Home > Author > Michael Hannan
1 " How often have you heard people brag about what great multi-taskers they are? Perhaps you’ve made the same boast yourself. You might even have heard that members of “Gen Y” are natural multi-taskers, having lived their whole lives constantly switching their attention from texting to IMing to Facebooking to watching TV— all supposedly without missing a beat. We even see training classes designed to teach managers how best to multi-task their Gen Y staff, the implication being that asking someone to focus on a single task through to completion has now become ridiculously old-fashioned for, if not downright heretical to, the new world order. Don’t believe it. "
― Michael Hannan
2 " This strategy goes against the established management practice of “holding people accountable,” and thus deserves some additional discussion. If people aren’t even asked to commit on a given task, won’t they relax too much, slow down, and lose focus? It turns out that the answer is no— people, as a rule, enjoy being highly productive— and tend to have even higher motivation when they can manage their own pace of work. Especially in high-risk environments like projects, it actually helps build unity of purpose and trust when staff see that managers above them are assuming responsibility for project risk, and buffering the task-level risk as needed. The aggregated risk approach frees everyone from the need to have the “how aggressively can you commit?” conversation, and allows all team members to focus instead on how to be a high-performing team. And if certain team members decide to take advantage of the “no-commitment” approach by slowing things down, it won’t take long for managers and other team members to notice it and take appropriate action. "
