Pressures

I've been away for a long long time - going through a transformation, re-focus and re-calibration of sorts for myself. Anyway, last week I was meeting a friend of mine and he was telling me on how his executives sign-up for timelines and then later give him a 24 hour window to turn around his deliverables !

This got me thinking, as executives what are our major roles? We need to be able to perform more with less (and therefore the 24 hour window for deliverables) but more importantly, we should be able to motivate our teams.

What is the point of training someone to run lean-and-mean and then giving them 24 hours to deliver just so that we as executives can take the credit on "how difficult it was to deliver but we still made it"

As executives, we need to manage expectations both ways - above and below. In one of the companies that I am associated with, we deal a lot with the government agencies worldwide and believe me, there is no one better than those government officials who manage expectations by giving enough headway and articulating, sometimes one too many, on what is needed.

How does all this fit into the Pressures topic? It is simple, as executives we think that we can pressurize someone to deliver faster, deliver better however we ignore one of the basic laws of physics - there is always a breakpoint which means that our resources will take the pressure only up to a point and then quit. So, did you gain or lose by this pressure tactic? Think about it !