Common-Sense Tips for Leaders

So, what does it take to be a leader? We talk a lot about that on this blog, and today I saw (and liked) this simple list of 101 common-sense tips for managers (and really can apply to just about anyone in leadership position).

They broke the list down into different categorizes, and gave reasons behind most tips.

Here are 10 tips I liked from the list of 101 tips, which I encourage you to go read:

1. Only promise what you can realistically deliver. Don't create deadlines that you know you can't meet. By only promising what you know you can do, you'll be able to finish on time.
2. Delegate tasks. Spread work among your employees in a way that doesn't leave anyone overburdened while also allowing the project work smoothly.
3. Give credit when it's due. Don't take credit for your employees' ideas or hog their limelight. This action not only fosters resentment but also makes you seem untrustworthy.
4. Do only what is necessary. There are times when going above and beyond works, but doing so on a daily basis can derail your progress on more important issues. Get the key things done first, then see if you have time for additional things.
5. Do your least favorite tasks first. Get your most tedious and least desirable tasks out of the way earlier in the day. After that, everything else will be a breeze.
6. Remember that the customer is the boss. At the end of the day, your job is to make the customer happy. Act accordingly.
7. Don't be afraid to say you don't know. It's OK not to know the answer to every question. It's better to say you don't know and get back to a customer than to try to bluff your way through a conversation and have to backtrack later.
8. Keep an eye on the competition. Don't let the competition get the best of you. Keep up-to-date with what they're doing and use it to your advantage in managing your business.
9. Be empathetic to personal problems. Whether it should or not, what happens outside of work can have a big affect on the quality of work produced. Be sensitive if employees have personal issues that keep them from concentrating on work.
10. Remember that ethics matter above all. Be honest and reliable in all of your business and personal relationships.

Relationships Part 1 - Trust and Responsibility

This is the first article in a series on relationships. I decided to write on relationships due to recent work-related examples that I just went through, and I truly believe relationship management is an essential part of leadership. It's all about Keeping the Customer Happy...


Trust and Responsibility

I was amazed when I read Seth Godin's article about the Dabbawalla. They are delivery people who deliver thousands of lunches daily - barefoot - in Mumbai, India.

They are so accurate that the reported error rate is 1 per 6 million deliveries.
They never even miss a delivery during the worst weather (monsoon season)!

How is this possible? How do you create and run a service with thousands of employees, no technology and a poorly-educated workforce and have better than six sigma quality?

Here's why, according to Seth:

Simple: the dabbawallas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.

Can we learn from the Dabbawalla phenomenon? We better.. But here are other questions around this topic of building relationships:

1. Do you know your customer well and their needs?
   
2. Do you know HOW your customer wants to be dealt with? their style, their pet peeves ?
   
3. Do we invest in our customer-facing individuals, to invest in the relationships?
4. Would retention of customer-facing individuals affect our quality, relationships, success?
   

Thoughts?

The 12 dead elephants in your Project

We know about them, yet we choose to ignore them.

In an article by Computerworld, Bart Perkins lists 12 things that can kill projects. Unfortunetly, we sometime choose to ignore them for the sake of getting our projects off the ground.

Some are:

• A poor business case
• The business case is no longer valid
• The project is too long
• betting on a new unproven technology
  
• No contingency
• An arbitrary release date
• and more...
  

Don't you love those Icebreakers?

Do you remember the last Icebreaker you participated in?
You probably do, specially if you had to come up with it :)
Regardless, so you don't need to search a lot, I've compiled a huge list for you. Next time, come back to this post and pick from the links.

Here are some Icebreakers you may need to use sometime in your career:

• Top 10 Icebreakers (from Coachville top10 resource center)
  
• Icrebreakers (from Leadership Development program at UK)
  
• Icebreakers and Energizers (from BusinessFundamentals.com)
• Educational Icebreakers (from Teacher's Toolkit at About.com)
• Icebreakers for your next Nonprofit Meeting (from suite101.com)
  

So, find out what you want to use an icebreaker for in your meeting, and choose an appropriate one based on your needs.

Push to the Top on Your Own

There's always a list of Top 10 or Top 50 out there. Maybe in your industry, maybe within the company or even in your own department. How much you strive to make it to the top is an indicator of your drive to excellence, and how much you strive to put your Organization in the Top10 list, is an indicator of your drive in Leadership..

However, most of these lists reflect Last Year's accomplishments. If you simply "follow" what they did, then where is the innovation in that? and why would you deserve that spot?

Learn from HOW they got there, and work on what could put you and your organization at the top THIS year, with TODAY's technology and innovation...

Here are two examples of "Top 10" or "Top 22" lists to motivate the leader in you:

Top 10 Companies where SOA made a difference in 2006

Top 22 Churches in America

Powerpoint Presentations done right

I'm not sure how many of you saw the recent "It's a jungle out there" commercials on TV from careerbuilder.com on the brutal culture of the work office. Go to the link and watch "Donuts" if you have not seen it. Really funny, and somehow I can relate to those "pointless meetings" they depict.

Can we ever avoid the pointless meetings? Not sure. But we can make a difference, one presentation at a time.

I just read Guy Kawasaki's "10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint". If you've not read it, I encourage you to read his straight-to-the-point post on the topic.

Simply stated: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and 30-point font !!

Try it in your next meeting.

Tell me what you want, what you really really want

In our pursuit of innovation and bringing value-add to our clients, we find ourselves asking our customers "What do you want? What enhancements would you rather we spend our time on?"

So they tell us. and we build it... was that innovative?

Anthony Ulwick says in a Harvard Business Review article titled Turn Customer Input into Innovation, that when you ask a customer what they want, they end up describing solutions - products or features, out of what they've experienced before. They can’t imagine what they don’t know about new technologies. So they end up suggesting things other vendors already offer, and thus you end up with the "me-too" products or incremental enhancement that others can do as well. So, you didn't get rid of competition, and you're not really that innovative if you're giving them what others can give.


Anthony gives a five-step plan (and much more) to turning customer input into innovation, but the nugget behind it is translating the customer/interviewee's solution statements into outcomes—by asking why customers want the stated solutions.

Along the way, you end up collecting information about what the customer truly wants.

It's not the "extra fields to save and view customer inquiries" (solution), rather it's "provide quick turnaround for customer inquiries", for example. When the customers go ahead and rate each outcome based on importance and satisfaction, you have a much better chance at innovating, because now you know what they really really want..