Meeting deadlines

Management can be complicated but the basics are easy to understand. The most fundamental skill that anybody can enforce is getting subordinates to meet deadlines. I was speaking to a manager the other day. He used to work for a multinational in Malaysia and he switched to a small, local company. He described his current organisation as one in where "everybody seems to be working in slow motion." When I asked what he meant, he explained that in a multinational, deadlines were respected. By hook or by crook, you had to finish your work on time.... so people started working on projects early. In his new job, deadlines keep moving. There is no incentive to start working on something now because you already know that the deadline willl change ..... The moral of the story is that good managers set realistic deadlines and stick to them. If people don't meet the deadlines, they scream, shout and rave to male people understand that dead;ones are important. If not, your message to your people is, "don't bother meeting deadlines because I don't really care anyway."