Cameron Test Bootstrap: August 2015

3 Tips on Leading Alongside Peers

Leadership comes with difficulties, no matter the relationship of the leader to those they lead. Managers can exert some direct influence from a chain-of-command and disciplinary perspective, but ultimately that only holds so far. When trying to influence peers without a direct manager-subordinate relationship, though, the challenges may appear insurmountable. Still, people successfully lead alongside others every day. So how can you effectively lead others with whom you don't have a direct relationship?

Find How You Can Help

You cannot lead for yourself. Followers give leaders the power to influence. But the reason that they give that power ultimately stems from what they get out of it in return. Simply stated, people follow others because the leader offers them something they don't have and require to grow or move forward. So, when you are trying to lead others, you must remember initially to focus on solving their problems, rather than trying to be a great leader. Some call this concept the "servant leader." Regardless of what you call it, approach people in terms of what problems they have that you can solve, and you will eventually gain rapport with them, and perhaps influence.

Learn to Plan

Sometimes, people cannot get moving because they do not know where to start. The paralysis has killed many a project. In a situation where motion has stagnated, leaders step in to offer up a plan, a solution. Practice developing plans and executing on them, which builds your skills to create plans for others as well as your credibility with others as someone that gets things done. Try planning something from a vague concept and see how accurately you can predict the key milestones. Share it with others for feedback.

Crowdsource

Leaders do not steal their ideas from others. They do, however, seek the wisdom of others in shaping and strengthening their ideas. When working within a peer group, leaders seek approval on every step of their plan. When you preview the plan steps with peers, valuable feedback may come in, but it also provides the ability to seek out the group's objections to the plan without having them comment directly on the plan itself. Those objections should be addressed in the final plan, as if you anticipated all potential challenges.

Keep the Vision

Leaders, by virtue of the position, have to know where they are taking the team. They have an idea of where they are going. Maintaining this vision keeps the rest of the team on track and focused on how they fit into the bigger piece of the puzzle. Be sure that you can speak clearly and often on the vision for the project. But talk to others, and make sure that your vision is the same as theirs. Adjust as necessary.

How else can you lead as a peer? Have ideas? I'd love to hear them. Drop me a line on Twitter

Image Credit: Efraimstochter on Pixabay.

What Type of Product Do You Sell? [Infographic]

How are you marketing your products to differentiate them against your competitors? Most products fall somewhere on a spectrum between novelty and innovation, customer experience, and price. Markets certainly exist to compete at any level between these factors. For example, "me too" products second to the market have to rely on price and experience to differentiate them from the original. Products charging a premium price may justify that with higher quality and customer experience. Where do your products fall on this spectrum?

Want a poster of this graphic? I have a PDF version that you can have if you sign up for email updates from the blog.

Why Good Work Is Never Waste

Once upon a time, I worked on a project with one of my team members that ended up a flop. We've all had failures (unless you haven't worked long enough), but sometimes they feel colossal, even if the failure was not our fault. This particular project went through multiple iterations and a good chunk of IT's development dollars before we cancelled it due to inability to match the functionality with what the users were seeking.

A few years later, I had a heavy role in the implementation of a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. It was a top industry pick, and one that we felt was going to revolutionize our sales process and methodology. A few months before implementation (but almost one year after we had started), some executives pulled the plug on it.

Both of these projects could be chalked up as complete time wasted. Teams spent countless hours working on projects that never saw the light of day. But neither of these were wasted.

The first project got resurrected from a different group who focused primarily on the user interface and experience. When that project got the green light to go forward, the knowledge of the previous project helped the team to avoid similar pitfalls and also make sure the new design covered all of the functionality it needed to cover.

The second project has yet to be resurrected, but the suggestion has come up time and time again. Knowledge of the decisions surrounding the first project have been beneficial in guiding the conversations going forward to make sure that if we do proceed with this project in the future, we approach it with a level of caution that allows us to avoid some of the traps that ended up killing it the first time around.

All in all, I've come to determine that nothing done in the right spirit of helping the company is ever wasted. The experience may not be a determining factor of whether or not to try the project again in the future, but it does provide useful intelligence to help guide smarter decision-making when trying to tackle the same or similar problems in the future.

Do you have any projects that have failed or been killed? What did you learn from them? What would you say to someone trying to tackle the same project in the future that might help them succeed where prior efforts failed?

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6 Aids For Finding Your Way In A New Job

When you are new on a job, sometimes you may feel lost. The first few days often don't have the amount of direction required to perform at your peak right out of the gate. Fortunately, you can find your way easier than following a treasure map with a few lists and a few actions.

List What You Know

Start with a list of everything you know that you need to get done. Chances are, on your first few days, this list will not contain enough to keep you full of work, but it should provide a starting point to get something done. More importantly, this list gives you a map to accomplishing something that you can call work product.

List What You Do Not Know

Most likely you can create a much longer list of things that you don't know than you do when you first start. Some of your list will consist of mundane items like learning the layout of the office building, determining the dates of your paydays, and getting invitations to team meetings. You should have some more detailed items, though, and some related to your work. Who are the right contacts for your project? How do you utilize the systems involved? Who can help you if you have issues? And importantly, what could you possibly not have thought of yet?

Ask For Help

You might find trouble asking how to do basic tasks that should be part of the job description (if you were hired as a Java programmer, asking how to program might get you an exit as quickly as you joined). But asking general questions of your peers or boss is forgiven at first. You're the new person, so everyone expects you to have questions. Use this grace period generously, too, because once you are (or should be) established as an employee, people might become less forgiving of your questions and start considering you "needy" or "unable to learn."

Offer Something of Value

You can easily fall into the trap of being overwhelmed when you first start and clam up in group settings. Remember, they hired you for your experience and skills. You have something to offer to the conversation. There may be history and experience with your peers that can provide context, but your new ideas or outside perspective can be a valuable tool in forcing the incumbents to think differently or to reevaluate some of their preconceived notions. Speak up and offer your opinion. It has value.

Listen

Those around you have a valuable commodity that you can benefit from: the same knowledge and history that your experiences can challenge. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you alone will change the world. You can certainly adjust perspectives, but those around you also can offer valuable history, knowledge of the politics and power around the office, and information that you can amass in your first few days or weeks on the job that will be useful to you in months and years ahead.

Do Something

Most importantly, when you start something new, start moving. Start doing something. Start producing for the employer. You will not be perfect at first, but as a new team member, nobody expects perfection. They likely do expect production. So take a stab, make something or do something. Ask for feedback. Adjust and try again. Work through your lists and ask for more to fill them up. Doing something will always earn you more respect than doing nothing.

What other tips do you have for newbies on the job? I'd love to hear about them.

Image credit: Unsplash on Pixabay

Winning the Weekend

By now, I am sure you are familiar with my productivity challenge, but I wanted to throw in a few more examples on how you can leverage the concepts to your advantage, even when it seems difficult. One way you can bump it up a notch is by making a game out of your productivity.

Around our house, we use the phrase "Winning the Weekend" to describe getting our weekend tasks done early on Saturday (or better, Friday night). At its heart, the game is just an extension of the "Get Ahead" task, only we also place a premium on finishing those tasks earlier in the day. That timing lets us have the rest of the weekend back for ourselves. While the heart of the productivity challenge avoids carryover (you still max out at five a day, even if you only completed three yesterday), getting ahead lets you prioritize the tasks for the remaining days differently. You can start to choose more and more enjoyable items off of your backlog when the difficult or distasteful tasks got completed earlier.

During the week, you can use the same technique to maximize what you can get completed. Tackle your "must complete" tasks as early in the day as possible, leaving time for you later in the day to work on what you would like to. It's like the dessert at the end of dinner.

I'd love to hear how this works for you. Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment and let me know if you have discovered any other tricks to your own productivity.

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Level Up!

I'm writing this Sunday night, but Monday, our family is going through something pretty cool: my oldest starts Kindergarten Monday morning. It's certainly a nostalgic event, and a change across the family. We will have multiple stops dropping off and picking up from school, we will be waking up earlier, and we'll be adjusting to all sorts of new things which we are not even yet aware of.

But for my daughter, it is a really cool change. A "level up" for fans of video games. She's moving to "real" elementary school from the preschool where she has spent the last several years. It's a great milestone as she moves one step further in her academic career. For us, it's a milestone that means our little kid is growing up.

Once we become adults, though, we (mostly) no longer have parents worrying about us as we move from one thing to the next. So our individual triumphs become about the positive growth we experience and lose the nostalgia factor.

In Super Mario Brothers (yes, I know that dates me severely), when you got a mushroom, you grew, and if you got a fire flower, you could shoot fireballs. Nobody needs those in the instruction guide, because as you grab it, you can naturally understand what happens. Still, you play a few times, and you learn quickly how to power up and play with that.

Which brings me to the question to start off your week: What is your level up? What can you do or achieve or accomplish that gets you more power and a big boost in your job? How can you get the next one? Moving towards your next goal level-by-level is still moving towards the goal, and you avoid getting run over;

Try to figure out what your level up is, and go chase it.

Happy Friday!

No post today but wanted to wish everyone a happy Friday. I hope you have a great weekend. Let me know how you are going to spend it!

You Had One Job

"You had one job." Every time someone makes a mistake in their perceived "job," this phrase gets uttered by someone looking to ridicule their sheer incompetence. The phrase has become an internet meme, has an entire website devoted to it, and probably more than one Twitter handle (but here's one).

Other than its reported first usage in the movie Ocean's 11, I think the first and most frequent time I hear the phrase follows a missed field goal in a football game. The idea that the kicker has one job (to kick the ball between the uprights) that he (or she, perhaps) practices day in and day out and still lacks perfection in execution is pure fodder for the hecklers. But have you ever tried to kick a field goal? It's not particularly easy.

But the truth is that nobody's job is easy. All of us have some degree of skill required to perform the job, and usually, we try to work multiple tasks or multiple jobs at once. If you are an entrepreneur, chances are that you wear or have worn the hat of every single job in your company.

"What if you only had one job? What would that look like?" (Tweet This)

But sometimes, when you seek ways to be better at everything, a little academic "what if" can help you see past the piles of email in your inbox. So, what if you only had one job? What if you had to define your role in one simple job? What would that look like?

Can you define your role in the context of a single "job" or a single "task?" What is most important to your success? Acquiring customers? Retaining customers? Producing quality product? Helping people? Take a few minutes today and try to define your job. Define it as a singular purpose. Then execute on that purpose. Make it part of your personal brand. Make it what you do and how others recognize you.

And while you're at it, send me a tweet and let me know your job's purpose. I'd love to hear.

Image credit: piper60 via Pixabay

3 Traits of Good Managers

What makes a good manager? There are several articles about what not to do as a manager (note to self: write a "bad manager" article in the next couple of weeks), but sometimes positive vibes are just more pleasant to read and to write. So, here's my opinion on a few traits that make someone a great manager.

They Know What They Don't Know

Smart managers know the limits of their knowledge, and they don't need to pretend to know everything. Some of them do know close to everything, but the smartest managers still know where they can rely on their people instead of their own knowledge. The most impressive and empowering managers in my opinion are those that feel comfortable inviting their employee to a meeting to speak in more detail on items that they do not know as much about. The employee on the ride-along gets exposure and experience, and the manager looks secure in their position and in the boundaries of their own knowledge.

They Are Completely Transparent

Employees know when their manager is hiding something from them. Sometimes they can suspect it from the boss's behavior. Sometimes (I know this is hard to believe but rumor-mills are rampant) the employee knows more than the manager does. Keeping up the wall around you as a manager makes you seem distant and disconnected from your employees. Being transparent allows for your employees to be in your circle and part of a team.

Of course, there are still times when you cannot share everything with your employees. Whether impending reductions, executive-level intelligence, or other restricted information, often a directive from above prohibits the downward dissemination of information. In that instance, transparency obviously does not work, but if confronted, you have to make a choice. In that case, you can still be transparent about your position. "You know I couldn't comment on that even if there were truth to it" would be a valid response to the direct question, and it still demonstrates that if you could share information you would, thus keeping them in the inner circle.

They Look for Ways to Grow Employees

I've heard this one phrase something like this: When asked about how to create skills and other growth opportunities for their employees, weak managers ask, "What if we do and they leave?" while strong managers ask, "What if we don't and they stay?" It's an oversimplification, of course, but strong managers look for ways to make their employees and the team better through whatever opportunities they can. Whether actively seeking out training or different experiences or opportunities, the good manager recognizes that the injection of outside ideas and skills into the team grows the entire team's capabilities and builds strengths that make the manager better poised to tackle new challenges.

This, of course, represents only a few traits of great managers. What others do you see? Feel free to drop me a comment or ping me on Facebook or Twitter and let me know.

What Is Your Dream Job?

I made this beer. No, really.

If you won the lottery and did not have to work, what would you do? If you're like me, the first thing you would do is likely take a vacation, but after some point, I would need to work at something. For me. that would most likely be running a brewery. I've even started running the numbers to see how much money I would need to start a brewery as a hobby. The answer to that math question is more than I currently have sitting around as play money, but it is not completely out of the realm of possibility someday. In the meantime, though, I can make moves in that direction by continuing to brew at home and learning as much as I can about the commercial process and equipment.

What's your dream job? One friend of mine (who answered this same question on Twitter last night) says "movie critic." The good news for him is that becoming a movie critic could be something he could start with absolutely zero capital. I may have to ask him why he's not already making moves to get some movie reviews published.

What about you? If someone gave you a pile of money to start a business, what would you do? Do you even need a pile of money to get started? What can you do today that moves you towards that dream, even if it never fully materializes? Go out and get started on something.

How Long Are Your Meetings?

Happy Monday! If you haven't yet filled out my quick three minute survey from Friday, click here and go do that. I really appreciate it and it helps me select topics for the blog and get feedback on how I'm doing and where to focus.

So, to the question of the day.

How long are your meetings? And how long should they be?

Everyone that ever talks about meetings agrees on one point: people hate them, yet they cannot escape them. Given our destiny seems to indicate that we will, for the foreseeable future, continue participating in and scheduling meetings, what's the best way for us to do that?

The Outlook Effect

I have a theory that Microsoft Outlook has contributed over the past several years to meeting times. The calendar app defaults to thirty minute increments, and requires editing start and end times separately to hit any duration outside of that. Adding to that, meetings rarely end at exactly the scheduled end time. If the meeting ends early, then everyone gets a little bit of time back to go accomplish some work, but if it runs over, chances are someone is late to the next meeting on their packed calendar. If the calendar is full of half-hour meetings, that delay could cascade throughout most of their day as they show up late to meeting after meeting.

A Better Schedule

Lately, I (and others at the office) have been experimenting with meetings of non-standard lengths. I recommend you try a few and see what works for your team, but try to avoid the thirty and sixty minute marks. Here are a few times you could use that might work as a starting point.

The Quick Standup - A daily checkpoint or quick decision meeting should be handled in ten or fifteen minutes. As a bonus, schedule an off-hour start time, maybe at 9:50.
Status Meetings - These could be eliminated altogether, but if you are trying to communicate status out to the team, schedule five minutes for everyone that will be attending the meeting, but max out at forty-five minutes. I have read suggestions that people only focus in forty-five minute increments, so that might be the longest you would want any non-participatory meeting.
Working Meetings - Again the forty-five minute timeline might be the most you want to shoot for, unless you can work through all of the items quicker. Consider breaking up longer topics into multiple meetings over several days, or assigning topics out to others to have sidebar meetings without the larger group.
Workshops or Extended Sessions - Sometimes, people have to fly in to a location to work through a large or complex session going in depth. As such, all day sessions might be required. Still, breaking them up into discrete chunks with objectives and separated by timed brakes will boost your productivity in the working sessions. Keeping those chunks to forty-five to ninety minutes as a maximum will help your team maintain focus. Whatever you do, don't exceed two hours without a break.

Your Ideal Time

My ideal meeting runs about fifteen to twenty minutes, and starts five or ten minutes after the hour. You will have to play with your own times to come up with your ideal, but you might have an idea from the meetings you regularly attend now. How long do you think they should be? Leave me a comment or drop me an email and let me know.

Casual Friday Fun Survey!

It's Friday, and I am cruising quickly towards 125 blog posts, which would mark the halfway point in this initial jump started journey, so I thought it was time to take a quick pulse check and see how I'm doing and what I could do better. It's ten simple questions. Answer as many as you like and I truly appreciate it!

Create your own user feedback survey
If you can't see the survey, click here.

Why and When You Need To Bounce

If you have aspirations to get promoted and move up the corporate ladder, chances are that you have, at some point, had the vision that it is as easy as climbing that ladder, or perhaps a flight of stairs. After you work for while, though, you realize that the staircase narrows as it goes up the pyramid. At the base of it, the mathematics just make it more and more difficult to climb by moving straight up. Sure, not everyone has aspirations for moving up the managerial chain, but even if there are two others on your team that want to move in the same direction you do, when your manager gets promoted, quits, or passes away (heaven forbid), there are at least three equally qualified people angling for the same job, not to mention those from the outside. If you are exceptionally talented, a direct vertical move may be in your future, but a horizontal bounce (either between departments or companies) may create an easier and better path for you.

Be The Easiest Approach

Sometimes managers try to take the path of least resistance when hiring, as they try to hurry to get a spot filled and move along. Hiring from within sounds like the easiest approach, as the manager would find someone who knows the team and the workload. But the aftermath of a situation like I described above, where multiple people from the same team apply, could lead to all kinds of resentment and dissent in the ranks. As such, sometimes the easiest path for a manager is hiring outside. It's often couched in phrases like "bringing unique background and experience to the role," and while that varied experience has value, sometimes just being the outsider has more value.

Build a Portfolio of Skills

I know people that have done the same job for fifteen years. Not only have they done the exact same thing, but they have mostly done it the same way. I find absolutely nothing wrong with that, if they want that career path. If your desire is to be an amazing welder, then welding for as long as you possibly can is the best way to do that. Same if you want to be a professional athlete. But if you are living in the corporate world, you might want to build more than one skillset. In the digital and service economy, this gains even more importance as technology can easily make jobs obsolete month after month. Bouncing from job to job in a lateral fashion helps build an entire portfolio of skills that can translate to other situations in the future.

Test Your Limits

A flat basketball looks perfectly normal just sitting in the middle of the court. Not until someone tries to bounce it do they realize that it won't move and needs some air. The same analogy works for careers. Often, the comfort of sitting in the same place may hide that you are slowly growing flat, stagnant in skills and abilities, and not growing. Bouncing to another position challenges that stagnation by forcing growth and forcing development of new skills. You might bounce smoothly, or you might flop at first. That doesn't mean you can't add some new skills and grow into the role. But you will never know until you move.

The Perfect Time to Bounce

The perfect time to bounce to a new role never comes. Fear of change and comfort with the status quo play a part to discouraging movement. Sometimes the change comes unexpectedly, with the loss of a job or an offer that appears from an old friend. You should always be open and always be looking, though, for when that opportunity to bounce appears. You can always say "no." As you bounce more and more throughout your career, the transitions get easier, especially with your broadened skillset, and the resistance to change diminishes. Be prepared for everything.

Bouncing jobs is never an easy activity. It seems counter-intuitive to the path that you think you will take up the stairs. But once you visualize that the staircase narrows as it goes up and that everyone on your staircase is pushing and shoving to move to the same spot above you, the idea of jumping staircase to staircase or even running down a step and moving to another staircase becomes a more rational path to climb higher.

However you get to where you want to be, get there. Build skills that interest you and help you grow. Move around, learning what you can where you can. You might surprise yourself.

What do you think is a signal it's time to bounce? And do you have other good reasons to do so? Leave a comment or ping me on social media and let me know.

What's The Matter With Kids Today?

Thanks to a couple of my coworkers, I was able to participate in leading a class during the take-your-child-to-work day at our office yesterday. We worked with over 90 kids to walk them through an exercise to help them understand what we do at work and how that operates to improve the business.

The takeaway for the kids was learning about efficiencies and automation and how systems can help improve job performance. The takeaway for me was that our children are smart. They ask questions. They may even challenge our worldview in a unique way. Unprompted, our group of ten- and eleven-year-olds who were playing the role of "customer" started chanting in unison demanding better service when the demonstration started revealing inefficiencies.

Our groups of kids asked some great questions and came up with some innovative ideas on how to make the process better and more efficient. So when people ask what is wrong with kids today, my answer is nothing. The kids today are resourceful, intelligent, and challenge us to be better versions of ourselves.They are tomorrow's leaders. Help them be even better at it than we are.

The Importance of the Unimportance of Analytics

It is incredibly easy to be sucked into data and analytics. It is fascinating how much information exists, and how readily you can get your hands on it. Whether you have Google Analytics on your blog or you are using Twitter or Facebook analytics as well, information about the performance of your website and your readers is constantly being collected and stored for you to continually pore over, wondering why that last post didn't just take off like the H1N1 virus. My recommendation on that front? Stop. Stop looking and obsessing over the data. Instead, develop a methodology for utilizing the data that keeps you from obsessing over every lost Twitter follower.

Set a Schedule

Do not check your Feedburner stats or Google Analytics every day. In fact, I would say check the statistics maybe once a month. Minute fluctuations in data are going to happen daily, and worrying about each individual post or follower or subscriber or whatever will drive you completely bonkers. It is important to check the data for the next couple of reasons, but start with the idea that you will not let yourself get sucked into checking it every single day, or worse, refreshing every hour or more to just "see if things got better" because it just doesn't self-correct that fast.

Understand Your Baseline

Do not obsess over everyone that unfriends you on Facebook or stops subscribing to your blog via RSS. Don't try to hunt down every Twitter follower who dropped you off her feed. That is not your goal with analytics and data. What you really want to do is understand what is happening from a trending perspective, and that means understanding your baseline. What's a baseline? That's your "normal" performance. Perhaps your blog normally pulls about 30 views a day on a first post. That's a good baseline. Your efforts should then focus on how to increase that, not on a daily basis, but overall. That way you can stay focused on broader activities like creating better content or finding a way to get posts in front of more followers.

Limit Variables

If you are trying to grow rapidly, this can be hard, as there is a tendency to throw everything including the kitchen sink and the pans soaking in it at the internet and try to see what sticks. Unless you have a very very sophisticated click campaign tracking system, this method can cause you some headaches. What if you all of a sudden quadrupled your daily hits? Was it the Facebook ads? The headline changes? The heavy Twitter push? The content itself? Luck? It can be difficult to determine the cause of a particular result if there are several changes being made that all effect the process. When you limit your variables to one or two, you may end up with a slightly better product.

Observe Trends, Not Spikes

It is easy to see that the one post you had on creating maple bacon pickle popsicles in your freezer had a giant spike in traffic, but have you seen it consistently? The spikes or crashes may give you a good sense of which posts have some interesting hook to them. What they don't do is show you the trending over time that can help you understand the directional view of the data as opposed to the individual data points. Go into any analytics with a question of, "What can I learn about my entire base of readers/followers/friends/etc.?" Your objective is stealth recon on your tribe, not cyberstalking individuals who may have joined and left.

This is all harder to do than it seems. Data is sexy and alluring and offers promise of telling you everything you need to know to garner one billion followers and half the Internet swearing fealty to you. Ignore that promise. Instead, look at data as a means to an ends. A way to show changes over time. A macro-skill rather than a micro-skill. ANd avoid getting sucked in. You can slowly death spiral into obsession playing this game.

What do you think? Leave me a note below or hit me up on social media. And don't forget to sign up for email updates here to keep up with the daily content over the next hundred and fifty posts.

The Last Leap in the Productivity Challenge - Are you Ready?

Here's the last jump for you in my ongoing productivity challenge on how to get more done: bump yourself up to five items a day on your list. Wow, this is groundbreaking. I know you are thinking to yourself that you can't believe the concept of just doing more. Well, there's a little more to it than just bumping up to five items a day. So keep reading, unless you think you have it figured out, and I will explain exactly which five items make your list today (and every other day from here on). There may be something in it for you in the end as well if you keep on reading.

Your Moment of Zen

So, if you are strictly keeping count at home, today is the day that would be the next step in the productivity path to getting a ton of things done. I hope you have made it and are ready. But I am going to postpone that post until Monday.

Last night I watched Jon Stewart's final episode of The Daily Show. I remember when he started on the show thinking that he could never rival what Craig Kilborn did with the show (spoiler alert: I was definitely surprised to see Kilborn cameo on the finale). He did quite a bit more. More than my expectations, sure, but more than anyone's expectations, I would say. The parade of stars that came through the show on his watch was amazing to see, from Colbert to Bee to Wilmore to Cenac to Gad to Black to Schall to Carell to Helms to Munn to Madrigal to Riggle to Corddry and Corddry to Jones to Hodgeman to Wilmore to Mandvi to Bakkedahl to Oliver to several that I still left out.

It says more to me in the sixteen plus years the number of megastar careers Jon Stewart launched than what he did himself. If you think about your own career, how many people have you propelled to equal or exceed what you could achieve yourself? That's your measure of success.

Have a great weekend.

How Not To Be a Needy Boss

So, a couple of weeks ago I had a post about how not to be needy as an employee (you can read it here). If you don't have five minutes to read it, I'll give you the synopsis: try it yourself first, rather than running to the manager to ask direction on every single thing before you take a stab at it yourself.

So what about if you're the boss? Bosses can be quite needy, too. And, if you haven't gotten the gist of my overall philosophy here, people need to be able to work independently. That includes management. So here are some tips on how not to be a needy boss.

Don't Micromanage

A needy boss involves himself or herself in every single business decision of the organization. While this can be an effective strategy for managing when the organization is small and the needs are small, this approach does not scale. Take the time as a manager to determine what decisions actually require your input and what decisions you can delegate. Understand that delegation means that you trust the decision that will be made by your employee and while you can question how they came to that decision, your responsibility as management is to support that decision. If you disagree with what conclusion they came to then you should utilize that as coaching opportunities for the methodology they used, but you should not override or reverse their decision unless it is utterly catastrophic. Think of pure delegation as deciding what questions require your level of skills. You made it into a management position for a reason.

Only Ask For Status If You Care

This sometimes causes havoc when the team works on too many projects at once. As a manager, I often have come across a situation where I felt that I did not know what was going on with every single project in the team. As a result, I would start asking for status on everything, even though there were always key initiatives that really required my input and attention and other projects that really should have continued to operate below my radar. Don't fall into that trap. Determine what is important to you, and only ask for status if you are prepared to direct or take action should something be awry. Otherwise, trust that your employees will have it covered.

Respect Your Employee's Vacation

This seems obvious, but too many managers do not seem to think that a vacation boundary exists. When your employees take vacation, that time allows them to recharge and come back ready to tackle whatever you throw their way. Every call you make to interrupt them on the beach or the golf course takes away multiples of that time in productivity when they return. Not only that, it makes you seem like a needy, whiny, and incompetent manager if you cannot live without them for a few days. Pro tip: interrupting vacation to ask irrelevant or non-time-sensitive questions is even worse.

Don't Bother Your Employees With Minutia

This should be an easy one. If you are making a decision about what color to paint the office or which color scheme you should use on the company website, consulting your employees who are not interior designers or web marketing experts wastes their time. Not only does interrupting their actual work for minute details disrupt the actual productivity of your organization, but it also gives them the perception that you cannot make even a simple decision without them, eroding their perception of your leadership. If you believe the decision should be made by the employees, delegate it, don't ask their opinion on it. Just give the decision away and be comfortable with that, or make the decision yourself. Everything does not need to be determined by committee.

Your Employees Are Not Your Therapist

It's perfectly fine to be a human or even a friend to your employees. Some of my best friendships came from relationships with employees or supervisors. That said, your employees should not be used as your personal therapists to help you with personal decisions that don't require or impact work. I'm not advising you to avoid any talk of home life at work. People have families or children and can commiserate or offer advice on similar situations. But you should make sure you are not just venting personal problems on employees who are only engaging with you because they work for you. And certainly don't ask them for advice on legal or financial or relationship matters. Seek out an expert for that.

In the end, much like the "don't be a needy employee" advice can be boiled down to "try it yourself, first," you can generally avoid being a needy boss by trusting your employees to do their jobs and trying not to interrupt them with your own needs. Step in when you need to but let your team do what you hired them to do. If you don't trust them, perhaps you need to reevaluate your team. But good people need coaching, they don't need you to try to do their job for them.

I'm sure I've missed something. What's your best advice for not being needy as a boss? Hit me up on social media of your choice and let me know.

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How Do We Connect?

I'm curious. How do we connect?

I've published just over ninety posts now on the quest for two hundred and fifty. I will likely do another survey soon to get some feedback, but wanted to ask this one question today. How do we connect?

Do you typically catch these posts on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, email, an RSS feed, or do you come here to the site?

Knowing how you and I connect helps me understand how best to communicate with you. Leave me a comment, tweet, email, post, or whatever on your favorite venue and let me know. While you're at it, feel free to let me know if there's something you'd like to hear from me about. If it doesn't fit the blog profile, I may just reach out to you directly (via your favorite means, of course).

Have a happy Wednesday!

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Stealing Scrum: Responding to Change

The Agile Manifesto consists of four comparative statements that describe the elements of value that drove the development of Agile software development methodology and eventually Scrum as well. The fourth, "Responding to change over following a plan," drives the vast majority of methodologies and practices. Why? Because change is inevitable. Change happens every day.

Even to a team operating Scrum, change can insert itself at inappropriate times. During trainings for Scrum methodology, where groups of people often attempt to work a project using the practice, the facilitator often injects a dramatic change mid-cycle. Even for a methodology with quick sprints and quick turnaround of work, injection of major enough change can wreak havoc on an efficient team. Agile nciples and methodologies pride themselves on responsiveness, though, so how should you deal with change?

Evaluate The Change

Don't throw all caution to the wind and accept any change that comes as if it is the new number one priority. You still have the opportunity to evaluate the new situation in terms of the overall goals that you are working towards. A good Scrum team will accept incoming changes and evaluate their impact on the overall project before making a determination to change course. You should do the same in your daily work. Just because someone drops something in your lap, it does not make it the automatic number one priority for you. However, you may, after measured evaluation and comparison, decide that the new directive is more important than something on your list. And that is perfectly OK. Just as it is OK to push a new request out because it is less important than ongoing work. In the end, any new request or change in direction should be evaluated in the greater context versus your other work and you should determine which takes precedence based on overall impact and your ability to get work done.

Reset and Commit

Once you have decided your path, commit to that direction. Take appropriate measures, though, to set expectations appropriately with others, when you do. Determine as a result of the new request which work you will not be completing in the previously committed window, or decide that you will not be starting the new request until a later time, and then communicate those adjusted expectations to those that are waiting on your output. Your customers need to have appropriate expectations, and you have the responsibility to deliver on your commitments. After setting the expectations, clear whatever you need to so that you can deliver on time.

Remember To Value Responsiveness

It's easy to rely on the methodology and sprints in development, or your daily work plans as you put together your own internal daily stand up. In the end, though, the methodology becomes just another type of plan. At that point, you should reflect on the core fundamentals. Place a higher value to responding to change than your own dogma and methods, even if it causes you to change direction. You usually can't control what caused the change, you can only control your response to change (Tweet that). Know that your response can and will set your direction.

Change is inevitable. No matter how well you plan, how set you are in your ways, something will come your way to throw you a curveball. Respond appropriately.

This article is one of a series evaluating how Scrum methodology might be utilized in non-IT business operations and decisions to improve productivity and performance.

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Thank Somebody Today

I do not thank people nearly as often as I should. Sure, every now and again I will thank someone for going above and beyond to help me out, but sometimes I fail to recognize above and beyond and miss out on appreciating some people.

Showing your gratitude has power. It builds relationships. It strengthens bonds between teams. It lays foundations that can pave the way for future assistance, should you need it. Saying thanks can also prevent erosion of those same relationships or alienating someone that helped so that they never want to help you again. It's a powerful glue with the power to bond together and prevent from breaking apart. So here are a couple of ways you can say thank you.

Big Thank Yous

You could always go over the top, buying the person something or taking them out to lunch. I had a boss one time that would thank his teams with Mont Blanc pens and a team dinner after wrapping a project. If you have the cash and want to spend it on them, do so. They will appreciate it. I still have a couple of those Mont Blancs fifteen years later. That said, this can be a rather pricey way to show appreciation, especially if you have multiple people to thank. Another lower cost method may be more your style. You don't have to buy expensive writing utensils either. A ten dollar Starbucks or Amazon gift card still brings it big.

Thanks With an Email

Perhaps one of the easiest things to do is to shoot someone an email. I recommend you put some thought into it. If you send a one word email that just says "Thanks," the chances are that the recipient will care about the email as much as you cared writing it. Instead, I recommend you be explicit about what they did to help you, but as important, I urge you to tie it back to the benefit that their help provided. That will help them see how they fit in the big picture, which may bring you some political capital to get assistance from them in the future. Copy their supervisor.

Hand Write a Thank You

Nobody writes anything by hand anymore. As a result, receiving a heartfelt handwritten thank you is a novelty. A handwritten note brings a more personal feel to it than its digital counterpart, and your handwriting leaves a personal stamp on the thank you. Taking the effort to get some nice cards and envelopes to send the thank you in adds even more class to it.

Just Say Thanks

If none of the above options work for you, maybe just a verbal thanks will. Even so something as the simple verbal thanks can easily be overlooked or forgotten. Still, even a verbal thank you is more gratitude than most hear on a given day. So even if it is the least you can do, it may be their best.

In the end, it does not necessarily matter how you say thank you, so long as you do.

Go out and thank someone today.

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