You’re a Manager Now: You Have to Dress the Part

You have to dress the part, you have to look like a manager, if you want people to perceive you as a manager. Not sure you believe this? Then watch my new video and leave your comment below.

You’re new to this, so cut yourself some slack!

Here’s a video I recently posted on YouTube, advising new managers (like you!) to be patient with themselves instead of expecting to learn everything at once. It’s great advice for new managers!

Dealing with Interruptions

Many new managers feel frustrated because they can’t get on with what they perceive as their work for dealing with interruptions by their team members. In this video, I talk about why you shouldn’t resent these interruptions, and also give you some tips on how to deal with them. Enjoy the video, and remember to leave your comments.

Characteristics of Winning Teams

If you look closely at winning teams, you’ll see they have certain characterics in common. And great team leaders work to establish and maintain these team characteristics because they lead to high performance, high productivity and – just as important – to satisfaction among team members.

Here’s a video I made for you describing those characteristics of winning teams.

Building Trust on Your Team

Team collaboration, extra drive for special projects, stepping up to help other team members, team motivation: all these are automatically increased when you have a team whose members trust one another. Here’s a video I made for you on how to build trust on your team.

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.

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

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.

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