There are plenty of books and courses meant to teach you management basics.
How to have a tough conversation. How to give feedback. How to communicate, delegate, and motivate, using this easy framework or that simple checklist.
I’ve sat through day-long workshops built around a single acronym – one word meant to serve as your guide to getting through a common management woe. Something catchy and memorable, like “The BEANS Framework”:
B — Begin with rapport!
E — Explore the problem!
A — Align on goals!
N — Navigate resistance!
S — Summarize the plan!
(I made that up. But I bet some of you have sat through something similar.)
Something like BEANS tries to package a whole process for dealing with an employee into one neat, tidy, high-in-fiber-and-protein acronym.
It assumes that, in the moment, I am going to (a) remember what BEANS stands for and (b) make the leap from what it stands for to what I’m actually supposed to do with it.
But when someone misses a deadline for the third time, or I have two employees bent on mutual destruction, I’m not thinking about beans.
I’m thinking “Oh, crap. What do I do?”
Acronyms and frameworks aren’t my go-to move when things fall apart.
I found that I had to use my own hard-won experience and unfortunate missteps to build the things that help in the moment. The kind of tools you create because you needed them once - badly - and you don’t want to get caught flat-footed again.
They’re bootlegged solutions – brewed out of necessity and distilled from experience. Not beans. (You can find a few here - more are coming.)
If you’ve been a manager long enough, I bet you have a few yourself.
What’s one bootlegged tool you’ve created to make your job easier?