Supervisors See Four Kinds of Personnel

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What makes a good worker? Here is a collection of criteria from seven different types of organization, where Supervisors – not Managers – defined four levels of employees.

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Performance Management = Count the Hours Worked? Or the Results Produced?

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What is “performance management”? Tracking how many hours people are at work? Or tracking the results they produce? Hmmm. It’s easier to watch the clock than do the real work of managing performance.

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Getting Things Done. Or Not.

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Procrastinating on our unfinished chores and projects is natural. Maintaining an effective “Results Wanted” list – and doing the work to check things off that list – isn’t hard either. But we sometimes forget that’s what it takes to get some things done.

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Training for Accountability: First Things First

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On-the-job training should focus first on what people will be accountable for producing and/or delivering. You can add the secondary matters of importance after they are clear about what counts most.

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The Manager’s Golden Rule: Make Production Goals Visible

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Humans aren’t always wired up to Get Things Done. In the swirl of daily life, we need a way to remember which things really matter.

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Servant Leadership vs. Management

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A friend asked me about “servant leadership”. So I looked it up. No thanks. I’ll stick with managing agreements and engaging people in accomplishing our goals and projects.

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Stop Managing People, Step 2. Reconsider Those 1:1 Meetings

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Private conversations are useful in the workplace for some things, like hiring or re-positioning someone. But performance conversations – agreements for what people will deliver – are best done by the group. It builds teams, increases integrity, and improves “delivery performance”.

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Stop Managing People, Step 1

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People pay attention to people – and make lots of assessments and judgments. That’s natural. But it maybe not the best way for a manager to support high performance or reach an organization’s goals.

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This Middle Manager is Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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When your Boss is not paying attention to what you need, and you are managing a group of people who want to become a team, what do you do? Claire paved the way.

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Productive Communication Works!

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A woman who had been waiting for an executive in another department to make a budget decision finally stopped waiting and… communicated productively. Good work, Kelly!

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