Do Business Well

The performance of his product was his best publicity! Let it also be yours.

If you are the first in the right market you may need little advertisement. Sun Microsystems’ workstations were the first on the market with the new UNIX operating system and needed no advertisement. They became the world leaders with their Sun workstations and in the early nineties were voted the fastest growing company on the Fortune 500 list, with a phenomenal 114 per cent compounded annual growth rate. Continue Reading »

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• You may want to donate a portion of the proceeds of your business to a good cause like the church, medical research, a university or a charity. Money and knowledge are the same. They mean little if you simply collect them, but mean everything when you employ them, share them and put them to work.

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“Everyone is exceptional” has a second meaning: Everyone should be treated as an exception. Each employee has his own filter, his own way of interpreting the world around him, and therefore each employee will demand different things of you, his manager.

Some want you to leave them alone from almost the first moment they are hired. Others feel slighted if you don’t check in with them every day. Some want to be recognized by you, “the boss.” Others see their peers as the truest source of recognition. Some crave their praise on a public stage. Others shun the glare of publicity, valuing only that quiet, private word of thanks. Each employee breathes different psychological oxygen. Continue Reading »

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As you might expect, great managers take a welcomingly pragmatic view of our innate imperfection. They begin with an important distinction, a distinction between weaknesses and nontalents. A nontalent is a mental wasteland. It is a behavior that always seems to be a struggle. It is a thrill that is never felt. It is an insight recurrently missed. In isolation, nontalents are harmless. You might have a nontalent for remembering names, being empathetic, or thinking strategically. Who cares? You have many more nontalents than you do talents, but most of them are irrelevant. You should ignore them. Continue Reading »

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Of course, none of this means that great managers ignore nonperformance. They don’t. Focus on strengths is not another name for the power of positive thinking. Bad things happen. Some people fail. Some people struggle. And even your star performers have their faults. Poor performance must be confronted head-on, if it is not to degenerate into a dangerously unproductive situation. And it must be confronted quickly—as with all degenerative diseases, procrastination in the face of poor performance is a fool’s remedy. Continue Reading »

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First, their feedback was constant. They varied the frequency according to the preferences or the needs of the individual employee. But whether the meetings happened for twenty minutes every month or for an hour every quarter, these performance feedback meetings were, nonetheless, a constant part of their interaction with each employee throughoutthe year. How much of a time commitment did this represent? According to the managers in Gallup’s study, the total time spent discussing each employee’s style and performance was roughly four hours per employee per year. And as one front-line supervisor said, “If you can’t spend four hours a year with each of your people, then you’ve either got too many people, or you shouldn’t be a manager.” Continue Reading »

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How can the manager help? In the new career, the employee is the star. It is his responsibility to take control of his career. It is his responsibility to look in the mirror and make sound choices based upon what he discovers. But what role should the manager play? She is no longer the gatekeeper, picking and choosing from among the most attractive, the most skilled, the most experienced supplicants. What is her role? Continue Reading »

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Each manager’s routine was different, reflecting his or her unique style. Nonetheless, hidden within this diversity we found four characteristics common to the “performance management” routines of great managers.

First, the routine is simple. Great managers dislike the complexity of most company-sponsored performance appraisal schemes. They don’t want to waste their time trying to decipher the alien terms and to fill out bureaucratic forms. Instead they prefer a simple format that allows them to concentrate on the truly difficult work: what to say to each employee and how to say it. Continue Reading »

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B. If your manager forces you to do things her way . . . she is probably focusing on process too much. Pick your moment, perhaps during your performance planning meeting, and tell her that you want to define your role more by its outcomes than by its steps. Ask her which outcomes she would use to measure your success. As you discuss this, describe for her how your style, although different from hers, will still enable you to achieve the outcomes expected of you. Continue Reading »

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No matter how many books you read, how many training programs you attend, or how many meetings you run, you can always improve your facilitating and recording skills. Professionals in any field know this. Famous athletes or performers are constantly experimenting, trying new techniques, striving for perfection which they know, no matter how hard they work, no one can attain. Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to receive professional facilitation training, if you want to become a topnotch facilitator or recorder, you will have to continue learning by yourself. Continue Reading »

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