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As the President you hold your monthly senior management meeting and discover that all of the senior managers are overloaded. Why has this situation occurred? Growth, the company is doing exceptionally well, sales and profits are up, obviously, you need more management staff.

Maybe it’s too obvious! It’s an easy decision to make, throw more management bodies at the problems and the work will get done and the problems will go away, however in reality that is not necessarily the case.

Companies that grow quickly often face the problem of an out of sync management structure. This is not because the officers or the owners failed, it is a problem created by the natural evolution of a successful business.

In order to solve the problem of overloaded management it is important to first determine why they are overloaded. The problem of not enough hours in the day can be created by a number of issues:

1. A lack of proper time management – many individuals have great difficulty in scheduling their time and setting priorities. As an example, an “open door” policy does not have to mean that you are available whenever someone wants to discuss something with you. It can mean that you are more than willing to discuss any matter with anyone – schedule a meeting.
2. Delegation – many managers have a great deal of difficulty in delegating authority and responsibility. This is a common occurrence when companies have left start-up mode when managers had to do certain tasks because the company was not in a financial position to hire subordinates. Now that the company has subordinates, the manager finds it easier and more expedient to do the task them self then invest the time to train the subordinate to do the task. After all it only takes the manager 20 minutes each day to perform the task, it would take three or four hours to train the subordinate and they do not have the time to undertake the training.
3. Systems, procedures and reports – company systems, procedures and reporting requirements are usually put in place to solve a current problem. As time progresses the problems change and systems, procedures and reporting are added. The situation that often occurs is that the old systems, procedures and reporting remain in the background, as requirements are never deleted. New hardware and/or software products and systems, the removal of procedures and reports that are no longer valid may free up substantial amounts of management time. Every company should review all systems, procedures and reports at a minimum annually and ask themselves; “why do we do that, what value does it provide to the company”?

5. Special projects – there are times when a company’s management can be overloaded because of a special project or non-recurring event. Projects or events such as an acquisition, merger, new facility, new product launch, new - very large account and the implementation of new technology can definitely overload a management group. In this instance a company should respond by contracting interim management or temporary staff to alleviate the short-term problems.

If a company’s response to these five points is, “we don’t have the time to look into those issues”, they are headed for disaster. The problems will not go away on there own and they will not go away by adding more managers, with the exception of interim special project or assignment management. In fact, the addition of more managers will most likely exasperate the problems even more.

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