I hate sharing the word “manage.”

Pet peeve alert: we throw around the word “manage” way too loosely. To be fair, I’m an only child and most sharing makes me uncomfortable. But even after you factor that in, the sheer number of concepts grabbing at that word has pretty much ruined it.

The word “manage” can mean nearly anything in a modern business context. For example, you could:

Manage a project
Manage a budget
Manage a small group
Manage a large department
Manage an entire business unit
Manage a software product
Manage a restaurant
Manage a little league team
Manage an NFL franchise
…and more!

Each of those would involve fairly different activities, goals, and timelines. Being great at one isn’t that likely to make you any good at the others.

I’m not quite sure why they share the same word. Who benefits from that?

Here’s a Nerdy Example

Computers tolerate this ambiguity even less than I do. Say you wanted to create a computer program that could perform basic division e.g. 6 / 3 = 2. I could decide to get cute and use a shorter word instead of “divide.” And in this scenario where I’m making bad decisions, split(6, 3) could instruct the computer to split 6 into 3 pieces, yielding 2.

But after I conquer math and move onto the written word, let’s say I want to add a feature that breaks sentences into words. If I tried this…

split(“I love chocolate”)

…the computer would tell me, “nope, you can’t have two features with the exact same name. No sharing allowed.” The machine needs clearer marching orders.

People are less precise than computers, but they can still be confused. Someone may tell you to “manage” a situation, and all they’ve really told you is they don’t want it to be their problem anymore.

What to Do Instead

When facing a challenge that’s unclear or new, I ask, “what might it look like to do a really great job at this?” Typically I ask myself first, scratch the ol’ beard a minute, and then capture a top-line statement with some key activities underneath, like this:

Reduce the problems originating from

Analyze the last 90 days worth of incidents
Identify the patterns/trends and separate outliers
Devise an approach to deal with each pattern and circulate the ideas for feedback

Again, you want lots of verbs in here, and maybe some numbers—but nothing ambiguous. Get buy-in on these miniature plans whenever you can, since the cost of communication is low and the value of alignment is high. Comparatively few teams can use any methods they like, despite what you may have heard about some household names.

Best case, you get a clear North Star from the right people, which lets you both chart a course before you get moving and make adjustments along the way when you encounter obstacles.

Once we get this squared away, we’ll tackle the meaning of the word “integrate.”