-
Three Keys to Managing People and Risk That I Learned From Teaching Au Pairs to Drive
There is no perfect solution to childcare. There are all kinds of childcare options with various trade-offs in convenience, stress, and guilt. Anyone who has peeled a clinging child off of their legs at the door of the daycare center while other parents looked on with a mix of empathy and fear knows what I mean.…
-
Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay
Mr. Lemmel was my first manager. I was a suburban kid working as a farm hand for the summer. On my first day, he needed me to help bale hay. He drove a tractor over to his gas pump to fill up the tank for the day. Then he told me to sit in the…
-
Five Reasons Your Company Is Addicted to Reorganization and How to Survive the Next One
Some companies seem to be in a constant state of reorganization. It’s almost an addiction. If you want to survive reorganizations, you need to be a bridge not a box. More on this in a minute, but first, it helps to understand why companies reorganize so often? 1. Modern enterprises tend to describe themselves in…
-
First Three Steps on the Road to Becoming an Expert Manager of Experts
Since most of us are experts in only a few areas, it would seem that one of those areas ought to be managing other experts. Here are three steps to get you started. Step 1. Learn to respect expertise. We expect others to respect our own expertise, but frequently we don’t seem to respect the expertise…
-
Two Secrets to Discovering the Benefits of the Long View: From Deadlines to Lifelines
One of the most damaging corporate pathologies is the obsession with short term performance at the expense of longer term sustainability. A pervasive symptom of this pathology is the daily game of “Name That Deadline.” Your manager asks, when can I have your report or when will that project be done? You give a date with…
-
Put on Your 3D Interview Glasses and Hire Three-Dimensional People
You should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing belief system among hiring managers that you have to make a trade-off between technical depth and breadth of interpersonal competence for example. I cringe when I hear a hiring manager say something like “the guy can’t…
-
But the Problem Actually IS Complicated! Seven Reasons to Build a Model to Solve It
Have you ever had a conversation with a colleague that sounded something like this? You: This is a complicated problem. There are a lot of variables to consider and many of them are interdependent. Colleague: I get that, but you need to simplify it somehow or no one is going to understand it. You: The problem…
-
Growing a Company Culture: What Kind of Trellis Are You Building?
I have been talking with my advisory board a lot about company culture lately. I recommend Teague’s recent post in which he explains why he thinks you can’t “build” company culture, you have to “grow” it. I like his analogy of training a bonsai tree or cultivating a vine on a trellis. It takes patience and…
-
Searching for Alternatives to Death by Powerpoint: The Single Slide Strategy
A friend sent me this link to an NPR story about the mind-numbing effects of powerpoint presentations. NPR interviewed various groups including physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider, CEOs at fortune 500 companies, and generals at the pentagon. Some of those interviewed have put an outright ban on powerpoint presentations at their meetings because they…
-
Don’t Argue With Your Team, Argue FOR Your Viewpoint
The best teams argue within a framework of collaboration. They understand the value of bringing different points of view to solving a problem and the importance of arguing in a way that builds trust rather than undermines it. Here are ten steps to building a collaborative environment for productive arguments. Don’t argue WITH each other,…