Back when I wrote Writing Secret 5: Decide on One Ideal Reader, I suggested there was one primary reader and other secondary readers. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Nonfiction writing causes people to decide, rethink, or change their actions, all a change of some sort. That means the ideal reader for a given piece […]
At a recent client, a senior leader, Tim, said, “We realize we can’t do everything, but we don’t know how to get a handle on what we need to do.” We talked about what they measured and how long it took them to make decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) Tim explained that they
Do you ever want to bounce ideas off someone else? Or learn the way they approach a particular problem? I’m not talking about anyone’s specific capabilities. Instead, we can enhance our abilities by working with someone else. That brings its problem: How do you choose that learning partner? I’ve worked with several partners as a
I wrote about general meeting problems in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid). But “hybrid” teams have much worse meeting problems. During the pandemic, most of us understood how to create nebula team meetings that worked. (Dispersed teams are nebula teams. See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for
How to Describe All the Value When You Want to Influence Do you ever wonder how to describe the value of the changes you’ve led or want to lead? Fred, a project leader, needs a new job. His company—despite his project’s success—laid him off. He needs to influence hiring managers to look at his resume
Ginny, a project manager, had a frustrating meeting with her boss, Henry, the VP of Engineering. His exact words to her were, “I don’t care how you get it done, but we need all of these two feature sets done. Now!” She explained she needed more teams to finish the work. Otherwise, people would be
Jim, a relatively new manager said, “I don’t have nearly enough time. I’m in meetings all the time. And I still need to do some of my previous technical work. I feel stretched from one end of the work day to the other.” We spoke for a few minutes. I asked him to eyeball the
If we want more ease and better results, we need to be able to change when the world changes. Yet, we don’t always notice these changes, so we don’t create options and experiment. Too often, we feel as if the world drags us down. We double-down on what we’ve been doing. Instead, we need to
Work Solo or Collaborate? How to Choose Based on What Benefits You Do you prefer collaborative or solo work? Some of us prefer to work alone because we know how to be effective, even if our work is not independent of everyone else’s work. Or, if we work as part of a workgroup, such as
I started this series by realizing managers have (too) many decisions to make. The longer it takes managers to make any single decision, the longer it might take to make all the decisions. That’s Little’s Law, applied to decisions. In Part 1, I recommended that managers start with their oldest possible decision and decide what