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Don’t risk being held to account for things you don’t know about. Take the time to find out what people really expect you to do, and what they expect you to deliver. If they don’t tell you, ask. I recently had a conversation with a manager who was disturbed by her inability to meet the Continue reading Convert Expectations into Agreements  Laurie and I recently conducted a training program on The Four Conversations for a group of project managers. Since most of the managers were from the same organization, they all encountered the same problem when given an assignment. Rather than being told a due date or deadline by when the assignment was to be completed, Continue reading “High Priority” Isn’t A Deadline I recently read The Things People Say, a column by staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert for The New Yorker in which she reviews Cass R. Sunstein’s book “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.” In the article, Kolbert talks about how, and why, in the face of the quadrillions of Continue reading Listening to the “Other” Side While flying home from a weekend visit with my son in Houston, Texas, I got a flash of insight into why it is so difficult to train managers to be more effective. I was reading “The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making” when I realized managers make a fundamental error in their understanding of what Continue reading The Fundamental Error in Managing Others If you read my earlier post on Incentives Don’t Work, then you know that Dan Pink’s TED video raises some interesting questions about incentives. In particular, he raises questions about the role of external incentives and their impact on non-routine, creative, or innovative work performance. His point is well made. Research has long known that Continue reading Incentives Don’t Work? Part II On September 29, I started my MBA class on Leading and Managing Change in Organizations. Unlike my prior classes, this is a mix of working professional and fulltime students. One of the questions I asked them was “What’s important to you? What do you really want out of this class?” Although there were a variety of Continue reading Motivating Others Is Easy IF You Stop Trying To Many of us confront challenges at work. Some of these are easily resolved. Others are more persistent. One reason challenges persist is because we don’t accept any responsibility for them. I recently gave an assignment to the managers in my MBA class on management in which they were to identify their top three persistent challenges. In Continue reading Top Management Challenges: Are We Being Victims? |
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