Goodbye Pennies!

The Canadian Government has decided to withdraw the penny from the monetary system, mainly because it costs 50% more to make than its face value.  This doesn’t even account for the constant costs in handling the penny from its minting through the banking and retail systems to its eventual hiding place in a domestic coin jar.

September is the date of the demise of the penny.  Let’s also make that the date to have eliminated “pennies” from our management practices.  Management “pennies” are policies, practices and habits that cost more than their possible benefits.  Anyone can make an argument for keeping them, but managers can use their intuition or analytical nous to just stop wasting personal and organizational resources.

• A couple of decades into my career as a manager, I reduced the routine boring weekly or bi-weekly status reports. Each staff member was allowed three key points of one sentence each.  Any number of questions were allowed as follow-up.  Plus, I more frequently dropped in on staff to listen to their current concerns. Much more satisfying and revealing process.

• An effective step to eliminate effort is to monitor or report routine matters three times per year rather than quarterly.  Given that progress is often light in December, July and August, meaningful reports can be scheduled for March, June and November.  For topics that are already well managed and subject to little change, reporting can be reduced to a semi-annual format.

For each initiative, be careful not spend more time analyzing your management “penny” than will be gained by its eradication.