Mike Russell

Below are questions that directly assess your effectiveness as a manager. Do you as a manager:

1. Want to manage people?
2. Use more than 2 of the 5 management approaches/styles for handling situations?
3. Prefer or tend to focus either on tasks/controlling OR on people/relating in situations?
4. Consistently excel in both productivity and satisfaction – your own, your co-workers, your reports, your customers, your owners/shareholders, and any other significant stakeholders?

How did you do?

Here is some perspective on each question:

[Read more…] about Quick 4 question self-check for your effectiveness as a manager

… internal organizational issues tend to remain the same.

Consider this list of work challenges from 20 years ago that I found when cleaning out some files:

• Slowness in responding to market and world changes + internal change resistance
• Slow execution
• Lack of focus and traction on strategic issues, including confusing strategic plans with strategy
• Poor (or no) performance management, leadership development, and succession planning
• Team (lack of) performance
• Process inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, especially for product and software development
• Inability to attract and keep talent
• Conflicting priorities or worse, no real priorities
• Multitasking to distraction and lack of results
• Need for innovation
• Too many meetings
• Burnout and overload

There were more, but you get the idea.

How many of these look familiar? For example, how many times have you heard “how can we go faster”? Or had your calendar loaded with so many ineffective meetings that you couldn’t get any work done?

Don’t treat symptoms … look for root causes and make real, sustainable changes this year – don’t wait another year!