Management Lessons From A Cake

So many managers experienced and new to the role of supervising others are often struggling on how to achieve what they need to in a working day.

Often overwhelmed by what needs to be done and stress is running high.

An exercise we sometimes use on our Professional Supervisor/ Manager course often helps a lot.

A large cake is presented to one person in a class of 10 x people and a single cake spoon provided with one knife.

The directive is Mary – your job is to make certain this cake is all eaten up within the next 10 x minutes

Let me be clear, it is your job to make that happen, the clock starts now.

So, Mary looks at the cake – you can see the panic start to settle in and at first, she begins to cut a piece of cake and starts to eat it.

A question is asked – what is your plan to eat this cake, she smiles and say, just one piece at a time.

The problem most managers have is that they think they have to do the job all on their own.

Now we produce an additional 9 x cakes spoons to Mary and ask what might be a better way to have this cake eaten in the next 10 x minutes.

The blinding obvious moment, Ooh I will share the cake with the group.

In that moment everyone understands the first rule of management.

Use the people in your team, share the load and give each person a specific task and a time frame of when it should be completed.

The lesson continues, but we are off to a great start.

Are you using your people to ease the burden and share the load?

Michael Robinson