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Get HOT: Be Hands-On and Transactional

July 24, 2007

"The following guidelines will help get you on course to becoming a HOT manager.

• Become highly knowledgeable about the tasks and responsibilities of your direct reports.
• Start spending time with every direct report in daily coaching sessions.
• Use your coaching time with direct reports to talk about the work they are doing.  Be sure to focus on performance standards and concentrate on assignments - that means talking about clear goals and deadlines.
• Provide direction, guidance, and support on a regular basis.
• Start a written tracking system so that you can monitor and measure every individual's performance on a daily basis.  This will help you reward success and address failure.
• Understand, and accept, and embrace the new reality that managing people has become a day-to-day negotiation.
• Embrace the fact that everything that is not a deal-breaker is open to negotiation.  Decide what your deal-breakers are - and what's not open to negotiation - and then be prepared to negotiate regularly about everything else.
• Whenever possible, tie financial rewards and detriments to measurable instances of employee performance and nothing else.
• Be creative with your discretion and use your discretionary resources to tie nonfinancial rewards, incentive, and benefits to measurable instances of employee performance.
• Look for every employee's 'needle in a haystack' and use it to make custom deals with individuals in exchange for exceptional performance.
• Have the discipline and guts to enforce every deal you make, and don't flinch when it comes to providing the promised rewards and detriments.
• And don't forget: You cannot be hands-on without being transactional, and you cannot be transactional without being hands-on (Tulgan, 2004, p. 17-18)."

Reference:  Tulgan, B. (2004).  H.o.t. management: hands-on transactional.   Amherst, MA:  HRD Press.

H.O.T. Management is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center.  To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page http://164.107.48.88/winnebago/index.asp?lib=???

Learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow's leaders today at http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu

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Created: 2008-02-28, Updated: 2009-02-20