Good managers are occasionally unpopular

Most, if not all of us, care about what others think of us. It is natural that we should wish for others to like us, including those who work for us. For that reason, many managers feel an inner need to be popular with their team. Almost all people share a common need for approval. It started as young children, when we felt the need for parent approval. And then, during school life, we wanted our classmates to accept and like us. By the time that we reach adulthood, we have a deeply embedded need for others to like us. The inherent need for approval leads many managers to try too hard to be popular and that eventually creates problems. You do not have to be remote and cold, but you must find the right balance between friendly and cool; you need a balance that fits with your own personality and with your particular management role. The first potential pitfall is concerning trust. For example, consider this situation which you may have already experienced. Your boss asks if you had a great weekend. You reply and exchange a few brief words before moving on to talking about work.

Being polite is definitely preferable to being rude or uncivil, so you welcome your boss’s approach. However, there is a difference between genuine interest and mere polite conversation. You have no difficulty discerning if your boss is genuinely interested in you or merely being polite. We make these judgments without conscious effort, and our brain communicates its decision to us instantly, experienced as gut feelings. Almost all adults are smart enough to see through managers who attempt to ingratiate themselves. At first, the team appreciates that the manager is making an effort to win their approval. But soon, when the manager is displaying symptoms of insincerity, the team starts to become suspicious. Suspicion is very close to mistrust and nobody gives their best for someone they do not trust.

The second pitfall concern manipulation. When things go wrong, and the manager’s behavior suddenly switches from being over-friendly to over-cold, the sharp contrast leads some people to view the manager as insincere, two-faced, uncaring and manipulative. This reaction is not necessarily justified, but that’s how many people react. You don’t want your team to class you as manipulative. The third pitfall concerns making enemies out of friends. When one team member is a genuine close friend of the manager, eventually, the inevitable happens. Every manager has to occasionally impose an unpopular measure, or deliver a harsh review of performance. Or even worse, the manager must handle a situation when a team member has done something seriously wrong. The manager must discipline that person; even warn them that their  actions could lead to dismissal. If the disciplining manager and the employee at fault are close friends, this adds an unpredictable dimension to the problem. The employee often feels unjust and undue resentment that cannot be resolved. Close friends torn apart by conflict often become enemies, and you definitely don’t want to create an enemy within your team.

The fourth pitfall concerns apparent favouritism. The team will assume, rightly or wrongly, that a member of the team who enjoys a close personal relationship with their manager is receiving favours and privileges denied to other team members. This equally well liked. They start devoting more time to ingratiating themselves  with their boss than to doing their job. Others react by becoming surly, remote and uncooperative. Both reaction kill productivity and make life at work unpleasant.

The solution to these pitfalls is to be polite, professional and even-handed. Never feign friendliness or interest. Gain respect by consistently doing your best to be a good leader. Over the long haul, people will respect you for this and and follow your lead. Every manager is called upon to be unpopular for some of the time. It goes with the job. However, although you cannot always be popular, you can always be respected, which matter much, much more

1 Employee + 2 Managers = Half the output

When you report to two managers, all the three of you achieve much less. With two managers, your output will almost certainly halve. And eventually the three of you will probably have a spat. When this happens, productivity will take a further dive. Think back to your childhood. When you have two managers, it is like having a mother and father. Mum says, ‘No ice cream today’, so you ask Dad for ice cream. He says, ‘Great idea, let’s all have ice cream.’ Now mother and father have an argument over how to bring up children. Next, mum decides that it’s time to encourage you to develop a work ethic so she says, ‘Today, I’d like you to help me around the house.’ Dad comes along and says, ‘What are you doing? I told you yesterday that today you must clean your bicycle!’

Mother and father have no alternative but to get together and solve the problem that their child has two bosses. If they are good and loving parents they will succeed in coping, but the problem will never entirely goes away. And most children learn the valuable lesson of accepting some of the little injustices in life. If you think that adults at work don’t act like kids and parents, take a cool analytical look at what goes on around you. They surely do! Organizational structures that create dual reporting responsibilities work fine if the reporting involves only the giving of information, but when it also involves receiving instructions from two or more sources, it encourages conflict. One manager will be disappointed when his or her work is not completed. Setting realistic deadlines becomes impossible, because no one manager has a full understand of the person’s workload. One boss will tend to pressure for his or her work to be done first. 

If you are involved in this problem, do not try to live with it, because you cannot ultimately succeed in this situation. Instead, find a way to eliminate it. The problem of having two managers must not be there in the first place. Eliminate the problem and you will see relationships improve and productivity rise.

People do not cope with more than seven concurrent objectives

If you have only one job to complete you will have no choice but to give that job your undivided attention. When you concentrate all your effort upon one thing at a time, it is easier to be more effective. If you must divide your time between two objectives, you must keep two balls in the air at the time without dropping one as you switch your attention between the two jobs

Every time you switch between jobs, you lose a little momentum. You need to mentally and physically put aside the paraphernalia of the one task and pick up from where you left off on the other. Each job switch drains a little of your momentum, so that your productivity suffers. Add a third job at your list of concurrent task and you need to concentrate a little more on the job switching process and a little less on the jobs themselves. As you add more jobs, there comes a critical point when the number of jobs you have on the go requires you to become as focused on job switching as on the tasks themselves.  At this point productivity takes a sudden dive. Research has shown that people reach the critical point at seven concurrent tasks for women and five for men. Sorry if that appears sexist, but the research found that most women are more adept than men are at coping with variety of concurrent tasks.

Coincidentally, how often do you see a juggler manage to keep more than five objects in the air for any length of time? The limit is reputed to be mental, rather than one physical agility. Many jugglers can handle five balls. Of those, fewer than 30 percent can manage six, fewer than 30 percent seven balls, and the few who can juggle seven or more generally keep all the balls in the air for only seconds, not minutes. At work, we often hear how people struggle to ‘Keep all their balls in the air’ or how they ‘dropped the ball. Many world-class top executives successfully manage more than seven concurrent tasks, but these are truly exceptional people and when you examine how they do it, inevitably find that they employ people solely to help them organize their time and maintain high personal productivity. You obtain higher productivity from people when you have them focus upon a small number of tasks or objectives. Too few, and some people find their work repetitive and boring, so their enthusiasm is reduced and their productivity falls. Too many, and people start dropping the ball.

When you set objectives and tasks for members of your team, avoid job descriptions that contain long list of catch-all responsibilities. Instead, give each team member clear written objectives, with an absolute maximum of seven, and a realistic maximum of five. Even better, restrict the list to the three! That way you‘ll get the result that you want.

People don't hit invisible targets, unless by ACCIDENT

People do not hit targets or achieve business objectives that they don’t know about or cannot see. This is self-evident. It’s so obvious that one wonders why managers so often overlook this basic fact. For example, here’s a common situation.

Imagine you are the member of a team and your manager has convened a team meeting. The manager announces new objectives, perhaps with a slick presentation including pictures or graphs or bar charts, followed by handouts or emailed confirmations. At the time, this all feels very important and probably engenders a positive and animated response. The manager addresses questions and the team returns to getting on with their day-to-day jobs. Some team members file the handouts; some place them on top of mounting stacks of paper; some put them into filing trays. Your team may read your follow-up emails, but usually they give them only a quick scan. They then drag them into folders containing hundreds of other emails, all filed away for potential future reference and quickly forgotten. After a busy week or two, the meeting soon fades into the back of the memory. The big launch meeting a one-off event, punctuating a steady flow of familiar work. It’s easy for the importance to slide. The manger has probably devoted hours to the objective: discussions with the boss and other managers, and then preparing the team meeting. But for the team, life goes on as usual.

To ensure that every team member shares an equally clear vision, the manager needs to take action that this is much more definite. You need them to know who must achieve what, by when, to what standard and possibly at what cost. Hearing the objective once and receiving it in writing is just not enough to penetrate through the mass of other business to become a priority.

Consider you and your own team’s current objectives. Do you personally know exactly what you are trying to achieve? Have defined targets clearly? In your own mind, do you know what achieving the objective look like and feel like? Can you immediately list your current objectives without referring to notes? If you can reply to these questions with quick and accurate answers, you’re on your way to success. Now think about your team. Does each team member share your clarity of vision? If you asked any one of them to list the current objectives, in descending order of importance, could they do so? And would their list be the same as yours?

If your team passes the test with flying courses. I must congratulate you. You are one in a thousand and on the road to success.

The power of NO!

Looking back, the day feels like one long series of interruptions and much of the work planned for day remains uncompleted. Does that apply to you, or to any of your team? Of course, many of the interruption will have been short and well-justified exchanges between you and colleagues, suppliers or customers. And when you are manager, people refer to you more often. Some Interruptions are urgent and important situations that you need to deal with immediately. Some will be people relying on easy access to your knowledge, too lazy to invest time in learning. Many interruptions will be downright time-wasters. Occasionally, team members will interrupt you to seek your approval before they act, rather than have the confidence to make their own decision, or take personal responsibility.

Many of us accept interruption without firs pausing to think. We often feel the rapidity of the day’s events prevent us from pausing long enough to take time to consider how we should react. It seems quicker to accept the interruption and quickly deal with it, and then we find ourselves dragged into countless minor issues, all eating up our day until we have achieved very little. We have only three potential responses to any interruption, namely the three acts:

Act NOW, Act LATER, Act NEVER

Immediately you receive an interruption, pause for a split second and ask yourself, ‘should I act now, act later or act never?’ Having decided the best of these three options, you either:

1. Accept the interruption (act now)
2. Schedule the task for later (act later)
3. Or simply say NO (act never)

Naturally, when we say NO we do it in a considerate way, because although we may need to be ruthless about our use of time we should till aim to be polite in our dealing with others. The habit of always asking yourself should I act now, act later or act never stops your train of thought of enough for wisdom to prevail. The brain has the ability to act wisely, but only if consulted. If you decided to act now, you first put aside the papers on your desk or turn away from your computer, mentally switching from your train of thought. You deal with the emergency and then refocus yourself to pick up from where you left off.

If you decided to act later, you diarize future action or set a reminder, or add another item to your to-do list. It is important to recognize how often you need to choose the final option of act never. Many interruptions bring with them extra work for you. Consider this: would you prefer a busy colleague to admit, ‘I want to help, but I don’t have the capacity right now,’ or for them to say ‘OK, I’ll do it,’ only to let you down later when they find that they do not have the capacity to deliver on their promise?

And frequently, when you say to a team member. ‘Not now, I’ll speak with you later,’ and then alter in the day you ask them what they wanted, they reply, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I couldn’t wait, so I coped by myself.’ Saying NO wisely can teach your team members to be more independent and more productive. It can be the most effective response. Do you say NO often enough?

Deadlines Often Backfire

The very word deadline is overdramatic because in business nobody dies when the line is crossed. We all miss deadlines; life goes on, so why worry? Humour the boss, agree to the deadline if you must, avoid it if you can, do your best, or don’t even try, it makes little difference. That attitude is all too frequent. Many bosses will bury their heads in the sand and deny it, but it is a common scenario. Frequently, managers set deadlines simply to put pressure on their people to get the job done more quickly. But be warned, deadlines frequently backfire. Imagine yourself in this situation. You lead a department within a large organization. The CEO sets you an objective. He wants this achieved by end next week. It seems practical and so you agree. Or, at least, you don’t say that you may not be able to achieve his deadline. You’re not worried; it’s not too much work for your team. However as you get into the detail of the job you find that in order to complete the task you need another department to supply essential information. Snag!

Do set deadlines when you think you have direct control over all the people and resources necessary to complete the job, and you can make a reasonably accurate assessment of how long the job should take.

• Don’t set deadlines when you need to achieve objectives that rely upon the cooperation of people outside your control. Instead, set targets and objectives but not with deadlines
• Do encourage higher productivity by making the targets and deadlines stretching, but achievable
• Don’t let your desire for productivity lead you to lose touch with reality
• Don’t set artificial deadlines for truly original creative work, but do engender enthusiasm and urgency
• When you need to achieve a major objective that requires the cooperation of people outside your control, break down the major objective into mini-objectives. Consider setting realistic but stretching deadlines for each of the mini-objectives that fall within your area of control.
• If you want your team to feel motivated by the deadlines that you set, then you must personally demonstrate that you don’t just pluck them out of thin air.

Be optimistic but realistic. Never set, or accept a deadline in haste. Think and plan.

People Tolerate being Managed, but they Love being LED

It’s the foremost law; people tolerate being managed, but love being led. First, consider how often you have heard people complaining to each other about management. One might expect staff to rebel against poor management, but they rarely do so. One strident employee may say, ‘We’ll tell them.’  But if he opens his mouth to complain, and then looks over his shoulder for support, suddenly he finds himself standing alone. People often complain to each other about their manager but open mutiny is almost unheard of. This is probably the main reason why so many incompetent managers continue to have free rein to make people’s life at work so disagreeable. Working for an inept manager can be very unpleasant. It can also be very frustrating because his or her incompetence holds back your own performance. You may even appear to be responsible for his or her mistakes, making you look foolish in front of clients, suppliers or co-workers.

Working for a manager of only average ability is not much better, yet people tolerate this and get on with their job. When the manager is fully competent, then people respond by doing a competent job. Good management elicits competent performance because people know what to do, by when and to what standard of performance. And their personal effort is coordinated with the work of those around them. But is that good enough?Consider how the following descriptors highlight the essential difference between management and leadership at work:

Manage: Run, Direct, Administer, Supervise, Deal with, Handle, Control.

Lead: Guide, Show the way, Direct, Pilot, Escort, Go In Front, Go Ahead, Conduct

Management without leadership produces only a competent performance because, although the manager organizes the team efficiently, the team is not motivated to give their very best. Add leadership and now people feel inspired to try harder. Performance lifts to much higher levels. When people work for a good leader they feel encouraged, supported and believed in. They want to contribute all that they are capable of, and they feel positive about the future. They feel less controlled, more encouraged. This empowering experience increases team enthusiasm and energy levels and helps create an expectation that the team will do well. But leadership alone is not enough. Leadership without management will fail through a lack of coordinated direction. Management and leadership together spark off the highest levels of achievement. Both leader and team enjoy the buzz they feel from achieving things together, which is why people love to work for a first-rate leader. The best leaders do more than merely organize and control their people. Either through instinct, or by intelligent thought, they know how to handle each situation so that the ordinary people around them produce extraordinary results.

If you have been fortunate enough to work for one of these leaders, you will remember how you felt motivated to go the extra mile and give your best. You will have found working with them more enjoyable, not necessarily fun-filled days, but fulfilling because you achieved so much, which was extremely satisfying. When working for this person you felt motivated and confident of your success.  Effective leaders do not work extra hard. In fact, they often appear more relaxed and easy-going, but they are very active people setting the agenda through being intelligently proactive, and intelligently reacting to events and people issues as they occur.

The quickest way to learn leadership is on the job and the following 39 essential truths provide a resource to help you decide when to be proactive or reactive, on which issues and how to go about it.

Keep your Heart Healthy

Chances are, one of your New Year's resolutions is to get fit, and that means staying heart healthy. In this Health Minute, John Lisk looks at five ways to keep your ticker going strong.

A healthy heart means healthy arteries, and healthy blood pressure. When arteries become clogged from cholesterol and fat, they shut off blood flow that's needed to keep the body running and the heart pumping. When blood pressure is high, it can weaken the heart and other organs.So, what are some of the best ways to keep the heart in top shape? Read labels. Doctors say look at what you are eating, especially when it comes to trans fats.

And, try a little laughter. Researchers still say that laughter can sometimes be the best medicine, especially for your cardiovascular system. Some researchers have found that music can have the same effect. Studies have shown that listening to your favorite music opens up your vessels, much like laughter does. And, move. A brisk walk for 30 minutes every day can also make a big difference. And, doctors say, to say in touch with friends. Studies have shown that being socially active gets ride of stress, and losing stress can reduce your risk of heart disease by 25 to 30%.

Cardio Training Tips

Effective cardiovascular training is a crucial factor in for many fitness related goals including athletic goals, weight loss & general health. In this article I would like to add to your knowledge and understanding of cardio training so you can design a program that leads you to your goals.

When I was just starting out in fitness, I was certain that I could achieve all my goals by running an hour (or more) everyday. I figured the more cardio I did (no matter what the type), it would make me a better volleyball player, lose the weight I wanted to, and be in great shape since I had so much endurance. I was wrong! While I did develop a lot of endurance, I still struggled to be as fast as I wanted during volleyball matches, reacted a little slower than I hoped, and had trouble staying at the weight I wanted. In other words, I was in good health and decent shape but the results I was after stayed just out of my reach.

It wasn’t until I learned to apply the simple tips I’m about to describe that I finally the results I wanted. In order to get the most benefit from cardio training, I recommend making continual adjustments and tweaks to three variables:

* Duration: Length of time spent for each individual cardio session

* Intensity: Level of difficulty achieved during each cardio session

* Variance: Varying the type of cardio performed each session

Remember, the purpose of each training session is to stimulate the systems of the body with a certain type of load (weights, cardio, etc.) elicit an adaptive response from each session. A cardio training plan that continually adjusts each of the three variables places a new stimulus on your muscles, tissues and cardiovascular system and challenges the body differently each time you workout.

A simple example is that of marathon training. A standard training schedule for beginners starts with 3-5 miles or so at week one and gradually increase distance runs (load) each week. The body adapts to each distance you run and each week you have the ability to sustain more.

Adaptive response to exercise:

The bodies response to the demand placed upon it during an exercise session

Obviously the length of your cardio training sessions has an impact on total calories burned, cardiovascular endurance, and cardiovascular health. While basic recommendations from ACSM and AHA are to do moderately intense cardio 30 minutes a day, five days a week or do vigorously intense cardio 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for healthy adults under the age of 65, it’s also important that your cardio training correlates with your personal fitness goals whether they be weight control, fat loss, or performance oriented.

For example, if your goal is weight loss you may want to increase your cardio from 20 minutes 3 times a week to 30 minutes 5 times a week, this would allow you to burn more total calories each week. Or, if your goal is to become a better basketball player, you may want to train for speed 2 times per week and train for endurance 2 times per week.

As I said before, you should also consider intensity and variance when designing an effective cardio training plan. In my next post, I will detail three different types of intensity training that you can incorporate into your plan, I’ll describe what I mean by the word variance and how you can use it to get better and more individualized fitness results, and I will give you an example of how I helped one client go from struggling to walk uphill three minutes on a treadmill to finishing her first marathon.

The points I’ve listed here are the basic principles I use when designing training programs for my clients. By using the combined information from this and next weeks post not only will you get better results, your routine will become more fun and interesting.