Category Archives: Productivity

Are You Worrying? Stress Management on the Job

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Worrying is a most unfortunate state, generally unproductive, tiring, and otherwise annoying. The human mind seems to have a special gift for generating worries. Thus, the whole field of stress management. A recent conversation with a client about new procedures in his business generated the following comment: “Now that I have these new processes in place I feel more relaxed.”
 
scared-cat-free-clipsThis made me sit right up. How had this happened? What stress management technique had he applied?((1))
 
My client had automated his incoming email streams so that customer email was filtered and alert emails generated that appeared as push notifications on his smart phone. All other email was just filed away for future reading. This means that when a customer (or for that matter a potential customer emailing from a website form) sends a message, my client knows within seconds that the message has arrived. He can then decide how quickly to respond. In fact, he pointed out that while we were talking he had received just such a push notice, but, seeing who the customer was, he knew that this could readily wait until we were done talking because he had developed this trusted system to aert him of customer service requests.
 
So how does this make him feel more relaxed? It is the sure knowledge that he is aware of these customer events that makes him able to relax. He doesn’t have to worry when he spends a couple of hours working on a project that requires real concentration and focus that he is missing a customer inquiry. This contributes to his stress management.
 
If you have read and used David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this should sound familiar. This looks to be an application of his step of getting everything out of your mind and down onto paper where you can do something about it instead of worrying. This is part of his trusted system and a key to stress management.
Footnotes:
  1. Keep in mind that he did not start out to manage stress, rather improve customer service. The stress management came as a side effect. [↩]

Drucker on Concentration, Performance, Results – The Effective Executive – 6

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“It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.”

In earlier posts in this series on Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done, we reviewed his list of basic practices:

Effective managers:

  1. “….know where their time goes.” 
  2. “….focus on outward contribution”
  3. “….build on strengths….” 
  4. “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
  5. “…. make effective decisions.”

Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive

This posting is devoted to the fourth practice, concentrate where it counts.((1)) 

If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.((2)) Continue reading →

Footnotes:
  1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 100-112 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006. [↩]
  2. Note that decades before the controversies over so-called “multi-tasking” Drucker notes the singular importance that people can only effectively do one task at a time. I have written about this earlier in “Multitasking, Too Much Information, Interruptions, and High Performance”  [↩]

Build on Strength – Drucker’s The Effective Executive – 5

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In earlier posts in this series on Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done, we reviewed his list of basic practices:

Effective managers:

  • “….know where their time goes.” 
  • “….focus on outward contribution”
  • “….build on strengths….” 
  • “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
  • “…. make effective decisions.”

Peter Drucker's The Effective ExecutiveThis posting is devoted to the third practice, build on strengths.((1))

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all of the available strengths – the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.((2))

Enable Strengths and Make Weaknesses Inconsequential Continue reading →

Footnotes:
  1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 71-99 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006. [↩]
  2. Note again the dated language from 45 years ago [↩]

To-Do List – what makes some successful task managers

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to-do-listEveryone has a to-do list. Even if you keep it in your head, everyone has one. I use a simple app on my iPhone that syncs with the same app on my iPad and on my desktop to manage my to-do list. This is a recent replacement for a technology I used for 30 years, 3×5 note cards (preferably un-ruled) that stuck out of my shirt pocket.

Regardless of the to-do list technology employed, I am sure that your to-do list is almost always longer than can be fulfilled and increasingly filled with “overdue” tasks. Mine is chronically creeping in that direction.

A recent article on Brain Pickings (BrainPickins.org) “A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success” by Maria Popova reviewed some recent research ((1)) ) that touches on two useful points. Continue reading →

Footnotes:
  1. mostly focused on a chapter about to-do lists, the third chapter, titled “A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey,” in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister [↩]

Meetings – where you begin to be a more effective manager

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A recent New York Times article “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green((1)) told the story of Doug Lemov’s discovery that a large component of high performing teachers’ success came from their classroom management skills. While reading the article, and, especially watching the videos of teachers actually employing good class management, I was struck by an interesting parallel in the management world. Just as education schools do not do a good job of preparing teachers to know what to do when they first walk into a classroom, most managers learn their craft by trial and error. They have little help from mentoring or development programs in their companies. And, business schools seem to provide little guidance either.

Meeting management is to effective managers as classroom management is to successful teachers

Meetings are a great place to start to learn the management craft and a crucial platform for driving and sustaining high performance. Great managers and great organizations have great meetings. And, from the perspective of a manager interested in developing a high performance culture, meetings are a great starting point in building a high performance company. After all, meetings exhibit all of the important attributes of high performance organization and culture. And, no effective manager can be ineffective in meetings.

Good meetings:

  • focus on results ($s, people and values)
  • engage, empower and demand every participant’s energies
  • use fact-based thinking
  • orient to customer needs (internal and external)
  • devolve strategy into tactics
  • employ process and systems thinking
  • use well-developed problem solving tools and approaches
  • focus on adding value for customers (internal and external)
  • look for waste reduction
  • build on company and individual strengths
  • among the more important……

Meetings are a great place to start because they are a regular event in which the manager has significant control and can demonstrate, concretely, high performance principles and practices in front of, and with their direct reports.


Footnotes:
  1. March 2, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html [↩]

Peter Drucker’s Little Red Book for the General Manager

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Peter Drucker's The Effective ExecutivePeter Drucker’s The Effective Executive was first published in 1967 and has been in print ever since. I first read it during the 1980s. When I began to coach general managers and owners of small businesses I re-read it with a fresh perspective.

The Effective Executive continues to be a book that I return to for its little pearls of wisdom. Once you get over the now obscure examples from WWII and the 1950s and its dated language (e.g., the pronoun “she” never appears), it remains  a most useful and continuously provocative statement of the tasks of the general manager.

Here are a few quotes for illustration.

  • “In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.”
  • “…the more an executive works at making strengths productive, the more he will become conscious of the need to concentrate human strengths available to him on major opportunities. This is the only way to get results.”
  • “No one has much difficulty getting rid of the total failures. They liquidate themselves. Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on long beyond their productive life. Even more dangerous are the activities which should do well and which, for some reason or other, do not produce. These tend to become… “investments in managerial ego” and sacred.”
  • “Systematic sloughing off of the old is the one and only way to force the new.”
  • “…no decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.”
Find this little book (183 pages long), read it. You will be enriched.

Seize Your Time – step away from “managing” time towards seizing your time

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I have written ealier about the strangeness of the concept of “time management”((1)), but I continue to bump into elements of the vast industry of time management consulting((2)).  And clients continue to wrestle with how to use their time more effectively.  All of this means that I am continuing to sharpen my practices. Continue reading →

Footnotes:
  1. in my posting, “Time Management – is now the time to get beyond this distracting oxymoron?” [↩]
  2. I am hardly the only person to note the fallacy of “time management”,here is David E. Allen of Getting Things Done fame on this point [↩]

Old Technology Displaces New Technology

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In a recent coaching session, a long-time client expressed frustrations at keeping track of all of his day-to-day tasks, especially the little items of following through with people he had met. He felt that lots of useful new and old contacts were languishing because he had not followed up on items brought up during a discussion or emails. They are falling through the cracks.

So, I asked him, “How do you keep track of your daily work?” “Well, I still have a Palm Pilot in working order. I enter stuff there.” Clearly this was not working. We kicked around different ways of keeping a task list up to date. Then, I recalled how I solved this same problem for over twenty years. I kept notebooks that I carried around with me and entered notes and tasks chronologically page after page.  Knowing that my client was old enough to predate PDAs and other such devices, I asked him whether he had ever used notebooks.Notebook technology for task/priority lists “Of course. I kept everything in notebooks. Each was carefully dated and then filed away when every task in it had been completed.” I shared my memories of using notebooks. Even odd moments when a co-worker would come to me to ask what i recalled of a meeting that had taken place months earlier and I dragged out my notebook form that period and found the pages with my notes of the meeting.

My client agreed to try out a notebook as a way of attacking his current problem. There is something very satisfying about putting an arrow in the left column indicating a task or date to be reserved and then, later,putting big check mark next to it with a date when a task is accomplished.

Shortly after wards, it came to me that I was not doing all that well my task list technology (Google Tasks in the calendar), so I have returned to this device that served me so well for so long.

Proven Checklist for Business Success – How Do You Put Them Into Action?

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I receive a regular email titled, “Management Intelligence…… from Edward de Bono and Robert Heller”((1)) . Their most recent email was “Management Intelligence: A proven checklist for business success”. Here is the checklist they provided:

“DO YOU…

  1. IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies continuously?
  2. THINK simply and directly about what you are doing and why?
  3. BEHAVE towards others as you wish them to behave towards you?
  4. EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?
  5. CONCENTRATE on what you do well?
  6. ASK questions ceaselessly about performance, markets and objectives?
  7. MAKE MONEY- knowing that, if you don’t, you can’t make anything else?
  8. ECONOMISE always seeking Limo (Least Input for Most Output)?
  9. FLATTEN the organisation to spread authority and responsibility?
  10. ADMIT to your own failings and shortcomings and correct them?
  11. SHARE the benefits of success with all those who helped to achieve it?
  12. TIGHTEN up the organisation wherever and whenever you can because familiarity breeds slackness?
  13. ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?
  14. SERVE your customers with all their requirements to standards of perceived excellence in quality?
  15. TRANSFORM performance by innovating creatively in products and processes including the processes of management?

Again from this email concerning this list: “These questions penetrate to the heart of successful management. They have passed, and will pass, the test of time.

This list looks a lot like others I have seen, and certainly many entries would be on such a list that I might create. But, whenever I see lists like this, I say to myself, “Great, but how do I do this?” Lets just take number 15, for example,  “Transform performance by innovating….”. What business processes do I put in place that assure that these results are regularly and sustainably produced? Or, what approaches and tools do I deploy to achieve number 8, “Economize…” ? Again, are there tools and approaches available that assure the we meet number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimize their individual and group contribution?” Continue reading →

Footnotes:
  1. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/ [↩]

Podcast – Delegation (Outsourcing) and Keeping a Focus on Strategy and Results

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Delegation and Outsourcing Share a Common Management Focus on What Needs To be Done, What Are the Results Required, and When?

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