The first step in being a more effective manager is to delegate decisions about how work is done, to those that are doing the work. Let them decide the right way to work. If you do this, you can focus on results and stop worrying about why people aren’t doing things exactly the way that you would do them. But,…
Category: Meaningful Management
How to escape the feast-or-famine business mentality
If you routinely experience down turns in your business and you’d like to end the pernicious cycle, consider the following: Breaking out of the cycle simply requires a shift in mindset. You can chose to believe that this is the nature of the work you do, or you can take responsibility for it and believe that you can work to…
How to deal with never ending meetings
For whatever reason it comes as a surprise to people that long meetings don’t tend to proceed well. The longer people sit in meetings, the less self-control they’ll exhibit. This is basic human psychology, we all have to exhibit self-control in situations that aren’t pleasant. And self-control is like a battery, it eventually becomes depleted. So the solution is simple…
Be flexible with personal issues at work.
If an employee comes to you for help with a personal issue (a death in the family, time off for having a baby, a sick kid, needing an advance, etc), consider the following before you react: Dealing with personal issues boils down to conflict resolution 101. If there isn’t a clash in helping, don’t fabricate a problem. Just help out,…
You don’t know what you’re doing.
What you want to accomplish matters, how is irrelevant, it’s a minor detail. Certainty about HOW can’t come before certainty about WHAT. So, if you’re certain about how you’ll do things, but you don’t feel certain about what the outcome should be, that means you have no idea WHAT you’re doing. And it’s probably too late to do much about…
Prosperous Mindsets
I’m putting together a list of the key mindsets necessary to live a prosperous and happy life. Check them out here Mindsets. I’ll add to this routinely, so check back.
Don’t waste time reviewing notes after a meeting
We all face meetings and we all like to keep notes. Speciously it seems like a good idea to distill those notes after the fact and type them up from the ones you wrote down. I’ve done this myself for many years. While the exercise holds value in revisiting what was said, I’ve long inveighed the tedium and futility of…
Perfection is insecurity
Perfection is by definition a never-ending pursuit. Perfection necessitates a lack of an objective standard. The pursuit of perfection assumes that one is not yet good enough. And never will be good enough. Perfection is infinity, it’s unobtainable. The only reason one would seek perfection, as opposed to good enough, is that they don’t have a standard and they’re too…
How to overcome hesitation
If you know what you have to do is the right thing to do, but you’re not quite sure how to do it. In other words, you’re hesitant with how to proceed, then you need to stop thinking and just act. For example, when learning to ride the new self balancing scooters, the ones that look like a mini Segway,…