Mike and Mark discuss a friend’s stalled technical career. What’s the secret to reinvigorating his career?

In this week’s podcast, Mike and Mark share a technique managers can use to give feedback to their team members. Feedback is the most frequently-used tool of effective managers. What is feedback? Feedback shows someone the impact of their behavior, allowing them to change ineffective actions or continue doing things that help the team achieve its goals.

The dirty little secret of most managers is that while they are DESPERATE to get feedback from their bosses, they then visit that same sin on their own team. Every time Mark asks groups of executives and managers if they’d like more guidance and response from their boss, everyone raises their hand. On the other hand, every group also believes that their team is hearing everything the team needs from them. Of course, it’s not true.

Another example of how little feedback is intentionally given is how managers defend themselves when we challenge them. “You don’t give enough feedback,” we suggest, and the common response is “I give detailed annual reviews,” or, better but still trivial, “I do quarterly reviews”. This is a great amount of feedback/guidance if you’re willing to wait 90 days or a whole year to change/improve anybody’s performance.

We believe the reason this is so is a combination of fear of conflict, and lack of skill. Basically, you probably see things all the time that you don’t like or would like to improve in some way. We think a lot of your fear is retention related: “Well, what I have to share is not that big, and if I say something, he might get mad and quit, and gee, he may not be great but he does more work than an open position would…”

The other reason is most managers don’t know how - this show will teach you.

How to do you feel about most of the meetings you attend? Are they productive, or generally considered a waste of time? Do you attend too many meetings? How do others value the meetings you run? If you are like most managers we know, your experience in running and participating in meetings is less than ideal.

Today’s show is the first of 2 or 3 shows to focus on running effective meetings. If you follow the guidelines we present here, your meeting will be much more effective, you’ll have less of them, and your individual and organizational performance will soar. And, it’s not hard!

A detailed outline of the podcast is located here. In addition, we’ve also provided you a Meeting Agenda Template that implements the guidelines we’ve discussed on today’s show.

Today we cover the second in our series on effective meetings.

A detailed outline of this week’s and last week’s podcast is located here. Also, be sure to check out the Meeting Agenda Template. We think you’ll find the template useful in improving the effectiveness of your meetings.

Today we wrap-up our conversation on effective meetings, as well as answer some listener questions on meetings, one-on-ones, and feedback.

Got Email? Of course - what manager doesn’t? We know managers who get 200 (or more!) emails every day. Email is a necessary evil in the corporate management world, and highly effective managers know how to get the most out of their email WITHOUT spending too much time on it. In our latest podcast, we talk about how to make your technology work for you, and how you can spend less time on email while getting more done.

Also, thanks to Tom Comeau for mentioning us during his interview on the Cranky Middle Manager Show. The kind remarks are very much appreciated. For those of you who haven’t heard Wayne’s interview of Tom, you can find the show at the The Cranky Middle Manager Website.

Mark made reference during the podcast to the process of setting-up multiple “in-boxes” in Outlook. Here is a PDF document outlining the steps Mark uses to set those up.

One of the most challenging aspects of being a manager is leading people who are remote to you. Sometimes it’s one team member being offsite; sometimes entire teams are spread across the country or even the globe, or even just across a corporate campus. All these situations are examples of “virtual” teams…and managing a virtual team is notably harder than managing a group that are co-located. And, these suggestions work well for project teams that may be in the same location but are matrixed together.

This cast addresses the special difficulties virtual teams present. First, we briefly discuss teams in general, and then we outline the three specific steps a ‘virtual’ manager can take to turn her workgroup into a team:

1. Pay special attention to hiring and interviewing,
2. Spend money to have a face to face meeting, and
3. Special rigor about team communications.

We tackle a tough topic in this week’s cast: Layoffs. We know it’s not an upbeat topic, but it’s highly likely you’re going to be involved in one at some point. Professional managers know how to conduct layoffs efficiently, with candor and compassion. While this is the first time we address the topic, this cast is second in order of the three we plan on the subject. One is on preparation- what you need to do in advance. This is for more senior managers, and those who will be in in discussions with HR. Today we address what everyone always asks us about - How to Actually Lay Someone Off. What do I say in the conversation? How do I say it? How can I deliver this news effectively and compassionately? The final cast is how to communicate to everyone after the fact. It’s an oft-ignored part of the process, but done well it can really help.

Despite our focus on performance at work, we want to state up front that we subscribe to the “soft” manager approach to layoffs. That means that even though you are dealing with THE TOUGHEST SUBJECT POSSIBLE, and the employee may respond with rage or frustration or tears, we think your profession requires you to be compassionate, caring and understanding. We believe these qualities make you a BETTER manager, and not just when you’re laying someone off. So, you may hear some suggestions today that aren’t standard. WE think they ought to be, but they’re not. One thing that will help you understand why we suggest these things is to read them from the point of view of the one being laid off.

We break our recommendations down into three sections: Before, During, and After.

This week’s podcast addresses a topic that many of you might be surprised about: your resume. Your resume, regardless of the baggage associated with it, is probably your most critical career management document. While it’s not something you ought to leave laying around on your desk (or on monster.com, for that matter), that doesn’t mean you ought to treat it like something you dust off only when you really need it. It needs to be reviewed quarterly, believe it or not.

So, in this cast we’ll teach you how to prepare it, and how to maintain it. We won’t talk about cover letters, or how resumes are used in the job search, because job search is only one use of your resume.

The Sample Resume we refer to on the show is here.

This week we recur to a theme we started a while ago, management communications. If you don’t remember, we won’t be surprised - it was September, and we barely scratched the surface of presenting with PowerPoint.

There are so many topics to cover, we’re just now getting back to management communications. One of the reasons was our just concluded FOUR part series on performance reviews. We hope that the timing of that helped you be HIGHLY effective this month.

While we ARE going to talk about communications this week, we’re going to discuss a topic that most of you give almost no thought to: communication plans.

What do we mean by communications plans? What we mean is, how do you, as a manager, intend to have your organization understand your team’s plans, strategies and operations? If you immediately jump to “email and a meeting”, you’re not thinking effectively. Have you ever even THOUGHT about having a PLAN or PROCESS for thinking about HOW to communicate with your team?

Here’s what we bet. We bet that you communicate on autopilot. You don’t think AT ALL about HOW to communicate… you think about WHAT you’re going to communicate, and then use the most basic defaults to get your message across.

In fact, we would argue that you NEVER think about communicating other than presentations with PowerPoint. You don’t THINK about communicating… you just DO communicating. The problem with that is, if you don’t ever think about it, you WILL NEVER GET BETTER.

How do you know if you’re on autopilot? Let’s say you want everyone on your team to know something. If you think pretty quickly, email! You’re on autopilot. If you say, well, wait. If I have a meeting coming up, I might put it on the agenda, you’re STILL on autopilot. If, on the other hand, you have something to tell an individual, whether it comes from your boss or not, you think, one on one or poke your head into their cube, you’re on autopilot.

By the way, “telling everybody something” is called, in the communications planning world, “broadcasting”… and telling just one person something is “narrowcasting.”

Now look, we’re not saying these defaults don’t work pretty well most of the time. They do. But there are two dangers with them. First, if something unique or special requires communicating, and you’re operating on autopilot without even a hint of being most effective in your communications, you run the risk of the WAY you’re communicating affecting the quality of your message. Putting it in systems language, your poor PROCESS is affecting your CONTENT. What today’s cast about is the PROCESS of communicating, versus the content.

The second danger is that if you don’t think about communicating as a PROCESS, your ability to communicate as you gain managerial responsibilities will break down. If you just take communicating for granted, when you become a director or junior Vice President, and now have to rely on managers and others to carry your messages to your entire organization, you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DO IT. You’ve got to have more tricks in your bag as you climb the org structure.

This inability to communicate is one of the biggest frustrations of senior executives we know. They often describe their jobs as “swimming” or “running in oatmeal”, because it takes so long to get the word out, and then “people still don’t get it”.

During the podcast, we make reference to a Sample Communications Plan to assist you in planning your communications more effectively. Use this tool to immediately increase the effectiveness of your managerial communications. You may download it here.