Archive for April, 2007

by Vince Thompson
Author of Ignited

If you’ve been living in the corporate world for some time, you’ve probably attended a training session where one of the exercises was to conduct a “time spent” analysis in order to increase your efficiency. You cracked open your calendar, reviewed how you spent your time for the past week, and identified black holes that were wasting your energy. Maybe you even went so far as to break your activities into categories, separating the “urgent” things from the “important” things and both of these from the “insignificant” things.

Time management studies like these can be interesting, but the findings are almost always the same. Virtually every manager who works through the exercises discovers that he or she is spending too much time on “putting out fires” — dealing with the daily dramas and emergencies around the office — and not enough time thinking and planning for long-term projects that really matter. E-mails, instant messages, phone calls, and that guy from Purchasing who drops in “just for a second” and chews the fat for 45 minutes undo our best-laid plans — not to mention the endless, interminable, usually pointless meetings.

We know all this. Why doesn’t it ever change?

The problem lies in our approach. Time management programs usually focus on your personal productivity, analyzing how you choose to spend your time. This is all fine and dandy, but it misses one essential truth: In an organization that’s devoted to banging pots, you better bang pots or have a damn good reason for not banging them.

That’s why, after the PowerPoint presentation had ended and the trainer went home, you fell back into your old, unproductive rhythms — not because you didn’t agree with the time management expert’s analysis, but because you returned to normal life in the world of The Middle . . . which means doing what you think your boss wants you to do. Bang! Bang! Bang!

Managing Your Managers

In order to take back your time, your life, and your career, you need to make a new kind of change in your approach to self-management. You must step into the realm of managing your managers and thereby altering their expectations related to your time. The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your bosses want (and perhaps need) you to do and what you believe you really should do.

In the same way that you coordinate the schedule in your PDA and your laptop with the one in your desktop computer, you need to continually coordinate with your bosses to ensure that you are clear, on track, and working from the same plan.

All of this starts with having a happy and supportive boss. And that means a successful boss. Your boss has to be successful. For if he is not, his failure may cast a negative light on everyone on his team. Many potentially great careers have been stalled, not because of the effort of the individual, but because of a boss who failed to make an impact, who failed to demonstrate his own value and the value of those on his team.

The first step in managing your manager is to move beyond your own needs to examine your bosses’ needs. Sounds reasonable — but understanding those needs and figuring out what to do to meet them isn’t usually straightforward. In fact, it’s a challenge in itself, requiring a whole new set of skills most people have never thought about.

Needs Explicit and Needs Implicit

Let’s start by dispelling a common misunderstanding. Lots of people in business assume that “meeting the boss’s needs” means doing exactly what the boss wants them to do — accepting the boss’s vision and direction wholesale. Wrong! This assumption is simple-minded and inaccurate. It leads to managers in The Middle focusing on aligning their lips with their boss’s backsides rather than meeting anyone’s actual needs.

Real “managing upward” demands a more serious and subtle analysis of human needs, which starts with the realization that needs come in two forms — explicit needs and implicit needs.

Explicit needs are easier to understand. They may be stated in the strategic plan promulgated by the company or the division, or they may be announced by your boss whenever the team gets together for the usual pep talk/torture session. They may sound something like this:

· “We need to expand our business internationally!”
· “We need to create a shipping policy that will save us some money and keep the administrative assistants from running around the office like decapitated chickens every afternoon at 4 p.m. when the FedEx guy makes his last pickup.”
· “We need to commerce-enable our Web site before Amazon.com decides to start selling the same kinds of widgets we sell and drives us out of business.”
· “We need to hire two more designers, fast, so we’ll have a prayer of getting the fall product line into the stores sometime this year.”
Explicit needs are the kinds of things that make it into the lists of goals you write every year at objective-setting time. They’re the things you tell people you’re working on when they ask. They tend to be the things you are proud of accomplishing (if and when you happen to accomplish one of them).
Implicit needs are more subtle. People don’t talk about them. Sometimes they’re not even aware of them. Most of the time they are things that people would deny if confronted with them. They sound like this:
· “Make me look good in front of my boss so that when he gets kicked upstairs he’ll recommend me for his job.”
· “Help me demonstrate my creativity by coming up with some ideas for next year’s marketing campaign that I can tweak a little and show off at the next divisional conference as if they were mine.
· “Help me feel more like a leader and less like the kid who was always picked last in the schoolyard basketball games.”
· “Figure out some way to keep the department running when I’m not around so I can go on vacation for ten days in a row without having to call the office every two hours to make sure the damned place isn’t on fire.”
While explicit needs tend to run a linear path, implicit needs tend be random, triggered by emotion and circumstance. But don’t think of them as flighty and certainly not as insignificant. They are ever-present, tenacious, and can overrule the explicit needs with a swiftness and power that can be awe-inspiring.

It’s a fun exercise to sit down with a sheet of paper and try listing your boss’s implicit needs. It’s also deadly serious. From the first day you meet your new boss through the last day you work together, you need to devote a portion of your time and energy to scoping out his or her implicit needs and defining them with as much precision as possible. Then measure whatever you do against those needs. (Your boss certainly will.)

One implicit need that virtually every boss has (and therefore belongs on the to-do list of every ignited manager) is the need for confidence. Your boss must have confidence that you are working in his best interest and that you are capable of delivering what he needs (both explicitly and implicitly). Fail to maintain this confidence and your boss will most likely drive you crazy — and will often drive you out.

We’ve all been there. The boss who last week simply set a goal and gave us the freedom to carry it out suddenly wants to micromanage every phone call we make this week. Sometimes it’s because they’ve lost confidence in us; other times it’s because their bosses have lost confidence in them, producing a sort of trickle-down anxiety that may end up with you being hypercritical of the dinosaur diorama your nine-year-old makes for science class. Giving your boss a sense of confidence in you is perhaps the most fundamental of all the implicit needs and the one without which no managerial relationship can succeed.

Understanding the implicit and explicit needs of your boss and his bosses sets a course by which you can align your own efforts. When that alignment is clear and accurate, you’re on track to creating an environment in which traction is possible.

Management Value Added

The concept of Management Value Added (MVA) is based on a simple question that you should ask whenever you’re making a decision about how to invest your time and energy: “What value does management add?” And how can your actions “add value” to any situation in business? That’s right — by helping to meet your bosses’ needs.

One way to start using the concept of MVA is by sitting down with your boss to discuss his or her explicit needs (the ones written down as part of the company’s strategy or the division’s official mandate). It shouldn’t take long for the two of you to agree on what they are and to prioritize them appropriately. Then ask your boss, “How do you feel I can add the most value?” If your boss responds, “Huh?” you can flesh out the question with additional questions like these:

· “What are the activities I am engaged in when I am contributing the most?”
· “What are the activities that you and the company most need me to do?”
· “What do you consider to be the best and most productive use of my time?”
· “What do you think is the special contribution that I am best positioned to offer to you and the company?”
· “Of all the things that I’m engaged in on behalf of this company, what are the three areas where you believe that I can contribute the most?”
Listen carefully to your boss’s answers. Using them as a guide, you can begin to understand exactly how your boss views your contributions. It’s quite likely that the way he or she measures your MVA is different from the way you might measure it.

Here’s what one of my bosses had to say when I asked him to define my most important areas for MVA:

1. “Hiring, nurturing, and guiding talent; putting the right people in the right jobs with the right goals.”
2. “Building capability; teaching my team members and creating an environment conducive to challenging thought and growth:”
3. “Staying close to the customers — understanding what’s important to them, what their challenges are, and how our company can provide them with solutions.”

Of course, this exercise will relate only to your boss’s explicit needs. (Don’t try to engage him in a discussion of his implicit needs. There’s a good reason why they’re implicit.) Having these priorities clearly defined is an enormous step forward and an advantage that surprisingly few managers enjoy. It provides you with a framework you can share with others on your team and allows you to use the test of MVA in your quest to get past pot banging.
You can use MVA to help you determine how to spend your time, which projects to support, and which meetings to attend. In my case, before committing energy to any new activity, I ask myself: “Will this activity help me achieve my priorities? Will it help me put the right people in the right jobs? Will it help me build capability? Will it help me know and connect with our customers?” If the answer is no, I avoid the activity — even if it sounds otherwise interesting, appealing, or fun.

MVA helps you maintain a focus on the things that matter while earning the support of those you serve. When your boss or someone else in the organization asks you to commit time or energy to an area that falls outside of the MVA priorities you’ve established, you can talk about how new commitment may affect your main goals and reach a joint decision as to whether a shift in priorities is warranted.

Copyright © 2007 Vince Thompson from the book Ignited Published by FT Press; March 2007;$25.99US/$32.99CAN; 978-0-13-249248-6

Vince Thompson, principal at Middleshift Consulting, works with Internet companies to design world-class online marketing solutions and build sales organizations empowering those in the middle. His clients include Napster, StarStyle.com. and Break.com. Thompson holds an undergraduate degree in Communications from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications, and an MBA from Pepperdine University. To learn more about Vince Thompson and the community of Ignited managers, visit www.beignited.com

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by Dawn Orbeck -
If you improve your time management, you can improve your travel experiences and your travel business operations. So enjoy this brief layover with some short success tips from travel pros who know that time management requires basic management skills as well as learning more about timing issues.

Take the Helm — Just as a good ship’s Captain takes charge of operations, you need to do so, too. No matter whether running your travel operations from out of your home or not, you still need to take charge. Plus it’s equally important to be enthusiastic about your choices and travel ideas, because if you do not enjoy what you’re doing you may either need a break — a travel break! — or to rethink your career strategy and what you’re doing right now. Pros know that the more enthusiastic you are, the more you put into your client packages of yourself and the more you can get out of them.

Decision-Making Skill - You also need to make educated, prompt, firm decisions. Yes, you can change your mind, from time to time, but take a stand and make a decision, right or wrong. Don’t let things get in the way and bog you down. Start by getting more organized with a good planning system like Franklin Covey’s planners and planning software, compatible with Outlook and handheld unit so that you can prioritize tasks and actually complete them in a timely manner.

Know that decision-making is a skill and it can be learned and improved upon, like using tools to help and taking time to learn from past decisions. And pros know that planned are most often the wisest.

Stay Informed — It’s no secret that everyone has the same number of hours in a day and that it’s what you do with them that counts. So do like the pros and study what they do. Find a mentor or coach. Keep up with the travel industry and work-at-home industry and any other fields of interest to learn about any changes and news that may help with your day-to-day operations.

And finally, go back over these basic guidelines to help ensure your own success with time management. Keep up with the latest issues and don’t ever stop learning. Brush up on your leadership and your decision-making skills so that these will take your whereever you want to go.

Visit Dawn OrBeck at http://coastalvacations-blog.com for more info and at dawn@CoastalVacations-Blog.com or call: 810-895-4408. She also invites you to call their Sales Center to learn more today at: 800-378-1169 and mention ID# 5802DO for more info.

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by Margret Lilin
Reading a book while washing the dishes is an impossibility — unless you have a dishwasher. But with the advent of audio books, you can now enjoy a good book while doing just about anything. For instance, have you ever thought about learning a new language? Audio book courses can give you an edge in learning a new language or skill; they can even help you increase your spiritual and mental awareness while you go about your daily life.

With downloadable audio books and an mp3 player, you now have the freedom to absorb information and gain new knowledge in almost any situation. You can be inspired by a volume of poetry while you walk the dog, or laugh along to a humorous play on your way to work.

We live in an era that presents possibilities like never before. For example, you can now transport your important business files, music and even famous works of art right in your very own pocket. The ability to “multi-task” is almost essential in the fast-paced world that exists today. Thankfully, we have adapted by creating impressive new technologies to help us do just that.

Technologies have been developed allow us to take in information and entertain ourselves while we carry out our daily tasks. Of course, there are situations when multi-tasking with audio books would be inappropriate, such as if you are in a business meeting, for example. It would not impress your boss at all if she hears you repeating Spanish phrases while she is going over the quarterly reports.

However, many people find that listening to audio books as they perform the more mundane day-to-day tasks, like cleaning the house or cross-referencing a stamp collection, makes these chores easier and much more enjoyable. Audio books make it possible for students to cram for the big exam while cleaning up after last week’s bash. Business professionals can brush up on their Japanese before the big business trip as they tend to the garden.

A large majority of audio book users report that listening to their audio books while doing their chores actually reduces their stress levels and improves the quality of their work. One theory suggests that this is due to the fact that the brain is performing more than one function at the same time and exercising areas that aren’t normally used to carry out these tasks.

These are just some of the reasons audio books are treasured by those among us who simply do not have the time to devote to reading a book.

Margret Lilin is the webmaster at http://www.audiobookfanclub.com . The site provides a wide selection of discounted audio books in various categories and constantly gives away surprise gifts and bonuses to subscribers and customers. To search for bargain MP3 players please visit our sister site http://www.incomeplaza.com

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by James Delrojo
Whether you are an employee or self employed if you learn to how to get the most out of your work day and then apply that learning you can considerably increase your annual income.

Not only will your income increase but your job satisfaction will increase as well. It is so much more satisfying to be able to look at your work day and to say with total conviction that your time was well spent.

In order to understand how to get the most out of your day let’s look at the three types of workers.

The first type of worker is time focused. He rates his contribution in the amount of hours he spends at work. You will often hear people speaking in this fashion describing how dedicated they are because they work 60 hours per week.

The question the time focused worker needs to ask is what exactly are they doing with that time. Studies have shown that most workers are only effective for about 20% of their working time. The other 80% includes things such as coffee breaks, conversation, browsing the internet, talking on the telephone, preparing to start, preparing to finish and all the other things that keep a person busy but aren’t really productive.

The second type of worker is activity focused. They realize that they aren’t being paid just to put in the hours. They will think about what tasks they are being paid to perform and they will judge their value as a worker in terms of what they actually do in the organization. When you hear this type of worker describe how hard they work they will give you a list of all the things they do in a typical day.

The question that the activity focused worker needs to ask is what outcomes are they getting from the activity. You could be the hardest worker in your organization but all the work you do may not contribute a single dollar to the bottom line profit.

Many self employed people and many managers fall into this category of worker. They genuinely believe that they are the backbone of the company because they work so hard but in fact if they resigned very little would change.

The third type of worker is the results focused worker. This worker realizes that no-one really gets paid to put in hours or even to keep busy. People get paid to produce a result. Whether you are an employee or self employed it is the results that you produce that will ultimately determine your value to the organization and therefore, sooner or later, your income level.

If you want to get the most out of your work day ask yourself what results you are being paid for. Once you are clear on your results objective then periodically throughout the day ask yourself if what you are doing at that moment is producing the results that you are paid to produce.

If the answer is “no” then stop doing that and start doing something that will produce the appropriate results.

Once you become consistently results focused the next step is to ask yourself how you can improve on the results that you have been getting. There is always room for improvement no matter how good your results are. If you develop that combination of results focus and constant improvement then you will soon discover that you are enjoying your work a lot more and that your income is going up as well.

James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you hisebook “Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind” (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to http://www.YourSuccessMind.com

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by John Mehrmann
Imagine what you could accomplish if you were given 100 years to complete any project of your choosing. How would you approach your project management and your time management? What would your timeline look like?

How many years would you devote to study, observe, listen and learn? You would probably spend several years gathering information, educating yourself and learning as much as possible. Your studies would likely become more focused and detailed as you gain knowledge and expertise related to your project.

How many years would you devote to plan and prepare? Before making any significant investments of time or money, would you establish goals and objectives? Would you take time to develop a strategy with milestones and a plan for successful completion of your project?

How much effort would you put into gathering and nurturing your resources? How would you select the people that you would need to help you accomplish your goals? What characteristics would be required of these people? How would you support your resources in a manner that would help them to be successful? Working with others requires a significant investment of time and effort to support the other team members, and the schedule would need to accommodate time devoted to others. To be successful, there must be common goals, common commitment and common understanding. There must be mutual dedication to shared objectives. How will you accomplish this with your team, your resources and your associates?

If you had 100 years to complete a complex and important project, how would you manage your time in between all of your other responsibilities? How would you balance your time between working on the project and personal relaxation? How often would you stop to measure your progress and direction? How flexible would you be to adjust your schedule or your strategy based on your timeline or your resources? Would you try to accomplish key goals ahead of schedule, or wait until the end of your timeline and hope to reach your objectives? How would it change your timeline if you had 100 years?

Perhaps the most important step is identifying and understanding which objectives are most important for you.

In business, projects may last as long as a year or a business quarter, or be as short as one week. Personal projects may be as short as a weekend, hours or a day. In any case, once the objectives of the project are defined, it is amazing how quickly time passes. The time ahead seems so long, while the time behind seems to have passed in the blink of an eye. Do we plan for the time ahead of us to pass as quickly as the time behind us? If you are truly focused on your goals, it is likely that you will not even notice the time at all. There is sweet satisfaction in accomplishing objectives and discovering the freedom to focus on other important aspirations.

Are you working to accomplish objectives of your own, objectives that have been assigned to you, or a combination of the two? It is likely that you have many different responsibilities to family, friends, associates and work. How do you balance responsibilities to others and your personal commitments? If you were to map out the timeline of your project to accomplish specific goals in 100 years, how would you define your goals and your place on that timeline? How would that change your activities? How would you manage your time and your life?

Every day is a new day when you only have 100 years to live.

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Words of Wisdom

“How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.”
- Fred Brooks

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
- George Bernard Shaw

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Soren Kierkegaard

“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?”
- Charles M. Schulz

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About the Author:
John Mehrmann is a freelance writer and President of Executive Blueprints Inc., an organization devoted to improving business practices and developing human capital. www.ExecutiveBlueprints.com provides resource materials for trainers, sample Case Studies, educational articles and references to local affiliates for consulting and executive coaching. http://www.InstituteforAdvancedLeadership.com provides self-paced tutorials for personal development and tools for trainers. Presentation materials, reference guides and exercises are available for continuous development.

John Mehrmann is a freelance author, industry expert and President of Executive Blueprints Inc, an organization dedicated to developing human capital and personal growth.

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