Just-in-Time Management Advice
Join Jed and Bob as they discuss how to improve your meetings using Wily Manager’s Four Points to Meeting Effectiveness.
Watch the ‘Conducting Effective Meetings’ Video (14 mins 30 sec):
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How much time do you waste in meetings every week? Conducting effective meetings is a critical leadership skill that needs improvement in just about all organizations.
On the other hand, not everyone is good at conducting effective meetings. Many meetings:
There are four steps you need to follow when conducting effective meetings. Here’s a brief introduction to the four steps:
Step 1 – Prepare When Conducting Effective Meetings
Step 2 – Communicate When Conducting Effective Meetings
Step 3 – Control When Conducting Effective Meetings
Step 4 – Document and Follow-up When Conducting Effective Meetings
Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Conducting Effective Meetings (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):
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A recent survey of managers determined that they spend upwards of 18 hours per week in meetings and about half that time is wasted. It might be time to do something about this before your organization implodes, and we have to have another meeting to discuss the damage. Join the Wily Manager guys this week, as they talk about how to improve meetings.
Monday’s Tip: Question what would happen if the meeting didn’t occur at all. If there are no decisions made, or nothing changes as a result of the meeting – cancel it.
Tuesday’s Tip: Take initiative to change – whether it’s your meeting or not. Anyone can raise questions as to meeting process or meeting effectiveness. Don’t wait for someone else to step-up, raise your concerns now.
Wednesday’s Tip: Insist on an agenda in advance. A meeting without an agenda is almost certainly a waste of time and money. You are being paid to use time and money wisely. Don’t attend meetings without agendas.
Thursday’s Tip: Document action-items and decisions. Commitments and decisions must be documented with an accountable person(s), and a completion date. This list should be reviewed at the next meeting, and status against progress reported.
Friday’s Tip: Agree on a meeting process. There should be specific norms and routines that become your effective meeting process. You do not want to “wing-it”.
Join the Wily Manager guys this week as they talk about The Triangle of Satisfaction – the three types of needs that must be addressed in order to negotiate lasting agreements.
Monday’s Tip: Consider the Emotional Needs of the person(s) you are negotiating with. How are they going to feel about the process and the outcome of whatever is at stake? What baggage will they bring?
Tuesday’s Tip: Consider the Procedural Needs of person(s) you are negotiating with. What is the other’s understanding of the process? Are the right people, with the right information available at the right time to make the process work?
Wednesday’s Tip: After considering Emotional and Procedural needs, consider the substantive needs of the negotiation. What are the actual issues at stake?
Thursday’s Tip: If you are in a longer negotiation process, continually revisit the Emotional and Procedural needs. Things will change throughout the process, and it is important to consider how those changes will impact the process and outcome.
Friday’s Tip: Remember that “negotiation” also applies to moving people to a new course of action. Sometimes negotiation implies legal agreements, but in other cases, it is simply moving people to a new way of doing things, and the same principles apply.
Join Jed and Bob as they talk about how you can be much more successful whether you are negotiating a contract, or simply trying to change behaviors of your direct reports.
Watch the ‘Triangle of Satisfaction’ Video (14 mins 23 sec):
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Many people don’t have Negotiation Tactics, but rather improvise their way through negotiations of any sort. Below we talk about the following aspects of Negotiation Tactics.
The Wily Manager Model of Negotiation Tactics
When involved negotiations, mediation, or conflict resolution, people have three interdependent needs that must be carefully considered in order to achieve agreements and decisions that will last:
Why You Should Use Negotiation Tactics
People often become overly-focused on what they are trying to negotiate, and forget they need to consider how negotiations are conducted.
How You Should Use Negotiation Tactics
Whether in structured negotiations, or just trying to impact some behavior change, managers need to look at all three aspects of Negotiation Tactics.
Start by asking the following questions:
Three Things to Remember about Negotiation Tactics:
Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about Negotiation Tactics (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):
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The Rolling Stones were right – You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But that doesn’t stop many people from trying.
I’ve been watching media reports lately of some Labor-Management issues for the same reason you might slow down to get a quick glimpse of a horrible traffic accident – to witness destruction, pain, and suffering from the air-conditioned comfort of your own space.
People tend to entrench themselves along ideological lines very quickly in labour-management disputes. Without knowing any of the details, or even any of the issues, people somehow feel they are entitled to an opinion. This works well for the people whose views of the world are shaped by their favorite TV show, and who name their children after movie stars. However, people with a brain (with apologies to the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz) need to dig a bit deeper before jumping on any particular bandwagon.
It is very rarely that a labor-management dispute has much to do at all with the substantive issues that each side articulates. More often the disputes are perpetuated by politics, emotional considerations, and issues of procedure that make the Department of Motor Vehicles look like a positively high performing organization.
Perhaps most unfortunately, such negotiations take place on the premise of dividing up a fixed pie. If one side gets more, the other gets less. If both sides could get past the crap, they might figure out a way to bake a bigger pie. But that would require trust, innovation, and initiative — elements in critically short supply in organized labour, and in almost all large corporations.
Twenty or so years ago, organizations would hire guys like us to come in and help them define metrics and measures. Often times there were not adequate data collection and storage systems, so we ended up counting a lot of things manually, and then getting our crayons out to hand draw graphs to represent these indicators.
Skip ahead in time a couple of decades, and organizations are still hiring guys like us to help them with the measures and metrics, but now its usually because they have thousands upon thousands of data points, but no ability to turn this data into wisdom, and ultimately better business decisions.
Blame Microsoft. They made it easy to have powerful spreadsheets and databasing capability on every desktop relatively cheaply. Now the guy who runs the janitorial service at the office has a PC with more computing power than the Space Shuttle, and 500 indicators he’s tracking. Bad news – if you have much more than half a dozen metrics you’re following, that’s not a scorecard… that’s a laundry list.
We also see it in any professional sport. Did you know that in games that take place on the road, in the Central Time Zone, on odd-numbered days, in the same month as the coach’s birthday, when the starting line-up all had chicken for the dinner the previous night, the team has posted a win 58% of the time?
Now that’s valuable data.
Professional Sports organizations are very fat with cash – they can afford to waste some on useless statistics. Your organization probably can’t.
You need to figure out what results your organization is trying to produce, and then determine the key drivers of those results. For many organizations, the goal is to make money while minimizing various forms of risk. What are the simple key drivers of these things?
Many managers are scared away from data because their accountant and their stats professor from college teamed up to make sure that any numbers were completely incomprehensible to the average human (and thereby keeping them both employed).
Yet, taking just a bit of time to better understand the key numbers in your business is time extraordinarily well spent. And a fringe benefit is taking those numbers (that you now understand them) back to your stats-prof, or your accountant, and truly baffling them.
Join the Wily Manager guys this week, as they put on the Stats-hat, and talk about Scatter Diagrams, and spotting correlations. Before you decide to skip this podcast, know that Jed and Bob are committed to making this easy, and you might even learn how to use stats to make better management decisions.
Watch the ‘Scatter Diagrams’ Video (14 mins 59 sec):
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The Scatterplot Graph is a simple technique that is not often used to help managers make better decisions. Below we talk about the following aspects of the Scatterplot Graph:
Why Would I Use a Scatterplot Graph?
Types of Correlations in a Scatterplot Graph
When gathering data points, a pattern may or may not emerge. Here are how we label those patterns:
The R-Squared
Excel makes it easy to determine a trend line for any Scatterplot Graph. Excel will also provide an equation for the line, and an R-squared statistic. The R-squared stat measures the collective distance from the trend line of all the data points. If something is highly correlated, the R-squared number will approach 1. If the data points are not at all correlated, the R-squared number will approach 0.
Example 1
This is actual data from an industrial operation that was testing a theory that their production was largely based on the output of one machine. After tracking their overall output, and the availability of the machine for 30 days, this Scatterplot Graph was produced, showing very little correlation between overall production, and the availability of the machine in question:
Example 2
This is actual data from a retailer that was trying to predict soft drink sales based on outside temperature. As you can see, the Scatterplot Graph shows a very tight, positive correlation between the outdoor temperature, and the volume of soft drink sold. As a result, the retailer could use the equation on the trend line to predict volume for inventory control purposes.
How to do a Scatterplot Graph
Some people will avoid doing a Scatterplot Graph because they think it is time consuming or difficult. It is neither. Here’s how to do it:
Three Things to Remember About the Scatterplot Graph
Watch the ‘3-Minute Crash Course’ about the Scatterplot Graph (CLICK THE ARROW TO START THE VIDEO):
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