ARC - A Simple Formula for Management Success

Putting together a solid management team is no easy feat. It is more of an organism as opposed to an object, and thus is difficult to consider in a more quantitative manner.

Given this, I've come to the conclusion that a simple tool can be more useful in making managment evaluations. This allows ones powerful mechanisms, whether you want to call it intuition or unconscious thought, to make less clouded, and hopefully better, judgments.

The tools we have developoed, and which we use regularly, is ARC, which stands for Attitude, Reliability, and Competency. We submit that different forms of these characteristics, with different expectation levels for different positions, in combination are one way to consider the value of an individual to an organization.

Attitude is simply a subjective measure of how positive the individual is. Reliability is simply a subjective measure of whether you can count on the employee. Finally, competency is a subjective measure of how well an individual performs his duties. Note that competency is not general, but job specific, thus a competent janitor may not be a competent controller, and vice versa.

We have used this so much we tend to refer to people's ARC score with an organization wide understanding of its meaning. For example, "he's a 10-9-9" would mean his attitude is a 10, his reliability is a 9, and his competency is a 9. One's ARC quickly comes up when we discuss an employees prospects with the company, and is an integral part of our weekly comprehensive strategy meeting.

I know it is simple, but believe me, it works. Again, I submit that keeping it simple gets the tool out of the way of the truly powerful tool that we all have - our brains.

Copyright James Hawkins 2009