Chickens do it, good managers do it and leaders need to do it too. If you’re not PLOCing – you’re not leading. If you’re not PLOCing you’re just wishing and hoping things will turn out all right. When managing or leading others you can’t leave things to chance. You have to be both an efficient and effective PLOCer.

To be a good PLOCer you need to be able to do three things very well. You need to be able to communicate, educate and delegate both effectively and efficiently. You can have one without the other – but that’s not going to get you to where you and your organization need to be on time and on budget. You can be effective in completing a task or reaching an objective but not efficient because it took you and your team too long to accomplish it – or you had to redo it because it wasn’t done satisfactorily the first time.

Worth Remembering …

“For all the fashionable hype about leadership, it is unfashionable management that is being practiced and its fundamental characteristics have not changed.” – Hales

Learn to PLOC your way to success.

Plan:  You need to be very clear on what you want to accomplish and then put a plan together that will accomplish that task. If you can’t explain what you want to do and how you want to go about doing it to a 5-year-old – than you don’t understand it well enough yourself. However, keep in mind that there is no such thing as a perfect plan. Don’t wait for perfect before you start. You can tweak it as you go along. Stop procrastinating and get doing.

Lead: You need to lead by example. Your team is looking to you for direction. You set the pace – You set the tone. And you can’t do that by sitting in your office. Leaders need to be both seen and heard. Manage by walking around. Be prepared to roll-up your sleeves when the situation warrants it. You shouldn’t ask someone else to do something that you aren’t prepared to do yourself. However, good leaders allow others to lead if there is someone else on their team who can perform a task better than they can.

Organize: Productivity is still the name of the game. You must minimize the input to maximize the output. You need to ensure that you are getting a significant return on your most precious resource – your time and your team’s time. Start off each day knowing what needs to be accomplished that day – who is going to do it – how it’s going to be done – how long it’s going to take to complete the task and when it needs to be completed by.

Control: People do what you inspect not what you expect. Your job is to monitor your team’s performance and remove any obstacles that are getting in their way. You can control the outcome by making sure they know what is expected of them. You can control the outcome by making sure they have all the tools they’ll need to do the job and complete the task on time and on budget. You can control the outcome by making sure you have the right people, doing the right task – at the right time.

Remember to Communicate often – Let your people know how they are doing (good or bad). Educate them by making sure they know how to perform the task and if they don’t teach them how. And Delegate the task to those who are capable of accomplishing what you set out to do. And then get out of their way and let them do it. (Resist the urge to micro-manage)

PLOCing may be for the birds – but, it’s good for managers and leaders too. 😉