The contents of this site are classified below :
Presentation Skills - thoughts....
*NEW Get Noticed with Powerful Presentations: Why should presentation skills matter to you?
Evaluate your slides: A presentation on making slides memorable and audience-friendly.
Is your communication sharp enough to boost your career? Take the quick test now!
Simplicity in slides: Example of how difficult concepts are represented pictorally
Kill the bullet and other boring things: The first step to start making more creative slides
Burger-izing your presentation: Presenting to foreign audiences needs to be customised like burgers are to different countries.
Stand up and Speak : Are presentation skills important?
Slide inspiration: Getting inspired by photos for creative and emotion-getting slides
Talk the talk: Be the Amitabh of Presentations
Tips for preparing presentation
How to start on a presentation: Making presentations more forceful
Powerpoint templates : Free PowerPoint templates to use as you like.
Management
Motivation through humor : How to be a medicine man
Time Management : Creating and sticking to a schedule
Sacred cow hunting: About doing productive timepass and some comments on the book
Appraisals: Treating the appraisal nightmare
Managing team: At customer site
Quality: The quality attitude
Creativity : Adding creativity to work
Whole-brain thinking: Why right-brain thinking is essential...
Reviewing : A 'not so often 'talked about part of a managers job
Hope you find this site useful. Do feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
DR. MANAGER: How to be the medicine man for your team ( without a Ph.d)
This post is about team management. If you are a manager who has recently been assigned a group of people and wondering what to do with them… or a manager who wants to be made to think....
Too many of my posts lately have been of a serious nature. It’s time to unwind and relax a bit.
Started to feel as if you are wasting time reading this article already? A bit of laughter does lot more. Consider these two case studies:
CASE A: Madhavan, the humorous
Madhavan, is a manager in a textile manufacturing company. Various floor supervisors report to him. He shows them smiling face. His main fault is that he gets tense when there are stiff deadlines to be met. But he encourages his guys to joke around, even in such situations. He takes all the floor supervisors out for a “cutting” tea when they meet their monthly deadlines.
When one of the supervisors tried to get workers to go on strike demanding better food in the canteen, Madhavan blasted the guy. Couple of days later, Madhavan was back to joking with the same guy and the incident was forgotten.
On Valentines Day, a supervisor had tied a dozen red balloons in the work area. Seeing this, Madhavan had burst out laughing. On the next occasion, that same supervisor was given the task of arranging the decorations.
CASE B: Prasad, the serious
Prasad is a manager in the same company. He keeps strict distance between himself and his subordinates. They are not allowed to smile or crack jokes in front of him. He thinks that it is insulting for subordinates to laugh in the boss's presence. He prides himself on his calm reaction to all news good and bad. When his supervisors meet deadlines, he calls them to his room and shakes hands with them.
When Prasad heard of the way Madhavan reacted to the red balloons, he said “my people have far more dignity than to do such things.”
NOW…
There is a new project coming up that has stringent deadlines. Remember I haven’t mentioned anything else about these two people – their educational background, the length of time they have been managers, their previous history of meeting deadlines, the kind of equipment they have…..
Which of the two managers, do you think, will be able to get their team motivated to achieve the target?
CONCLUSIONS
I am hoping and guessing you have said “Madhavan” because he has the right attitude to motivate his people. Given a boss who has a good sense of humor, subordinates automatically associate various other good managerial qualities to him. Remember, encouraging humor and bonhomie also makes any negative attributes seem less significant (Madhavan does get tense around deadlines!)
It takes time for a newly promoted manager who expected to lead a team, to adjust. No one takes to managing like a fish to water- because fish have always lived in water.
Management is a learning process and if a manger proceeds in the right away up the learning curve, he reaches a favorable point. That is, the point where his team considers him approachable, understanding and fair.
How can a manager be laughing and cracking jokes, you ask, when that manager is not naturally humorous? It is not necessary for the manager to be humorous. But can the manager encourage his people to be humorous- i.e. less stiff and formal and more open and natural around him?
If you have a team of 10 people, chances are that at least one of them is very humorous. Encouraged, this person will,
- act as a stress buster
- relieve boredom
- defuse tense situations and
- make the office a more attractive place to be.
Having found the joker in the pack, so to speak, your task as a manger, is to make sure those jokes are not offensive or interfering with work.
There are possible additional benefits to this. When people have less stress and feel that the atmosphere is open, they may be more productive, able to give more ideas and even undertake unpleasant tasks with good humor. Isn’t the idea of working on a holiday less frustrating, if other people at work were laughing and joking and working?
So go ahead, and be the medicine man for your team. Allow a dose of humor to take away the ills and chills of a workplace.
Too many of my posts lately have been of a serious nature. It’s time to unwind and relax a bit.
Started to feel as if you are wasting time reading this article already? A bit of laughter does lot more. Consider these two case studies:
CASE A: Madhavan, the humorous
Madhavan, is a manager in a textile manufacturing company. Various floor supervisors report to him. He shows them smiling face. His main fault is that he gets tense when there are stiff deadlines to be met. But he encourages his guys to joke around, even in such situations. He takes all the floor supervisors out for a “cutting” tea when they meet their monthly deadlines.
When one of the supervisors tried to get workers to go on strike demanding better food in the canteen, Madhavan blasted the guy. Couple of days later, Madhavan was back to joking with the same guy and the incident was forgotten.
On Valentines Day, a supervisor had tied a dozen red balloons in the work area. Seeing this, Madhavan had burst out laughing. On the next occasion, that same supervisor was given the task of arranging the decorations.
CASE B: Prasad, the serious
Prasad is a manager in the same company. He keeps strict distance between himself and his subordinates. They are not allowed to smile or crack jokes in front of him. He thinks that it is insulting for subordinates to laugh in the boss's presence. He prides himself on his calm reaction to all news good and bad. When his supervisors meet deadlines, he calls them to his room and shakes hands with them.
When Prasad heard of the way Madhavan reacted to the red balloons, he said “my people have far more dignity than to do such things.”
NOW…
There is a new project coming up that has stringent deadlines. Remember I haven’t mentioned anything else about these two people – their educational background, the length of time they have been managers, their previous history of meeting deadlines, the kind of equipment they have…..
Which of the two managers, do you think, will be able to get their team motivated to achieve the target?
CONCLUSIONS
I am hoping and guessing you have said “Madhavan” because he has the right attitude to motivate his people. Given a boss who has a good sense of humor, subordinates automatically associate various other good managerial qualities to him. Remember, encouraging humor and bonhomie also makes any negative attributes seem less significant (Madhavan does get tense around deadlines!)
It takes time for a newly promoted manager who expected to lead a team, to adjust. No one takes to managing like a fish to water- because fish have always lived in water.
Management is a learning process and if a manger proceeds in the right away up the learning curve, he reaches a favorable point. That is, the point where his team considers him approachable, understanding and fair.
How can a manager be laughing and cracking jokes, you ask, when that manager is not naturally humorous? It is not necessary for the manager to be humorous. But can the manager encourage his people to be humorous- i.e. less stiff and formal and more open and natural around him?
If you have a team of 10 people, chances are that at least one of them is very humorous. Encouraged, this person will,
- act as a stress buster
- relieve boredom
- defuse tense situations and
- make the office a more attractive place to be.
Having found the joker in the pack, so to speak, your task as a manger, is to make sure those jokes are not offensive or interfering with work.
There are possible additional benefits to this. When people have less stress and feel that the atmosphere is open, they may be more productive, able to give more ideas and even undertake unpleasant tasks with good humor. Isn’t the idea of working on a holiday less frustrating, if other people at work were laughing and joking and working?
So go ahead, and be the medicine man for your team. Allow a dose of humor to take away the ills and chills of a workplace.
Thinking Quality
Ask anyone about a public service, and they will give you their free and incisive opinion about it. For example, ask them about the status of the roads. You will have to run away because they just will not stop complaining. They will condemn everything from the potholes, patchy repairs, the pollution and traffic jam caused by dug up roads, the condition during monsoon, and a hundred other things.
Let’s analyze this sample list of complaints:
- The potholes: caused by low quality material
- Patchy repaid work: leaving behind unwanted scraps, just addressing the specific part of the road with the pothole
- Pollution and traffic jam, dug up roads: carelessness about the people using the road, bad planning, closing off alternate roads at the same time
- Condition during monsoon: again to do with usage of low quality material that is unable to take the load.
Every one of these complaints is rooted in lack of two basic things:
- Quality focus
- Customer focus
The people who lay the roads are not bothered about quality or proper planning, because they are not bothered about how much the customers suffer because of their careless or money pinching attitude. They are laying the road, because they get paid money to do so.
It is easy to find fault with the public works department. That is because it is a problem visible to all and so easy to pinpoint. What about your customers? Are they complaining the same about the work that you deliver?
Now, think back to the work you do: whatever it is, running an organization or managing a team or driving a car. Think over the work your people do. Does this same attitudinal problem affect you or your team?
Here are some questions you can use to test yourself/ your team
1. When you deliver your product/service do you
a) wait till the customer tells you about a problem to fix it
b) do you take steps to fix any potential problems in advance
2. When the customer reports a problem, do you
a) Do whatever is required to make the customer happy
b) Address the customer’s problem, and put process in place so that it never occurs again. See if there are other related problems likely to occur.
3. When you offer more than 1 product or service, you
a) Leave it to your customer to figure out how to make these work together
b) You have done everything possible to be sure that they are complementary
4. When someone takes more time than the others to finish a project, or task,
a) He gets laughed at, because he is obsessive about being correct
b) Others are required to be as careful and obsessive about output
If you are answering with more A’s then you have the same problem as the Indian roads. If you have answered with more B’s, then you are on the right track. You are thinking Quality.
You are putting in proper process to reduce customer problems. You are encouraging people who are focused on doing quality work - less errors and less patchy fixes that come apart.
Do we really want to uphold the example set by bad road conditions? Are you or your organization still in that mode- the poor customer has to take whatever the organization chooses to give? He may not take it for very long, because, as we have seen before, without quality, there are complaints. Quality is in your attitude – see question 4 above. It reflects in everything you do.
There can be far more said on quality. But I will stop here for now.
Let’s analyze this sample list of complaints:
- The potholes: caused by low quality material
- Patchy repaid work: leaving behind unwanted scraps, just addressing the specific part of the road with the pothole
- Pollution and traffic jam, dug up roads: carelessness about the people using the road, bad planning, closing off alternate roads at the same time
- Condition during monsoon: again to do with usage of low quality material that is unable to take the load.
Every one of these complaints is rooted in lack of two basic things:
- Quality focus
- Customer focus
The people who lay the roads are not bothered about quality or proper planning, because they are not bothered about how much the customers suffer because of their careless or money pinching attitude. They are laying the road, because they get paid money to do so.
It is easy to find fault with the public works department. That is because it is a problem visible to all and so easy to pinpoint. What about your customers? Are they complaining the same about the work that you deliver?
Now, think back to the work you do: whatever it is, running an organization or managing a team or driving a car. Think over the work your people do. Does this same attitudinal problem affect you or your team?
Here are some questions you can use to test yourself/ your team
1. When you deliver your product/service do you
a) wait till the customer tells you about a problem to fix it
b) do you take steps to fix any potential problems in advance
2. When the customer reports a problem, do you
a) Do whatever is required to make the customer happy
b) Address the customer’s problem, and put process in place so that it never occurs again. See if there are other related problems likely to occur.
3. When you offer more than 1 product or service, you
a) Leave it to your customer to figure out how to make these work together
b) You have done everything possible to be sure that they are complementary
4. When someone takes more time than the others to finish a project, or task,
a) He gets laughed at, because he is obsessive about being correct
b) Others are required to be as careful and obsessive about output
If you are answering with more A’s then you have the same problem as the Indian roads. If you have answered with more B’s, then you are on the right track. You are thinking Quality.
You are putting in proper process to reduce customer problems. You are encouraging people who are focused on doing quality work - less errors and less patchy fixes that come apart.
Do we really want to uphold the example set by bad road conditions? Are you or your organization still in that mode- the poor customer has to take whatever the organization chooses to give? He may not take it for very long, because, as we have seen before, without quality, there are complaints. Quality is in your attitude – see question 4 above. It reflects in everything you do.
There can be far more said on quality. But I will stop here for now.
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