Delegate to Succeed
A manager’s primary responsibility is to get work done through other people, and the single most effective technique for achieving this purpose is delegation. Effective delegation is the act of giving someone else the responsibility and authority to carry out an assignment or to represent you or your organization in a specific role. In addition to sharing responsibility, delegation involves communication and training. When teamwork is at its best, effective delegation occurs. Practicing the art of effective delegation is a vital tool in your development as a leader and manager because of these key benefits: 1. You improve your personal time management, leveraging your energy and ideas. 2. You provide motivational and development opportunities for others on your team. 3. You maximize the interests, strengths, and contribution of others and increase the team productivity. 4. You make use of a valuable yet easily overlooked training tool – delegation! The definition of delegation can be expanded to include sharing of responsibilities with team members, other managers, or anyone with whom dividing responsibilities is appropriate and logical. The concepts used for traditional delegation apply with some modification when sharing responsibility. For example, some tasks within your work load may best be accomplished by counterparts of yours. Certain individuals may have special skills or knowledge, information, or relationships that make it more effective for them to complete the work. Keeping in mind the overall goal and being willing to share responsibility, as well as the credit, increases your success as a manager. Effective delegation multiplies your efforts many times over by using the time, knowledge, experience, and creative power of other people. Effective delegation frees you for the planning, problem solving, and tracking required to build a more productive organization. Types of Delegation Choose carefully the team members to whom you delegate specific…
Identifying the Best Candidate
Choosing one candidate for a position out of five can be overwhelming, let alone fifty. Where does an employer begin to differentiate?
Your Business Success is in the Hands of Your Employees
Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.
Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals
By Valerie G. Cardenas “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success. Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.) If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when? Now you’re ready to measure. Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI): General Business Measurements Dollars per contracts signed Number of call-backs per 100 jobs Increased your profit by [insert your goal percentage here] Sales Measurements New accounts as a percentage of total accounts Number of new accounts per day Percentage of referral business to your total business Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you? Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements! Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet,…
Realizing the Personal Aspect of All Productivity
Recently in one of my business coaching workshops, a client hit the nail right on the head when it comes to company productivity. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.” You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.” All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company? It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity. Leadership Matters in Productivity Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge. Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst, orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for. In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown. Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not…
Leadership and Crisis
Leadership and Crisis By David Byrd, President, LMI Pick up any newspaper today and you will read about economic crisis. Turn your TV to any news broadcast, and you will hear about economic crisis. I was with a group of business executives yesterday, and we talked about economic crisis. We are being overwhelmed with negative news and fearful conversation regarding the issues of the current, global economic crisis. But with all the bombardment of negative news and fearful conversations leaders must still lead. How do we do that? During times of crisis a leader’s greatest enemy is fear. During crisis most people respond from the emotion of fear. This is a natural response that can be traced back to our ancestral roots. The emotion of fear was designed to protect us from any imposing dangers. However, many people have developed the habit of responding to any crisis situation form the emotion of fear, and that poses three significant problems for leaders: Fear paralyzes productive actions. Fear leads to negative attitudes which, in turn, get in the way of positive, productive actions. Fear attracts and supports failure. Negative attitudes find comfort in failure. They offer an instant and comfortable excuse to quit, point blame, or procrastinate. Fear eliminates ownership of possible solutions. Fear destroys creative energy. Fear causes us to think of ourselves as victims and victims have no solutions. How do effective leaders respond to the natural, human emotion of fear? The effective leader knows that there are only two options in responding to crisis…Positive Actions or Negative Beliefs! The leaders who respond with negative beliefs nullify their leadership position by joining the ranks of the fearful. When a leader responds to crisis from the emotion of fear, his or her position as leader is no longer effective. The leader…
Business Communication
Communication: The Essential Connection By Paul J. Meyer Business success depends on the ability to communicate more than ever before with the continuous acceleration of technology and international competition. Effective business communication can make the difference between mediocrity and market leadership. And skillful communication can even make the difference between being employed and not being employed! More than for any other reason, people lose their jobs because of inability to get along with other people. Communication is intricately woven throughout effective and satisfying interpersonal relationships; and relationships are the basis of success in the business world as well as in the home and with friends. Achieving long-term business goals always requires covering the basics: careful planning, accurate research and preparation, getting the right people together, and obtaining necessary financial and technological resources. Effective communication provides the positive relationships and mutual understanding that are essential for successfully covering these basics; without communication, any project and its potential for future returns evaporate. Businesspeople daily communicate their goals, concerns, performance feedback, and appreciation to those they work with and for. Skillful communication creates the human synergy that turns ideas into profitable ventures. Communication is the essential human connection — understanding others and being understood. As the essential human connection, skillful communication enables you to meet professional and personal goals. It is the conduit for mutual understanding and change. Without communication, you accomplish only what you can do alone, which inevitably is only a fraction of what you can do in joint effort with others. Communication – the human connection – is the key to career and personal success. Rewards of Successful Communication Good communicators go above and beyond ordinary means and methods of sending messages; they express a unique human touch in their communication. Human behavior experts have long said the most universal…
