Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Thu, Jan 26, 2012 @ 09:01 AM
Are you struggling to get ahead and stay ahead? Does your inbox fill up exponentially faster than your outbox? Perhaps you have a workflow issue and need to delegate more, or perhaps you have a time management problem. You can get time management advice from professional newsletters, business blogs, your boss, or your deskmate. But sometimes the best thing to do is to dive all the way into a book that can help you to address the problem more thoroughly.
3 Books to Improve Your Personal Effectiveness
1. Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy
Published in 2007, Brian Tracy’s motivational book continues to create buzz on the blogosphere. It is a quick, easy read that offers practical advice for increasing personal effectiveness through the use of such strategies as delegating tasks to others and evaluating your priorities. Efficiency expert Tracy offers 21 specific hints for how successful people manage their time and reduce procrastination. The book doesn’t go deep into business philosophy but instead offers practical time management action steps, such as planning your day so that you accomplish your least desirable tasks first, making your day easier as you go on.
2. 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam
Vanderkam’s book offers an innovative approach to time management. She sees that we all have the same amount of time in any given week, but she notes that successful people allocate their time differently to maximize that time. She advocates increasing personal effectiveness by prioritizing the most important tasks at home and work and scheduling those into one’s weekly schedule first. She recommends streamlining by eliminating unnecessary tasks to waste less time and become more effective time managers.
3. Today Matters by John Maxwell
Maxwell’s book has been around for a few years, but it offers advice that is just as relevant today. The underlying concept is that we spend too much time thinking about the past and the future, and we neglect to create productive habits today. Maxwell’s book may not appeal to everyone, as one of his sections is about spiritual health as part of the path to personal effectiveness. But it is hard to argue with the importance of attitude, communication, and prioritizing to make the day go smoother. Today Matters is a practical guide with step-by-step advice for becoming more disciplined in your time management and more fulfilled in your life.
What books have helped your time management?
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Wed, Jan 25, 2012 @ 09:57 AM
Now that the holidays are over and the big office holiday party is behind you, it is time to reflect on what career development lessons you might have learned from this year’s holiday party experience, or lessons that might be helpful to take to any office gatherings in the coming year. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Career Development Lessons
1. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing to get ahead.
Sometimes following the crowd or conducting business as usual is not the most desirable career development option and just isn’t in your best interest. Instead, you may wish to consult a professional development newsletter or other sources of information for ideas about how to innovate. Or perhaps it isn’t innovation that you are looking for, but your intuition tells you that you simply need a more straightforward way to operate compared to some of your colleagues. Either way, quietly observing how you would do things differently can be helpful as you shape your own path forward.
2. Networking and getting along with others is crucial to success.
Recent research has shown that one of the quickest ways to derail a promising career is to possess an inability to get along with and work well with other people. The ability to work well with people at a variety of levels in a variety of departments is a crucial career development skill, and networking at social events such as the office holiday party can start you on your way. And even though it can be unpleasant, dealing with difficult people in a more productive manner is part of the challenge.
3. Professionalism in the workplace is important after hours, too.
Just because the office holiday party or other office events might be located off site, and just because they might involve alcohol, does not mean that this is an excuse to let your hair all the way down and ignore the protocols of professionalism in the workplace. It is fine to have a drink to loosen up a bit and improve your ability to approach your coworkers. And nerdy Christmas sweaters or ties that you wouldn’t usually wear to the office are probably welcome, depending on the dress code of the specific event. However, it is probably not a wise career development move to indulge in such a way that your performance at the office holiday party or Cindy’s baby shower will be plenty of fuel for office gossip for months to come.
What did you learn from this year’s holiday party?
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Sun, Jan 22, 2012 @ 11:09 AM
As a manager, you try your best to keep up with the latest business news and industry specific developments. You read a variety of business blogs and subscribe to a few professional development newsletters. For the most part, you have a sense of what your employees need to work on to be more effective each day. You pass on helpful tips to some of your employees over the water cooler and during one-on-one performance review conferences, but your well-meant advice doesn’t always seem to affect the personal effectiveness of your employees in the way that you would like. So what is a manager to do?
You might want to consider creating your own intra-office professional development newsletter filled with directly relevant information to email to your employees on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis in order to keep all of the employees in your unit abreast of the latest business buzz.
How to Create Your Own Professional Development Newsletter:
1. Find the Right Person for the Job
First, you will need to decide whether you have the available bandwidth to take on this project yourself, or whether you will need to delegate it to someone else. If you need to delegate, make sure that the task will not put an undue burden on the employee you ask to assist with this project. Find a person with strong organizational skills coupled with excellent writing and editing skills.
2. Gather Relevant Information
Subscribe to a variety of free professional development newsletters from industry leaders as well as more general business sources. Read up on business blogs. Keep up on the latest news. When you read something that is particularly relevant to your own employees, bookmark it, paste it into a Word document, or send it on to the person you are asking to compile this newsletter for your unit. You may also wish to ask your newsletter collaborator to spend a small amount of time each day trolling for newsletter relevant information.
3. Get Your Employees to Share Ideas
Get all of your employees on board. Encourage all employees to read the professional development newsletter tips you’ve gathered to improve their own personal effectiveness. Allow a time for employees to discuss these tips and how to apply them to their own practices each day. By discussing these ideas with their peers, these personal effectiveness tips are more likely to have a positive effect on performance.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 09:55 AM
Does your desk look like it was hit by a hurricane? Do you struggle to stay on top of everything you need to accomplish each day and each week? You need to get organized – and stay organized – fast. You need a plan to manage your time wisely.
In today’s rapid-fire world, you are not likely to have only one simple task come across your desk at a time. Instead, you will need to do some serious juggling and multitasking to improve your time management skills. The best way of all to keep on top of all of your necessary daily tasks is to prioritize.
Priority management is a skill possessed by some of the most successful and efficient people you know. They know how to make a working plan. They know how to quickly assess a task’s importance and shift their day accordingly, spending the most amount of time on the most important things and the least amount of time on less urgent matters. This is a skill, like all skills, that can be developed, but effective time management does take practice and patience.
Easy Priority Management Tips
1. Make a Plan
Before you jump into your inbox each day, take 15 to 20 minutes to assess what you’re up against and determine what needs your most urgent attention. Make a plan of attack and a tentative schedule for the day.
2. Delegate
If you have any less demanding tasks that don’t need to be done by you specifically, then delegate those tasks to one of your employees to take a bit of stress off of your shoulders. Be certain that they understand the potential level of urgency so that they can also effectively engage in priority management.
3. Check Back In
Throughout the day, periodically compare your progress to your plan. If you are getting stuck on a particular issue, move on to something else for a while and them come back to it fresh, if your time management schedule will allow. If something new comes across your desk over the course of the day, decide where it fits into your lineup and whether this changes your schedule.
4. Put it to Rest
Don’t spend endless amounts of time tinkering to get a perfect result. Sometimes this might be necessary, but a more effective policy is to get a project to the best place you can in the time you have available. Perfectionism can be problematic if you are trying to have an effective priority management strategy. Save the tinkering with the details until you have input from the whole team and can see the project from other perspectives.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Mon, Jan 16, 2012 @ 02:34 PM
Are you settling into the new year with calmness and efficiency? Or do you still feel like you are desperately trying to catch up on everything that got disrupted before the holidays? Do you use your weekends to recharge, relax, and prepare for the week ahead? Or are you so overbooked on the weekends that you never really get the chance to get ahead?
The new year has already begun, but it is not too late to resolve to improve your work-life balance in 2012. Until you slow down a bit to make balance a priority, it may be difficult for you to increase your personal effectiveness and get on top of your game at work.
Work-Life Balance Tips to Get You Started
1. Just Say No
It is tempting to be the agreeable, amenable person that everyone likes. But it is very hard to be that person and not drop the ball at some point under the weight of a wide variety of responsibilities. Instead, in 2012, try to only take on essential projects that you are passionate about or that will help your career development, and work on excelling in those areas. If you stretch yourself too thin at home or at work, it is hard to perform up to your potential.
2. Plan Unstructured Time
In order to think creatively, you need to give your brain a little space. You may have an excellent, highly structured time management plan that serves you well. But if you want to increase your personal effectiveness, it is best to pencil in a bit of wiggle room as well, so that you can wander around the corner to a local coffee shop to ponder a difficult problem, or even just stare out the window for a time before focusing on the task at hand again. Such small moments of unstructured time can actually be very productive for your thought process.
3. Delegate
You can’t do everything, so make 2012 your year to learn how to delegate more effectively. At the office, stick to doing that which only you can do, and work on training your employees to take on aspects of projects that might be of interest to them. At home, discuss how to effectively simplify and share the load with your family. Also consider spending a little money to improve your work-life balance by taking one or two major responsibilities off of your plate. It might just be worth the investment to hire someone to take on the lawn care, pay for occasional maid service, or spend the money to order takeout several times each month. Figure out your priorities, and then streamline your responsibilities at home and at work to reflect those decisions.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Thu, Jan 12, 2012 @ 02:32 PM
Most employees thrive in an environment where their career development is nurtured and supported, where their accomplishments are recognized and rewarded.
In fact, a new study shows that this is a leading factor in the decisions that new graduates make about where to start their careers, and it also influences where talented employees end up. In a large corporation, it can be all too easy for even the most promising employees to get lost in the crowd.
Forbes Magazine recently published an article about why large companies tend to have a large problem with talent retention. What are the reasons?
According to Eric Jackson:
1. Big Company Bureaucracy.
2. Failing to Find a Project for the Talent that Ignites Their Passion.
3. Poor Annual Performance Reviews.
4. No Discussion Around Career Development.
5. Shifting Whims / Strategic Priorities.
6. Lack of Accountability and/or Telling Them How to Do Their Jobs.
7. Top Talent Likes Other Top Talent.
8. The Missing Vision Thing.
9. Lack of Open-Mindedness.
10. Who’s the Boss?
This is a long laundry list of problems that lead to talent retention issues. But the bottom line in this article is the lack of support and the lack of career development opportunities which may encourage talented employees to continue their careers elsewhere.
Improve your Talent Retention Prospects
1. Greet your employees in a friendly manner every day.
2. Provide interesting and diverse employee training. From online personality tests to courses in being more assertive to team-building, your employees are hungry for dynamic career development opportunities.
3. Participate in leadership training to learn how to better manage your employees and help them learn to navigate the problems they are experiencing each day in the workplace.
4. Regularly discuss employee progress and recognize employee achievement.
5. Slow down and create a community that works together towards increased effectiveness and innovation.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Wed, Jan 11, 2012 @ 09:20 AM
It can be easy to get stuck in a rut at work, thinking the same old way about the same old problems. But if you really want to get your employees thinking in a new way, then you need to inject your own thinking and your own management development technique with new ideas. How can you do this?
It is as easy as subscribing to a free professional development newsletter, a resource which can provide you with new ideas as well as tried-and-true tactics for dealing with a wide variety of issues, from dealing with difficult people to improving personal effectiveness with such tools as an online personality test.
A recent professional development newsletter revealed the secrets of innovation:
According to a six-year study conducted by Harvard Business Review authors, there are five habits that reveal the underpinnings of creative thinking. These habits are embraced by innovators such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, and Peter Thiel of PayPal. Would you like to share in the secret? Here we go:
The Top Five Habits of Innovators
1. Associating
The ability ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields.
2. Questioning
Constantly asking questions that challenge common wisdom.
3. Observing
Scrutinizing common phenomena-looking out for common behaviors and figuring out how things could be done differently.
4. Experimenting
Actively trying out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots. (Think of Edison who said, "I haven't failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that do not work.").
5. Networking
Devoting time and energy to finding and testing new ideas through a network of individuals and organizations.
Incorporating these behaviors into your daily life will boost your level of innovation. And what motivates innovators? According to one study, innovators actively desire to change the status quo, and they regularly take risks to make change happen. So, what are you waiting for? Start your innovation education today!
If you are ready to boost your management development in the area of innovation, then follow these innovation action steps. If you’re ready to take action across the board, then subscribe to a free professional development newsletter today!
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Tue, Jan 10, 2012 @ 10:57 AM
As the year draws to a close, many of us are starting to reflect on our successes and failures of the past year and consider how things might be different in the coming year. If you are hoping to improve your personal accountability at work and to increase your success as both a manager and an employee, then you may want to try something new. Subscribe to a professional development newsletter today in order to start preparing for a more successful 2012.
A recent edition of the Employee Development Systems professional development newsletter gives helpful tips to its readers about how to “be a better boss in the new year.” If you are looking for easy ways to freshen up your management skills, look no further!
3 Management Tips from a Professional Development Newsletter
1. “Practice being happy to see people at work.”
One of the best ways to encourage a positive workplace atmosphere each day is greeting all of your coworkers in a cheerful manner, whether or not they work in your unit. A happy hello can set the tone for the day, and it can begin to establish your reputation as someone who is desirable to work with. If you can learn and retain the names of all of the people you pass in the halls on a regular basis, that is even better.
2. “Keep yourself from being reactive.”
When someone comes to you with a problem, he or she may not need you to come up with a solution. Ask the employees you manage to tell you if they need you to take action on a particular situation. Often, the best plan of action is to let your employees solve problems for themselves if it is not an urgent matter. Start brainstorming about how to encourage and empower your employees to help themselves.
3. “Get buy-in where possible, but sometimes you need to make the call.”
In order to be efficient, it may not be the best strategy to ask every employee to weigh in on every decision. Get a sense of where everyone stands as you move through a project, but there are times when your own personal accountability necessitates a quick decision on your part as the leader of the project.
In addition to thinking about these individual steps to starting the new year off right with an improved management style, you may also wish to collaborate with your management colleagues to discuss more effective leadership. The same professional development newsletter also includes detailed instructions for an hour-long management exercise that is designed to help you identify and discuss desirable leadership traits in groups.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Mon, Jan 09, 2012 @ 09:47 AM
If you're looking for an innovative way to get your employees excited about improved performance in the new year, then it may be as easy as adding employee engagement training into the mix during your leadership development courses throughout the year.
Basically, you can't just expect all of your employees to be excited about their performance without effort on your part to motivate and inspire them to get them excited about the tasks at hand.
Employee engagement training can help you and your fellow managers to learn crucial leadership development concepts, such as the idea that people are much more likely to perform well if they are engaged in a task that they are invested in the outcome of. Such basic psychological concepts seem like common sense, but many managers need employee engagement training in order to get ideas for how to effectively apply these ideas in the real world.
Leadership development courses will also help to train you in helping to regularly share outcomes with each of your employees. Research shows that people flourish and perform better when they can see measurable progress from their own efforts. This success in turn inspires employees to work even harder to gain further success.
How Employee Engagement Training Improves Job Performance
1. Learn how to motivate employees to put forth their best effort each day.
2. Learn how to keep employees engaged, even with tedious tasks.
3. Learn how to encourage employee teamwork that can boost morale and productivity.
4. Learn how to challenge your employees with relevant tasks without giving them too much or too little to do.
5. Learn how to take advantage of employee strengths to increase effectiveness and engagement.
6. Learn how to interact with different personality types for maximum performance.
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Posted by Sherman Updegraff on Fri, Jan 06, 2012 @ 11:59 AM
Forbes Magazine recently published an article about the dirty side of innovations in business and technology. Although our technologies are rocketing forward into the future, a study by the environmental group Greenpeace revealed that “the technologies of the 21st century are still largely powered by the dirty coal power of the past, with over half of the companies rated herein relying on coal for between 50 percent and 80 percent of their energy needs.” Certain technologies, such as cloud computing, actually create increased amounts of pollution behind the scenes, according to the Forbes article.
Today’s companies are looking for any competitive advantage that will help them to outshine the competition in today’s economy. Technological innovations are an important part of that equation, but if you really want to pull ahead, consider challenging the status quo by becoming more environmentally friendly.
Sourcing your company with green energy, the focus of the Forbes Magazine article, is just one of many ways to make your business more eco-friendly. Some environmental measures may take effort or cost money or involve employee training, but many experts agree that investing in a more environmentally friendly business will save you money and give you a competitive advantage in the long run.
Challenging the Status Quo through Environmental Sustainability
1. Invest in energy efficiency.
You can invest in energy efficiency in a variety of ways. Light rooms with lights connected to a sensor which will only come on when a person enters the room. Invest in energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs.
2. Invest in green energy.
Some utility companies will allow you to pay a little extra to source your company with renewable energy and other energy technologies that are cleaner than the old coal power plants which can cause a great deal of pollution. Many environmentally aware consumers are more likely to give their business to companies that employ such conservation measures.
3. Reduce waste.
Challenging the status quo when it comes to waste just means getting your employees on board with simple conservation measures. For example, encourage your employees to turn off their office lights and their computers before they leave their desks for the day. Install energy-efficient hand dryers in the restroom to reduce paper waste.
4. Promote recycling.
If you aren’t ready to take your business paperless, consider starting a company recycling initiative that will send less waste to the landfills. In many areas, you can actually get paid for recycling a variety of materials, including old computers, cell phones, and ink cartridges.
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