Doing the Job

It's a real job getting people to help out at these events. A specific piece of work to be done for a set fee: The object to be worked on: Those overgrown shrubs are a big job. Something resulting from or produced by work: I like the job they did on those shrubs. An operation done to improve one's appearance, or the result of such an operation. Often used in combination: Computers A program application that may consist of several steps but is performed as a single logical unit. Informal A state of affairs: Their marriage was a bad job from the start. It's a good job that we left early to avoid the traffic.

Informal A criminal act, especially a robbery: Informal An example of a specified type, especially of something made or constructed. To purchase merchandise from manufacturers and sell it to retailers. To arrange for contracted work to be done in portions by others; subcontract. To damage, harm, or worsen: The stylist did a real job on my hair. Paying close attention; on the alert. At work; at one's place of business: Employees are not allowed to smoke while on the job.

I had a job to contact him. Computer Science computing a unit of work for a computer consisting of a single complete task submitted by a user. Brit to buy and sell stocks and shares as a stockjobber: Commerce often foll by: Bible Old Testament a.

Doing the job - definition of doing the job by The Free Dictionary

It is your job to be on time. We had a job getting him to agree. That little sports job is a great car. We are looking for someone to fill a senior management position. He's afraid of losing his job. Switch to new thesaurus. Old Testament - the collection of books comprising the sacred scripture of the Hebrews and recording their history as the chosen people; the first half of the Christian Bible.

Hagiographa , Ketubim , Writings - the third of three divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Informal difficulty , problem , hassle informal , trouble , hard work With all these different pensions, you're going to have a job to keep track. Quotations "If you have a job without aggravations, you don't have a job" [Malcolm S. Forbes] "Everyone sees life through their job. To the doctor the world is a hospital, to the broker it is a stock exchange, to the lawyer a vast criminal court" [Alasdair Gray Janine ] "McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector" [Douglas Coupland Generation X ].

In accepting responsibility for a job, a person must get directly involved. Every manager has a personal responsibility not only to find problems but to correct them. This responsibility comes before all other obligations, before personal ambition or comfort. A major flaw in our system of government, and even in industry, is the latitude allowed to do less than is necessary. Too often officials are willing to accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong.

The tendency is to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them. Recognizing this, many subordinates give up, contain their views within themselves, and wait for others to take action. When this happens, the manager is deprived of the experience and ideas of subordinates who generally are more knowledgeable than he in their particular areas.

A manager must instill in his people an attitude of personal responsibility for seeing a job properly accomplished. Unfortunately, this seems to be declining, particularly in large organizations where responsibility is broadly distributed. The man who takes such a stand in fact is not responsible; he is irresponsible. While he may not be legally liable, or the work may not have been specifically assigned to him, no one involved in a job can divest himself of responsibility for its successful completion.

Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort. There is also the tendency to establish more and more levels of management, on the theory that this gives better control. These are but different forms of shared responsibility, which easily lead to no one being responsible—a problems that often inheres in large corporations as well as in the Defense Department.

When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point.

I run my present organization on the same principle. A good manager must have unshakeable determination and tenacity.

Deciding what needs to be done is easy, getting it done is more difficult. Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience. Once implemented they can be easily overturned or subverted through apathy or lack of follow-up, so a continuous effort is required.

Too often, important problems are recognized but no one is willing to sustain the effort needed to solve them. Nothing worthwhile can be accomplished without determination. In the early days of nuclear power, for example, getting approval to build the first nuclear submarine—the Nautilus —was almost as difficult as designing and building it. Many in the Navy opposed building a nuclear submarine. In the same way, the Navy once viewed nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and cruisers as too expensive, despite their obvious advantages of unlimited cruising range and ability to remain at sea without vulnerable support ships.

Our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and cruisers have proven their worth by defending our interests all over the world—even in remote trouble spots such as the Indian Ocean, where the capability of oil-fired ships would be severely limited by their dependence on fuel supplies. The man in charge must concern himself with details. If he does not consider them important, neither will his subordinates. In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details.

Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation. To maintain proper control one must have simple and direct means to find out what is going on. There are many ways of doing this; all involve constant drudgery. Often the process is carried too far.

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The top official then loses touch with his people and with the work that is actually going on. Attention to detail does not require a manager to do everything himself. No one can work more than twenty-four hours each day. Therefore to multiply his efforts, he must create an environment where his subordinates can work to their maximum ability.

Some management experts advocate strict limits to the number of people reporting to a common superior—generally five to seven. But if one has capable people who require but a few moments of his time during the day, there is no reason to set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key people report frequently and directly to me. This enables me to keep up with what is going on and makes it possible for them to get fast action. The latter aspect is particularly important. Capable people will not work for long where they cannot get prompt decisions and actions from their superior. I require frequent reports, both oral and written, from many key people in the nuclear program.

I insist they report the problems they have found directly to me—and in plain English. This provides them unlimited flexibility in subject matter—something that often is not accommodated in highly structured management systems—and a way to communicate their problems and recommendations to me without having them filtered through others.

The Defense Department, with its excessive layers of management, suffers because those at the top who make decisions are generally isolated from their subordinates, who have the first-hand knowledge. To do a job effectively, one must set priorities.

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3. .
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On any given day, unimportant but interesting trivia pass through an office; one must not permit these to monopolize his time. The human tendency is to while away time with unimportant matters that do not require mental effort or energy.

Doing a Job

Since they can be easily resolved, they give a false sense of accomplishment. The manager must exert self-discipline to ensure that his energy is focused where it is truly needed. All work should be checked through an independent and impartial review. In engineering and manufacturing, industry spends large sums on quality control.

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But the concept of impartial reviews and oversight is important in other areas also. Even the most dedicated individual makes mistakes—and many workers are less than dedicated. I have seen much poor work and sheer nonsense generated in government and in industry because it was not checked properly. One must create the ability in his staff to generate clear, forceful arguments for opposing viewpoints as well as for their own.