Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.
Well, Steve Pavlina's done it again - another great idea to improve focus, drive forward progress, and increase your personal accountability. This time, he's writing about personal quotas - a very innovative approach to create structure and "space" to sharpen the saw.
Check it out, and give yourself a quota.
Read More[Updated July 2007 to correct broken links]
I'm in the midst of writing annual reviews. For the managers that report to me, I typically ask for input from people in their teams, people they interact with, and customers they work with. This is a great process, as you end up with a lot of different perspectives, stories, suggestions, kudos, etc.
One of my challenges in the past has been summarizing that in a concise, meaningful way. This year it was so much easier - it's the first year I used MindManager to organize the input.
I created a basic template to categorize and summarize the input and stories. Using this template, it was very easy to collect the information, and organize the information into summary "themes." You can download the template here: PersonnelReviewTemplate.mmap (16 KB).
I organized each person's input into three top level categories: input from their own department, input from other departments (I included customers in this category), and my own perspectives as a sort of summary.
Under each of these major categories, I created a branch for what they do well, and a branch for areas for improvement. I included stories and meaningful quotes from the feedback I received.
Then, as I wrote the review I had a handy reference catalog on each person. This made it easy to find relevant examples - for example, if I wanted to talk about the person's performance with regard to follow-through and effective communications, I could quickly scan the map and pull out a few nuggets along with an example or a quote for emphasis.
This year, I found that this method made it much easier to write these reviews. I also have a one-page summary of the input that I can keep on hand to refresh my memory as I develop coaching plans for the coming year. I think this approach will be part of my toolkit from now on.
Read MoreAre you familiar with victim mentality? I was talking to someone the other day who epitomized it - no matter what the topic, he claimed that other people were to blame for all of his problems. I tried all my voodoo about envisioning how it could be different, taking responsibility for your own well being, and all that jazz. Nothin' doin'.
This episode prompted a nice little flashback for me:
I was hanging out with an ex-Microsoft guy named Jim McCarthy about 10 years ago at a software development bootcamp, and he threw something out that has stuck with me to this day.
Jim used this notion of "trying on beliefs" a lot, which means you basically pretend that you believe something even though you may not. Sort of like putting yourself in the other guy's shoes.
Anyway, one of the beliefs he'd get people to try on was to "Pretend that you create everything that happens to you. When you find yourself in a situation you don't like, ask yourself what you did to make it happen to you."
If you flip your perspective on its head, you can inevitably come up with something in the past that contributed to your undesirable present. And, more than likely, you can think of something you could've done differently that might have prevented it.
OK, you ask, how does that help me now? For some people, it may not. For others, it might put you in a reflective mood, and you may be able to get to the next step:
Ask yourself what you can do today that will
a) keep it from getting any worse;
b) make up for the past error;
c) make it better
There's almost always something, but it's hard to see unless you look at the problem from a different perspective.
Got problems? Go ahead - try on the belief. Pretend you create everything that happens to you...
Just read a great post over on Management Craft, in which Lisa talks about the impact of relationships and behavior on management effectiveness.
Lisa's got some great insight to share about how we can destroy or create success purely based on how we treat other people, and how we choose to interact with them.
I've met plenty of abrasive people who deny that their abrasiveness is a choice - they say things like "That's just the way I'm wired." I think that's a crock. They're just happy with the status quo ("It's working for me...")
In Lisa's article, I love premise 4: "Great Managers Do What Others Won't."
That got me thinking about what the best managers I've worked for. What did they do that the others didn't? It was amazingly easy to tell the difference between the best and the rest, and also very easy to rattle off a list of what set them apart. The best have done things like:
I just finished reading my SlackerManager friend's note on the Context Agnostic Toolkit for Managers, which lists some technology-related tools that help you out in just about any field. I believe there is another set of tools: a Context Agnostic Mental Toolkit for Managers. Please indulge me in a story, as I attempt to explain.
As you may know from some of my posts, I help out with my son's Boy Scout troop fairly regularly (as an Assistant Scoutmaster). This past weekend, we were at a district Camporee -- that's an annual event in which a bunch of Boy Scout troops from a scouting district gather together.
I was staffing one of the skills stations which dealt with knot-tying. My job was to help Scouts learn to tie knots they didn't know so they could prepare for a time trial, which involved working together as a patrol to:
I taught a bunch of Scouts some new skills and details about knots. In the process of teaching and judging, I learned and practiced a lot of things:
I think I learned more than I taught, and now recognize how universal some of the skills I used can be. With that in mind, I think the Context Agnostic Mental Toolkit for Managers includes things like:
I know there are more, and I'm by no means a master of the ones on this list. As managers, just like young scouts trying to tie knots they haven't yet mastered, there is value in the process. And there is always value in improving.
What skills would you add to the list?