Using Open Book Management

Using Open Book Management

Modern leaders know that in order to get their employees to be loyal to their companies and work at their most productive levels, they need to engage with them.

Engagement has been shown to be one of the most vital strategies a manager can achieve in order to stop high employee turnover and build a positive corporate culture with happy employees.

How does one engage their staff?

One such way is with open book management.

This theory was first coined by John Case of Inc. Magazine in 1993, and has been implemented and written about ever since.

Back before the rise of corporate scandals and social media, Case was a forward-thinker that understood that leaders need to be open with their employees in order to promote the most efficient workplace.

What Is Open Book Management?

Open book management’s main concept is that bosses need to reveal information to their staff not only pertaining to their specific job roles, but so that they can get a good sense of the organisation’s overall mission, goals and plans.

Case stated that “a company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business rather than as hired hands,” according to one source.

Case employed three main points in this theory, which included:

• The organisation should be open about financial records and other important information with staff
• The staff should be encouraged to help the company raise revenue
• The staff should be rewarded for their hard work in helping the company succeed

How Can You Implement Open Book Management In Your Firm?

It’s not easy to make the switch from a traditional top-down management style where only the senior executives are privy to sensitive information to a bottom-up system.

Truth be told, a company should only consider doing this if they are prepared to share their wealth with their employees.

Although in public companies financial information is more or less in the open; employees of private companies may become disgruntled if they know how much profit a company is making, but are not rewarded fairly for their efforts.Before sharing financial data with employees, it is important to train them to read and understand this type of information.

Case recommends finding a “Critical Number,” which is the amount a company needs to either break-even or to be profitable.

Once this number is calculated, all employees can be involved in the decision to reach or surpass it.

Open book management empowers employees to become true partners instead of simply workers.

They become invested in helping the company succeed, not only because they are made part of the “elite” executives, but because they have a financial stake in this endeavour.

To your success!

You MUST Read This Management Book       

Reading books on management topics is one of the best ways that leaders can constantly better themselves by freshening up their management skills.

A great book to consider reading is called One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson.

This book has gained so much notoriety, that it has been used to train managers in some of the biggest companies in the world, such as Apple, Pepsi-Cola, Harvard University, etc.

The main principle that the book hopes to leave its readers with is that people who are happy with themselves are the best workers who continuously show the best results.

The book provides examples of what a top-ranking manager would possess, which would be skills including goal setting, as well as praising and reprimanding staff.

However, it also stresses that time is of the essence, so that all of these tasks need to be done quickly, in one minute or less, otherwise it will not be efficient.

The book encourages managers to ask their staff members to set weekly goals for themselves.

However, instead of making these goals private, which wouldn’t allow the manager to know whether they are doing it or not, the employees should write these goals and give them to the boss.

In a weekly meeting, staff should take no more than one minute to write a realistic goal for the week in 250-words or less.

Another important task is for the managers, which stresses the importance of acknowledging and empowering team members by praising them.

Many bosses do value their staff’s hard work, but not all of them verbalise that.

In order for your employees to feel like you are paying attention to them, and seeing how hard they work, you need to say so.

Take one minute to praise your employees individually or in a group setting.

Another responsibility of a manager is to speak up and reprimand team members when something has gone wrong.

Although some bosses prefer not to say anything negative to their workers, this is a bad idea as they will never improve if they don’t know that they are not working up to the expected benchmarks.

By taking one minute to point out an error and then suggesting a way to improve it, managers will help their employees be better at their jobs.

This book has been so well received, that the authors penned two other books, The One Minute Entrepreneur and The 4th Secret of the One Minute Manager.

Courtesy -MTP Tips