Mid-Day Management
Are your employees struggling to perform? Have you looked at their manager’s mid-day management approach?
Mid-day management is often left by the wayside, and therefore results in lack of performance. But I swing by my employees and check in on them throughout the day.That’s enough, isn’t it? Evidently not.
What is mid-day management? Mid-day management is a brief, formal review of a groups performance against expectations during the middle of the day. This process allows you to stop, assess with the manager regarding where the performance is for the day, and why. The beauty of this model is that it allows you an opportunity influence the performance before the day is in the books.
When I worked in the call center industry we used to have the employees go up to a white board and log their performance throughout the day. The manager of the group and I would meet half way through their day, and come up with a plan to move their lower performers to where they needed to be, or to get their top performers to do even better.
I hope you have enjoyed this management tip.
Leadership
Its been in the last hundred years, really, that the fervor for writing books on leadership has really taken off. What is leadership? There are many who would offer up an opinion. Leadership is one of the most cliche terms used in business. Its hard to measure, so its hard to value.
In my experience, leadership manifests itself in different ways, but the end result is always the same - Leadership is catalyst for positive change that otherwise would not have happened, had the leader not been there. Now, does this mean that the leader is the manager, or the head of whatever activity we are observing? Of course not. Leadership is George Washington noticing that his troop’s morale was down, so he stayed with them in the freezing cold despite having a warm house to sleep in. Leadership is asking the right questions, and motivating the right people in the right way to make them want to achieve a common objective when they may not have believed in that objective in the first place.
I’d be curious on your definitions of leadership. Do you have any modern day examples? Post a comment so we can have a discussion.
Thanks
Mr. Swap
MBA
Simple Approach to Problem Solving
Problems are hard. We all have them, and we dislike them in so many ways. Problem solving is easy to put off. Problems seem bigger than life, and often unsolvable. They can be hard to understand, and they represent hard work. So, what is the best approach to solving a problem?
I’m going to offer up a very simplified approach to problem solving. There is no math here, and no great formula.
Name it
Part of the problem solving process that many struggle with is the part of identifying the problem. You less likely to fix something if you don’t know what it is. Come on, you have been in this situation before - A group of managers sit around the long table for a morning meeting, and the facilitator hands out a report which bears tidings of great discomfort as you all look at a number that is way off target. You have a problem, right?
You might get yelled at. “Get this number up! (or down!).” You may get asked “How did this happen?” or “What are you going to do to fix this by next week?”
So now what? The first step is to name the problem. Naming the problem somehow makes it a little less frightening to us, and therefore a little more apt to tackle it head on. “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself,” said Hermione Granger in one of the Harry Potter books. Why inflate the problem in our minds? This will serve only to intimidate those who are tasked with tackling the problem.
Naming the problem is also the first step in the process of coming to understand the problem. Go ahead, try naming your problem. If you name it something that has nothing to do with the problem, you can start weeding out what is not the problem by a process of elimination. If you have a problem with a sales target, its probably not because of the cafeteria food. In this stage, you want to eliminate as many factors as you can. Figure out what its not, by naming it. You will much closer to identifying the problem when you have done this exercise.
Shape it
Now that you have some understanding of the problem, you have named it. Next, you need to shape the problem. Start by asking the right questions that will lead to understanding the problem on a deeper level. Once you really understand it, it will take shape. When does it happen? How often? Who is involved? Do you have the right reports to track it? You have to ask the right questions to shape the problem properly, and to gain further understanding. There are many exercises you can do to help you literally form a picture of the problem. My favorite is the mind map. Visit the nearest whiteboard, and draw the name of your problem in the center of it. Then, draw a ciricle around it, and branch words and phrases that link to the problem. Later you can branch other words and phrases to those words and phrases. Before you know it, you are starting to get a good idea of what attributes are driving the problem. At this point, you have named the problems “parts.”
Are you struggling with this part of the simple problem solving approach? Okay, I will go ahead and put a formula out there (but no numbers). Behaviors = results. Let that sink in. Behaviors equals results. Think of a basketball player on the free throw line. There are certain mechanics as to how he holds the ball, bends his elbow inward, and later releases the ball at the basket with a certain amount of force. All of these mechanics, or behaviors, result in how well he shoots a free throw, or what his free throw percentage is. If he changes his behaviors, say, by sticking his shooting elbow far out to the side, it will dramatically impact his results.
What does that have to do with your business problem? Everything. Let’s say I work in the call center industry. I have an employee that has a really high call time, and no matter what I do, I can’t help her bring it down to an acceptable level. I have a problem. First, I need to look at the process. What goes into making a phone call? The phone rep has to pick up the phone, then dial. Once the rep is on the phone she has established patterns. Maybe she’s using a script, maybe she isn’t. Perhaps there is a certain problem that comes up frequently, and her way of explaining it entails a really long story about her childhood. There you go - I found the problem. Until I break down the process, however, that isn’t clear. That brings us to our next point.
Break it
Once you have shaped the problem, and named its parts. You are ready to break it up. For any problem to be solvable, you need to break it down into bite-sized chunks. There is the old saying that you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. It is daunting to try to attack a large problem all at once. You have to break it up.
As mentioned earlier, I like the mind map. I like to see the relationship that various parts of a process have with each other. It gets me thinking. You need to decide how best to put yourself in that state of mind. You need to be able to see the process as a whole, broken down into parts. Once you have named the problem, and named its parts / processes, you should be ready to attack.
Attack it
Attacking the problem is simple at this point. Because you have gone through the struggle of shaping, naming, and breaking the problem down, you problably have a good understanding of the issue at hand. Now you need to prioritize your attack. Which parts can you address sooner, and with the greatest impact to the business? Can you delegate some of the now bite-sized portions of the problem to other capable people that can help your organization move to a better place?
Problems are scary, but they don’t have to be. However large they seem, they are made up of smaller parts that make up the whole. Break it up, then attack it. Try it, you will see how scary problems aren’t when they are shattered into pieces on the whiteboard.
Thanks
Mr. Swap
MBA
Communication Basics
In this age where technology advances so quickly, and more and more tools come out to improve your productivity, it is important to take a step back and consider your approach to communication in the corporate world, or in every day life. Especially if you want to be effective. There is a lot static out there, and a lot of competition for your audience’s attention. Your communication has to be on target if you want to get through.
It helps if we all have a common understanding of the purpose of communication. We communicate to share meaning, and to arrive at common understanding. Why do we need to share meaning? Shouldn’t we just understand each other when we communicate? Well, no. Most everyone has a different frame of reference from which they are working. Take this blog post for example. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, so I am taking the time to establish some common understanding about communication before we start building on the idea. Before we can go somewhere together, we have to meet each other somewhere, and we are meeting at the definition of communication, and going from there.
Know your audience
If understanding each other is the reason why we communicate, it stands to reason that you should take time to know your audience. This isn’t just cliche, but a very real fact. Consider your favorite joke as an example. Its so funny that you just love to tell it whenever you can. However, let’s say that there are portions of this joke that are considered inappropriate for some reason. Would you tell this joke to your close friends at a party? Probably. That being said, would you tell this very same joke to your boss at work? his boss? A female co-worker? Your mother? Knowing who your audience is can be a real factor.
People come from from various cultures, experiences, languages, and places. All of these factors color how they see they world, and determine how they interpret what is going on it. The joke that may be funny to some, may be quite offensive to others. Knowing your audience consists of trying to understand who they are, and where their vantage point is coming from. This is critical because it will determine your approach to delivering your message. Why is delivery important? Because it influences how people receive it, internalize it, and apply it.
Think of connotation, for example. Connotation implies that some set of experiences or situation could give a secondary meaning to something that is being said, above and beyond its face value. Do you know how your audience would react to a particular wording? You had better. If you think this is unimportant, you don’t have to look very far for examples of how critical this concept really is. Take the Chevy Nova for example. This might very well be a great name for a car that is distributed in the United States, but when Chevy decided to destribute the car outside of the United States, did they consider the new culture, or the new context? What did the name communicate to the consumers in Latin America? Well, in Spanish, “No va” means it doesn’t go, or it doesn’t work. Let that sink in for a moment. Yes, they allowed their product name to undermine the product. Perhaps considering what they were communicating - and understanding their audience - could have saved them face, and money.
Delivery IS Important
Our world is full of communication static. Marketers are bombarding us with messaging, and trying to influence what we do every waking hour. The TV is always glowing, the radio is always squawking, the press is always printing, and pop-ups are always popping. With all of this communication clutter flying around, what makes you think your communication is going to get through? Society is conditioning people to tune out these communications, and is giving them the tools to do it. Tivo let’s you skip commercials, you can always change the radio station, we have all but stopped reading printed material (more and more folks read online), and pop up blockers are standard in every browser almost. People are tuning out, and have the tools to control what they take in.
So how do I deliver my message in such a way that it sinks in to my audience? That is the key question. First of all, do you have a capitve audience? Is it a seminar, or a lecture? Or, are you trying to address your employee base during regular work hours? Are you trying to communicate to everyone on the web? Obviously, delivery is important, and the channel you use is critical as well.
So, what is the best way to communicate in a given situation? Well, that depends on the situation. For the sake of this blog post, we will keep it fairly simple. I think in the future we will do a deep dive into the specifics of each method. For now, remember that you should consider many factors before you decide to communicate a certain way. If someone just had a death in the family, should you email? send flowers? or show up in person? This is an obvious case of good, better, best.
Delivery Methods
There are various ways you can deliver a message. The best way to think of it is in terms of our five senses - Hear, see, feel, touch, smell, and taste. Examples of communication in each of these abound in advertising and sales. We hear radio ads, word of mouth, or a politician on a podum with a microphone (that politician may be out shaking hands too). You see TV ads. You go to a store and you can touch the products, or you can smell and eat “samples” that they are handing out as you walk around the grocery store. You can always test drive a car. Why do people and business communicate this way? The most obvious answer is that they want you to experience. When you can get your audience to receive your message by more of their senses, they are likely to be more involved. You could hear an audio exerpt from a movie and have it impact you, but if you were to watch and listen to the movie it might be that much more powerful.
Which leads us to our next question. What impact do I want my communication to have? Do I want it to make people excited, or sad? You need to decide all of this upfront, or you may choose a delivery method that will cause an undesireable response. There are too many communication factors to cover in one blog post, but some other factors that should be considered are frequency of the communication, and asking for feedback. If you communicate something too often, it may really beat down on your audience, or lessen its impact - which may or may not be your desired outcome. Asking for feedback will allow you to better understand what your communication does for your audience.
Cheers
Mr. Swap
MBA
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