How to Read and Take Notes (As a Manager)

Filtering out the Noise in Managerial Communication

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Managerial reading is different from reading for entertainment. That applies to this article as well.

Managerial reading needs to be selective and interactive

You might have begun your reading with fiction as a kid. Stories start slow, they set up the stage, introduce the characters, show friendships and enmities, and then insert a challenge to the hero/ heroine. Resolving this challenge then becomes the focal point of the story, ending in a happy or tragic climax (as your taste may be). You read stories to let go, you are asking the author to take you on a ride and you give up power. The author plays…but in your playground.

If you are reading to learn / educate/ manage / make decisions however, reading becomes interactive. You don’t want to spend time reading a writeup of 500 words without knowing if you will actually get anything out of it. Why the impatience, you ask? Working in management, I receive dozens of mails per day, need to read through a lot of articles, proposals, mails, websites, sales pitches from vendors…you name it. At the end of the day, you get tired. Your eyes get tired, but more importantly you become brain dead from information overload.

What to focus on while reading

Be it reading articles, proposals or endless mail chains, all you become concerned about are:

• Should I read this new mail/ article/ proposal or not?
• If I begin reading, am I able to find the key ideas fast, at the very top?
• If there are too many ideas, do I need to understand all of them?
• Is there a table or index or appendix that quickly lets me know if something is relevant to me (ex: you might be on the business side and technical content needs to be quickly delegated to someone else)
• What should I do with the sections relevant to me? Is it for my information, for my action?
• If I need to act, do I need to take this upon myself, or is there a team member who I can delegate to (Delegate so you can focus on what’s important, not so you can escape what’s boring)
• Are there any questions / clarifications that are required to make a better decision? Are there any inputs that prevent you from making a decision right now?

Take smart powerful notes

As you make the above quick analysis, take notes. Why? You don’t want to read the whole 60–100 pages again to remember what it was all about. There are high chances you will forget what you read, and also forget why you made the decisions you did after reading all that material.

It is not easy to remember why we made certain decisions, especially if the decision making took some logic / reasoning involving you considering how multiple stakeholders would react, and how you would justify to them. Your notes are not intended to summarize what you read, but to summarize what you did after reading and why you did it. Essentially, you use notes to summarize your thoughts, not the author’s.

How and when to refer to your notes

Keep these notes in a folder — they will come in useful someday when the situation typically gets complicated as outlined below:

• You made a decision based on what you read and passed it on to Persons 2 and 3.
• Persons 2 and 3 make a few errors in understanding what they read and make decisions that somehow indicate that your decision may have had a few gaps
• Someone higher up in the hierarchy reaches out to you asking for a justification for your decision (50 days after you had read the original content)

The above is just an example of one such situation. Use your notes in the following powerful ways:

• Use your notes to clarify your actions, not just to explain a subject (everyone hopefully would have read enough subject material)
• You can easily refer to your notes to explain why you were right (and not why others were wrong — which will only create office politics).
• If your decision was wrong, that is perfectly fine — the key is to refer to your notes and outline the assumptions you made, which led to a less than ideal outcome.
• Use your notes to clarify the overall situation, not to defend yourself or start a blame game. Make the process reiterative, work with Persons 2 and 3 to resolve gaps and refine the decision.

Structuring your notes

There is no perfect way to take notes, despite a hundred templates out there. Find what works for you.

• Don’t worry about whether your notes are fancy or simple. For instance, I take verbatim notes at times (with exact quotes of people in the meeting), which comes in very useful especially as people tend to forget what they themselves say.
• At other times, I hardly note down 3 lines of my own interpretation.

Use your notes at the right time, in the right context

Decisions are based not just on your inputs but also on others’ emotions, points of view and information available with others at the time the notes were taken. For instance:

• Day 1: People make a decision based on 50% of information available.
• Day 40: People might engage in a ‘revisit of the decision’ or a blame game trying to understand why they went off track.

Your notes capture history and context. By proper reading, note taking and decision making, you will be in a position to explain how 50% of information on Day 1 was completely revamped by Day 40.

To give a humorous metaphor:

• Day 1: You are asked to create a product with 4 legs. The people in your team tell you that from working with the client, they know the client loves water and likes to eat insects. You propose making a frog, people overrule you and propose making a lizard. You note down “lizard” and why it was decided so.
• Day 30: The client clarifies that he never said insects, he had only told sales that he wanted to eat “small fast creatures”. After a hectic meeting, your team decides to change “lizard” to “eagle” and you quickly send out a response to the client proposing to build an “eagle”.
• Day 32: The client trusts you, glances through the presentation and says go ahead, as he doesn’t have enough time to evaluate assumptions. He decides evaluating the final product is easier than checking your assumptions now.
• Day 40: You present the client with an eagle. The client is shocked and says he wanted a flamingo, which eats fish. People rush to find out what went wrong and see that on Day 30, they forgot all about the ‘water’ aspect mentioned on Day 1.
• They grab the minutes of the meeting and question you, the design manager. Your notes will help clarify how a lizard became an eagle, but surely never could have walked on water…you get what I mean.

So, in conclusion? Read smartly, be decisive, take intelligent notes. No one can understand or analyze everything. More importantly, no one, even you, the straight A grader throughout college, can remember everything. Note the ‘whats’ but don’t forget the ‘whys’.