Managment Foundational Training Pt negative one

So Next week I am going Management Foundational training where I am supposedly going to get really practical on being more effective as a manager.

 

A bit of pre-work was to get some colleagues to describe me in 4 words. I was described by one colleague as Smart, Direct, Agile, Social. These are actually quite complementary – now my paranoia is setting in a wondering what are the words he has left out.

 

6 months in Managing People – Top 10

So there are a 10 things I would like think have been important things but equally mundane things that I have learnt and practiced over the last 6 months.

1. Trust is soooooo important
2. You don’t get trust unless you communicate with people
3. You cannot Trust people to Trust you
4. The Network is very important
5. Smile and everyone smiles with you – laughing with people is even better
6. Keep growing and changing and challenging yourself and others
7. "Health is my number one priority, because without it I cannot help anyone else" Jeff Kennett 2006 ex PM of Vic
8. Like Companies there are good people and there are great people, but generally all people are good which; is ok.
9. Hiring the great people is sooooo important
10. You and others are not always right and that’s ok too
11. There is/must always be a what’s next

Who has inspired me this week.

1. Ray Ozzie – read his blog, he looks to be quite an interesting human
2. Gigi – An exciting change in career that is going to bring on challenges and new experiences
3. M&C – the unconditional love
4. S – talent and a nice tush
5. Some of My Colleagues – such enthusiasm, drive and stamina, especially when suffering from lack of sleep

Use of the skills

So I was listening to one of these talking books in the car this morning, and it was talking about what he was going to teach (about emotional intelligence) was going to start off being very uncomfortable and it is only through repeated behaviour change and practice and use that it will start to be comfortable. Now I have been told off by my work colleagues that this blog is far too academic (for a reason: as it served as part of a personal log assignment) and needed to be more real life and experiential.

 

So I was going to say today that conflict resolution opportunities and experiences are becoming a whole lot easier for me. So yesterday I had the "opportunity" to resolve an issue I was having with a product manager who obviously had a high opinion of the power he had over some resources that needed to be shared with the rest of the company. So I went through the Centreing, exercies before I made the call. As I had the PM squirming on the end of the phone to try and explain the situation. I used "I" statements to further understand the situation and suggest a way forward.

 

In the end he passed the buck and said it was his manager and it was out of his hands. So I had to pass it up to my manager and in the end I feel like a bit of a failure because I could not resolve it there and then. What to do, what to do?

 

But – the learning of the day is that it is a whole lot easier to manage conflict and to work towards aligning mutual win win outcomes. I am now becoming comfortable at doing it – and creating my own style.

A Brush with a chick Entrepreneur

On Monday, we had the pleasure of meeting Margaret ??? still a mystery or to those that have read the MEI case study, known as Peggy Thomas the soap manufacturer. She was an inspiring, funny and a values driven leader of her organization. She expressed to me a form of Level 5 leadership with many examples she related to us throughout the one hour we had with her. She said “I knew when I had made it (sometime between 40 and 45) when I stopped worrying about making it.” She said that she was worrier, she would internalize and have sleepless nights worrying and thinking through things. She said that she has never written a business plan on her business or has many conscious ideas on what to do, but she can walk into another business and have lots of ideas and know exactly where to start in terms of a business plan. She has been running her business for about a decade and a half and she inherited from her husband that passed away. She has made significant growth in her market and is the sole supplier of the types of soaps she makes. Was it luck or good management? The jury I think is still out, but I think she has made her own luck and would attract people and influence people to do their best and for the good of the community as well. She has a range of products that is going into aged care, which has an element of taking on a growth industry but she talks about her products relieving a lot of discomonfort for aged patients, for the staff that look after them and for the family that visits them, from skin care to air cleansers that make the air smell pleasant.

 

She has no kids and has a life long ambition to build schools for underprivileged children in Africa, she also supports 15 Worldvision kids. I found her quite inspirational!

Reading the Emotional Intelligence Quickbook

Just started reading this book in between working on spreadsheets. So this is a great book to understand the "Why?" about Emotional Intelligence. Here are the top 10 interesting bits of the book:

1. While IQ can rarely be improved EQ can significantly be improved and usually improves a point or two as you age.
2. Four Skills of Emotional Intelligence: Self Awareness, Slef Management, Social Awareness and Relationship Management.
3. They can be paired under tow primary copmetencies: personal competence and social copmetence.
4. Studies have found that only 36 percent of people are able to accurately able to identify their emotions as they happen – even after all the research and focus of late
5. Gender does not determine Emotional Intelligence – At all.
6. Profession doesn’t either apart from people in customer service positions – So Accountants can have as much Emotional Intelliegence as Sales, IT, Finance or Engineering
7. The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and job Title is really tite. Medium levels in the bottom levels of orgs – high in middle management and plummeting to low levels as you reach the levels of CEO. (hmmmmmm)
8. Emotional Intelligence skills are more important to job performance than any other leadership skill
9. Emotionally Intelligent people are usually happy and healthy people. (as an aside, interesting article in the Age today about happiness and healthiness of women who do it all)
10. Emotional Intelligence is the single biggest predictor for great job performance in the work place

So with all these benefits the great thing is that unlike personality and IQ you can be flexible and learn and adapt your personal and social competancies to improve your Emotional Intelligence and hence your ob performance and hence your health… so I am up to the part where I have to take the test… so stay tuned for the score.

Diversity

I know that I haven’t mentioned this topic before because I think it is (or should be) a non-isuue but it has been coming up a lot recently with my recent role change into management and a new policy set by the company I work for and an interesting article yesterday.

Yesterday I read a great article in the Boss magazine about women running the show in the major advertisng companies in this country. You can see the article here if you didn’t catch the paper version. Anyway Jane Emery (MD Grey advertising melbourne) who is mentioned in the article is doing the same course as I.  I am getting side tracked from the point I would like to make and that is what Jane says is that "the gender issue usually doesn’t need to be discussed" I also like the comment "Women here are expected to have a point of view" (why wouldn’t they, I say). I think the most important point she makes is that "the company needs to reflect the gender mix of the clients." This is something that a lot of companies say but rarely do something about. Which the company I work for has until recently done very little about in terms of putting into the process of recruitment and hiring. Especially in the more technical areas of the organisation there is an under representation of females, which may reflect the customers, I don’t know but in my experience, most meetings I attend there is usually a higher representation of women.

 

I believe also diversity should be more than this. Here are my top 10 Diversity ideas which are mostly about acheiving better connections with customers and better innovative thinking within the company:

1. Hire people with different levels of experience (younger to have the new teaching from Uni, older to have more wounds in the battle, medium term to get a mix)
2. Hire people from different cultural and ethnicity to reflect that of our customers
3. Hire people with an aptitude to grow into a role and succeed even if they don’t have the skills required today.
4. Hire people that will diverse behaviours (See the DISC) to again reflect the different styles of the customer
5. Don’t hire people in the reflection of yourself. (where will the growth come from?)
6. Put more flexibility in working arrangements – to attract people that need to be home at 3:30pm or over school holidays. I also think that there is opportunity to do a lot of individual work at odd hours too. Like after kids are in bed, on weekends, at 6am in the morning.
7. Encourage diverse thinking in the workplace – Creative thinking. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes type of things.
8. Encourage Professional development experiences, such as doing a swap with a colleague in India or China or Chile.
9. Encourage swaps with customers or industry partners.
10. I think we would all do better if we all understood each other better as well.

Another aha moment in the article was Amy Smith’s comment "you have to think of yourself as a brand and be consistent in that respect". I wonder what my brand and tag line would be.

hmmm. I have had an epiphany too. Some of my now colleagues have said to me that sometimes I can be quite direct and not put up with cr%^. Now I am wondering whether this has been commented on because it is not usual for that to be an attribute of women in this country and this country’s work culture. I don’t think it is an unusual trait generally for peope to have; in general people have this behaviour especially at my employer. Anyway I have decided I am not going to change that. I may modify for certain situations, but it has worked so far.

 

 

Use of Conflict Resolution Skills II

Well a study colleague I think is expecting this blog, so here goes.

Last Wednesday night I had a great opportunity to again use my conflicte resolution skills, although I probably have done it a little more elegantly instead of bursting out with laughter at my colleagues who were beginning to rant and get quite heated in their so called debate. What I did was call a time out and asked clarification from Party A about what he was arguing – I got a yes from him. Then I asked party B what he was arguing – clarified and got a yes from him. Then I offered an alternative. I think I could have done it a little better and asked them what they would suggest to make both parties satisfied.

 

It is quite amazing hving a lot more consciousness about these "conflict" situations and how to resolve them. It just makes the situation pass so much more quickly and quietly. Although I still think people like to have a rant.

Use Of Conflict Resolution Skills

So I have been looking and looking at ways of using my conflict resolution skills and I have only been really been able to use them twice and once wasn’t personal.

 

So the first one was a conflict that one of my new  staff had. So I thought of what the conflict resolution rules would suggest. The situation was a meeting conflict. Neither party wanted to back down. The situation resolved itself with another resource being available, but in principle neither was happy about it. So I explained that both parties do have common goals and that my guy should reflect on the issue they have in common which is doing a great job around selling a particular solution to the customer. Now this will not happen if they are called in at the last minute or if they are briefed inadequately. Also that he is earnest in helping everybody out and that the other party might like to help him understand the priority of the situation so he can balance his time amongst all the commitments that have been made. My learning out of this is that if you show empathy and honesty rather than being short and stubborn that things will work themselves out. It is not that they both don’t want to do a great job for the customer but the interactions each other are having is showing mutual disrespect which leads to misunderstandings and false assumptions.

 

The second situation was helping resource an opportunity in a far western geography. I started down the path of suggesting an option. This option was not adequate for the other party and I was adament that it would be. Then I had an aha moment – we are not on the same wavelength here and I am getting angry .

So I went into discovery mode. So I said "What is it that you are after?" – wow –  how der (obvious) is that? That took the conversation down a whole different track, we explored all the options and as time isn’t critcal in this situation we agreed to do some next steps and then catch up the following week and explore some more and track how it is going.

 

I have now just remembered last night I went into conflict over email. The worst kind. I am going to have to rectify the situation today to my esteemed study colleague, but it was midnight, and I felt the thrill of going into conflict and getting my point across. I reflected on this with my husband and we discussed why is it that it is actually somewhat satisfying to vent and release on other people. It can be fun, it can be challenging to "win" the argument but as I found in my second example it can be rewarding for all parties if you work out what everybody wants and work out a plan TOGETHER.

 

So today I am naming TOGETHER day. "Yes we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together…., Yes we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together…"

 

 

 

 

I have 1 email in my inbox

It is an email that I cannot get rid of, It has been sitting there for a month. I must admit I got rid of 2 by making tasks in my taks list … I hardly ever look at those though.

What do I do now that my email is down to 1 – maybe I should do some REAL work.