To quote Peter Drucker, “The stepladder has gone, and there’s not even an implied structure of an industry rope ladder; it’s more like vines, and you bring your own machete!”

Today work environment has changed beyond all recognition, and the journey towards promotion is changing inexorably within business circles. How can you improve your chances of being seen and heard in the promotion stakes?

It’s not enough these days to just be excellent at your job. All that does is make yourself stand out in your current position. You need to discuss with the right personnel exactly what skills and talents are required for the promotable position. Try to become more visible by mixing with those decision-makers who you need to impress. But do it to support the business, not to show off your skills.

The most important skills you can develop to make yourself promotable revolve around great interpersonal skills. Most senior positions demand a higher level of political sensitivity because relationships go beyond the organisational setting and are more likely to have an impact on the long-term viability of the business.

You need to prove that you are able to meet the business objectives the new role will demand. Show your abilities by volunteering for an important project, chair a committee or support a specific interest group. This will show your passion and support for the whole business and you’re more likely to be seen as someone who can add value at a more senior level. If you act like someone who occupies the type of role you are aiming for, you are more likely to be seen by others who make those promotion decisions.

One skill you will need in a senior position is the ability to build and lead teams. Without co-operative networks, the business is less likely to succeed, so you need to be seeking out opportunities to grow team spirit and business acumen. Communicating clear objectives, understanding motivations and personal values of team members are critical knowledge centres for you.

Your ability to manage transition and change will be carefully scrutinised. Remaining flexible and actively seeking ways to progress, keeping people motivated through change and learning from new experiences will highlight the abilities that top management are looking for from their promotable candidates.

Identify role models that exhibit the style and expertise that you know will get you noticed. Look for a potential coach, either in person or through reading and DVD/CD materials, who will help and encourage you through the transition period. The best people will be internal within your organisation, and if you approach them with the attitude of wanting to learn and not show off your potential, you will be in strong position to benefit from their knowledge and experience.

So, being promotable depends more on your ambassadorial qualities as you want to represent your company from a higher level. It demands you demonstrate an active interest in the strategic issues you will face, and ability to reach targets and build value, a genuinely confident communication style and the ability to build good long-term relationships with your teams, colleagues and clients. Remember…making a success of your current role is the best foundation for success in your future roles!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

You’ll have read lots of information about how to conduct an appraisal with your team members.

But what about when you, personally, are being appraised by your boss? Do you spend time preparing well and laying the foundation for your own success?

Firstly, ask these questions:

Am I satisfied with my own performance in this appraisal period?
Have I achieved all the objectives set out for me?
What went well and what went not so well at my last appraisal?
What objectives do I need to set for this next appraisal?
What did I learn from the last time I appraised one of my staff members?

Answers to these questions will assist you in the preparation of your own appraisal.

Let’s look at a checklist of ideas that will help you become more confident in what you have to do to succeed in your own appraisal:

1) Understand what the main objectives are and how your performance is monitored: If you’re going to discuss your pay and remuneration, find out what the terms of reference are first.

2) Lay the groundwork: Your manager should give you adequate notice and guidance on the structure of the meeting. Review your past performance and plan your objectives for the next few months.

3) Focus on key areas: Discussions should revolve around the key tasks or projects you thought went well and not so well, your overall performance, areas of improvement, plans for future projects and your short and long-term development plans.

4) Ask for specific feedback: If your boss gives you fairly woolly or generic feedback, ask them to be specific; you want to know exactly what their expectations are. If they say ‘you need to show more assertive behaviour’, ask them for examples and specific things you can do and say.

4) Dictate how you can be helped to improve: Propose your own solutions to problems that may be interfering with your performance. This is a great opportunity to show your boss that things could improve if you could get help.

5) Discuss your current and future priorities: Your boss might be trying to align company goals and objectives, while you are dealing with day-to-day minutia that takes a lot of your time. Agree what your key priorities need to be to assist your boss achieve their goals as well.

6) Agree goals and objectives: You can reassess the factors contributing to changes in your business environment. Make sure you are both aiming for the same target.

7) Agree further training and development for yourself: You should agree a general programme of skills and talent acquisition for yourself that will continue to make you a valuable team member and asset to your boss. The more you learn and develop, the better chances you have for future promotion prospects yourself.

8 ) Agree the evaluation and set yourself up for progress: Make sure your final evaluation is agreed and ensure you are clear on the measurables for the next time period. Write up the agreed action plans and determine how they are going to be monitored. Keep a record for yourself and plan regular reviews with your boss so there are no surprises at your next appraisal.

Remember that preparation is key. As Warren Buffett said “Noah didn’t start building the ark when it was raining”. If you apply all the ideas and ground rules for your own appraisal, you give yourself a great chance to progress and prove your worth to your boss and your company.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Daniel Simons, author of the book ‘The Invisible Gorilla‘, wrote something interesting recently.

Simons looked at the evidence that demonstrates multitasking is not all it’s cracked up to be. He quotes that every productivity study in every industry published in the last 100 years has come to the same conclusion: after about 40 hours of work in a week, the quality of your work starts to go down. You start making mistakes.

That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: you’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the first place. That may be the reason why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: there isn’t as much mess to clean up.

In today’s economy, where management thinking and creativity are seen as the main differentiators in business, brains are assets. They need to be looked after. Managers need to take the evidence seriously that too much work doesn’t make us all productive; it actually causes undue stress and downtime.

Problems are best dealt with when we spend some time away from them and let our brains simmer before solving them. Also, the only thing that happens when people are asked to work in ways that interfere with other parts of their lives is burnout.

As I mentioned in the blog on multi-tasking, it doesn’t make us more productive. Simons mentioned that checking emails while in a meeting does not enhance our efficiency. He was asked whether there was anything we could do to enlarge the capacity of our minds. The answer was simple; “no.” There are hard limits to what our brains will do. Practice, Simons says, will improve specific skills but not general abilities. Carrying out crossword puzzles will enable you to be better at crossword puzzles; it won’t improve your IQ.

Is there anything that managers can do that can help themselves? Yes, says Simons: exercise. His colleague Arthur Kramer showed that walking for a few hours a week led to large improvements on cognitive tasks. Stretching and toning exercises had no cognitive benefits, but aerobic exercise, which increases blood flow to the brain, did.

Older managers who walked for just 45 minutes a day for three days a week showed better preservation of their brains in MRI scans, says Kramer. Exercise, Simons concludes, improves cognition broadly by increasing the fitness of your brain.

That’s an interesting thought for this week. If you want to improve your emotional intelligence or feel better at doing your job, maybe take that 45 minute break at lunch time and actually do some walking or more strenuous exercise.

Build it up during the next few months and see what effect it has. And if you want to get the best out of your team, remember that overwork will not add much benefit to the company. In fact, it will just cause more problems. So avoid burnout at work; your team members are your greatest asset!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Email has completely changed the way we work. Most managers we talk to consider themselves to be enslaved by the keyboard, unable to accomplish their daily tasks because of the amount of electronic, as well as paper, mail they receive.

What’s the best way of dealing with this? How can you proactively manage your in-box so it serves you, rather than the other way round?

Firstly, does it matter how many emails are in your in-box? Well, yes it does. If you have dozens or hundreds of emails in your in-box, you run the risk of losing sight of the importance of some of the messages, and will find it difficult to find something at short notice. Yes, you can use the search box, but that only proves you have too much information there, because you can’t find it easily.

Also, by not pruning your in-box, and your colleagues contributing as well, you add pressure to your company servers,causing the well-known and ill-timed message from IT that the servers have crashed again. Don’t moan…you added to the problem!

So here are some tips to deal with this dilemma:

Prioritise your in-box. Check the sender’s names…how quickly do you need to deal with their email? Check the subject…is it urgent or just for information? Is it your responsibility or can it be delegated on? Check the priority given by the sender…do they really mean it’s urgent?

This initial scan can help you identify those emails that need immediate attention, and those that can wait until you have more time.

Reply in stages. You may wish to send a brief acknowledgment to the sender first, following up with more detail later. This means you take control of when you deal with it, and the sender isn’t wondering what’s going on. This is useful when you need to get more information before replying or when you’re angry, upset or confused about a message and you need time to compose yourself.

Set specific time for dealing with incoming mail. That way, you control it rather than the other way round. Resist the temptation to check every email the moment the tell-tale sound alerts you to a delivery. Most managers tell us that checking first thing in the morning, again around lunch and again later in the afternoon gives them time to deal with other stuff in their day, too.

Use a filing system to manage your messages. Check what the archiving policy is for storing emails, and if you have to keep them for a certain time period. If it’s a central facility, utilise that rather than filling up your own memory. Create your own filing system arranged by customer name, project name, date of receipt, research project, etc. Then use subtitles in the files to determine what still needs to be done.

For example, you might have a folder for ABC Ltd, then subtitles in the folder for invoices, projects, work in progress or items still to be done. The pending items can be marked ‘unread’ so they still stand out in the subfolder.

Many people find it useful to set up day-folders, just like a diary. Make five folders corresponding to days of the week, then when an email comes in and you want to deal with it on Wednesday, simply transfer it to the Wednesday folder. That way, you have your to-do list for next Wednesday.

You need to practice good housekeeping with your in-box. Set time limits for how long a message will stay in your in-box. (Take a look now and see how old is the oldest message in your in-box…surprised, huh?). Decide what you are going to do with any messages that are there…file it, delete it, delegate it, action it…do something with it! If a response was necessary, make sure you’ve done it. Send unwanted messages to your ‘deleted messages’ file, then cleanse that file regularly.

Offer alternatives to email. Remember, there are practical and effective alternatives to email, like instant messaging, text, voicemail, teleconferencing, and (a communication method that seems to have gone out of favour recently!) actually talking to someone in real-time!

Check who your mail is coming from. If you find that much of your overwhelming email is coming from old subscriptions to sites you no longer have any interest in, purge the lists so you only get stuff from people you are actually going to read. Ask yourself…how many emails do I get that I delete without reading? Maybe they are from senders you can unsubscribe from.

So, remember to avoid these common mistakes:

Don’t react immediately to every email that comes in
Don’t let your in-box become another storage folder
Don’t become overwhelmed with too much clutter

That way, you reduce the risk of being overwhelmed by your inbox, and you can spend time on more important things…like running your department!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Having prepared your presentation, how can you deliver in a way that will make the maximum impact?

No doubt you can recall presentations from others that had you constantly checking your watch, wondering when this was all going to end, and concentrating more on what you had to do afterwards than in listening to what was being said.

And no doubt you can recall presentations from others that had you riveted to every word, enthused and inspired by the message and determined to take action as a result of what was being said.

What were the main differences?

Naturally, you needed to have an interest in the subject. Also, you needed to see the value in what was being presented. But the main difference, I’ll bet, was the quality of delivery, the passion that the speaker used in delivering the message and the way they kept your interest all the way through.

And that’s what you need to do to make a massive impact, to create an impression and blow them away with your presentation!

So what can you do? Firstly, plan an impactful opening! Make it visual, interesting, attracting attention and building desire to hear more. Use metaphors when you can to make the information come alive. Don’t just reel off a list of statistics or facts…you’ll lose them before you start.

Remember how impactful your body language is when you present. Your audience will notice your nerves if they are showing and this will detract from the message. Think about your posture and style of delivery, so they are listening to your words rather than worrying about your shaking!

Be passionate about the subject. This means creating meaning in everything you say, creating an interest with attention-grabbing stories, influential ideas and absorbing information. Make the subject really come alive in the listeners’ minds by painting pictures with words. That way, you are developing reasons why this message is important.

By all means use humour, but ensure it is appropriate. Jokes can easily fall flat or be badly timed, and people will remember a poor delivery more than they remember the attempted humour. Try to find everyday situations that are funny, rather than attempting to be a comedian when it doesn’t suit you.

Understand that you always will speak differently during a presentation than when you have a conversation. This is natural, but make it as free-flowing as possible, without rushing, mumbling or missing off the ends of words.

Eye contact is a must when presenting. If you are constantly looking down at your notes, you lose the contact and rapport with your audience that will convince them this is really worth listening to. Use cue-cards if possible and keep the eye contact as open as you can with everyone there.

Above all, make your presentation end on a high. There are two laws to remember here…the recency effect and the closing effect. Of the two effects, the closing effect carries more weight for your message because the last thing the audience hears and experiences, is the first thing they’ll remember! It should be… Outstanding!

What should your closing include? A quick resume of what you’ve covered, and the actions that need to be taken as a result of what you’ve presented. Make it memorable and outstanding, and your audience will remember it for the right reasons.

All this won’t guarantee your presentation will be the best ever…but it will give you the best chance to be your best ever! And that will surely blow them away!

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”