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Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.
10 Common Time Management Mistakes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
How well do you manage your time? If you’re like many people, your answer may not be completely positive! Perhaps you feel overloaded, and you often have to work late to hit your deadlines. Or maybe your days seem to go from one crisis to another, and this is stressful and demoralizing.
Many of us know that we could be managing our time more effectively; but it can be difficult to identify the mistakes that we’re making, and to know how we could improve. When we do manage our time well, however, we’re exceptionally productive at work, and our stress levels drop. We can devote time to the interesting, high-reward projects that can make a real difference to a career. In short, we’re happier!
In this article we’ll look at 10 of the most common time management mistakes, as well as identifying strategies and tips that you can use to overcome them.
Activity Logs: Finding More Time in Your Day
How much time do you spend at work doing things that don’t contribute to your success? At first, you may say “not much.” But – especially if you haven’t used Activity Logs before – you may be surprised by how much more time you can find.
When you properly understand how you use your time at work, you can minimize or eliminate low value activities. This means that you can do more high value work, while still being able to leave the office at a sensible time.
So, how can you understand this? One useful way is to keep an Activity Log, and that’s what we’re looking at in this article.
Leadership is especially critical when organizations have to adapt to difficult business environments.
When times are good, leading a company or a team is exciting. Resources are plentiful, customers are satisfied, and opportunity is everywhere. However, when the economic conditions are challenging, this excitement and positive energy can weaken. People feel the pressures of work, and they fear for their jobs.
These worries and fears present a major challenge for leaders who need to keep their teams productive and on target.
One of the keys to protecting yourself and your business in an economic downturn is to develop a culture that builds, and sustains effective leadership practices. After all, good leadership is good leadership, regardless of the economic climate.
However, during difficult times, top-notch leadership skills become even more important. Second-rate leaders might be able to keep a company going in a strong economy. However, you need high-performing leaders if you’re going to succeed in tough times.
Of course, you need leaders who can control costs and conserve cash. However, you also need leaders who see opportunity – and who will strive to seize that opportunity – despite all the negativity. You need leaders who remain committed to their people. And you need leaders who can transfer their positive outlook to the people around them.
How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind
If you’re a leader, it’s likely that not everyone who works with you will agree with the decisions you make — and that’s okay. Leadership involves making unpopular decisions while navigating complex relationships with colleagues, partners, and clients. But often, you will need to get buy-in from these constituents, and therefore you will need to convince them to change their mind.
There is little friction involved in convincing people who are your natural supporters. But trying to change the mind of a dissenter, or a detractor, is a different story. How do you go about convincing someone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you? Someone who gives you a flat out “no”? Read on to find out.
Remote Managers Are Having Trust Issues
Covid-19 has thrust many leaders into remote management which requires a different skill set than face-to-face management. They have been forced to make this transition quickly, and for the most part, without training. While some jobs have proven adaptable, many sectors are not well-suited for the remote environment and many workers have home lives that present overwhelming challenges. As a result, some managers may be finding their roles more difficult than before — and making their subordinates’ lives more stressful as they struggle to adapt.
Even prior to the pandemic, managing teleworkers presented unique obstacles. Research shows that managers who cannot “see” their direct reports sometimes struggle to trust that their employees are indeed working. When such doubts creep in, managers can start to develop an unreasonable expectation that those team members be available at all times, ultimately disrupting their work-home balance and causing more job stress.
If we look at what is happening today and consider the many scenarios employees may be facing — especially those with compromised finances or families to care for — we can hypothesize that certain workers are struggling to perform at the same level as they did before, or at the least, are seeing some changes in their degree of productivity. This, in turn, could create a negative spiral in which manager mistrust leads to micromanagement, which then leads to drops in employee motivation, further impairing productivity.
5 Tips for Managing an Underperformer — Remotely
While a majority of employers believe that that their employees will return to their workplaces after Covid-19’s impact diminishes, working from home isn’t going to disappear. The reality is that a huge number of people were already working from home and that number is only likely to rise post-pandemic. As the manager of a remote team, you can’t afford to ignore underperformance from remote workers, whether they’re temporarily at home, working in local branch offices, or half a world away.
Although you might assume that managing an underperformer in a remote environment would be more challenging (who wants to have a series of difficult conversations over Zoom?), there’s actually an upside. You may actually be more effective in handling the situation because you have to plan and structure your interactions, rather than catching up in the hallway or waiting for them to stop by when you’re in the office. Here are five things you can do to help remote underperformers improve their game.
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