It’s Friday and I will start with a food thought this week. I’m a fan of every cooking magazine on the planet, as you should know by now. One of the things many of them have is some sort of time estimate on recipes – this long to prep, this long to cook. Those estimates are usually pretty far off. The reality is that I can do mise en place for almost any recipe faster than most folks in my home and even the slowest of us around my house can do it faster than a real beginner. Our skills make those estimates inappropriate and incorrect.
We also have a cook top that puts out more BTU‘s than does our furnace, so we can cook at restaurant temps (I won’t bore you with the tale of the 6 weeks it took me to relearn how to cook this way after cooking on an electric cooktop for years). This means that often the cooking times are often off as well. Fascinating stuff, I know, but what does this have to do with you?Fast forward to the office. When asked how long a task would take, as a younger manager I’d often make the mistake that the recipes do and give time estimates based on me actually doing the task. I’d often let my mouth write time checks my staff couldn’t cash. My assistant called this the “Ritter Time Factor” and told me that I should take whatever estimate I came up with and multiply it by 10 to get something everyone could achieve. It’s not that I was 10 times faster, but when one factors in time to explain, teach, learn, do, correct, and redo, it often takes a lot longer than we think. My making unrealistic time commitments placed unneeded stress on myself and my staff.
Being an effective manager requires the ability to understand that you are not your staff. Hopefully they have skills you don’t and can do some things faster (I am a hopeless coder, for example) but may lack your skill in other areas (I can write quickly and correctly – faster than most). You have to know your folks well enough to make accurate estimates or, even better, have a good enough relationship with them so they trust you and give you their own accurate timings.
I got better over time (I think I got the factor down to 3x) but like the recipe written for everyone, I could always try to be more accurate. That’s what keeps clients and bosses happy!
Consult Keith 