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Continuing Education for Technical Professionals |
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THE LEARNING PROFESSIONALTM Project Performance and Career Advancement Tips Volume 4, Issue 6 |
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In This Issue: AuxTipsTM Third of a three part series by Susan de la Vergne.
Six tips from Preston Michie about using leverage to improve your position in negotiations.
Managing Many Priorities
Now available at amazon.com:
by Steve Trautman
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AuxTipsTM Quick tips you can start implementing immediately.
Eliminate Waste!
Unproductive meetings, inefficient processes, and poor communication are some common issues that slow down projects. When time-wasting issues exist, implement a system for measuring the amount of time wasted. Define categories of inefficient activity such as “unproductive meeting time,” "interruptions," or “design changes due to poor planning.”
Get consensus about the activities that waste time, then monitor the percentage of time in those wasteful activities compared to total work time. If the percentage is high, it should point out specific corrective actions. Without this sort of data, it’s difficult to understand the magnitude of a particular problem.
Five more tips for speeding up projects!
Part 3 of a 3 part series - Organizational Character by Susan de la Vergne Read Full Text
Now, Once Again - Where Were We?
You can’t motivate employees. Employees motivate themselves. You can, however, create the best conditions under which they do so.
And those conditions that bring out the best in people are found in three aspects of the workplace:
Purpose: So that people on the job feel that what they do matters, their sense of contribution and of giving back is fulfilled by something greater and more lasting than better earnings quarter after quarter.
Leadership: Where the company’s visionaries and keepers of accountability operate from a base of personal power, i.e., expertise, competence and humility, leading by example more often than by command.
Organizational Character: The integrity and consistency of choices and decisions the organization’s leadership makes.
An “Ah Hah” Moment
In 1985, Dr. Edgar Schein, a professor in MIT’s Sloan School of Management, studied the phenomenon of life in the workplace. He published his findings in Organizational Culture and Leadership and so brought to the world the idea that companies have cultures. He talked about culture in terms that sound like anthropology and social science, with words like the “artifacts” of work (technology), and values (what “ought” to be) and basic assumptions (what we take for granted). He examined the roots of culture in the workplace, the importance of it, and how it shows up on the job every day.
It was a groundbreaking idea in 1985, but today “organizational culture” is a commonplace term. Every company has an organizational culture. Leadership now knows it’s supposed “to hire to the culture.” We’ve figured out dysfunctional cultures cost more money to sustain than healthy cultures. Anyone who’s tried to drive an initiative to change organizational culture knows it’s difficult and time-consuming and often unsuccessful.
Organizational Character
Extending Dr. Schein’s discovery just slightly, Organizational Character is not only “how we do things around here” (the culture) but also why we do things this way and what people expect when we do things. It’s an organization’s reputation with the people who work there. It’s the tone and the pace of the organization, and it’s how people are treated. It’s a major reason people like, or don’t like, where they work and a key contributor to motivation.
The Disengagers
So, then, what aspects of Organizational Character disengage people, causing them not to be motivated or energized by the jobs they do?
Click here to read the complete article.
Tips from Preston Michie, President - Team Soup, LLC Read Full Text
Busting the Myths About Lack of Leverage: Six Tips for Improving Your Position in Negotiations
Some people believe you can’t do anything about leverage: Either you have it or you don’t. You need the job. You want that car. You owe the money. It may seem like there is little you can do.
This is nonsense. Even from a position of weakness, you can create leverage in a negotiation, weaken the other side’s leverage, or enhance your own. Here’s how.
Leverage is the ability to influence the outcome of a negotiation. In simple terms, the more the other side needs to deal with you on your terms, the more leverage you have. Leverage is usually a function of the costs to the other side of not dealing with you.
In other words, the other side’s B.A.T.N.A. (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) is a key to defining your leverage. You can assess your net leverage by asking a few simple questions: What’s likely to happen to the other side if there is no deal? Can they live with that? What’s likely to happen to me? Is that OK with me?
Regardless of how you answer these questions, you can usually improve your position through several simple techniques.
First, assess your leverage, which can come in a variety of forms. Sometimes, people don’t know that they have leverage. Can you pay cash? That’s leverage.
The fact that you are customer willing to buy creates leverage. Simply answering an ad, applying for a job, and visiting a used car lot create leverage. Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” The mere fact that you are willing to deal creates leverage.
Courses that build negotiation skills:
Fundamentals of Successful Negotiation Special Topics in Negotiations
Managing Many Priorities
This class starts by identifying the problems inherent in multiple, conflicting priorities:
We then address each of these problem areas specifically, taking a deep dive into the solutions for these problems, which include:
We draw on insightful, outside-the-box research in this area, illustrated with real-world examples. Participants practice what they’re learning in class so they can help balance competing priorities when they get back to work the next day!
After attending this seminar, participants should be able to:
Who should attend?
Managers and individual contributors in demanding jobs.
Click here for more information about Managing Many Priorities.
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