After talking to people about my post on Delegation I decided to expand the discussion to other related issues in Management that everybody knows about, but the general understanding remains vague, preventing fruitful actions. Today I would like to talk about the most frequent complaint of employees about their Managers – them being Micromanagers. 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
How did we come to know what we know? Obviously, our first answer would be that we learned things in schools and universities and later acquired some practical experience in the job market. After that, we did our best to keep ourselves updated about the state of the art, visiting trainings and reading articles.
But I’m not talking about that. What I’m asking is how did you come to acquire your style of working, your working patterns, the certain way you do things – they didn’t teach you those things in the university. Continue reading
The summer is over, the kids are back at school, and it’s a beginning of a new year in some cultures, so I think this is a great time to draw some bottom-lines by discussing the most popular posts of this blog. After all, people read what seems important to them, right?
So let’s see what makes some topics in Management more popular than the others, by looking at the Top Ten posts of AnyaWorkSmart as defined by readers’ views. Continue reading
After my previous posts on Office Politics I got some very interesting reactions from readers. Many of them included the same question: How to be good at Office Politics without getting into unnecessary conflicts? In order to answer this question, we have to understand why engaging in Politics leads to conflicts initially. 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
In my previous post I did my best to present the concept of Legitimate Office Politics, while stressing the importance of doing it properly. Now let’s deal with one of its most basic aspects – participating in Office Gossip.
There are people who have a natural and an understandable aversion to any kind of gossip. They usually think something like: “I don’t like it when people discuss me behind my back, so I’m not ready to discuss others behind their backs”. However, one glance at the history of humankind can prove that gossiping is such an important part of our lives that there is no escaping it. 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
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