed business acumen, helped Intel navigate one of the most challenging periods in its history, having to make dramatic changes to its business model to survive.

Mr. Grove’s master class on management in High Output Management, reads part tutorial, part father figure giving you sound advice, and covers in-depth on the tactical and practical ins and outs of running a business, managing time and making decisions.

Leverage as a decision-making factor

Time is a very precious resource, there’s little you can do to get more time on your day, it’s as finite as it gets, and everything you do takes up a bit of it.

What’s most important about deciding how to use your time, is not just what you choose to dedicate it to, but the awareness that for everything you decide to place your attention and time on, you are leaving something else undone.

To make things trickier, for most of us in leadership or managerial roles, the range of possible things that need to get done is usually much larger than what can be accomplished in any given time period, we never run out of work.

This is where the concept of leverage comes in, an extremely valuable criteria to use when a choice has to be made as to which activity to perform at any given time.

The idea of leverage can be summarized in the impact towards the total output capacity of the organization given the activity you choose to perform. The more leverage of your activity, whether gathering information, making decisions or influencing others in some specific direction, the higher the output.

You could also go very wrong in your decision-making and choose activities with negative leverage, meaning they will decrease the output of the groups you directly or indirectly influence.

A manager’s output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage. Clearly the key to high output means being sensitive to the leverage of what you do during the day.

Task-relevant maturity

It would be unwise trying to define the level of “maturity” or skill for any one of the team members that we lead as a single value, as a global metric that globally represents their experience.

Even within a single field of expertise, the actual level of experience, maturity and skill on any one specific type of work or challenge may dramatically vary for any given person, and a good manager will identify each specific level of prowess to understand how to best work with her team member.

This is What Andrew Grove refers to when he speaks of task-relevant maturity, it is extremely important to accurately assess the maturity directly related to any one specific objective, in order to successfully delegate and support the development of an employee.

…there is a fundamental variable that tells you what the best management style is in a particular situation. That variable is task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates, which is a combination of the degree of their achievement orientation and readiness to take responsibility, as well as their education, training and experience. Moreover, all this is very specific to the task at hand, and it is entirely possible for a person or a group of people to have a TRM that is high in one job and low in another.

Delegation

The line that divides delegation and abdication is a fine one. To successfully delegate, the manager never releases the responsibility towards the successful execution of a task, and must actively monitor the work delegated.

The type and frequency of monitoring will be determined by the task-relevant maturity of the employee that has received the assignment.

The higher the task-relevant maturity, the less structure and involvement that is required from the manager.

There’s another interesting aspect to delegation, deciding what to choose to delegate. Should you delegate tasks that you are very familiar with, or those with which you aren’t?

Considering that monitoring is an indispensable component of successful delegation, it is of course ideal to delegate those tasks that you are most familiar with, in order to be able to accurately gauge the progress of the work assigned.

Delegating those tasks you are most familiar with however does require a high degree of self-control; monitoring a delegated task is not about meddling, nor prescribing execution, something easier said than done when you’re comfortable with a given task and have a way of going about it that you feel quite confident about.

And another piece of advice on delegation, straight from the words of Andrew:

We should apply quality assurance principles and monitor at the lowest-added-value stage of the process. For example, review rough drafts of reports that you have delegated; don’t wait until your subordinates have spent time polishing them into final form before you find out that you have a basic problem with the contents.

Meetings

For managers, meetings usually represent a large percentage of their time, therefore, effectively managing meetings and getting the most out of each is definitely something to strategize and hone. Meetings are never an end by themselves, meetings are a medium for a manager to perform the most important aspects of her work: making decisions, gathering information and influencing people.

But meetings are not all made equal, both in terms of the objective and nature of the meeting, as well as the role and expectations on the organizer, decision maker and participants.

Mr. Grove talks about various types of meetings, clearly defining key criteria towards best taking advantage of them. I’ll share some details on a couple of them.

Staff meetings are ideal for decision-making, everybody in the meeting having worked closely together and representing authority across a specific area. The role of the supervisor of the meeting therefore is not to lecture, rather to enable free discussion and ensuring that all participants are actively involved.

He should ask questions, make comments, and in general impart the appropriate spirit to the meetings. He is the catalyst needed to provoke audience participation, and by his example, he should encourage free expression.

1:1 meetings are critical to maintaining a solid business relationship between a manager and her subordinate, and should be held often, also dependent on the task-relevant maturity with the work being performed by the team member. The one on one is not a meeting for the supervisor, it is a meeting for the employee, one for which the team member must prepare and leverage as an opportunity to talk about progress and discuss problems, present or potential.

Training and Motivation

There are two things a manager can do towards her goal of eliciting outstanding performance for her employees: training and motivation.

Motivation is something that can’t be directly executed, in other words, motivation comes from within the individual and can only be encouraged, therefore the manager’s objective is to create an environment that promotes high performance by understanding the highest level needs of the individual, and “shaping the field” to promote the surfacing of the individual’s own motivation.

The other thing a manager can do towards enabling the best performance from her team is training, which is such an important task that the manager should always handle it personally, and eventually training others to continue the process.

Thus, our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals, and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.

Managing yourself

Managing the work of others and fulfilling the ultimate objective of any leader, to elicit top performance from those she leads, is not something to be taken lightly.

To succeed, the first person you must manage is yourself - train yourself, create an environment that promotes your own motivation, organize your time and always choose activities with the highest possible leverage in your self-development.

We must realize -and act on the realization- that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

In a nutshell

It is clear to me why High Output Management has gained legend status across most of the most successful CEOs in Silicon Valley, and why it should be kept handy throughout your day as a manager and leader. Get the book, read it cover to cover and put it to work, and your own ability to perform as a manager, and the performance of those you lead, will undoubtedly become better.

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