How do you you apply the principles of improvisation to management?
Too often our management plans consist of mental gymnastics that keep us in our heads and out of touch with what is occurring at work and with our staff.
Many managers are finding the benefit of learning about improvisation to improve their management approach and skills. See Patricia […]
If you’re a manager, you should be having weekly meetings with each person on your team. Why? To make it easier for you to do your job as a manager by having documentation of what’s happened and what expectations are for what’s about to happen.
So how can you do this without spending a lot of […]
Recently I started using iGoogle, a personalized Google portal similar to PageFlakes and others I’ve tried in the past. I wasn’t sure how useful this could be to me as a manager, probably because I never took the time to play with these pages…until now.
Before I share what I’m using, you’ll need to sign up […]
To love or not to love, that is the question.
Labor day was on Monday. Now it is back to work for the week. Are you just laboring along or is management a labor of love? How do you feel about the following equation (labor = love)? Is it a dream of new age management flakes […]
Looking for some easy, common sense tips on how to be a better slacker manager? Look no further than this Manager’s Cheat Sheet of 101 Common Sense Rules for Leaders.
Some of my favorite tips from the list:
8. Always smile. Smiles are contagious and will make others feel positive when you’re around.
19. Make sure expectations are […]
One of the best ways I’ve found to pick up the slack as a manager is to realize that failing forward is my best option for future success. Taking a few minutes to learn a lesson from the times that didn’t go so well have been what taught me the most in my time as […]
“I have observed that most people put too much emphasis on decision making and too little on decision managing. As a result, they lack focus, discipline, intentionality, and purpose”
~John C. Maxwell, The 360 Degree Leader
Before you can begin to manage others you must become disciplined in managing yourself. “Leading by example” is an old piece […]
One of the most difficult and inconsistent people I’ve had to manage over the years has been…yes, you guessed it…me. As a project manager I’ve worked with all kinds, from the strong silent types to the prima donnas that can move the world with a finger…and make sure you know it.
The challenge truly comes down […]
Here’s just a total brain dump of various “do it easier/faster” tips that I’ve collected recently:
Check movie listings on Google by typing: movies: your-movie-name. If Google already knows where you are, the first clickable result will be all your local listings. If Google doesn’t know where you are, you’ll get a place to input your […]
David Lorenzo has a great post about the power of face to face meetings. I wholly agree with his assessment that passion is best expressed in person.
I’m all about email and IM and, when I must, the phone. For several months (until yesterday, actually) I even had a polycom unit set up on the corner […]
What follows is probably going to be controversial. And it will probably be taken out of context, or dismissed out-of-hand because of the name of this blog. But what I’m going to tell you is both subtle and powerful and must not be misused or abused, though I’m quite sure it will be and probably […]
One thing I’ve always admired about the business of higher education is the idea of collegiality. The big idea is that coworkers ought to have a good sense of civility and cooperativeness. In higher ed, like most other workplaces, it’s easy to find intradepartmental collegiality, but tougher to find interdepartmental collegiality. On the whole, at […]
This is really more of a personal management hack than a personnel management hack, but I think it scales pretty well–I’ve had an entire office take vertical days from time to time. And actually, I like this so well that this isn’t the first time I’ve written about it.
The concept is super simple. You just […]
This is a tried and true hack that isn’t limited to the managers in the crowd. Death by next action has it’s roots in the ‘Getting Things Done’ philosophy. The ‘next action’ phrase refers to the very next physical action that moves a project forward. Death by Next Action is a micromanagement trick that’s used […]
Back in the day, radios had actual dials which, when turned by hand, scanned across radio frequencies. Much of the sound coming out of the radio was static “noise.” When your ear heard recognizable sounds (”signal”) like voices or music, you slowed down the dial spinning and moved the dial back and forth until you […]
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