Effective Management Tip: Loose or Tight Control

One thing all of us, managers, struggle is how tight you want to control something. You control tight, it surely leads to frustration. You let loose, chances are someone will goof up. Ofcourse THE best method to lead someone is based on the principles of "Situational Leadership", that says your leadership style should dependent on the task and the person's competence and temperament to do that particular task. However, on a day to day basis we come across numerous events that calls for some type of control, and the temptation is always to control it tight. I use the following to make a decision on what type of control one should use:

Tight Control: Rigor, Quality, Commitments, Customer escalations, Things related to NI core values and culture

Loose Control: Work plan/approach, individual preferences not coming in the way of team effectiveness,

The key idea is to make sure we keep humans as humans. Love to hear your thoughts.

Ten questions for work that matters

I ran into this article in Seth Godin's blog and it looked so good that I thought I'd produce it verbatim here

What are you doing that's difficult?

What are you doing that people believe only you can do?

Who are you connecting?

What do people say when they talk about you?

What are you afraid of?

What's the scarce resource?

Who are you trying to change?

What does the change look like?

Would we miss your work if you stopped making it?

What do you stand for?

What contribution are you making?

Hints: Any question that's difficult to answer deserves more thought. Any answers that are meandering, nuanced or complex are probably a symptom of something important.