Happy New Year, everybody! 🙂
AnyaWorkSmart is back online and will continue with discussion of every aspect of Management that can be improved by fighting Biases. I decided that the first post of the year should deal with a situation where the negative influence of Biases is most critical – our attempts to judge others based on their appearances and actions. Continue reading
Delegation is such an integrative part of Management that it seems everything has already been said about it. We all understand its benefits for grooming potential Leads and know how to redistribute the load of responsibility according to people’s natural tendencies. However, in real world we sometimes find it hard to apply our knowledge for the simple reason that delegation basically means trusting people with important things, and having some actual experience in dealing with employees sometimes makes trust a very rare resource. Continue reading
Can you put a non-engineer to lead an IT development team? How effective would be a financial product development team when managed by someone who has no previous experience with financial systems? When looking for someone to fill an executive position in an aviation sales department, should you be looking for someone who has more experience with aviation, a better salesman or A BETTER MANAGER?
I think it’s easy to understand what I’m getting at: there is an eternal argument going on in every possible industry – when looking for Managers, should you prefer people from the same industry or people with good managerial skills but without any previous knowledge of the industry. Continue reading
After discussing the basic properties of Office Politics and the importance of gossiping correctly in order to succeed at it, I would like to discuss the concept of Social Status.
If gossip is one of the main tools of Office Politics, status is its main currency, being lost or acquired through different actions and interactions. For some people, the goal is to achieve maximum level of status, however if you’ve ever heard about Peter Principle, you may consider achieving optimal status instead. Continue reading
This is clearly our most favorite aspect of office life to complain about. It’s hard to imagine a normal person expressing any liking for all the intrigues, gossips and “pointless” conversations filled with personal agendas and lacking any practical goal. Mostly we try to distance ourselves from “all that” or at least we like to think that we do. Continue reading
Welcoming a new employee into the Team could be a serious challenge, as there is always a chance that something would go wrong and precious potential would go wasted on unnecessary complications. Many pitfalls await the new guy as he tries to navigate the labyrinth of the new workplace: taking too long to start delivering, making a lot of mistakes and asking wrong people for help, being unable to connect socially because of trying too hard or not trying hard enough, and many others. Continue reading
Let’s admit it – people always leave.
May be we let them go, may be they’ve found something else and may be their time has come and they’re retiring. In any case, your organization is left with an open void that needs to be filled as soon as possible. The sooner and the better you’ll fill it with somebody else – the smaller would be the amount of time and energy swallowed by that void. In order to do that you not only have to find Continue reading
My previous post dealt with some of the reasons for negative influence of constant change of human resources on our projects. Despite the fact that many Managers still consider this phenomenon a “necessarily evil” and an integrative part making things done, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would argue that no attempts should be made at mitigating this “evil”. Continue reading
There are several terms not so pleasant to our ears that seem to dominate the news lately, terms like sequestration, spending cuts and most of all – austerity. The abundance of these subtractive terms in the media may well mean that they pretty much define the current situation, and we, as Managers, will need to adjust to function in this situation, because it’s unlikely to dissolve quickly.
Let’s try to understand what Austerity means from Management perspective and what tips we may use to lead our teams successfully despite the harsh environment. Continue reading
We all have been taught at certain stage that you cannot compare apples to oranges. What was usually meant by that is that the world is divided into clear categories and those categories should not be mixed up. There are Developers and there are Managers, there are First world countries and there are Third world countries, there are “winners” and there are “losers”. By conveniently dividing the complex reality into more simple and digestible parts this thumb rule clearly makes our life easier, but nevertheless – is it true? Continue reading
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