Best Travel Tips?

The holidays and holiday travel season is upon us.  This short post is a request for the community to share any great travel tips they have for less stressful travel.  One of the podcasts series I listen to is ManagerTools.  One of their casts discussed great travel tips.  I’ve adapted a couple of their ideas and added some of my own.  Full disclaimer.  I used to try to surf the web and get the best deal on different aggregator websites.  I’m now a BIG believer in using a travel agent.  it just took one flight cancellation out of Portland OR coming back to the East Coast for me to be a believer. If you want a recommendation, I can certainly give a ringing endorsement to my travel agent, Janine.

Here are three tips I have learned:

1-Choose a primary airline. Base your decision on where you fly most frequently and whether the airline has a hub near you.

2-Get and use a travel agent-see above.

3-Enroll in a Frequent Flyer program.  Look especially at those programs that allow you to double dip and use your points for things other than simply flight miles-gives you many more options.

Now what are yours? Please comment below.

All the best,

Chris

6 Keys for Every Leader

Had a chance to hear a senior leader address a group of high potential senior leaders today.  This senior leader spent time talking about six keys that every senior person should keep in mind.  They are three pairs of characteristics:

1. Creativity and Problem Solving:  Creativity is not the exclusive domain of the artistic among us.  Creativity is the ability sets of information and put them together in different ways.  Problem Solving is the capability to get things done.  One nugget:  Vision without execution is hallucination.

2- Leadership and Management: Leadership is all about people.  Management is all about processes.  Leadership is about change and management is about process improvement.

3-Speak well and Write well:  Pay attention to some of the great public speakers. Watch what they do with their hands, their voice cadence, their postures, gestures, and how they use silence.  Learn to write with active voice.  Many word processing applications have a reading index that you can use to ensure that your writing is clear and crisp.

 

Many thanks to the participants who made this session as  valuable as it was!

All the best,

Chris

50 coolest websites from Time Magazine

Ran across this article in Time Magazine last week. It is a list of Time’s 50 coolest websites.

Check it out here. They also have a list of what they call the essential sites.

What websites do you find you cannot do without?

The 3 C’s

I read an article from Wall Street Journal last month on Nate McMillan (basketball coach of the NBA Supersonics) and how he uses time outs as a strategic tool. The stats suggest that he calls more time-outs than his peers-it may be a function of the relatively youthful age of his team.  What struck me was how he used timeouts as a reminder of what he focuses on during practice.

He calls them the 3 C’s:

Calm

Clarity (clear about what we are doing and what we want to accomplish)

Consistent

It reminded me of how great leaders create conditions where they repeat their key points over and over again to ensure that it reaches into the organization. Call it your teachable point of view, call it communicating your vision, or call it beating the message into all aspects of their organizations.

So, do these three C’s make sense to you?

Chris

One on Ones with your key direct reports

It’s baseball playoff time and the start of the “payoff” for teams and individuals doing the right things most of the time. An interesting part of baseball is that you have a large number of individuals working individually for the collective good of the team.

Like baseball players and managers, one of the right “things” to do for us as managers and leaders is to help your employees grow and develop their talent. A good tool to use to help your direct reports grow is a term called “one on one” meetings (O3 as shorthand). O3s can and should be done with your key direct reports or indirect reports. There are multiple benefits to O3s-encouraging their participation, be more active in team meetings, keep your projects and priorities on track, and it helps when it is time for you to collect info for the annual reviews at the end of the year.

I found these tips to be useful when I conduct O3s:

1-formally schedule them with your subordinates or individuals running key projects on a monthly basis. Save more frequently scheduled O3s with those who are either new or marginal in performance.

2-Block out about an hour for each of the O3s. Any longer tends to be counterproductive.

3-Neutral sites-Don’t conduct the O3s in your office-find a conference room or another place where you can shut the door and maintain privacy and enhance focus for both you and your direct report.

4-Split your time in about 50/50%. About half the time should be an update by your subordinate on the status of different projects and any future milestones that are required for achieving team and organizational goals. Save the other 50% for informal question and answer.

5-Who’s on First?-continuing the (poor) baseball analogy, save the last 5 minutes to summarize and outline who has to do what for the next monthly meeting. Otherwise, you have a bull session where there are no outcomes. You are busy enough as it is with your other management duties-make this time useful.

6-Ensure that there is roll up-use your O3s to show how the team goals and objectives roll up to larger organizational objectives.

7-Document-I learned this from one of my colleagues, Dan Cable, who showed me how to set up a VERY simple spreadsheet that simply has 4 columns: Date, Who, What Happened, and How it helped or hurt the organization. Each month, I insert data on a spreadsheet for each of my direct reports. When annual review time comes around, I have longitudinal data that I can clearly see trends and themes. (STRONG HINT-don’t put this on the network drive where everybody can see it).