What gets managed gets done. What doesn’t get managed doesn’t get done. We talked about things falling apart earlier this week.

It’s probably worse than that. What doesn’t get managed doesn’t just not get done. What doesn’t get managed turns into a great big pile of caca. Yep, it’s a mess.

You Have a Lot on Your Plate…

Let’s take the bookkeeping piece of your practice as an example. Let’s say you’ve got a full-time bookkeeper handling your time and billing system, general ledger, payroll, benefits, vendor relations, collections, etc. She (and she’s nearly always a she, so hold off on sending me the nasty e-mail, okay?) does a pretty good job, and things are rolling along nicely.

You, of course, are busy doing legal work, so you check in with her when you’ve got a chance. Mostly she does her thing, and you feel good about her ability to manage herself and keep things going. The fact of the matter is that you don’t really manage her at all: she manages herself.

Then one day you discover that she embezzled $143,228. Okay, okay, maybe that’s overly dramatic.

Erase, erase, erase—strike that—and roll back to before the embezzlement.

Then one day you discover that she has been allowing the bank to deduct the merchant fee for credit card deposits to the trust account directly from the trust account rather than from your operating account. In many jurisdictions, this violates the Rules of Professional Responsibility. It doesn’t seem like a very big deal—to me, anyway—but state bars do nasty things like suspend your law license when you screw up your trust account. So, unless you’re really in need of a sudden vacation from your practice, this could be a big deal.

This problem—the suspension, not the vacation—is what I mean by things that don’t get managed turning into giant piles of caca.

Make sense now?

Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew…

So, you’re thinking, fine, I can manage the problem by actually managing the bookkeeper instead of letting her manage herself: forced vacation averted, and you get to keep your law license. Ah, but sorry, there’s a glitch with that plan.

“What’s the glitch?” you ask (not to put words in your mouth, but I knew you’d ask).

The glitch is that it’s really hard to manage things you don’t understand. Let’s be honest: we don’t really understand bookkeepers and the stuff they do. After all, if we were good at math, we would have taken the GMAT or the GRE (tests with math on them) instead of the LSAT (a test with zero math), right?

To manage the bookkeeper, you really need to invest some time in learning about the billing system, the accounting software, payables, receivables, debits, credits, and all that other stuff. Are you really going to do that? Really? Nope, you’re not going to do that unless you happen to be my friend Miles Mason, who is a CPA on top of being a JD.

Without all that knowledge, you’re going to have a tough time managing the bookkeeper. I think we can agree on that at this point. And, remember, what doesn’t get managed turns into a pile of…

Bookkeeping isn’t the only problem. You’re going to face the same issue with your IT person. The IT person manages the servers, the phone system, the Internet, external access to all that, and a bunch of other stuff. Do you understand it all? Nope. How are you going to manage that person? Now you’re getting it. You’ve got a problem.

There’s no telling who else you’ve got in your firm that you aren’t managing. Sometimes it’s the marketing person; sometimes it’s the recruiter. We hire these folks and expect things to go smoothly without managing. We don’t worry about it much because we explained in the help-wanted ad on Craigslist that we needed a self-starter who is self-directed. That should take care of it, right? Wrong again.

And If You’re Already Chewing, Spit It Out

What’s the solution? How do you get things done without managing?

You’re already doing it. You’re outsourcing pieces of your business that are beyond your ability to properly supervise and manage. For instance, you’re probably outsourcing the creation and maintenance of your website. You’re also doing it with your accounting function. You likely have an outside accountant doing the tax return. You outsource the maintenance of your copier, and you’ve got an outside cleaning company doing the vacuuming and dusting.

These outsourced functions are being handled well by employees of another company. Someone else is managing these folks, and that’s the key. These employees are being supervised, but their supervisor is someone who understands what it is that they’re doing. They’re being managed by someone who can measure and monitor the quality of their work.

You need to follow the same approach—outsourcing—with any function you can’t properly manage. If you’re not capable of investing the time required to understand, measure, and monitor the quality of the work, then you need to let it go and find a vendor who can take care of it for you. Of course, you’ll still need to specify the outcome you’re seeking to the vendor. You’ll need to be clear about what you expect, but that’s far easier than understanding what’s required to obtain that result.

I’m not sure how so many of us got ourselves in the position of managing work we don’t understand. However, I am sure that it’s time for us to dig out. Outsourcing the work is the solution. Then you can be sure it’s managed, gets done, and never turns into a big pile of something you don’t want in your office.