by Lucy Cadman @ Developing People
I know I go on about it a lot when writing my blogs, but I really am lucky to be managed at work by such an effective manager. My boss is capable of seeing that every job gets completed effectively by the right person, that all problems are addressed and resolved swiftly, and that the working environment is a happy and productive one.
To be an effective manager like this, it is important to recognise the good habits that belong to the areas of personal effectiveness and priority management. It is equally as important to recognise that the opposite of these good habits are the bad habits that can sneak up on us all sometimes, and start to make us ineffective almost without us realising!
Here are five steps towards being an effective manager:
1. Use a diary, and plan your work schedule
It may sound simple and obvious, but using a diary effectively can have a massive impact on how you utilise your time. It is no help to your effectiveness to complete one task and then spend the next half hour deciding what to do next! A previous boss of mine taught me how to use a diary, and her words still ring in my ears ten years later – “Action every single item in your diary for today, either by crossing it off as completed or by bringing it forward to another day, but do not ever let anything vanish from your diary unless the task is totally complete and requires no further follow up at all”.
She showed me that a diary is not just for out of office appointments, but can be used to plan the tasks of each day and week to use your time to maximum effect, and to help you keep clear time for priorities, including those which sometimes crop up unexpectedly. It also helps to ensure that your “important but not urgent” tasks still see the light of day. Remember - If you don’t have a plan for where you want to be … don’t be surprised if you arrive somewhere you don’t want to be!
2. Maintain a clear environment
One of my colleagues works from home, and every time she visits the office, she never fails to exclaim in surprise at the tidiness of my desk. I am not sure whether her surprise is based around the fact that I can manage to maintain such a tidy environment, or whether it has some roots in astonishment that I have managed to train my boss to be almost (well, nearly … maybe not quite!) as tidy and organised as I am – a skill for which he has in all honesty never previously been renowned!
An effective manager operates a “clear desk” policy. Make sure that everything you need regularly is easy to find and close to hand, and that things which are not needed so often are towards the back of your desk or filed away in draws. Have an In Tray, an Out Tray, and ensure that your Out Tray is empty at the end of each day. Do not leave your desk covered in papers at the end of each day, as you will find it surprisingly unattractive to return to the next morning, and you will waste valuable time in sorting out yesterday’s work today. Efficient administration and filing systems are invaluable.
3. Delegate efficiently
Delegation does not simply mean “ordering someone else to do it”. When used effectively, it is a key tool for an effective manager. My boss is the King of Delegation as he is not only able to pick the right person for the right task, but he can also assign tasks without any air of “offloading” them, and even more importantly, he then has the capability to take his hands off the task entirely instead of trying to tinker with the results in advance of them being presented – something that as a control freak, I must confess I aspire to being able to do.
Delegation is about entrusting responsibility and authority to others, who then become responsible to you for their results. It gives more time for you to spend on important priorities, increases your own effectiveness and impact, develops others and equips them to solve their own problems, enables decisions to be made nearer the “front line”, and promotes involvement and motivation amongst your staff. Management is about getting things done through others – it is not about doing everything yourself!
4. Remove all interruptions
The two biggest distractions preventing people from getting immersed in their work are emails and the telephone. As a bit of a technical “geek”, I am all too easily distracted by the sight or sound of an email arriving in my inbox. I could quite cheerfully tell the phone to go to … erm, somewhere lovely for a permanent holiday … but I cannot resist the allure of sneaking a peak at every email when it arrives. My boss is the opposite – he finds it harder to resist the phone, but is capable of showing great self-restraint in only checking his emails two or three times a day at the most. Between us, we make a combination of good practise!
Turn off the “ding” sound when you receive an email so that you are not tempted to look straight away and break your concentration – set aside time at the beginning, middle and end of each day for reading and replying to emails, and do not look at them at any other point. Likewise with the telephone – batch outgoing calls together rather than making them randomly throughout the day, and where possible, turn your telephone to voicemail and collect messages at stipulated points throughout the day. Operate a “stand up” policy when colleagues enter your workspace – if you remain standing whilst they are talking, they will get the message that you mean to be brisk and brief so that you can get back to the task you were completing.
5. Do not accept responsibility for the problems of your staff
For a kind and caring manager, this can be a tricky one, but you do yourself and your staff no favours by taking over responsibility of their problems. This can be a fine line to walk between showing concern and support without overstepping the bounds of professionalism, but having experienced the boss who phoned me a week after I had undergone major surgery to ask why I wasn’t back in the office at one end of the scale, through to the boss who was quite prone to shed a tear with me if things were tough at the other end of the scale, I can vouch for the fact that the middle line is actually the best place to be from an employee’s point of view.
Help your staff by all means, but the moment you let their problem become your problem, you will have one more problem than you had before – if you do this for ten staff every week, you will have gained over 100 problems in the space of three months! Instead, meet with them at an appointed time, and help them to resolve the issues themselves – you will be one problem lighter, and they will feel a sense of achievement for having ultimately dealt with things themselves.
Keep these five tips in mind, and you will be well on your way to be an effective manager with a good work/life balance, who achieves great results and motivates their workforce to even better things each day.
Showing posts with label lucy cadman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lucy cadman. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Management Training - Improving Your Networking Skills
by Lucy Cadman @ Developing People
I freely admit that I probably spend way too much time on the internet. It seems to be one of those things that is just like Marmite – you either love it or you hate it. And my relationship with the internet is definitely a love affair.
In third place, I would say, is reading and replying to emails. They are such a quick and easy way to keep in touch, especially with those who don’t live locally, or indeed who are from another country altogether. You can cram so much into one single email that you couldn’t probably fit into an expensive international phone call, although I must admit that I ought to get off my sofa and walk round to see my friend who lives in the next street as opposed to emailing her!
Second place is likely to go to using forums. With a number of fairly diverse hobbies (ranging from Ballroom Dancing via Classic Car ownership through to the keeping of several Tarantulas, and all manner of things in between!), I am often on the search for information, supplies, and the company of like-minded people. Forums provide a wealth of information at the touch of just a few buttons, and it is pretty easy to get absorbed into the community feel of such sites.
Without a doubt, in top place is Facebook, and other similar networking sites such as LinkedIn. I can misplace hours at a time keeping up with what friends all over the world have been doing, and keeping everyone up to date with my latest dancing injury, my newest car purchase, or the hiding place of my most recently escaped Tarantula. I can relay news to a couple of hundred friends, old and new, again at the touch of just a few buttons.
In today’s technological times, social and professional networking sites are a quick and easy way to give you access to a large network of people via your computer. Here are five top tips to help you use the internet successfully for networking purposes:
1. Don’t mix business and pleasure. Be careful about the way you use your business networking sites (for example, LinkedIn) as opposed to the way you use your social networking sites (for example, Facebook). If possible, keep business and pleasure completely separate online – don’t invite professional contacts to link with you on social networking sites, and vice versa. The last thing you really want is your professional contacts to be reading all about how you got a bit tipsy at the weekend, or your poorly dog needing to be taken to the vets!!
2. Take the time to look up old contacts. By adding just one contact to your online network, you will often gain access to hundreds more people who are interested in a similar vein of work, or who have professional skills that may be useful to you. Take the time and trouble to look up people you haven’t contacted in a while, and make use not only of their skills, but also of the skills of the people they network with.
3. Be careful how you come across. Remember that the written word does not have the advantage of body language to emphasize its true meaning. Words can easily be misunderstood across a computer screen, so if in doubt, leave it out!
4. Think what your legacy will be. Where as the spoken word is gone the moment it has been said, the written word has a much more lasting legacy. Never type anything out in temper, as it may be difficult to retract it, by which point the damage is already done. Be polite, courteous and professional at all times.
5. Beware of addiction! Networking sites can be incredibly time-consuming. Whilst they are a very important and useful resource, stay aware of how much time you spend using them, and don’t let this become proportionally imbalanced to the amount of work you generate from networking in this way.
One of these days, I will take my own advice on that last point … promise!
I freely admit that I probably spend way too much time on the internet. It seems to be one of those things that is just like Marmite – you either love it or you hate it. And my relationship with the internet is definitely a love affair.
In third place, I would say, is reading and replying to emails. They are such a quick and easy way to keep in touch, especially with those who don’t live locally, or indeed who are from another country altogether. You can cram so much into one single email that you couldn’t probably fit into an expensive international phone call, although I must admit that I ought to get off my sofa and walk round to see my friend who lives in the next street as opposed to emailing her!
Second place is likely to go to using forums. With a number of fairly diverse hobbies (ranging from Ballroom Dancing via Classic Car ownership through to the keeping of several Tarantulas, and all manner of things in between!), I am often on the search for information, supplies, and the company of like-minded people. Forums provide a wealth of information at the touch of just a few buttons, and it is pretty easy to get absorbed into the community feel of such sites.
Without a doubt, in top place is Facebook, and other similar networking sites such as LinkedIn. I can misplace hours at a time keeping up with what friends all over the world have been doing, and keeping everyone up to date with my latest dancing injury, my newest car purchase, or the hiding place of my most recently escaped Tarantula. I can relay news to a couple of hundred friends, old and new, again at the touch of just a few buttons.
In today’s technological times, social and professional networking sites are a quick and easy way to give you access to a large network of people via your computer. Here are five top tips to help you use the internet successfully for networking purposes:
1. Don’t mix business and pleasure. Be careful about the way you use your business networking sites (for example, LinkedIn) as opposed to the way you use your social networking sites (for example, Facebook). If possible, keep business and pleasure completely separate online – don’t invite professional contacts to link with you on social networking sites, and vice versa. The last thing you really want is your professional contacts to be reading all about how you got a bit tipsy at the weekend, or your poorly dog needing to be taken to the vets!!
2. Take the time to look up old contacts. By adding just one contact to your online network, you will often gain access to hundreds more people who are interested in a similar vein of work, or who have professional skills that may be useful to you. Take the time and trouble to look up people you haven’t contacted in a while, and make use not only of their skills, but also of the skills of the people they network with.
3. Be careful how you come across. Remember that the written word does not have the advantage of body language to emphasize its true meaning. Words can easily be misunderstood across a computer screen, so if in doubt, leave it out!
4. Think what your legacy will be. Where as the spoken word is gone the moment it has been said, the written word has a much more lasting legacy. Never type anything out in temper, as it may be difficult to retract it, by which point the damage is already done. Be polite, courteous and professional at all times.
5. Beware of addiction! Networking sites can be incredibly time-consuming. Whilst they are a very important and useful resource, stay aware of how much time you spend using them, and don’t let this become proportionally imbalanced to the amount of work you generate from networking in this way.
One of these days, I will take my own advice on that last point … promise!
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