What is the most significant concept, habit or strategy you have learned, this last year, which has helped you be more effective and successful in your position?
Answers
Pour yourself into your people. Grow and develop them to be the best at what they do and never stop challenging continuous improvement.
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Christie - Love your answer! The success of your people is your success.
Excellent strategy. Thanks for great response.
It is a constant improvement and
Thanks Emerson, having the ability to slide up and down from the detail and tactical needs to the 35,000 ft level is a great skill. I have found that the best managers are those that understand and respect the processes and challenges associated with the day to day
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Thanks Richard. As I said, it is a constant improvement and learning as I still find myself (from time to time) stuck in either place and have to reorient or look at things from the other perspective. The skill is arriving at a decision with those two perspectives in mind.
Look for the underlying commitment - why people say what they do or act the way they do. It may have little to do with what they say. If we can talk about that commitment, we can come to an agreement.
Quit taking yourself so seriously and take others and the goals of the organization more seriously. Try to strike a more balanced view of yourself which will help with pouring yourself into others.
Very good strategies from all of you. I have also learnt that you do not know it all. Open up to learn from your team. Some may have very critical knowledge for you to harness for your success. You may have a good system, but you only succeed through the people.
Secondly, integrity is very key. There could be pressure to lure you into malpractice, as a
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Excellent Teresa. Our people are our greatest assets and our responsibility as Senior managers is to help our staff feel valued, demonstrate integrity and achieve success.
You can't take the focus away from blocking and tackling. Things are changing at a faster and faster pace but you have to concentrate on the basics. Once those start to slide, it is a slippery slope.
My firm spent part of 2013 developing a proprietary method of polling (pro/con) among various alternative actions that allow critical stakeholders and those charged with implementing the options to opine on the options with a numeric scale.
It is an invaluable tool to identify additional options, to build consensus, to identify stakeholders who need to be "sold" on the consensus position, and to warn clients off the "consensus" by allowing critical stakeholders to identify the potential shortfalls in the decision.
Once a consensus choice has been implemented, we go back and poll the stakeholders on the results so that the consensus decision can be evaluated by those who made it.
We believe it leads to constant and continual improvement in organizational decision-making. It also allows decisions to be fine-tuned after-the-fact to improve the ultimate outcome.
Thanks J.G.,
It sounds like an excellent tool for those complex projects that require extensive team involvement, support and buy-in. Gaining support and momentum are often the more difficult aspects of establishing a new project that requires change.
First thing in the morning, spend 5-10 minutes informally with your team to discuss anything under the Sun. This exercise creates emotional bank with employees, unknowingly acts as catalyst for team building/ binding which ultimately delivers the desired result…
It works!!
Relating to what Teresa Anyango said above, I realize I don't know everything, so I have been habitually reading finance and
Delegate well. Be more of a coach than a manager.
Continuous improvement-constantly get better or you will be left behind.
My big leap forward this year was transitioning from