5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Be a Better Boss

Much of the discussion on bosses seems to be how bad some of them are.  This week, we turn the question on its head, and challenge you to be a better boss.  It’s easy to point the finger at someone else, but how self-aware are you at identifying things you can do to improve your game as a leader? 

The Wily Manager guys will give you a head start with 5 things you can do right now to improve as a leader. 

Monday’s Tip: Be a Better Listener.  Listening well is very hard work.  Don’t underestimate the effort and concentration it takes.  Today, work to recall all the contents of every conversation you have.  This will be much easier if you commit to talking less.

Tuesday’s Tip: Be a Teacher.  Invest the appropriate time to teach one or more of your people some aspect of the job.  It may be something very simple, but look today to share your knowledge and experience with those you work with.

Wednesday’s Tip: Offer Feedback.  Actively look for something to offer feedback on today.  Look first for positive feedback opportunities, but don’t ignore the presence of corrective feedback opportunities.

Thursday’s Tip: Set Clear Expectations.  Make sure your people know what you need from them.  Don’t think by telling them once that you’re done.  Look for an opportunity today to set or reinforce a clear expectations.

Friday’s Tip: Reinforce with Consequences.  Consequences should occur as a result of specific behaviour or performance.  Look for an opportunity to reinforce desired performance by applying an appropriate consequence.  Don’t forget that meaningful consequences can be very simple, such as saying “Thank You”.

The Power of Persuasion: Selling Your Ideas

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Why Sell Your Ideas?
  • Your projects, programs, and career turn on the difference between “no” and “yes.”  Part emotional intelligence, part politics, and part psychology, selling ideas is not like tricking someone out of his money.   It’s about helping others to see things your way— engaging their minds and imaginations.  (Richard Shell, author of “The Art of WOO – Using Strategic persuasion to Sell Your Ideas”)
  • On today’s knowledge based workforce – “In our world, the right to give orders has largely been replaced by the need to facilitate, lead, and exercise influence.” (Klatt, Murphy, Irvine)

Influence Pre-Work

1. Establish Credibility

  • Authentic professional relationships
  • Expertise
  • Trust

2. Plan

  • Know how you are perceived by others.
  • Know your audience – what do they value?
  • Inside an organization selling your idea is likely to be a series of interactions rather than one single “pitch”

The Pitch

1. Context

  • Frame Your Idea
  • State the opportunity

2. Clarify

  • Explain the details
  • Why should they act?  (in their frame of reference)
  • Supplement numerical evidence with stories, metaphors, analogies that will speak to the heart as well as the head

3. Create

  • Deal with concerns or objections
  • Seek and share ideas

4. Commit

  • Determine Who will do What by When

5. Close

  • You’ve already closed the “selling of your idea” and have commitment.  This is more about ending the conversation appropriately, saying Thanks.  Don’t keep selling at this point …. Get out of the conversation and move on.

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Good Boss, Bad Boss: Be a Better Boss

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Why care about Leadership?

  • Retention – Unwanted turnover = 1.5 – 2.5 annual salary
  • Capturing Discretionary Effort  – What the value of 10% more productivity?  How about 100% more?
  • Less stress

Realities of being the Boss

  • You are under a microscope
  • The blame you get, and the credit you get are both exaggerated
  • Most people land in leadership roles because they were good technicians or practicioners of their work
  • Leaders underestimate the impact they have on others

5 Things you can do right now to be a better Boss

1. Be a better listener

  • Take the time
  • Don’t multitask (especially PDAs)
  • Seek to understand… not to plan your response
  • Paraphrase without being a parrot

2. Be a Teacher

  • It may take more time in the short-run
  • Don’t micro-manage
  • Tell people why
  • Connect them to something bigger

3. Give and receive feedback in abundance

  • Look for opportunities to offer feedback on a daily basis
  • Ask your direct reports for feedback frequently – and act on it
  • Offer both positive feedback, and corrective feedback

4. Be crystal-clear in your expectations

  • Write important expectations down formally at least once per year
  • Constantly reinforce expectations
  • Use several different media to describe important expectations
  • Practice what you preach at all times

5. Provide consequences for both good and poor performance

  • People will do what gets reinforced
  • You are currently getting the performance you are asking for
  • Be absolutely consistent with consequences
  • Apply consequences to reinforce both good and poor performance

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Good Boss, Bad Boss: Be a Better Boss

5 things you can do right now to be a better boss.

Listen to the ‘Good Boss, Bad Boss’ podcast:

Good Boss, Bad Boss Podcast Slides

Take a look at the ‘Good Boss, Bad Boss: Be a Better Boss’ Cheat Sheet

The Power of Persuasion — How Great Ideas Die

“Selling” is not a bad word – it is an essential business skill.  It’s easy to see how some people would think that influencing others is somehow underhanded or unethical:

“Yep… this one’s got really low miles.  Only driven to church on Sunday by a little old lady from Pasadena”

In reality, many great ideas die an agonizing death because they have not been properly sold.  There also seems to be an inverse correlation between our technical ability, and our willingness to sell.  In other words, probably the more technically skilled you are in your area, the less likely you are to want to sell your idea.  (With all due respect to the Engineers out there.)

Here’s an ugly truth:  marketing is everything.  Think of the examples in consumer goods:

  • 8-tracks were far superior in quality to cassettes or records.
  • BetaMax was most certainly better than VHS
  • Apple’s Mac has long been superior to any PC.

So if these are any indication, great products and great ideas require great marketing if they are to be adopted.

So what do you do?

First – you have to value the idea of selling your ideas.  You need to tell a story about how your idea is going to enhance pleasure, or reduce pain.

Second – Put together a marketing plan.  Depending on what you’re doing, it might only be half a page long, but have some idea about what story you are going to tell, to whom, and via what media.

Third – Check out our podcast this week to hear more about Influencing Others

Finally – remember that we are all “in sales”.  If you live in a society of more than one person, you will be constantly trying to lobby people to your way of thinking about one thing or another.  The sooner we all get comfortable with this reality, the sooner the good ideas will at least seem to “sell themselves”.

The Power of Persuasion: Selling Your Ideas

Many smart managers have found out the hard way that great ideas don’t sell themselves.  As much as perhaps your genius should be self-evident, you would be well advised to build a strategy for getting your ideas accepted.  Join us this week, as we discuss effective ways to be more persuasive and sell your ideas.

Monday’s Tip: Build Street-Cred.  You should be constantly looking for ways to be credible with your stakeholders.  When it comes time to sell those same stakeholders on an idea, you will be at a significant advantage if you already have lots of credibility.

Tuesday’s Tip: Make a Plan.  You don’t need to write pages and pages of notes, but don’t wing it either.  To whom do you need to speak?  What do they want to hear?  How do they communicate?  Who are potential champions?  Who are the resistors?

Wednesday’s Tip: Target/Segment Your Audience.  Know who will be driven by facts, and who will more driven by relationships.  Figure out how to appeal to specific people, and tailor your message accordingly.  The same story can be told a variety of ways – make sure you choose the more appropriate to your target audience.

Thursday’s Tip: Anticipate Objections and/or Push-back.  Don’t become defensive, but rather come prepared to deal with those who may resist your ideas. 

Friday’s Tip: It’s About Them, Stupid.  You need to frame your argument in terms where the other party is clear about what is in it for them.  If you talk exclusively about how this will be so much better for you, then you probably won’t win them over.

The Power of Persuasion: Selling Your Ideas

Find out how different people react to different methods of persuasion, and then effectively target those you may be trying to influence.  Also learn the three killer mistakes many managers make when attempting to influence others.

Listen to the ‘Power of Persuasion’ Podcast:

The Power of Persuasion Podcast Slides

Take a look at the ‘Power of Persuasion’ Cheat Sheet

The Project Post Mortem: A Good Investment

Every few years I’ll do a job or a project for a governmental organization.  Given that I spend about 90% of my time dealing with private sector organizations, I always have to recalibrate when I enter a public sector organization.  Most often in government, I experience generally hard-working people frustrated by a bureaucracy resulting in precious little actually being accomplished.

The public sector usually attracts people who are generally risk averse, and as a result, the idea of taking action without perfect information, or allowing oneself to make mistakes and then swiftly correcting them is a hard sell.  I seem to spend a ridiculous amount of time just urging people to hurry up and move to action.

In some cases, my problem in private sector organizations is exactly the opposite.  Getting people to slow down for just an hour or two to evaluate and document their performance is often branded as heresy.  In the case of doing some form of “look-back” after a project or initiative, public sector organizations tend to do a much better job.

There are probably a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is that public spending is subject to much closer scrutiny, and by a wider variety of interest groups.  Nevertheless, private sector organizations would be well advised to take a look at how their cousins in the public sector evaluate and document lessons learned from projects and initiatives.

Most often, the reason given for failing to do a post mortem is, “we don’t have time, besides… everything went well.”  When things go very well on a project or initiative is the most important time to do a post mortem.  Do you know why things went better than expected?  Can you repeat that performance again, or was it just good luck?

To spend an hour or two properly debriefing a project or initiative may be the best investment an organization can make.

Project Post Mortems

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What is a Project Post-Mortem?

  • A “look-back” from a specific project or course of action
  • Occurs after the fact
  • Documents lessons-learned for use in similar future circumstances
  • Compares expected results with actual results
3 Types of Post-Project Mortems
  • A full, comprehensive project post mortem for the project or action
  • Bundle the project with other similar ones and debrief together
  • No post project review will occur, but it will be a conscious decision rather than just not getting it done

Benefits of a Project Post-Mortem

  • Documents the wisdom gained through experience, and what could be done differently next time
  • Understand why things went well (or not), and why
  • A form of structured feedback
  • Improves communication

How to Conduct a Project Post Mortem

  1. Decide on scope and who should participate
  2. Establish ground rules, and meeting roles
  3. Conduct Gap Analysis
    • Review expected performance or results
    • Document actual performance or results
  4. Document action items arising as a result of the PPM

Questions to Ask at a Project Post-Mortem

  • What are the KPIs for this project?
  • Where the requirements and goals of this project clear at the beginning?
  • Did we achieve the business objective?
  • What went better than expected?
  • What did not go as well as expected?
  • How were specific problems overcome?
  • What changes would be made if we were to do this project over?
  • Which process or methods caused frustration?
  • What specific tools or techniques were useful on this project?
  • Next time we need more/better involvement from…?
  • Does a smaller group need to go offline and evaluate parts of this project further?

Tips for a Successful Project Post Mortem

  • Do it as soon as possible after the conclusion of the project or action
  • Do not assign blame, but rather focus the intent on learning
  • Talk about team performance
  • Keep the discussion focused, and do not allow digression to related issues
  • Look for an 80% solution

3 Things to Remember about Project Post Mortems

  1. Don’t let the project post-mortem become bigger than the project it was meant to assess
  2. Take the time to do it well
  3. Make it a learning exercise – don’t make it about personal blame

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Project Post Mortems

What should happen after a project winds down?  Pick up some tips for a successful project post-mortem.

Listen to the ‘Project Post Mortems’ Podcast:

Project Post Mortems Podcast Slides

Take a look at the ‘Project Post Mortems’ Cheat Sheet