Guidance for the Newly Promoted

I recently did an interview with Tom Cox on his Internet radio program, Tom on Leadership. It was all about how to use the first 30 days of your new position to get you off to a good start. If you’d like to hear some great insights from both Tom and me, here’s the link to the recording:

Guidance for the Newly Promoted

I’d love to have your comments on the ideas Tom and I discussed, and especially if you put them into practice.

Time Management for Managers: a More Effective To Do List

Most people I know start each work day with good intentions and a To Do list. Sadly, by the end of each day the To Do list has gone by the board and the good intentions have evaporated in a black cloud of frustration.

Does that describe you? As a manager, you need to have a system that ensures that you get done the things you need to get done, despite the chaos around you. Time management for managers requires a better To Do List.

The traditional To Do list is simply a list of the names of things you want to get done. You sit down and start jotting down, or typing in, all the things that pop into your head that you’d like to get done today — and that list can be dauntingly long by the time you’ve finished. That’s not a To Do List — that’s a brain dump.

The first problem is that there’s no difference on the list between a 2-minute item and a 2-hour item — they’re both just items. So how can you possibly know how many you can fit into your day?

There’s a simple solution to this. Block off the amount of time you will devote to each item. This forces you to really think about the size of each task, and when it totals up to about 15 hours of work, you know you can’t do it in an eight-hour day — it just doesn’t compute and it’s not going to happen.

But this reality check will help you become practical and cull the list so that the block for each item has a place on your schedule. Now all you have to do is put them in order and work through them.

“Huh!” I hear you say, “what about all the interruptions?”

Ah well, that’s a subject for another day — stay tuned!

Problem Solving for New Managers

Problem solving is one of the most challenging skills for new managers. In this new 12-minute video, I give you one model of collaborative problem solving. Try it, on your own or with your team.

Effective Listening Skills: Essential to Your Management Toolkit

Effective listening skills can make a world of difference to you as a manager, as well as to the people you manage. Most of us think we listen better than we actually do, so I’ll help make it easy for you. Here are “Helen’s 9 Rules for Lively Listening.”

1. Decide to listen

Make this conscious decision every time you enter a conversation. You’ll be surprised at how this focuses your attention and helps you listen to what the other person is saying instead of just waiting for your turn to speak — which is many people’s idea of listening!

2. Avoid selective listening

It can be difficult to truly listen to someone we don’t like. However, it’s a simple fact of life that we won’t like everyone we work with, or even everyone who reports to us. But as a manager, as a professional, don’t let that get in the way. The person may have something valuable to say, and how will you know if you don’t listen? Remember, it’s the song that matters, not the singer.

3. Give acknowledgment and feedback

It’s not enough for you to know you are listening — the other person has to know as well. Use body language signals such as a nod or a smile, or verbal cues such as “I hadn’t realized that”.

4. Ask appropriate questions

Asking questions is, of course, speaking; however, it’s also listening because it is a way of eliciting information from the other person. Confirm facts through closed-ended questions that can have one-word answers: are you coming to the meeting? Expand discussions through open-ended questions: how can we use that idea in the product launch?

5. Listen for non-verbal cues

If someone’s tone, body language and words are not congruent, you would be well advised to pay attention to the non-verbal signals. They are usually the ones that speak the truth.

6. Listen with your whole body

Leaning forward towards the speaker and keeping eye contact will confirm to him or her that you are listening. What’s more, it actually does help you listen effectively.

7. Separate fact from opinion and propaganda

If a person says something controversial or challenging, consider whether it is a fact, or just the person’s opinion masquerading as truth. Base your response on your understanding.

8. Control your emotional response

We all have “hot buttons” which, when triggered, can lead us into unwise reactions instead of considered responses. Learn to recognize how you physically feel when you are about to “lose it”; this lets you mentally step back before you respond and the result is always more professional.

9. Make notes

The act of taking notes promotes the act of listening, as well as showing that what the speaker is saying is important.

Effective listening skills are arguably among the most important skills in working with others. Improving your listening skills will make you a better manager.

Tips for New Managers Is Reactivated!

As you can clearly see from the dates of previous posts, Tips for New Managers hasn’t been an active blog for quite some time. I won’t bore you with the reasons, but suffice it to say that I’m back and so is this blog.

I won’t give you a schedule as to when or how often I will post, but it will be enough to supply you with a continuous stream of information that will help you as you struggle to come to grips with the skills you now need in your new role as a manager. To help me keep Tips for New Managers relevant and helpful, please do leave a comment with your specific challenges, questions, information needs etc., and I will do my best to address them in future posts. I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope you will visit often.

Also, check out The Manager’s Journey and claim your free audio program, 7 Mistakes New Managers Make and How You Can Correct Them.

Happy Managing!

Managing Team Conflict: 4 Obstacles

One of the topics people often ask me about in my manager coaching engagements is how to manage conflict on their teams or in the workplace generally.

There are many different types of conflict, not all of which is bad. In fact, healthy conflict born of many people bringing a variety of skillsets and viewpoints to a discussion can result in innovation that would not otherwise have been possible.

However, team conflict can also be demotivating and eventually lead to a toxic environment. If you are in a position of leadership, at whatever level, you will do well to create some systems for dealing with conflict in a way that is in the best interests of all concerned.

Of course, this is a huge subject, and in fact it warrants a whole Stage in The Manager’s Journey. But for now, I’ll concentrate on what I see as four common obstacles that keep people from dealing with workplace conflict effectively.

1. Considering only your own interests. If you have four people on your team and everyone is taking this attitude, then you’ll have four people digging their heels in, and the scene is set for conflict. Your job as team leader is to help everyone see the issue in the light of the team’s interests, or even the company’s interests. I’ve founds sports analogies to be quite useful in these discussions: if everyone tried to score all the goals themselves the team strategy would fall apart and they would never win any games. You, of course, must have a very clear understanding of your own team goals, and be prepared to articulate them persuasively. You must also find a way to help each person get at least a part of what they want out of the situation so that nobody will feel they lost.
2. Putting limits on the scope of discussion. Assuming you have jumped over the first hurdle and have everyone will to contribute to a useful discussion of the issue, don’t sabotage your efforts by limiting the possibilities. I love “blue sky” brainstorming sessions, in which everyone is free to put forward any and all ideas for discussion. Set a clear ground rule that nobody is allowed to squelch anyone else’s idea in the first round of simply surfacing ideas. In the next round of discussion, you’ll need to weed out the impractical ideas, but again set a ground rule that comments are to be on the ideas themselves and not personal attacks on those who propose them. No ideas should be categorized as stupid, or you can be sure that fewer ideas will be put forward in future.
3. Judging and rejecting ideas prematurely. People’s thought processes are different. Someone might think a problem through very carefully and come up with a promising solution, but their way of expressing it might not make it clear to everyone else. Ask questions that elicit more information and start a useful discussion. Of course, the solution may not be the right one, but if it has had the benefit of discussion, discarding it is less likely to offend anyone and deepen the conflict.
4. Finally, looking for only one best answer. If you work from the assumption that only one solution is the right one, it follows that you’ll have to reject others that might have had built-in possibilities. If you come up with two, or even three, possible solutions, you can then examine the pros and cons of each, and perhaps even decide on a hybrid that works perfectly for the situation.

These steps will help you work through team conflict arising from process and function discussion. Of course, there are other types of conflict that arise simply because we are all human beings with human failings — but that’s a topic for another post!

In the meantime, check out my “10 Minutes for $10 on Managing Conflict on Your Team” at http://www.mhwcom.com/pages/10minuteaudios.html

New Manager: Invest in Yourself!

Someone recently told me she would like to become a Traveler in my program for new managers, The Manager’s Journey, but her employer would not pay for it. She asked how she could persuade the company to pay so that she could take part in The Manager’s Journey.

My answer probably wasn’t what she expected, but here it is: pay for it yourself! After all, it’s your career, isn’t it?

One of the biggest mistakes new managers make is not investing in their own professional development. Of course it’s great when your company puts you through courses for your development, but you shouldn’t restrict yourself to those. If you want to develop your management career, there are many things you’ll need to learn and they won’t all be available in-house. Those who ask why they should have to pay when it’s the company that gains are taking a very short-sighted view.

In the long term, you will actually benefit more than the company, because you will learn skills that are transferrable. If you move to another position in another company, you will already be more prepared if you’ve learned some basic management skills. If you can truthfully say in your resume that you have taken management courses, that gives you an advantage in the job market, so why not put yourself in this position even if it means paying your own way?

That is, in fact, the reason I have kept the ticket price for The Manager’s Journey low, because I know many new managers will have to pay their own way and I want them to be able to afford it. (By the way, if you haven’t already, you really should read all about The Manager’s Journey to see if it’s for you.)

Don’t be short-sighted, new manager, and don’t be left behind: invest in your own professional growth, invest in your career, invest in yourself!

Is It Important, or Just Urgent?

New managers often tell me they seem to spend their time “putting out fires”; in other words, everything seems to be urgent and need attention right away. This is, in fact, a major cause of stress for managers at all levels, but particularly for new managers. So how can you deal with all these emergencies and still get on with the work you set yourself to do at the beginning of the day?

In Steven Covey’s classic book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, he divides tasks, challenges, decisions etc. into four quadrants, which he describes in the following diagram:

Covey Quadrants

Think about an item that’s on your “to do” list right now. Which quadrant would it fall into?

For example, finishing your report for delivery at a high level meeting tomorrow: Q1

Planning a staff training program for next year: Q2

Answering a colleague’s question about where to make a lunch reservation: Q3

Answering an e-mail that should never have come to you in the first place: Q4

Now look at all the items on your current “to do” list, and consider which quadrant you live in most of the time in the course of your job. Most stressed new managers find they work predominantly in Q1 and Q3, because they automatically react to the urgent, never stopping to consider whether it is important or not.

Steven Covey changed a lot of lives by recommending that we move as much as possible into the items that belong in Q2: important but not urgent. Using my examples above, planning your staff training program is important, but it’s not urgent because it is for next year. Why is that good? Because it gives you time to do the job well without panic! The key here is not to procrastinate, but to block off time over a certain period to do the job before it becomes urgent. This is an automatic stress reducer.

So what about the other three quadrants? Q4 is a no-brainer: if it’s not urgent and not important, why do it at all? Get rid of these items.

Q3 items are not important, so why is it urgent that you do them? Often these items become urgent because other people having procrastinated about asking you for information, and now they need it right away. That makes it their problem, not yours. Help them out the first time, but make it clear that in the future you can’t be interrupting your schedule to deal with items that would not have been urgent had they been dealt with earlier.

Finally, Q1 items must be done urgently because they are also important. Your task as a manager is to come up with solutions so that these particular items don’t become emergencies in future. The best way to do that is to handle them before they become urgent — in other words, move them over to Q2.

The Covey Quadrant is one of the most useful tools you will ever come across as a manager. Take some time to put it to work, and work as much as possible in Q2. You’ll be amazed at how much important work you get done, and how much less stressful your day becomes.

Quiet Please, Manager Working

Interruptions are part of a manager’s day, as you’ve probably discovered. On another day I’ll write about how to handle constant questions and requests for information on a normal day, but for today I want to offer a specific tool that has helped me complete many an important task on time and with less stress.

It’s the quiet time.

You have a report to write, and the deadline is looming. You’ve made several starts on it, but never seem to get a big enough chunk of time to complete it, and all those distractions make it difficult to get your concentration back to the job at hand. OK, how much time will you need to finish the job? An hour? Two hours? Half a day? Decide this first, then block off that amount of time on your schedule.

So now you know you’ll be busy on the report during that time, but you need others to know so that they will respect your quiet time. Simply send out an e-mail saying, “I need quiet time on Thursday from 9 – 11 a.m. Thank you for co-operating.” In case you get a visit from someone who didn’t see the e-mail, hang a sign on your closed door with the same message. Most people I talk to about this don’t expect it to work, and are amazed to find that most of the time it does. The reason is that other people wish they had thought of it too!

Now of course some people will ignore your message and barge right in. If that happens, don’t even look up from your desk or your computer. Simply concentrate even harder on what you are doing to make it obvious. If your fingers are hovering over your keyboard, type something — anything. You can always take it out later if you typed nonsense, but it sends the message that you really are working. When the person speaks, unless it is the President of the company or your immediate boss, don’t respond. Keep typing! Eventually they will get the message and say something brilliant like, “I see you are busy.” Look up at that point, agree that you are under deadline and this is not a good time to talk. Ask if you can call them when you are finished, and usually that will take care of things.

Since interruptions are often cited as a major cause of stress in the workplace, it’s in your own interests to figure out ways to deal with them that work for you. I strongly recommend quiet time. However, this is one of those tools that shouldn’t be overused or it will lose its effectiveness, so reserve it for times when you really need it and it can be one of the most valuable tools in your management toolbox.

Leading Meetings: an Essential Skillset for Managers

Monday morning meetings, client meetings, problem solving meetings, staff meetings, regular meetings — just too many meetings! That’s a common problem for managers at all levels, who feel they can’t get on with the work of their department for attending or leading meetings. For new managers, it’s just another layer of added stress!

Meetings are a fact of business life, and while technology can cut down on the number of face-to-face meetings, there are still times when that’s the best way to deal with issues. So whether you are a new manager or a seasoned manager, you’d do well to learn to run effective meetings.

Here are Helen’s 9 Rules for Meaningful Meetings:

1.    Call only necessary meetings.
Could a teleconference, a series of phone calls, an e-mail or a memo serve the same purpose? Develop a reputation for calling meetings only when necessary, and people will be more willing to devote their time to them.
2.    Invite the right people.
Invite people who have something to contribute or who need to be involved in the discussion. Don’t invite people just because they are at a certain level in the organization. Busy people appreciate your consideration of their time.
3.    Distribute the agenda before the meeting.
People should receive the agenda a week or so before the meeting. This lets people know what will be discussed and gives them an opportunity to gather information they will need and prepare their input. Receiving an agenda as you arrive at a meeting is almost as bad as not having an agenda at all — and that’s bad!
4.    Start and finish on time.
Don’t wait for latecomers—they shouldn’t be rewarded for upsetting everyone else’s schedule. Allot a time to each subject on the agenda and stick to it. You will finish on time—and people will love you!
5.    State the objective at the start of the meeting.
State an objective that is results-oriented rather than discussion-based. e.g. “We are meeting this morning to approve the final budget for next quarter.” This is a measurable objective, towards which you can work during the discussion.
6.    Keep the meeting moving towards its objective.
Don’t let people drag the discussion off track. Keep reminding them of the objective and redirect the discussion back when they stray.
7.    Don’t just sit there—say something!
Having something to say and saying it is the only way to contribute to someone else’s meeting. Do your homework in advance and you will know what you want to say.
8.    Arrange for appropriate notes.
If it’s your meeting, arrange for a support staff person to take notes. The note taker should not be a participant, since it is difficult to participate and takes notes at the same time.
9.    When the objective has been accomplished—stop!
Finish early and you’ll be a hero, so don’t spoil it by starting to discuss other issues. Congratulate participants on a successful meeting, and let them get back to their day.
We don’t spring from the womb knowing how to run effective meetings — we need to work on the skills! That’s why The Manager’s Journey includes a whole stage on both leading your own meetings and making the most of the time you spend at other people’s meetings. Learn these skills now, right at the start of your management career, and you’ll save your company money and yourself a whole lot of stress.