Management Craft

Management Tricks and Treats

Trick: "I'd like to get your thoughts on this." (The decision has already been made)
Treat: "I'm going to get input from my team and I will get back with you on what we recommend."

Trick: "Acme is a great company and the culture encourages participation."
Treat: "I believe that it is important that you consider this opportunity with eyes wide open. I am going to share the good, the bad, and the ugly."

Trick: "Senior management is totally committed to supporting this initiative. If we need help, we will get it."
Treat: "We both know that this is going to be a challenge and we won't have the resources we need. The question we should discuss is whether this initiative is worth the effort and sacrifice, and if so, let's together figure out how we can do our very best work."

Leadership

Leading is a choice - based on how we feel about our roles and the company.
Following is a choice - based on how we feel about our roles and leaders.
Leaders are the company.
The company is defined by its leaders.
And those that follow.
It feels great to lead when people follow.
It feels great to follow when people lead.
It's ALL choice.
Relationship is all that matters.
Leadership is communication.
Followership is communication.
Conversations are the company.
The company is comprised of its conversations.

One Thing + Ten People = Magic

Try this.

Determine ONE THING you want to learn over the next six months (express in positive "start" not negative "stop" terms).

Tell TEN PEOPLE and ask for their ideas. Thank them for their ideas - even the stupid ideas.

Start doing.
Keep sharing.
Show genuine gratitude.

This is a hybrid of Marshall Goldsmith's feed forward technique.

I'll start with you. Over the next six months, I want to learn to be joyfully patient. Each thing (task, project, opportunity, process, relationship) has its course and speed - I want to perceive and appreciate the natural rhythms of the work. Part of being joyfully patient is seeing that things are great right now - appreciating the present.

What ideas or suggestions do you have for me? What would you do if this were your goal? Please leave a comment.

Now it's your turn. Perhaps we can get a little meme going....

What if you did this at work... at your next staff meeting (instead of the around the room updates)?
What if you shared your goal with your partner?

Fireside Chat with Alexandra Levit

Corporate culture shock? - Chat with Alexandra Levit

During this 30 minute podcast, I chat with Alexandra Levit, who specializes in helping younger professionals develop winning practices for the corporate world. You see, Alexandra has studied the difficulty many younger people have going from a university environment to a corporate environment and the methods that can facilitate this transition. She also helps employers and managers learn simple techniques that will help their younger workers succeed. So whether you are a younger professional (like a recent college grad), a manager, or human resources professional,  Alexandra shares several interesting perspectives (based on interviews she has conducted across the country) and several important concrete strategies for success. Alexandra wrote, They Don't Teach Corporate in College: A Twenty-Something’s Guide to the Business World and blogs at Water Cooler Wisdom.

do you want to know more about how to help newer workers be successful? Listen to this podcast!

You can listen to my podcast with Alexandra Levit by clicking here:

You can also download an MP3 version of the podcast here: MP3 Download

And just a reminder.....

Here is the Podcast Feed for the entire Fireside Chat podcast series:

You can also find this series on iTunes (and several other podcast sites), just search under my last name for Fireside Chat.

Blog Tools for Super Geeks - Blog from Mathematica

My husband Bill shared this link with me and thought you might be interested. Mathematica - a pretty powerful and expensive computational software program is now offering add ons for everyday life stuff.

"A WorkLife FrameWork is an Extendable and Customizable ToolSet for All Mathematica Users that broadens Mathematica's scope across many aspects of your daily work."

It even allows you to blog using Mathematica's graphical and typesetting capabilities. Wow - that's super geek (I mean that in the nicest way). Bill is a superuser of Mathematica in the arena of geology, even having written a book about its uses.

It's interesting to think about why a company like Mathematica would do this. They seem to be looking to deepen the relationship its users have with the software.

Have you noticed that we seem to be able to blog from almost any program these days?

I think we are all getting tired of single solution applications. This extends to software programs and also our gadgets. I have so many power adapters and chargers I cannot keep them all straight.

I want one stop shopping and I want to be able to do everything.

Maybe that's the vibe Mathematica is picking up on. That said, I don't know how these features will help sell more Mathematica licenses, which go for about $2,000 a pop or more. I would doubt that people would spend the big bucks on this program because they can journal and blog. It must be an after sale loyalty enhancement strategy.....

What behaviors do your decisions encourage?

I was talking with a colleague and the topic of cars came up. He said he needed to get another car because his lease was up on the one he had. He was thinking about getting an SUV instead of a sedan.

That reminded me of a great absurdity.

We want people to conserve and be energy efficient, but the American government has made at least two decisions that encourage the opposite behaviors.

1. We offer a business expenses tax write off for purchasing vehicles over 6000 pounds. As a result, thousands of business people are buying the heaviest SUVs. I have one friend who narrowed his list of options by whether they met the 6000 pound criteria for the tax write off. This law was originally intended to help farmers, now it's helping Rolex wearing executives.

Why this is important - weight is what sucks up most of the gasoline. While engines have gotten more efficient, our SUV buying preferences have MORE than made up for any engineering gains. We are less efficient than ever and over 50% of all vehicle purchases are SUVs.

2. A good decision gone bad. The American public WAS rewarded with a tax cut for buying Toyota hybrid vehicles but because we bought so many, we have exceeded the quota set by the government and now the tax cut is reduced and it will eventually go away. People who really want Priuses will likely still get them, but the tax cut certainly helped some people make that decision.

There's no quota on 6000 pound gas guzzlers, but there is on the hybrids.

I don't want to get into any kind of political debate here, this is a statement about how our decisions drive behavior. Everyone is talking about energy concerns, but I don't hear people talking about the decisions, laws, regulations, and incentives on the books that drive some decisions. If we really want people to buy more fuel efficient cars, we need to stop rewarding people for buying Land Rovers, Acura SUVs, Cadillac SUVs, and Hummers for "business" purposes.

Most of these vehicles never see a drop of mud unless they hit a rain-filled pothole on Wall Street.

As leaders we need to make sure that our decisions reinforce what we really want.

More Space Free

1800CEOREAD's InBubbleWrap is giving away lots of copies of More Space: Nine Antidotes to Complacency in Business. I was one of the nine authors and my essay is about generating breakthroughs. Go get your copy now. If you already have one, get a copy to give to a hip friend.

I really enjoyed working with Todd and the other eight authors on this project!

Fortune's - What it takes to be great.

Wally Bock does a great job in this post of summarizing and responding to Fortune magazine's recent cover article called, What It Takes to be Great. Here's a snippet that ends with a very good question.

If you read nothing else in the article read the part about "deliberate practice." The old adage is that "Practice makes perfect." But that adage is clearly wrong.  Practice may make permanent, but only a particular kind of practice makes perfect, and Fortune has zeroed in on it. The Fortune article takes these insights and then goes on to discuss how it all applies to business. In the end, after many good points, they're left with a key question that none of us can answer, "Why are some people motivated to do the extra, focused work while others are not?"

Wally also counters the article's claim that talent does not matter. I side with Wally on that arugment. You?

It's Your Ride

I was cruising on my motorcycle the other day (before fall/winter whacked Seattle upside the head) and noticed that I was a bit preoccupied with the speeds and rhythms of those around me. Bikers have to have eyes on all sides of their heads to keep from getting creamed, but beyond that, I need to make my journey. "It's my ride," I said to myself and flowed into a much better biking groove.

I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym today and was noticing the folks around me and who they were noticing. It was a bit distracting. I closed my eyes, let my iPod take me away and into my own best pace and rhythm and said, "It's my ride."

Over the weekend, I was thinking about my business and where I want to take it. During the last month, I have connected with lots of people like me and noticed what they are doing and how they are running their businesses. Benchmarking the cool things people are doing is fun and important to keep fresh and relevant - that said, so much of what other people are doing just doesn't seem like me. This weekend, I leaned back in my chair, put on some thinking music and said, "It's my ride."

And when I was a manager, I needed to tell myself the same thing and it worked very well. When leading inside an organization, we can get overwhelmed and distracted by everything that's going on and by comparing what we are doing to how others are doing it. Learning, getting feedback and  benchmarking best practices is important and helpful. Managing is tough stuff. Dysfunction, change, and opportunity make our jobs more complex. But that's why we lead, right? We each need to define and manifest the managerial experience that fits our style because that is what will help us be most effective - the best expression of our unique excellence.

Sure, we need to develop important managerial and leadership fundamentals, but then, "it's our ride."

Whose ride are you on?

The Future of Workplaces

Tim Callington, from the Orange Future Enterprise Coalition (OFEC) gave me a heads up about a report they just launches called, “The way to work: space, place and technology in 2016”, which explores how the way we work will change over the next decade. It's pretty interesting stuff, so I thought I would share it with you. Here's the summary he shared:

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It concludes that businesses should prioritize managing intellectual property and flexibility of work time and location to control change over the next 10 years. The Coalition has designed four future ‘worlds’ of work, scenarios depicting what organizations may look like by 2016. The scenarios are defined by the relationship between workers and employers. Based on the scenarios and to help businesses plan for the future, the report also sets out seven factors to focus on when developing business strategy.

FOUR SCENARIOS:

1. “Disciples of the Cloud”: Businesses control all intellectual property and determine where and when work takes place.

2. “Electronic Cottages”: Businesses control all intellectual property, but workers are able to determine where, when and how they work.

3. “Replicants”: Businesses depend on specialist consultants, their expertise and intellectual property. Work is much less predictable and reliable, but workers are free to choose where, when and how much they work.

4. “Mutual Worlds”: Businesses operate as cooperatives of independent contractors. Intellectual property is controlled by workers, who focus on small local ventures, often connected to networks of similar ventures elsewhere to give scale.

SEVEN STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONS:

Innovation: Maintain an external focus and engage with others outside your organization, your sector as well as your customers. Share the costs and fruits of innovation with strategic partners where possible. Move away from deploying innovations from the top down, give areas of your business freedom to trial and refine multiple innovations on a smaller scale.

Culture: Create a culture that recognizes and complements the values of increasingly empowered employees at all levels. Build on successful core competencies as well as recognize and respond quickly when things can be done better elsewhere. In the context of a more fragmented workforce, understand the limits and relevance of ‘implementing’ a corporate culture and move towards a more consensual style engagement.

Leadership: Re-evaluate the role of management in your organization. Look for ways to make management an enabling force for activity taking place across the organization, rather than solely a decision function.

Quality: Continue to champion quality, of course. But also look at how to champion good service design, which embeds quality in delivery, or even co-creates it with its end-users.

Operation & technology: Create a map which includes the story of how your world is changing and why - and what the critical stepping stones will be. It is important that your roadmap allows for divergent future outcomes and that there is spare capacity inside or outside your company to explore these.

Brand: Understand the model which matches the value you deliver - and have a risk management program which understands where the conflicts are likely to flare.

Regulation: Work with others in your sector, and your regulators, to develop models of the workplace of the future – and collaborate on building the most effective regulatory regimes for them. Develop an understanding of and engage with the relevant interest groups and NGOs that increasingly influence policy making.

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The report includes some interesting diagrams and is very well presented. I am working with a company right now on how to be a better virtual organization - which might be a combination between an electronic cottage and mutual world. If you have any books or resources you would recommend in this topic area, please let us know in a comment.

Check out the report here (Scroll down to "The Way to Work").