Manager Impossible: The Inside Joke on Managerial Optimization

As John rushed to the office for his 9AM meeting, a blunder beeped on his phone – stores are out of stocks, again.

He quickly pings his sales team to act immediately and decides to tell his manager that they need to hold back the BOGO marketing campaign for a week. Products are taking more time to reach the stores and in the right quantities, creating unsatisfied customers and too many lost opportunities. If John can find a better process by then, all will be resolved.

But the moment John enters the meeting room, his manager tells him while beaming with excitement, “John, the marketing team said the campaign is a hit. Let’s expand the campaign in all markets”.

John keeps calm and tries to explain the current situation and how they should best tackle it. His manager replies with a frowny face, “Is it a bandwidth issue? Should we hire a new manager to help you run the campaign?”

Thinking of the promotion that might fly away, John gulps down the logic and replies, “No, I’ll get it done”.

His phone vibrates again, and this time it’s his top dealer. Apparently a salesman came and dumped excessive stocks saying they are in very high demand in the market. The dealer is now out of space to store other products and wants to send back the excess to John’s company.

John takes a deep breath and types the standard reply – “I’ll get it done.”

Just then as John sits down to think like a Ninja and close these tasks as fast as possible, his phone rings again and it’s the CEO. Apparently the strategy team has observed that changing the color of the product packaging from light green to deep green has increased the sales numbers. The CEO wants a sales report by EOD to know which SKUs were sold where and when.

As John felt the energy drain from his body, he uttered the same response – “I’ll get it done.”

John thought for a second about all the tasks he has been asked to do on priority and all the tasks he felt he needed to prioritize, the then moved onto watching memes for mental peace.

This is sadly every manager’s reality.

Between keeping an eye out to ensure nobody’s wasting time and keeping an ear open to track what’s happening in the business, managers keep swallowing too many “need to get this done” pills everyday.

Soon these task lists become their goals and later their achievements, which are used to assess their performance.

But if everything gets done as planned, why do the awkward conversations of low performance still exist? Is the mistake in the plan or the manager?

It’s mostly actually in the lack of clarity in the JD.

No matter the number of tasks mentioned in the job description, every manager in the history of managers has always been expected to do two duties:

• Act as a catalyst to bring more visibility and seamless process flow across different functions.
• Nurture internal and external relationships to strengthen the company’s foothold in the market.

While unsaid, these two are key pillars of growth and crucial success factors for every business. So while John works on rolling out the campaign for every market and creates the sales report to please his manager and CEO respectively, the tasks he’s failing to pay attention to will cause much greater damage.

Until John fails to create a process where stockouts are automatically informed and the right stocks are sent to the dealers in an instant, the company will keep losing money and huge opportunities. John too, might lose out on the promotion due to his “poor management skills” that led to bad performance.

Around you too there exists hundreds of Johns who struggle to optimize the way they manage – your team members, leaders or even you yourself. That’s why route-to-market technology is essential to bridge these operational gaps and help managers ace their two biggest duties with ease.

So that even while the manager is busy creating reports or attending meetings, technology like the Manager’s app will become his eyes and ears to ensure every teammate is putting their most productive foot forward, while technologies like Smart Merchandising, Auto-replenishment System and Suggested Order will makes sure that stores are rightly and nicely stocked.

The list of such technologies is long and the business benefits are boundless. To explore them all, click on the link and talk to a Bizom expert.