As a manager, you are the person who is in charge of a team. Your company expects you to find ways to get the most out of your team. The problem that most of us run into is that we don’t necessarily know how to make this happen. I think that a lot of us believe that there must be some magical means that we can use to connect with our team and draw their best work out of them. I hate to be the one to tell you that such a magical tool does not exist. However, it turns out that there is something that is fairly simple that you can use that will allow you to better connect with everyone on your team.

How Valuable Is Feedback?

Ok, so just for a moment imagine that you strike up a conversation with a stranger in line at Walmart one day and quickly notice that they have a large smudge of dirt across their cheek. Would you tell them about the potentially embarrassing mark? Let us all agree that we certainly like to know if we’re walking around in public with dirt on our face. Additionally, most of us would like to think we’d help a stranger out with a discreet heads up if they were unaware of an embarrassing issue.

However, when a team of university researchers actually tested this scenario in real life, sending a confederate out to question passersby for a survey with a large lipstick or chocolate smear across his or her cheek, do you want to guess how many people actually informed the clipboard-wielding stranger about the problem? The correct answer is only roughly 2.6 percent. Only five out of 200 people even said anything. If that result surprises you, guess what: you’re not alone. The researchers were surprised by the findings, which they insist offer managers important lessons about giving constructive feedback.

It turns out that we have all been underestimating how much people value our feedback. The researchers said that their results surprised them because they didn’t expect the number to be so low. Most managers like to think of ourselves as someone who would give someone feedback in this kind of situation, but the study showed that most people don’t.

Should We Be Offering More Feedback?

Managers want to know find out why our behavior so frequently fails to live up to our ideals in this kind of situation. A series of follow-up experiments were conducted using both real-life set ups and fictional scenarios to figure out how people think through when and how to give constructive feedback. Each experiment yielded roughly the same results for the researchers: people consistently underestimate how much other people will appreciate feedback. No matter if we’re dealing with close friends or complete strangers, managers will frequently misperceive either how much impact our feedback will have and how much the other party generally wants to be given advice to improve.

Managers need to realize that this is particularly true in higher-stakes situations. For instance, when the university researchers ran a speaking competition with the prize of a $50 Amazon gift card, those who were charged with coaching speakers seriously underestimated how much their partners wanted feedback in order to improve. It was found that the gap between real and expected desire for feedback was smaller in lower stakes situations. The dead simple takeaway of all of this according to the researchers is very simple: managers and others in a position to give useful feedback should offer more. Even if we feel hesitant to give feedback, we should give it: the person most likely wants it more than you think.

Now you may be nervous that the other person might react badly even after becoming aware of this research. You need to ask yourself, “If I were this person, would I want feedback?” This simple question has been shown to improve people’s willingness to give feedback during the research. Of course, working up the courage to provide constructive feedback is only part of the overall process. Managers also need to know how to deliver it effectively. All these tips and formulas for better feedback will only be useful if you can actually bring yourself to open your mouth and share your feedback. So whenever you doubt whether your feedback will be well received, think back to this study. This should encourage you to give the feedback your team both needs and wants.

What All Of This Means For You

Managers are always looking for ways that they can get more out of their teams. We want to be able to connect with our team members and we want to be able to provide them with the kind of guidance that they need in order to become better workers. Our challenge is that all too often we are not sure what the best way to go about doing this is. The good news is that studies have been done and the best way to improve the members of our team is known.

When we encounter someone who has something visually wrong with them, a stain, a torn piece of clothing or whatever, would you speak up? Studies have been done that show that all too often people would not speak up and let the person know about what was wrong. The problem with this is that the person would like us to speak up, they really want our feedback. What managers don’t realize is that the members of our team really want us to provide them with feedback about their job performance. As the importance of what our team members are doing goes up, the value of our feedback also increases. Managers who are hesitant to provide feedback need to realize that feedback is what their team members really want.

Motivating our team and getting them to perform at a higher level is what every manager would like to be able to do. We are always searching for ways to let our team members know what they can change and what they can do better. It turns out the just knowing this information is not enough. Once we know how team members can become better, we need to take the time and share it with them. Our feedback is not only needed, but it is also wanted. As our team members become better and better at their jobs, we want them to come back and thank us for the feedback that we have been able to provide them with.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: How often do you think a manager should provide a team member with feedback?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As though managers didn’t have enough to do, now it seems as though our teams are starting to become more spread out. Once upon a time we would have team members who would work from home perhaps once a week. Now we have team members who are always working from home. In fact, we may have team members who are remotely located in foreign countries. Somehow we have to take this spread out group of people and come up with a way to get them to all work together. We need a plan.

Problems With Distributed Teams

A recent study of more than 60,000 Microsoft associates who were working remotely during the pandemic found that the shift to company-wide remote work made these workers feel less interconnected and caused their collaboration network to become more heavily siloed. The study further noted that workers did not seek to make up for this lack of connectedness and silo behavior via extra audio or video calls, as one might expect, but instead found that, remote work caused team members to communicate more through media that are more asynchronous such as sending more emails and many more IMs. Unfortunately, the result of this new wave of written communication only served to make things worse at work for the team members.

What managers need to understand is that the sheer volume of emails and text messages are creating significant job dissatisfaction among team members. A recent survey found that more than a third of the work-from-home respondents want to quit their jobs due in part to the volume of email, Slack and Teams messages that they are receiving every day. The same survey reported a virtual tie in preference by team members between cleaning bathrooms and sorting through a week of work messages. As if all of this negative employee sentiment isn’t reason enough for managers to rethink things, it turns out that an over-reliance on written communication can open the door to a rash of errors and miscommunication between team members.

The problem that we have with all of those written forms of communication is that people tend to miss even simple, little details. Now, if we ratchet this up across hundreds of thousands of sentences in thousands of written communications each month just imagine what can happen. It’s no wonder that a recent study found that 86% of respondents pointed to ineffective communication as the number one cause of their workplace failures. So, what’s a manager’s answer to far-flung teammates failing to communicate?

Solving The Communication Problem

So somewhat amazingly, the answer to the communication problem that is bedeviling teams everywhere is very simple. It comes down to holding a simple huddle at the beginning of every day. The daily huddle meeting is exactly what its name implies that it is. It’s a short, 5 to 10 minute meeting at the start of each day that requires all team members to gather together to set the tone for and discuss the priorities for each day. Additionally, you will want to also review both the good and not so good things that might have happened the day before. This meeting ends by identifying any obstacles that stand between the team and achieving its goals.

Managers realize that a key function of any organization is to align the efforts of many talented individuals towards a single common purpose. To accomplish this, they have to be in the right collaborative conversations with the right other people about the right topics to advance their shared understanding. Working towards common purpose requires solving problems about what to do, why to do it, and how to get it down with frequency, speed, and competency. Daily Huddles provide both the right amount of connectivity and also provide a forum for collaborative team problem solving.

Managers need to be prepared for some push-back at first. The daily huddle brings with it a level of accountability, visibility and open conversation. These features won’t always be everyone’s cup of tea … at least in the beginning. But managers must not give up. The daily huddle meeting works; it can help drive heightened morale and engagement, improved alignment and increased performance, as well as better compliance. For managers struggling to manage hybrid workforces, it just might be the best ten-minute investment of time you’ll ever make.

What All Of This Means For You

Managers manage teams. In the past this used to be a fairly simple thing for us to do – our team was in the office, we were in the office, it was easy for everyone to communicate with everyone. However, then the pandemic hit. For over a year your team was distributed and everyone had to struggle to stay in touch. Now that the pandemic has faded, life has not gotten back to normal for anyone. Our teams are still spread out with people only coming into the office occasionally. With this kind of distributed team, a manager’s job has not changed – we still need to find ways to get our team to be able to accomplish tasks by working together.

When our teams spread out, they realized that they were facing a communication problem. They could no longer walk down the hall and have a chat with a fellow team member. They chose to fill in the gaps by sending more emails and IM messages to the other members of their team. Unfortunately the result of all of this additional chatter was that team members quickly started to feel overwhelmed with communications. A problem with trying to communicate between team members this way is that we all tend to make mistakes and miscommunications can happen at any time. In order to solve this problem, managers need to start to hold daily huddle meetings. These meetings involve all team members and give everyone a chance to talk about what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and what challenges they are facing. These meeting allow the team to work together as they move forward. There may initially be some push back from the team, but it will go away over time.

As managers, our job is to find ways to get our team to work together in order to accomplish tasks. This can’t happen if our team is not clearly communicating between everyone on the team. As the manager, it is your responsibility to make sure that clear lines of communication exist and are being used. A daily huddle meeting is a great way to set your team up to be successful. Give it a try and see what happens!

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: Do you think that problems discovered during the daily huddle should be dealt with immediately after the meeting?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As a manager, you are the person who is in charge of a team. Your company expects you to find ways to get the most out of your team. The problem that most of us run into is that we don’t necessarily know how to make this happen. I think that a lot of us believe that there must be some magical means that we can use to connect with our team and draw their best work out of them. I hate to be the one to tell you that such a magical tool does not exist. However, it turns out that there is something that is fairly simple that you can use that will allow you to better connect with everyone on your team.

Managers are starting to realize that more and more often the teams that they are managing are not always going to be collocated. This means that they need to understand how to use their manager skills to deal with the challenges of a virtual workplace. This is not an easy thing to do and most of us don’t have any manager training on how to accomplish it. Managers need to learn how to build relationships with colleagues they’ve never actually met, work across multiple time zones, deal with technology that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, etc. If they end up handling any of these key items incorrectly then any of them can sabotage their team’s chances at success.

The Challenge Of Remote Teams

Let’s face it. We all need some help in making this remote team stuff work out correctly. The good news for us is that Google has the same problems that we have. Google has 100,000 workers spread over 150 cities. In more than 50 countries. On five continents. The neat thing about Google is that when they have a challenge, they collect a lot of data and then they study it to find out what they should be doing. In this case, Google spent two years studying more than 5,000 employees. They measured such things as well-being, performance, and connectedness and came up with recommendations on how to keep things consistent, even if your team is spread out across the globe.

From a manager point-of-view, the folks at Google discovered a few things that are good news for us. One thing that they learned was that there was no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings, or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world. This was in comparison to Google employees who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office. The study that they performed revealed that well-being standards were uniform across the board as well; Google employees or teams who work virtually find ways to prioritize a steady work-life balance by prioritizing important rituals like a healthy night’s sleep and exercise just as non-distributed team members do.

From a manager point-of-view, this is all good news. The reason that you should be pleased to learn about these results is because remote work has the potential to greatly lower costs for your business, while increasing employee happiness. However, managers need to understand that reaching the full potential of remote work doesn’t come easy. Managers need to understand that remote work makes it more difficult to establish connections with colleagues. Simple things like it takes extra brain power to schedule across time zones, can also create challenges.

How To Make Remote Teams Work For You

The first thing that managers have to do is to take the time to know the people that are on your team. Managers need to understand that employees value managers and colleagues who care about what happens in their lives outside of work. What this means is that instead of jumping right into an agenda, allow time at the beginning of a meeting for personal conversations. Doing so can help build connections and establish rapport. Getting to know your team also includes knowing what their meeting schedule is. Most people would opt to have meetings on certain days, or certain times of the day. You won’t know unless you ask.

Managers of remote teams also have to set clear boundaries. Managers already know that norms set clear expectations for how your team works together. However, they’re often assumed rather than explicitly stated, leaving opportunities for confusion when dealing with remote teams. Instead of making assumptions or leaving things to chance, clearly communicate guidelines regarding the following three items: (1) Communication (e.g., answering emails/pings off-hours, expected response times, information-sharing across time zones), (2) Meetings (when team members should and shouldn’t join meetings off-hours), (3) Schedules (personal time, vacation, etc.). The more you can include your people in developing these norms, the better.

Finally, managers have to find the time that will be required in order to forge strong connections with their team members. Let’s face it, to build trust and connection with your colleagues takes effort. This is even more so when those colleagues are hundreds–or even thousands–of miles away. Managers need to make an extra effort to connect on a personal level. This can be as simple as picking up the phone or sending an instant message to ask about their day or weekend plans. Use one-to-one meetings to discuss team member’s experience, and how you can better support and include them.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end, managers need to remember that for all the suggestions in the world, there is simply no replacement for in-person interaction. So, make sure to arrange opportunities to bring the full team together in one location as often as you can. Managers need to make these meetings special, celebrating the team and its hard work and doing some team building. For anyone who absolutely can’t make it, invite them to connect virtually and do what you can to make them still feel like part of the occasion.

Never underestimate the role you play as a manager. The Google study revealed that managers who were leading by example and making an extra effort to get to know distributed team members were extra impactful. It turns out that a little rapport goes a long way. Managers need to remember that the most efficient way to get a job done is not always the best way to get it done–and this applies even more so in the virtual workplace. Take the time and invest the resources needed to take care of your team, and you’ll start to unlock the true potential of remote work for everyone.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: If a member of your remote team starts to cause problems, what is the best way to deal with them?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As though managers didn’t have enough to do, now it seems as though our teams are starting to become more spread out. Once upon a time we would have team members who would work from home perhaps once a week. Now we have team members who are always working from home. In fact, we may have team members who are remotely located in foreign countries. Somehow we have to take this spread out group of people and come up with a way to get them to all work together. We need a plan.

How do you communicate with other people? If you are like most of us, you use email. Yes, yes – there are text messages, Zoom meetings, and the like. However, when we want someone to really think about what we have to tell them, we generally sit down and send them an email. The problem with this approach is that all too often, they send an email back. The result of this is that it is far too easy for us to get overwhelmed with incoming email. If we are not careful, our job can turn into one where we just process email all day. We need to come up with ways to get on top of our email.

The Problem With Email

Come on you know that you’ve always wanted to do it – log into one of your work inboxes, selected thousands of unread emails and, with the click of a mouse, remove them from your life. Let’s face it, we all believe that if they’re important, they’ll come back. So many managers spend our days ruled by email: constantly refreshing, wading through detritus, paralyzed by the pressure of crafting a reply to the one note that actually matters. If we are ever able to reach that magical inbox zero state, and few of us ever do, the email ding seems to sounds again.

How can we deal with this problem? Perhaps we need to take a page from the email defectors. You know the ones I’m talking about – those co-workers of ours who are good at their jobs, but don’t seem to care all that much about your email. If they bother to move email messages into folders, it’s with the express purpose of forgetting them forever. They pretty much stick to either Slack or Teams and ignore everything else. Some of these people set up highly specific out-of-office responses such as “I only check email at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.”;or “I’m with a client today” which they seem to actually mean. They say that they’ll get back to you next week. Meanwhile, they can…get work done?

For most managers checking email feels fast and it feels productive. However, for some reason the stuff that really matters isn’t moving forward. So how can we deal with this issue? We can start by not even going there. We should start our day by writing a list of priorities on a piece of paper. When we do this we need to block two half-hour slots on our calendar to really deal with our email. This is in contrast to scrolling through it constantly and ignoring it the rest of the time.

Dealing With The Email Problem

I think that we can all agree that some jobs take place almost exclusively via our inbox. Some managers might get in trouble with the boss if they let a note languish for even half a day. Some of us just get addicted to seeing what’s new. You never know what you’re going to get is our thinking. We want to pull the handle again to find out what’s there: it could be amazing, it could be terrible, or it could be nothing at all.

What managers need to realize is that people who take control of their inboxes become calmer, happier, more productive and better at hitting their work goals. The key for us is making a plan. An example of an email plan would be pledging to log off after 6 p.m. and on weekends. In order to make a plan like this stick we need to publicly declare it. This does mean that we need to talk to our boss to find out what’s acceptable and what’s not. Be prepared to negotiate if you have to. Often just by asking your manager to verbalize specific guidelines makes it clear that no one expects a reply to an email within two minutes from you.

We need to keep in mind that our liberation can go awry. When we clear out our email inbox, there is always the possibility that we are throwing away something that is actually important. What we need to be doing is reading our emails but rarely respond; when we do it’s with a couple-word answer. Something else that we can do is to implement a 15-minute delay for incoming messages so we aren’t constantly inundated. The best part: the less email we put into the world, the less the world sends back to us.

Managers need to realize that filters and folders can help ensure fewer useless emails clog our inbox. If we move things like newsletters into a separate folder for less important emails, consider these to be the ones that require a scan, not a response. We need to set a weekly appointment to read those. Then route emails from the top five people at your job – your big client, your boss – into a folder that you check hourly. If you want to then you can get even more granular by flagging emails that have your name in the body, or by assigning ones where you’re just cc’ed a less important label. We need to realize that there is no need to spend five hours on a Sunday creating some elaborate system. Just sort as you go, and try to keep it simple.

What All Of This Means For You

I think that all managers can agree that we have an email problem. We’ve got too much of the stuff and try as we might, more and more just seems to come in. We make attempts to get to the bottom of it, but even if we are successful it seems as though all too quickly it can fill up again. How can a manager get on top of their email problem?

In a perfect world we could just go into our email and throw it all away. However, most of us can’t do that. A good thing to do is to take a hint from our coworkers who don’t allow themselves to get shackled to their emails. These are the people who will get around to responding to us, but they do it on their own time. Some managers spend so much time with their emails because it makes them feel productive. Some jobs are performed via emails. But for all other jobs we need to take control of our inboxes. We need to have a talk with our boss to find out what is acceptable email behavior. We have to understand that some emails may be important. In the end, we need to set up a system that works for us to deal with our emails.

Email is a part of our lives. It’s not going away anytime soon. Managers need to understand that it’s simply a tool. We can’t allow this tool to occupy too much of our time because we have many other things that we need to be working on. Creating a way to process all of the email that we receive and find the few pieces that are actually important is a critical part of being a successful manager. Master your email and you will master your job!

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: How does a manager know when they have an email problem?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Managers are starting to realize that more and more often the teams that they are managing are not always going to be collocated. This means that they need to understand how to use their manager skills to deal with the challenges of a virtual workplace. This is not an easy thing to do and most of us don’t have any manager training on how to accomplish it. Managers need to learn how to build relationships with colleagues they’ve never actually met, work across multiple time zones, deal with technology that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, etc. If they end up handling any of these key items incorrectly then any of them can sabotage their team’s chances at success.

I don’t know about you, but it sure seems that in the past few years, everything has changed. Yes, that whole pandemic thing was a big disruptive influence on everyone, but there had been changes brewing even before that. The pandemic just seemed to accelerate things. Now managers find themselves in charge of a new workforce that has a whole new set of expectations about how things are supposed to work. How can we manage this new hybrid workforce successfully?

The Arrival Of The Hybrid Work Force

Managers realize that remote and hybrid work options create more opportunities for managers to attract and retain talented people. However, hybrid work, often referred to as being the “messy middle,” requires an entirely new manager playbook to work well. Managers are going to have to start off by making sure that they know the difference between their guardrails and their principles. Managers are often used to command and control, and many right now think that making flexible work models successful means mandating that team members spend a certain amount of days in the office. It turns out that research shows that 79 percent of people want flexibility and a voice in how that flexibility takes shape.

So how can managers balance the needs of the company with those of their team? We can start by establishing principles and guardrails to help define what flexible work means to our team. Principles ground an approach in core company values, while guardrails are the agreed-upon guidelines for behavior that keep the company’s principles in place. This approach helps give team members the framework to get started, but also leaves room for teams to test and learn.

Managers have to beware of falling into the trap of faux flexibility. Managers need to lead by example instead of just handing out broad mandates. An example of this would be a “one dials in, all dial in” guardrail policy for meetings. Managers should also consider setting “speed limits,” another type of guardrail, on the number of days per week that managers spend in the office. Define both your principles and guardrails, and then make sure to stick to them.

Creating A New Way Of Working

Something that managers need to understand is that for most team members time matters more than place. It’s easy for us to get too focused on “days in the office” when thinking about flexibility. However, while the majority of people want location flexibility, almost everyone surveyed – 93 percent – want schedule flexibility. It turns out that it’s more valuable in unlocking productivity, reducing stress, and creating work-life balance for team members. The big question is how can teams coordinate and collaborate when they are working on different schedules?

Managers can make schedule flexibility work by letting employees set team-level agreements around how they’ll work together. An example of this is if team members agree to a set of “core collaboration hours” from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in which they’re all available for live conversations and meetings. Then the rest of the day can be reserved for heads-down focused work. Finding ways to document decisions and share discussions in virtual spaces is crucial to keeping teams on the same page. Teams can use digital channels for their status updates, and brainstorm in real time using shared cloud docs.

In order to balance the needs of all team members, managers need to start to treat onsites as the new offsites. Using a flexible and digital-first approach allows managers to access a broader, more diverse talent pool but requires more intentional relationship building both on- and offline. This can be difficult without those accidental lunchroom encounters. Navigating this new paradigm means that we need to be being intentional about our time. Managers should use in-person gatherings more deliberately for connection. Teams can come together in the office for a few days or weeks at a time to plan, reconnect, and socialize. This is why onsites are the new offsites. Managers need to encourage teams to find the rhythm that works best for them, whether that means gathering monthly for more frequent product sprints or gathering quarterly for long-term strategy planning sessions.

What All Of This Means For You

Finding ways to attract, retain, and get the most out of talented people in a hybrid work environment requires managers to consult a new playbook. At companies that have experimented with new, more flexible ways of working, team members are reporting improved work-life balance, greater productivity, and even a better sense of belonging than those who are working full time in the office. Team members don’t want to give that up, and managers who want to attract and retain top talent must be intentional about the transformation of their work models.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for managers to learn what the members of their team want from the new workplace?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How do you communicate with other people? If you are like most of us, you use email. Yes, yes – there are text messages, Zoom meetings, and the like. However, when we want someone to really think about what we have to tell them, we generally sit down and send them an email. The problem with this approach is that all too often, they send an email back. The result of this is that it is far too easy for us to get overwhelmed with incoming email. If we are not careful, our job can turn into one where we just process email all day. We need to come up with ways to get on top of our email.

Let us all agree: not every meeting that you go to requires your presence. In fact, there may be a number of meetings that you attend that are basically just a waste of your time. The person who was setting up the meeting didn’t really need to have you there, they just wanted to make sure that they didn’t forget anyone who might be important. The downside of all of this is that your time is being wasted. What managers need to do is to find ways to avoid having to go to meetings that they don’t need to attend. How can we make this happen?

Why We Waste Our Time

Let us all agree that the corporate world has always loved meetings just a bit too much. But then the pandemic happened and it accelerated the problem, as managers desperately attempted to supervise their direct reports after the shift to remote work, and team members strove to coordinate with each other and maintain some semblance of their social connection. A study showed that professionals now spend more than half the standard workweek—a full 21½ hours – stuck in meetings. This is an increase of 7.3 hours a week just since the pandemic began.

Even as many companies have returned to the office or adopted hybrid arrangements, it seems the bias toward more meetings may have stuck with us. The overall number of meetings remains up nearly 70% versus a year ago, the study reports. And of course, more of our meetings are being held virtually. This creates an additional challenge because they can be particularly exhausting compared with in-person meetings, Research has shown that this is the case given the intensity of close eye contact and the mentally stressful temptation to monitor one’s own reflection.

So what do managers have to show for this surplus of meetings? Apparently not much. One study of senior executives showed that only 17% believed meetings were a good use of either group or individual time. Indeed, the time we spend in these meetings is time that we’re not accomplishing the “deep work” we are evaluated on. As most managers know all too well, much of our actual work ends up getting shunted to nights and weekends.

How To Avoid Unnecessary Meetings

How can managers go about fighting back the problem of too many meetings? The first thing that we need to do is to address the problem upstream. If everyone around you seems to love meetings, it’s going to be hard to be the voice arguing against them. Instead, you need to try to tackle the problem upstream. If you’re the manager, you can implement something like a “meeting-free Friday” experiment, in which at least one day a week is held sacred, department wide, for more focused work.

You can also try to appeal to shared sentiment. Even when people are dissatisfied with the too many meetings problem, they’ll likely revert to their old habits unless they’re “disrupted” from that behavior. As their manager you can be the disrupter by reminding them of what they’re already feeling. For example, you could say “I don’t know about you, but it seems like we’re all pretty exhausted from so many meetings these days. Instead of meeting as a team to brainstorm about our project, maybe we could just delegate it to one person to come up with initial ideas and then at our next official team meeting, we could review them. What do you think?” By doing this you’re not seen as shirking responsibility by dodging an ill-conceived meeting. It is possible that your suggestion is making it easier for everyone to skip a meeting no one really wanted or needed.

Finally, you need to take the time to interrogate the invitation. If it’s the default at your company to suggest a meeting to talk about things, the bar for a meeting-worthy occasion is likely fairly low. This means that you can’t simply assume that because you’ve been invited that it will be a good use of your time. Instead, you are going to have to make it standard practice to “interrogate the invitation” by asking the meeting host what the meeting topic will be and what, specifically, they’d like you to contribute to the meeting. If they give a vague answer then that’s a sign that either the agenda is ill-formed or you won’t have a meaningful role to play. In that case you can likely beg off with a friendly note.

What All Of This Means For You

We can all agree that meetings generally aren’t anyone’s idea of a good time. However, all too often we accept them as a necessary “tax” on our productivity. We view them as being the inevitable cost of being part of an organization. It turns out that this doesn’t have to be true. By using the strategies that we’ve discussed, you can evade the most painful and least productive meetings. With a little luck this leaves you room for more important work.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: What should you do if you find yourself in a meeting that you’ve just realized is a waste of your time?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I don’t know about you, but it sure seems that in the past few years, everything has changed. Yes, that whole pandemic thing was a big disruptive influence on everyone, but there had been changes brewing even before that. The pandemic just seemed to accelerate things. Now managers find themselves in charge of a new workforce that has a whole new set of expectations about how things are supposed to work. How can we manage this new hybrid workforce successfully?

So how are you feeling? That pandemic thing took a lot out of managers. We had all of the normal things that we had to worry about and then we also had to make sure that the members of our team were keeping things together. Oh, and our family and friends were also dealing with the pandemic in ways that affected us. If you are like most managers, you are feeling overwhelmed right about now. In fact, you just might be feeling burned out. If you are, you should probably tell your boss that you feel this way. Do you think that you boss needs to know?

The Problem With Feeling Burned Out

More than half of workers who were surveyed said their mental health has degraded since the start of the pandemic, with rising workloads and blurred boundaries being the top culprits. Companies have stayed lean after layoffs, and the recent flood of team members who have become job quitters means managers who stay have more to do. Nearly two years of a global health crisis have left all of us feeling overwhelmed. The good news is that we are getting more comfortable admitting it.

What managers have realized is that so much was happening in the world that it has become ok to say, “Yeah I’m not good,” simply because nobody is good. More managers are open to saying, “I need help.” Still, we all understand that talking about burnout with a boss isn’t the same as talking about it with a friend. There is a real stigma around mental-health challenges. How can a manager get some breathing room, and back to feeling like yourself, without jeopardizing your career?

The first thing that we need to realize is that you don’t need to share just for the sake of sharing. The goal is to share in a way that you can ask for what you need. We need to assess what it would take to stop feeling overwhelmed, and think about whether you really require permission to get it. Would it be possible for you to attend virtual therapy on Wednesday mornings without telling your boss? What do you really need: different work hours, a deadline extension or a leave of absence? We need to speak up if we need to, and mention burnout by name if our colleagues seem supportive of diverging viewpoints and our mental-health struggles.

The Right Way To Ask For Help

When we go to tell our boss that we are feeling burned out, we need to keep it simple. We have to remember that our boss isn’t our therapist. For all the risk that comes with it, a lot of positives can come from sharing how you’re really doing – developing a deeper trust with colleagues, getting permission for others to open up, moving away from a pressure-cooker work culture toward something just a bit more humane. Who knows? You could end up being less miserable, and so could everyone else.

All too often our burnout can feel like a uniquely individual experience, as if we’re the only one who can’t keep pace. But researchers say it isn’t just you. Employees across just about every industry feel worn down and used up because what they are being asked to do is unrealistic. The backlog of tasks, the lack of resources – we all realize that this isn’t sustainable for long. There had already been a speedup in many jobs before the pandemic hit, and then all of a sudden we seemed to have turned up that volume. Let’s face it, taking a meditation session or a yoga class isn’t going to fix our problem.

Instead, team interventions are what will make a difference. When we have bosses who are trained to check in to see how we were doing personally and professionally, and to give us flexibility to work how we wanted, will result in managers who have significantly lower levels of burnout and psychological distress. Guess what: with this kind of support we are 40% less likely to quit.

What All Of This Means For You

Managers seem to always be living with a great deal of stress. However, the arrival of the pandemic pushed many of us over our limit. What had been a hard job become just about impossible. We found that we just didn’t have time, energy, or willpower to keep going. We were burning out. What we need to do when things like this happen is to reach out to our boss. We need to ask for help.

With the pandemic coupled with the number of team members who have been leaving the company, managers are feeling burned out. However, the good news is that it is getting easier to talk about how we feel. We are starting to feel more comfortable telling coworkers that we are not doing well. However, we still need be careful about what we share with our boss. We need to learn how to ask for what we need. When talking with our boss we have to keep it simple. Burnout is real and we are being asked to do too much. If our bosses can work with us, then our problems can be solved.

Burn out is a real problem for managers. We need to be able to find the courage to go to our bosses and let them know what we are experiencing. If we understand how to have this conversation with them, then we can find a way to deal with all of the stress that has entered our life. This is something that we should not put off, we need to do it today.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: When do you think would be the right time to talk with your boss about your burn out problem?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Let us all agree: not every meeting that you go to requires your presence. In fact, there may be a number of meetings that you attend that are basically just a waste of your time. The person who was setting up the meeting didn’t really need to have you there, they just wanted to make sure that they didn’t forget anyone who might be important. The downside of all of this is that your time is being wasted. What managers need to do is to find ways to avoid having to go to meetings that they don’t need to attend. How can we make this happen?

For most managers, there is always too much work to be done. What that means is that we find ourselves multitasking trying to get all of the work that has been assigned to us completed. Although we may feel proud of what we are able to accomplish, are we really getting anything done? Does multitasking work for us? Learning how to balance multiple responsibilities is a key part of becoming a successful manager. We need to learn how to multitask well.

The Problem With Media Multitasking

By now we have probably all experienced that productivity rush we get when responding to Slack messages from colleagues, emailing our child’s teacher and placing an Amazon order – all while on a Teams call? Not all of our multitasking is the same, of course. Generally speaking, folding laundry while watching TV isn’t a problem. However, trying to study for an exam while listening to music and checking your social-media feed can be.

As it turns out, so called “media multitasking” is making us less productive, not more, according to the neuroscientists and others who are studying this. You may be checking stuff off your to-do list, but at the same time you might also be missing some of the more important things that go whizzing by. Our nonstop switching between devices and apps slows our ability to process and retain information, decreases our ability to filter out extraneous information, shortens our attention span and can cause us to make mistakes the neuroscientists say. The researchers are telling us that the glut of new technological distractions over the past decade means the consequences of bad multitasking can now be direr than ever.

Attempting to do too many things at once can cause a bottleneck in our prefrontal cortex, the brain’s control center. Researchers conducted brain-imaging scans of young adults to see what was going on while the participants were asked to read or listen to two kinds of sentences: sensical (“This morning I ate an egg.”) and nonsensical (“This morning I ate a bowl of hats.”). The participants were then asked to identify which sentences made sense. While doing this they were presented with written and spoken sentences at the same time. The study showed that the participants’ ability to correctly identify sentences declined significantly when their attention was divided between written and spoken sentences.

Why Do We Have Problems Multitasking?

The study that was performed provides evidence that the brain reaches a capacity limit as it tries to process two streams of information at once. Back in 2002 American adults were spending up to 40 hours a week consuming media; now, they’re spending about 80 hours a week doing so. The question is how do people spend the equivalent of two full-time jobs a week consuming media? The answer is that it isn’t possible unless they’re doing two things at once.

Adults aren’t immune to the detrimental effects of attempting to do too much. We allow ourselves to be constantly distracted by notifications at work and families can’t seem to watch a TV show together without one or more members simultaneously scrolling social media. These habits tend to carry over into all areas of life including driving, where divided attention can be fatal.

It has been shown that people who claim to multitask less often were better able to tune out the distraction. You can do this if you can block out focus time. Set aside time to get a work project done and set your phone to Do Not Disturb. You need to set expectations. If your co-workers frequently need to be in touch, let them know when you plan to be offline focusing on a project. Leave your phone in another room. Whether you’re working on a report or are in a meeting, have your phone out of sight. Research has shown that just seeing your phone, even if it’s muted and the screen is obscured, can lead to distracting thoughts.

What All Of This Means For You

It never seems as though a manager has enough time to get everything that has to be accomplished done. In order to get what needs to be done done, all too often we attempt to do multiple things at the same time. We generally think that we are pretty good at doing this. However, it turns out that attempting to do this type of multitasking comes with some downsides. Managers have to be aware of the challenges that they face when they try to do multiple things using multiple types of media all at the same time.

The people who study us when we are media multitasking have discovered that doing this actually makes us less productive. When we divide our attention between multiple inputs, our ability to successfully do work goes down. Our lives have become more and more complicated and it turns out that our brains don’t do well when we ask them to do two things at a time. Those of us who say that we can multitask, often can’t. We need to understand that we have to take steps to allow us to work on our work without having to multitask.

Understanding what we do well and what we don’t do well is a key part of being a successful manager. What we need to do is to realize that when we are multitasking and multitasking among different types of media, our productivity goes down. What we need to do is realize that in order to be productive we need to focus on single tasks. We have to organize our lives so that we can accomplish this. If we can do this, then we can boost our productivity.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: What is the best way for a manager to be productive in the office?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So how are you feeling? That pandemic thing took a lot out of managers. We had all of the normal things that we had to worry about and then we also had to make sure that the members of our team were keeping things together. Oh, and our family and friends were also dealing with the pandemic in ways that affected us. If you are like most managers, you are feeling overwhelmed right about now. In fact, you just might be feeling burned out. If you are, you should probably tell your boss that you feel this way. Do you think that you boss needs to know?

How easy is it for you to make up your mind on something? If you are like most of us, you can generally make a decision fairly fast; however, there will always be those times that you really have to spend some time thinking about something before you can decide how you want to handle it. Once you’ve made up your mind, do you generally stick with your decision? Depending on what kinds of outside pressures you are dealing with, this can be difficult to do. Just exactly how can a manager take a position and then actually stick with it?

The Power Of Taking A Stand

Taking a stand is a key responsibility of managers. It means that you need to make big decisions, set clear priorities, give definitive directions — and then stick to it – even when it turns out to not be a popular decision. When you avoid taking a stand, your team can get confused and will be left wondering what matters, what to do, and why. Managers who are highly collaborative in nature may shy away from taking a stand, fearing it may come across as being dictatorial, make them unpopular, or lead their team down the wrong path. Leaders who have no problems taking charge in the extreme may neglect to consider how their team will be affected when they take a stand.

So just exactly how are we supposed to go about doing this “taking a stand” issue? It turns out that the answer is to effectively take a stand and then maintain connections with both your people and yourself. Doing both is actually a more caring approach to leadership. You have the ability to commit to what matters most and you do what is needed as a manager, while being open and transparent in ways that support healthy relationships with the members of your team.

Questions To Answer Before Taking A Stand

When we are preparing to take a stand on a given issue, we need to start things off by asking ourselves some important questions. The first question is what does the idea of taking a stand bring up for you? If you were going to take a stand on just one thing and make it a non-negotiable, what would that one thing be? When you do take a stand, how could you express it in a way that increases trust and respect with your team? The next thing that you need to do is to take a moment and look inward. When deciding whether to take a stand, you have to first calm yourself and then check in with yourself to make sure that it’s aligned with what you truly believe is best for your team, and that it feels authentic to you.

As a part of the taking a stand process, you are going to have to choose the stories you invent. Let yourself imagine how the members of your team will react when you take a particular stand, including your worst fears. Then gain some altitude and allow yourself to call those imaginings what they are — your stories. Now take just a moment and imagine more positive outcomes. You need to allow for unhappiness. Remind yourself regularly that not everyone is going to be happy with every decision you make or every stand you take. It turns out that that’s okay.

Now comes the tough part. You need to have the hard conversations. When you do take an unpopular or controversial stand, acknowledge that you know some members of your team may not like it. And that it is what the organization is going to be doing. Be sure to convey that you considered other options, and why the stand you are taking is important. You need to remember why you are making this decision. Be explicit when describing the stand you’re taking and let team members know how it supports the organization’s vision. Help team members stay connected with the shared higher purpose, whether or not they agree with the particular stand you’re taking.

What All Of This Means For You

Making decisions is never an easy thing to do. Making tough decisions is even harder. We need to understand that when we make tough decisions, not everyone on our team is going to support it. That’s why managers have to get good at taking a position and then sticking with it. We just have to learn how to do this well.

Depending on what type of manager you are, sticking with a decision that you have made may be a hard thing for you to do. When you make a decision, you need to learn how to stick with it. You will need to ask yourself a series of questions before you make a key decision. How do you feel about the decision that you are preparing to make? When you look inwards, are you aligned with the decision that you are preparing to make? Create stories to understand how your decision is going to affect the members of your team. Take the time to convey your decision to your team so that everyone understand the thinking that went into it.

The good news for managers is that you can learn how to take a firm stand and stay deeply connected with both your team, and yourself. Doing so is a great way to earn respect, and a powerful demonstration of your caring in action. The next time you have to make a tough decision, take the time to think it through. Once you’ve made the decision, stick with it.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: What should you do if you learn new information after you have made a key decision?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

For most managers, there is always too much work to be done. What that means is that we find ourselves multitasking trying to get all of the work that has been assigned to us completed. Although we may feel proud of what we are able to accomplish, are we really getting anything done? Does multitasking work for us? Learning how to balance multiple responsibilities is a key part of becoming a successful manager. We need to learn how to multitask well.

As a manager, part of our job is to set deadlines for the people who work for us. Work needs to be accomplished and we know when it needs to be done. In order to communicate this to the rest of our team, we establish deadlines that tell everyone when the work that has been assigned to them must be completed. However, how people treat deadlines can differ from person to person. Additionally, managers need to realize that women and men may treat deadlines differently.

The Problem With Deadlines

I don’t know about you, but all too often I feel as though I have too much to do and too little time to do it. This is a feeling that skyrocketed during the pandemic, especially among working women, who last year reported completing an average of five additional hours of chores and child care a week versus men. The end result of all of this extra work was that their happiness and productivity was undermined. Today, as a result of these new increased demands, 23% of employed women with children under the age of 10 are considering leaving the workforce, compared with 13% of employed men.

Along with additional responsibilities at home, women also tend to take on more administrative tasks at work, which contributes to their feelings of being stressed about time. But the latest research finds there is another factor at play that is often overlooked: women are less likely than men to negotiate for more time on adjustable deadlines at work. Regardless of their job status or number of years of experience, women reported feeling less comfortable asking for such extensions than men.

The question is what is behind this dynamic? It has been found that women are more concerned than men about appearing incompetent and burdening other people with their requests. These concerns can increase feelings of guilt and undermine women’s willingness to ask for more time in order to complete projects and assignments. To retain top talent, it is critical that managers understand the dynamic that is occurring and encourage all of their team members especially women – to negotiate for more time when deadlines are flexible.

How Managers Can Deal With Deadlines

As a start, managers need to let your team members know when a deadline is flexible. I think that we all understand that many of our day-to-day work tasks are smaller tasks that do contribute to a larger goal, and can often be adjusted with minimal or no costs to the company. A good example of this type of work is when a manager may ask a team member to create a draft of a proposal by the end of the week for an event that’s will happen in a few months. Since there is extra time built into the proposal timeline, the employee’s initial deadline for the proposal draft can be adjusted. This is the kind of thing that is critical that managers communicate.

Managers need to let their team members know that asking for more time doesn’t signal incompetence but rather a commitment to high-quality work. Although worries about appearing incompetent and burdening colleagues can dissuade women from asking for more time, it has been found across multiple studies that such fears are unfounded. Indeed, women weren’t judged more harshly than men – even when adjusting a deadline incurred a direct cost to the manager. What’s more, it turns out that asking for more time can lead to better output.

Finally, the best policy for mangers is to enact a formal workplace policy on project extensions. It turns out that formal policies that make clear team members can request extensions without penalty. This serves to eliminate gender differences in extension requests and appears to improve the performance of women. With warnings of the great resignation in our midst, it is more important than ever that managers help team members help themselves. This can be done by encouraging team members to ask for the time they need to perform at their best.

What All Of This Means For You

A key part of the manager job is telling the members of our team when the work that they are working on will be due. This means that we need to set deadlines. However, we need to understand that deadlines can cause stress for the members of our team. In fact, deadlines may end up affecting women more then it affects men. What this means is that we need to be very careful in how we go about using deadlines in our work environment.

The pandemic had a disproportional impact on the amount of work that women had to do. Not only did the amount of work that they had to do at work increase, but they were also saddled with additional responsibilities at home. All of this is causing them to reconsider if they really want to put the time into coming to work. When presented with a deadline, women are more likely to not attempt to have it moved back than men are. Women don’t want to appear weak. Managers need to deal with this issue by making sure that our team members know when deadlines are flexible. We also have to let team members know that asking for additional time to complete a task doesn’t signal incompetence but rather a commitment to high-quality work. In the workplace, we need to enact a formal workplace policy on project extensions.

Understanding what the members of our team are going through currently is a key part of being a successful manager. We have to understand that when we have overworked or overwhelmed members of our team, we need to make sure that the deadlines that we assign to team members don’t contribute to their problems. Yes, deadlines are important. However, we need to work with the members of our team to make sure that they will be able to get work done when it is required. Take the time to properly set your deadlines and make life easier for the people on your team.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills

Question For You: When you change a deadline, do you think that you should tell the rest of the team that it has been changed?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How easy is it for you to make up your mind on something? If you are like most of us, you can generally make a decision fairly fast; however, there will always be those times that you really have to spend some time thinking about something before you can decide how you want to handle it. Once you’ve made up your mind, do you generally stick with your decision? Depending on what kinds of outside pressures you are dealing with, this can be difficult to do. Just exactly how can a manager take a position and then actually stick with it?