For some, life feels like an endless journey of excitement and accomplishment. They move from success to success, opportunity to opportunity, revelling in their ability to show up, face the challenges of the day and successfully apply their skills and talents. For others, life feels like an endless tunnel of dread and anxiety. The move…
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Inferior communication often results in increased stress, lost opportunities, misused resources, lost money and wasted time. Relationships and projects suffer. Effective communication builds relationships, boosts career success and enhances project completion. Say what you mean, get your message understood and acted upon. This month, guest presenter George Torok dives into strategies to communicate effectively and…
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For some, life feels like an endless journey of excitement and accomplishment. They move from success to success, opportunity to opportunity, revelling in their ability to show up, face the challenges of the day and successfully apply their skills and talents. For others, life feels like an endless tunnel of dread and anxiety. The move…
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When I became a manager, I was incredibly naïve about what it meant ‘to manage’. I micro-managed everything. I had no sense of how to spend my time. I rushed from one task to another without any attempt to think about what I should be doing and ultimately, I failed in my new role. Not…
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The topic of facilitation is continuing to preoccupy us (and this webinar series). Mark’s final comment last month was that “success in facilitiating is abstract.” There is no way to directly measure it, except by whether or not you helped guide the group to where it needed to go. And a great question we didn’t…
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There are few greater challenges than facilitating a meeting well. There is process behind it, and there are guidelines. There are strategies you can employ in some situations, and yet those self same strategies will fail you utterly in others. And there is very little guidance around which situation will succeed, and which will epically…
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Managers must learn to delegate. If the mandate of a manager is to manage the activities of others, then the ability to delegate effectively is a necessary, even mandatory, skillset. To that end, we’ve glommed onto an effective methodology known as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reasonable and Time-bound). We learn to use it, once we…
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We talk about organizational culture a lot. We recognize that there are ways of working that are unique to individual organizations. That we need to learn those ways, and to understand “how things are done here.” We learn—sometimes the hard way—that we need to respect culture as we manage change. But what, exactly, is culture?…
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Ask virtually anyone in the field of project management about the role of project sponsor, and they’ll tell you the role is vital to project success. Ask them what that role actually does, however, and you’ll get an astonishing array of answers. Ask them for great examples of project sponsorship and—sadly—you’ll like come up empty-handed….
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As we become better at managing people, and especially when managing change, a question arises: Are we manipulating people? A simple, honest and immediate answer is “Yes! Management is about manipulating people to get the results we want.” If that answer raises hairs on the back of your neck, it’s because ‘being manipulated’ carries with…
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