Four questions for every manager to ask themselves

The one thing that managers reliably lack is time. They will often be doing their existing jobs as well as supervising others. They have bureaucracies to navigate – expenses to authorise, hiring requests to make – and mini-crises to solve. It is all too easy for the weeks to whizz past; suddenly, it is September and the Northern Hemisphere nights are drawing in again. But it is possible for even harried managers to ask themselves questions that force useful moments of reflection. For example:

“Would I hire this person again?” There is a whole category of questions that executives should ask themselves, which are basically about regret. Mr Peter Drucker, a management guru, urged bosses to reallocate scarce resources to more useful pursuits by asking of various activities: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?”