Tag: manager-tools

Back in January, I found out that Mark Horstman’s second book, The Effective Hiring Manager, was available for pre-order on Amazon.com. It was a no-brainer: I ordered it immediately.

When a Manager Tools licensee newsletter announced in August that Horstman would be signing copies, I ordered a signed copy. I had to get a signed copy to match my signed copy of his first book, The Effective Manager.

Today my unsigned Amazon copy arrived, and I was as excited to unwrap it as my sixteen year-old daughter is to unwrap BTS merchandise.

If I ever met Mark Horstman (or Michael Auzenne for that matter) I’d be as speechlessly mortified as my wife would be in front of Barbra Streisand. It would be as bad as Troy from Community meeting LeVar Burton.

I know, in my head, they are just people. But I’ve heard their voices on the podcast for so long, and their guidance has made so much sense, and I’ve benefitted so much that I’ve been affected the way that is normally associated with cringing women at the front of a Beatles concert.

via GIPHY

Unfortunately, a book on management is unlikely to ever spark a global craze of enthusiastic admiration. It seems that only happens for memes that are merely entertaining, diverting, or even infuriating. But, if you have to bear the responsibility of being accountable for another person’s performance, if you have to participate in the process of defining a company by deciding who gets to work there, if you find yourself tap dancing as fast as you can—wondering if you’re the only one that feels this unprepared: then get this book.

Now, there is one thing infuriating about Manager Tools. One thing that keeps me wondering.

You see, normally I don’t feel confident in recommending a technology without being aware of several instances where I would NOT recommend it. (If you can’t see anything wrong with a technology, then you are probably stuck in the bad part of the hype cycle, and painful enlightenment awaits.) So, I’ve been listening for eight years now and waiting for something I disagree with.

I’ve been waiting to find something to disillusion me. Show me your limits, Manager Tools! Well, I’m sure there’s something, somewhere….

Frankly, if you’re a manager or team lead then manager tools is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s hard for me to think of something wrong with sliced bread, too.

Accepting Uncertainty at GE

RE: GE Re-Engineers Performance Reviews, Pay Practices

So General Electric is going Lean? It’s exciting to hear they have hired Eric Ries as a consultant to shake up the emphasis on Six Sigma. If you’re a Manager Tools fan some of the changes at GE simply match good management.

That’s right: It shouldn’t take 5 months to write your annual review. And yes, the annual review shouldn’t be the linch-pin in your performance management system. You should be getting regular, quick, fine-grained performance insight from your manager and your peers. See Feedback and Peer Feedback.

I chuckled a bit at the comment from Janis Semper saying, “It’s not realistic to expect perfection anymore.” Anymore? Yeah, we should always have high standards. We should be disappointed when we miss them. And managers should know their people aren’t going to be perfect.

I actually interviewed a guy that said he had a perfect track record over decades in software of always hitting every deadline with quality. Maybe it’s me, but that actually made me trust him less. Perfection requires artificiality. (See Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park — the book, not the movie.) You can’t really hit it. And if you do, how low are your goals?

It’s great to hear GE will be considering giving incentives closer to the time of performance. No more home-runs in February that have to wait until next January for a raise — or similar.

Offering managers the ability to give their employees time off as a reward? That sounds a bit like HR officially blessing what managers are already doing for their people. But I’ve never worked there. Maybe managers really don’t feel they could do that there already.

Overall, GE’s emphasis on learning and improving faster is a great application of Lean principles, and plain old management feedback.

On a snarky note: the peer feedback via a tool sounds just like what engineers would do. “I want to tell Bob he did a great job here, and might want to change this over here. If only I had a mobile application so that I could type that up and send it to him.” Yeah, what about just briefly and respectfully chatting with Bob?

It sounds like the mobile app’s real purpose is to achieve that ever elusive holy grail of performance management: managing my boss.

That’s right, the company is encouraging employees to give feedback to their bosses via the app. And employees are reluctant to do that. Rightly so.

A good manager has a relationship with his directs that allows them to give “insights” to him. But it’s naïve to assume that all of the managers in a company have that relationship. A program that pushes all employees to speak to bosses with an expectation that they will always be heard, never subtly penalized, and that the boss will change her behavior… a bridge too far.

After facilitated group sessions to gather feedback for bosses “the group is expected to hold the manager accountable for changing his or her behavior, through regular check-ins, but it is a work in progress.”

Yeah, that’s not going to work. Not unless the process involves the boss’ boss.

A group of directs can’t manage their boss. And even if it happens once, it’s not reproducible.

If you want the state of management to improve in a company then directors have to manage their managers for it. You can’t delegate that to the individual contributors.

Just my prediction.

So, yes. Please adopt lean. Please give regular feedback, not just once a year. Please collect information on how management can change. Don’t promise that a group can change their manager on their own.

Recommend: Effective Communicator and Interviewer Conference

Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Jan 2016.

Waking up in my own bed again after two days in Palo Alto for the Manager Tools training on DISC (Effective Communications Conference — ECC) and interviewing (Effective Interviewer Conference — EIC). Bottom Line: I recommend them, both. The Experience The setting was intimate. There were 11 attendees the first day and seven the second.… Continue reading Recommend: Effective Communicator and Interviewer Conference

Be Likable

Here’s a gem from the February 20th edition of Mad, Sad, Glad from ManagerTools.com: This is a typical HBR article in that it’s long and academic.  The important part is that people would rather work with with someone who is incompetent than someone who is unlikable.  If you think that smarts are enough, refer to our very first… Continue reading Be Likable

What Works isn’t Stupid

The second rule of the Army is, “If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.” We could modify that to say, if it’s awkward, but it works, get over your awkwardness. Mark Horstman, Trinity Rollout Email Course, “But it feels awkward!”