FREE online courses on Great Managers - Version Two - PRESCIENCE
Prescience is something for which you really have to work at.
Prescience is having foreknowledge of the future. Particularly as a Protector,
you have to know in advance the external events which impact upon your team. The
key is information and there are three type:
information you hear (tit-bits about travel, meetings, etc)
information you gather (minutes of meetings, financial
figure, etc)
information you infer (if this happens then my
team will need ...)
Information is absolutely vital. Surveys of decision making
in companies reveal that the rapid and decisive decisions normally stem not from
intuitive and extraordinary leadership but rather from the existence of an
established information system covering the relevant data. Managers who know the
full information can quickly reach an informed decision.
The influences upon you and your team stem mostly from within
the company and this is where you must establish an active interest. Let us put
that another way: if you do not keep your eyes open you are failing in your role
as Protector to you team. Thus if your manager comes back from an important
meeting, sit down with him/her afterwards and have a chat. There is no need to
employ subterfuge, merely ask questions. If there are answers, you hear them; if
there are none, you know to investigate elsewhere. If you can provide your
manager with suggestions/ideas then you will benefit from his/her gratitude and
future confidence(s). You should also talk to people in other departments; and
never forget the secretaries who are normally the first to know everything.
Now some people love this aspect of the job, it makes them
feel like politicians or espionage agents; others hate it, for exactly the same
reasons. The point is that it must be done or you will be unprepared; but do not
let it become a obsession.
Gathering information is not enough on its own: you have to
process it and be aware of implications. The trick is to try to predict the next
logical step from any changes you see. This can get very complicated, so try to
restrict yourself to guessing one step only. Thus if the sales figures show a
tailing off for the current product (and there are mutterings about the
competition) then if you are in development, you might expect to be pressured
for tighter schedules; if you are in publicity, then there may soon be a request
for launch material; if you are in sales, you might be asked to establish
potential demand and practical pricing levels. Since you know this, you can have
the information ready (or a schedule defence prepared) for when it is first
requested, and you and your team will shine.
Another way of generating information is to play "what if"
games. There are dreadfully scientific ways of performing this sort of analysis,
but reasonably you do not have the time. The sort of work this article is
suggesting is that you, with your team or other managers (or both), play "what
if" over coffee now and then. All you have to do is to postulate a novel
question and see how it runs.
A productive variation on the "what if" game is to ask: "what
can go wrong?" By deliberately trying to identify potential problems at the
onset, you will prevent many and compensate for many more. Set aside specific
time to do this type of thinking. Call it contingency planning and put in
in your diary as a regular appointment.
