First, ask yourself: Am I committed to high performance? Do I really want to be one of the rare breed of managers who makes high performance the only option? You can do it on your own or find a coach to get you there quicker. Here are some guidelines set up by Bruce Turgin from his book- HOT Management.

Here are the tools:

1. Schedule weekly meetings with every direct report.
2. Create written and well organized performance log of progress.
3. Give feedback, guidance, timelines, and challenge when needed.
4. Ask for updates- hold them accountable! Be their coach.
5. Expect high performance and coach them to their success.

Stick to your vision, hold the plan and succeed! It takes guts and hard work. And remember, you’re only as good as the people below you, so make your life easier and polish the team!

~ Kate ~

How do you maintain peak performance of a virtual team, deal with staff issues in the office, then relax and be fully present to deliver a dynamic PowerPoint slide show to Corporate after 3  fourteen hour days?

As an Executive Coach, I have witnessed clients doing all the work to cover team limitations rather than develop the abilities of their under-managed staff, and then explode when a miscommunication happens and things get botched. They, in essence, set themselves and others up for failure.  So what could you do differently to be more productive on the road?

The truth is, it’s easy to say and hard to do on your own, but here are 4 tips to work smarter and not harder while on the road:

1. Create a great team below you.  Your measure of success is your ability to develop leaders to work in your absence. Spend the time and reap the rewards!
2. Develop the team replace you!
3. Delegate to your admin and team. Challenge them to take on more. If everyone does 5% more, you’ve got 20-30% more being done by others.
4. Find a coach to hold you accountable and create a more effective system. The $ you spend comes back to you and the company 6x over. (Fortune magazine statistic )

As an Executive Coach one of the key requests I receive is: “How can I do more in less time?” I first look at the systems in place and find most often, there are no effective communication systems at all. Instead it is: endless emails, email the person sitting next to you, ignore your phone, and just go on and on when emailing…you know.

Here are six ways to master the message mania:

1. Establish ground rules for email use within your team, and corporate wide
2. Turn off the chimes and check email once an hour
3. Have symbols for emergencies or priorities
4. Use the subject header to say it all, thus no need to open the text
5. Make folders to create efficiency when referring back to information
6. Turn off your Blackberry during meetings, lunch break, at dinner time, and weekends

Create rules and guidelines that work for you, your team members, and your company. The result is increased productivity, better communication and greater health! Yes, your sanity and time off is important to your company, so when you return on Monday morning, you are relaxed, fired up, and ready to dive in. Come on, you can do it. Set guidelines and turn it off. Give yourself the time to work!

~ Kate ~

Baby Boomers shift values with aging, Gen-Xers look at the world differently, and statistics show, most employees leave a company because they don’t feel valued. In today’s hyper paced, global economy, how do you keep the talent?
Three quick tips:

1. Ask who are the emerging leaders? What do they need? GenXer’s don’t feel loyalty, they will leave for a better opportunity. What can you do to retain the talent?
2. Create a cross training program for employees, so that when the senior people leave, they don’t take all the knowledge and client relationships with them.
3. Invest in your future. Retain the talent through coaching, training, 360 assessments, and/ or team building. It doesn’t have to be an expensive off-site or require hundreds of hours.

Group training is an economical and effecient way to empower, inspire, and inform and may save you from the “brain drain” corporations are experiencing.  Retain talent, give the team a shot of adreneline, and you’ll be surprised at the results!

~ Kate ~

During the holidays, I was visiting family in Ohio and engaged in an interesting conversation with a successful engineer on the leadership track in a growing corporation. He mentioned how much time he spends a day resolving personality issues of his team, rather than doing the work he is supposed to do. So how do you do it? How can you change the course you are on?

3 Tips:
1. Create a good communication system, including how to handle phone, email and memos.
2. Ask questions that enable your team to become part of the decision making, and ways to encorage who will take on more responsibility.

3. Break the vision into steps, so that several team member can be responsible for reaching different goals.

In today’s fast moving world, people get promoted with the expectations that they will be able to take on greater leadership, be more effective and productive, and effectively manage change without further training.  Ask for training or team coaching.  Getting the group together for 3 to 4 half days can make a huge difference in being able to lead and manage. Why go it alone?

~ Kate ~

Challenge the Process

1. Search out challenging opportunities to change, grow, innovate, and improve.
2. Experiment, take risks, and learn from the accompanying mistakes.

Inspiring a Shared Vision

3. Envision an uplifting and enobling future.
4. Enlist others in a common vision: appeal to their values, interests, hopes, and dreams.

Enable Others To Act

5. Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust.
6. Strengthen people by giving power away, providing choice, developing competence, assigning critical tasks, and offering visible support.

Modeling the Way

7. Set an example by behaving in ways that are consistent with shared values.
8. Achieve small wins that promote consistent progress and build commitment.

Encouraging the Heart

9. Recognize individual contributions to success of every project.
10. Celebrate team accomplishments regularly.

So how does a leader step out of the old box and shift gears to incorporate new visions, take risks, and encourage the team to do the same?

Two ways: #1. You have to have the intention to make it happen. The best way is to think in the simple terms and post the following next to your desk, on the white board or the water cooler: Challenge, Inspire, Enable, Model, Encourage.

#2. Leadership starts at the top. It is up to you to enroll the team in your vision and commitment.  Meet with your team to discuss how you can collectively create a working system to make it happen. Enable others to champion the process. Create a follow up and action step plan so that the vision doesn’t slide. It is up to you as leader of the company, division or project to make your leadership commitments become a reality. Challenge yourself. Others will follow.

~ Kate ~

1. Understand what’s behind the comment (their core values, needs, feelings)
2. Discern what they want as a result of their conversation
3. Actively listen from their point of view. If you are thinking about what you want to say, or ready to defend or refute their statement, you are not listening!

Here are other tips: In a business meeting, men are programmed to solve problems, be decisive, and move forward, while women like to collaborate, discuss at length, confirm others, and give support. As an effective boss/ manager, you have to participate in active listening to understand what the speaker wants to communicate, rather than what you want to understand. Seek to understand their style of communication and take the DISC assessment to learn the different communication styles. Life will be easier!

Deborah Tannen, Ph.D, Linguistics professor at Georgetown University, talks about how

• Women speak to be accepted in the group and use tenative words, like “I think” and “probably”, “most likely”.
• Men use definative words, speak from a place of position and power, often taking credit for work someone else did.

So the key is…. what does the speaker need: Does she need to be acknowledged or be heard? Does he speak to influence or control others? If you understand the difference between the players (mars and venus), you can move conversations forward, diminish the differences, and acknowledge all the team, regardless of their style. As my yoga teacher says, “Everything you do today, prepares you for tomorrow.” Are you prepared for tomorrow?

- Kate-

Comedian Dave Barry says “If you had to identify in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved and will never achieve it’s full potential, that word would be MEETINGS.” So, how do you control “meeting madness”? You’re probably thinking- corks and ductape, that would do it or maybe eliminate the team members from attending meetings altogether. Well, that’s one way, but there are many other ways. Here are a few ideas.

1. Have a pre-meeting agenda, emailed out in bullet point format ahead of time.
2. Create meeting ground rules with an enforcer and a time dragon. Those jobs are perfect for the talkers, as it gives them something to do instead of talking.
3. Ground rules determined by the players and could be something like: topics are given priority level and approximate time needed for discussion, dumping on others ideas or interupting constitutes $1 towards the birthday fund. Others rules could be: Each person gets a minute to talk on an idea or can pass, leader calls to vote and moves on to next. Again, to be determined by players.
4. Scribe responsibilities are rotated and emailed after meeting with conclusions and the next steps with time to be completed and by whom.

The ultimate goal here is create an environment open for dialogue, increase meeting productivity and effectiveness, as well as, start to train corporate professionals to have connecting conversations that build the team, create new ideas, and expand possibilities. Save the ductape for repairing your car, it comes in handy.

- Kate -

]]> http://katecarleton.com/?feed=rss2&p=34 http://katecarleton.com/?p=33 http://katecarleton.com/?p=33#comments Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:20:10 +0000 Kate Carleton http://katecarleton.com/?p=33 There is nothing more constant than change. The Pac Man mentality of gobbling up the competition and the concept of “big box” stores are here to stay. Mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, re-organization have forced us to deal with change. The company as we knew it, is no longer; the leadership is moved around and you don’t agree with what they’re doing. Here’s the bad news- Change happens, we can’t stop it, we can’t control it, but we can learn to handle it differently. It is said, that those who embrace change, can succeed the quickest. Easier said than done, right?


First step is to ask yourself: How do you react to change? Are you in resistance? If so, what works for you to stay in resistance?

Step two is to ask yourself: How can you lead change and make it work for you? First one has to start to see things differently; it’s out of the box thinking. By this I mean: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Get out of your blind spot (we all have them) and allow yourself to lead with change. Ask yourself how can I turn this around and work for the change, embrace the new challenges and step up to the plate. Lead the change instead of letting it lead you. Think about it.

- Kate

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