Keep presentations simple, it should make sense to a five year old, without treating your audience like a five year old.
9 Signs of a Losing Organization
- Fuzzy Vision: corporate vision and mission don’t inspire people; lack of strategic alignment ; people don’t know where the organization is going and what it is trying to achieve in the future.
- Lack of Leadership Skills: fear of change; leaders lack entrepreneurial spirit; leadership style on the part of management is either too directive or too hands-off; managers do not lead, they just administrate and micromanage; weak leadership development program.
- Discouraging Culture: no shared values; lack of trust ; blame culture; focus on problems, not opportunities; people don’t have fun at work; diversity is not celebrated; failures are not tolerated; people lose confidence in their leaders and systems.
- High Bureaucracy: bureaucratic organizational structures with too many layers; high boundaries between management layers; slow decision making; too close monitoring of things and subordinates; too many tools and documents discouraging creative thinking; bureaucracy is tolerated.
- Lack of Initiative: poor motivation and encouragement; people do not feel their contributions make a difference; management fails to engage the organization effectively; people work defensively and not creatively, they do their job, and nothing more.
- Poor Vertical Communication: people have no clue of the big picture and do not feel that their contributions are important; too much uncertainty; people don’t know what top-managers are thinking and planning.
- Poor Cross-functional Collaboration: functional mindset; lack of cross-functional goals and cross-functional collaboration spirit; functional, no enterprise-wide business process management; no cross-functional management committees; lack of or powerless cross-functional teams.
- Poor Teamwork: no organizational commitment to team culture; lack of shared and worthwhile goals; weak team leaders; team members who don’t want to play as part of a team are tolerated; teams are too large; lack of shared rewards.
- Poor Idea and Knowledge Management: cross-pollination of ideas is not facilitated; no idea management and knowledge management strategies and systems; “know-it-all” attitude; “not invented here” syndrome.
Progress + momentum = confidence. The moment you see yourself tackle the smallest part of the impossible task, the quieter the Critic (your internal voice) becomes because you’re slowly proving him wrong.
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action. Similar to Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept.
Hedgehog Concept By Jim Collins. Hedgehog concept is finding the intersection of the following circles:
- Understanding what you are deeply passionate about?
- Understanding what you can be best in world at and equally understanding what you cannot be best in the world at?
- Understanding what drives your economic engine? Understanding one ratio above all other ratios … profit per X … understanding what X can give you highest ROI?
A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak.
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.
Email template for respectfully declining unsolicited requests to meet from vendors
In my career I have came across two types of vendors. Type A: Vendors who were recommendations from friends, family, co-workers and executives or they obtained your contacts from conference meet ups or well established public companies looking to add your company to their partner list. Type B: everyone else.
Its usually best just to ignore type B, as majority of these emails are from bulk account and your response is no different then responding to spam. For type A however, its best to respond politely, as you may run into them in future. Below is the email template taken from Rajiv Pant.
The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.
Delegation; A development tool.
Delegation is a challenge faced at all hierarchies of leadership. Root of the challenge lies in the intention or understanding of what it means to delegate. Often delegation is misinterpreted as a way to delete items from your own to-do list or feared as way of losing power. Delegation is a development tool for subordinates. Delegation is not participation, but it is an empowerment of a trusted subordinate to make decisions unfamiliar to them. When a subordinate starts to makes a familiar decision, then they have successfully crossed the bridge from development plans to new role/responsibilities.
Delegation is not abdication; even if subordinate disagrees. The manager still has the ultimate accountability for the assignment. That is why it is important for you to establish and agree upon controls, communication and checkpoints to monitor progress. On short term tasks, its beneficial to also define completion, and measurements to define success or failure.
Remember while delegation is about people you want to grow and not about you, but if you delegate too much or not enough: in addition to possibly overburdening others, it can lead to perceptions that you are uninterested, unavailable, detached or disinterested.
Below are few considerations to help evaluate and identify, when, and how delegation can be most effective.
Who
- You trust.
- Shows the will or desire to learn and grow from experience.
- Posses complementing skill set needed to get the job done.
- You spend time guiding, teaching, leading, but not someone whom you spending time compensating for.
- Understand the difference between a having a job and holding a responsibility.
- Can represent you accurately.
- Will not be overburden with additional work.
- Has earned this reward based on accountable metrics.
What
- Delegation is not about you, it’s about others! How can this challenge help grow the individual in question? Would your HR and or Boss agree?
- Putting your own development in jeopardy? It is unquestionable that leaders need to develop others, but as we rise to more senior positions and have more resources at our disposal, we may tend to delegate too much, or hand off tasks that are vital to our own development.
- Too early to delegate? Can you solve the problem? if you can’t articulate the problem, or what needs to be solved/done, then wait until you can. When someone tell you “I wasn’t really sure what you wanted,” that is a sign of when you delegated too early.
- Is this responsibility appropriate for the individual’s current role?
Follow up
- Establish just enough controls, to step in and provide guidance, without micromanaging.
- Be very clear on expectations including any boundaries.
- Avoid prescribing HOW the assignment should be completed, but make sure the individual knows you have an answer, in case they need it.
- Keep a regular status check! Be the effective guide when the task seems to be in trouble; but let the individual complete it.
- Is there a incentives for success? What is motivation for someone to do this task, and do it well?
