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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,…
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How Much Work is Enough? Are You Working Smart, Hard, or Long?
On this topic, I have many more questions than answers. There are new kinds of vacation policies popping up, especially at new companies trying to establish a different kind of company culture. They have been experimenting with policies with no set formula for determining how much vacation you can take. It is up to the…
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Dealing with the Dangers of Hub and Spoke Management: All Roads Lead to …
Some managers use a method that I call “hub and spoke management.” I am not a fan and here’s why. In this approach, the manager is the hub of all communication and the manager communicates with each direct report (and sometimes other employees) in separate private channels. In hub and spoke management “team” meetings, most…
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What the Muppets Have to Say About Your Business and Your Audience
I have been reading the new biography of Muppets creator Jim Henson by Brian Jay Jones. Part of Henson’s genius was that he recognized things about the medium of television that seem obvious in retrospect. In particular, he understood the importance of literally seeing things from the audience perspective. Most early television shows that included…
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Five Steps to Create Customer Support to Match Your Hyper-Convenient Service
We have all come to rely on many new services which we find hyper-convenient. For example, we rely on: Video and audio recording and streaming services like TiVo, Roku, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and Spotify. We find them hyper-convenient to watch and listen to what we want, when and where we want. Paying for parking with a…
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Five Lessons You Can Learn From CVS’s Recent Announcement
CVS announced last week that it will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products in its stores as of October. It will be a while before all the implications play out, but on the face of it, this looks like a great case study for some of the principles we have been talking about in…
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Who Are Your Customers?
Last week we looked at the two questions that successful businesses ask and answer relentlessly. What business are you in? Who are your customers? In last week’s post, we focused primarily on the first question. Here are some tips on how to get useful answers to the second question. 1. Talk to your best customers…
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Successful Businesses Ask and Answer Two Questions Relentlessly
What business are we in? Who are our customers? These two questions surface your most important business challenges and opportunities. Even if you are an internal service provider in a bigger organization, these are still the right questions. Here is a simple case I am dealing with right now that focuses primarily on the first question.…
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Three Secrets to Managing Interruptions With Less Stress for Everyone
1. Define your “interrupt hierarchy” and discuss it with your colleagues. If you are meeting with a colleague and your smartphone buzzes, your desk phone rings, and someone knocks at the door, what do you do? Do you answer the call on your smartphone while letting your desk phone go to voicemail, then answer the questions…
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Creating the Best Solution Requires Both Seekers and Finders – Which Are You?
Finders don’t hunt for something, they try to figure out where it is and go there to find it. They narrow down the possibilities through careful analysis. Not surprisingly, they are good at finding things that are lost. They like mysteries and puzzles as long as they have answers. They employ the deductive reasoning of…