Procurement & Career Guidance
Staff meetings are important for morale, but achieving a productive session is not always easy.
At times, a staff meeting can be a “check the box” activity, which is ultimately counter-productive.
I have been struggling with establishing good, meaningful meetings for my staff and this video discusses some basic must-haves and some loftier concepts.
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Poor communication, no training, and lack of resources can lead to teams becoming less productive. But those issues could be a part of more dysfunctional problems like a fundamental lack of trust within the organization.
This video leverages Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” to highlight areas where things can go very badly.
I then use examples from Jim Collins’ book “Great By Choice” to build a team back up by allowing them to be creative and try new ideas.
I spent the last two months reading articles, finding videos, and reading books about leadership development. I was surprised with what I found.
45% of managers report they did not receive formal training to manage people or develop strategy.
How can we have so many people striving to advance, yet we don’t have a good system to ensure we are developing good managers and leaders?
This video covers development strategies mixed with my own personal experiences and thoughts.
At a micro level, the misplaced application of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO can fundamentally change a company for the worse. A wartime CEO, as Horowitz notes, is “completely intolerant, rarely speaks in a normal tone, sometimes uses profanity purposefully, heightens contradictions, and neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” In the strictest application, we are seeing this align with a common false trope that has plagued the tech industry: “To change the world like Steve Jobs, I need to emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality.” A classic logical fallacy many founders/CEOs have learned the hard way — if you emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality, it doesn’t mean you will change the world like he did.
At a macro level, peacetime CEO/wartime CEO conjures outdated themes that are at best inaccurate, and at worst, counterproductive. War implies “destruction, ruthlessness, blood, death;” there is an innate sense of machismo and bravado in this language reinforcing a homogeneous tech community. This type of vernacular and attitude increases barriers to a more inclusive community excluding women and underrepresented minority participation.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/05/the-rise-of-the-human-centric-ceo/
Enterprise tech leaders are finding a lot of value in real-time knowledge-sharing as they seek solutions to IT problems brought on by the health crisis and its fallout in the economy, said Sunny Gupta, a board member of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit trade group that seeks to establish standards and best practices for enterprise IT managers.
Among other issues, Mr. Gupta said CIOs are being called upon to rapidly support a distributed workforce, replan IT spending and redo budget forecasts, cancel noncritical projects and refocus IT team efforts into capacity upgrades, public cloud and operational resilience—often all at once.
As a result, the IT industry is seeing an “unprecedented level of peer-to-peer support,” said Mr. Gupta, who is also chief executive of software maker Apptio.
With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.
The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.
Last month, I downloaded employee-monitoring software made by Hubstaff, an Indianapolis company. Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. (Whoops.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html
Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash
In 2006, epidemiologists from the University of Southern Denmark set out to explore why citizens of Denmark consistently score higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction. Their findings, published in the medical journal BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), zeroed in on the importance of expectations. “If expectations are unrealistically high they could be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,” write the authors. “While the Danes are very satisfied, their expectations [compared to other countries] are rather low.”
In a more recent study that included more than 18,000 participants and was published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from University College in London examined people’s happiness from moment to moment. They found that “momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is not explained by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of the recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations.” In other words: Happiness at any given moment equals reality minus expectations.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-case-for-lowering-your-expectations
We recently conducted a survey of 355 people and learned that the #1 piece of information that managers want to know is the progress that’s being made on a project. As a result, you’ll want to ask yourself: Am I sharing the progress I’m making day-to-day or week-to-week? You can also ask your boss directly: “How can I give you more visibility into my work?” or “Are there any decisions or projects you wish I were more transparent about?”
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-communicate-with-your-boss-1837407349
No matter how experienced your new hire is, they likely don’t want to be the center of attention of a group of strangers on day one. Starting a new job is stressful, and being immediately thrust into a round of clapping employees magnifies that stress exponentially.
What to do instead: Opt for “pre-boarding.” To minimize first-day jitters (and the chance of a new hire getting cold feet after accepting your offer), send a welcome email within a couple days and perhaps have one or two key staffers send a similar email. You may also want to send along the employee handbook and a brief outline of the first week’s schedule. That way, new employees can start with confidence and a warm, but low-key, welcome.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90382574/you-should-think-more-about-how-you-onboard-your-newest-hires