It’s a source of amazement and some amusement that many articulate people are reduced to blubbering incompetents when required to put their thoughts down in a written form. Some people are intimidated by a blank piece of paper or computer screen. Let’s examine why this feeling of panic overtakes individuals who otherwise appear to be…
Tag: Management
How to manage your promotion. Is the Game Worth the Prize?
Being an outstanding manager and concurrently working up to the next rung on the ladder is a constant in almost every manager’s career—unless he loses interest in gaining a promotion. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to pay the price of moving to the next level. Preparing for your promotion That is healthy if…
Office Politics: Playing the Game
As you may already know, you’re judged by the performance of your area of responsibility. The people who report to you are as important to your future as are the people to whom you report. That leads directly to the matter of office politics. It exists everywhere. People recoil at the idea of office politics,…
Can an Understudy Contribute to Your Promotion?
As soon as you’ve mastered your job, you must start looking for an understudy. The reason for this is clear. Decision makers are going to be less likely to promote you if doing so will create an operational void. By having an understudy who is prepared to take your position, you make yourself a better…
Avoid Becoming Indispensable
It is important not to allow yourself to become indispensable. Some managers trap themselves into this kind of situation. In their effort to ensure the quality of work, they request that all difficult questions and decisions be referred to them. It doesn’t take long for employees to figure out that anything out of the ordinary…
Developing a Positive Self Image
Having a positive opinion of your own ability is not an ego problem if it’s a realistic assessment. People can get awfully mixed up in dealing with this self image thing. There are always people who want you to feel guilty if you have a healthy opinion of yourself. But as the old saying goes,…
Managing Customer Relationships
In previous articles I have emphasized that ultimate success is not determined by weather the project was completed on time, within budget, or according to specifications, but whether the customer is satisfied with what has been accomplished. Customer satisfaction is the bottom line. Bad news travels faster and further than good news. For every happy…
Outsourcing Project Work: Why, How, When?
…being a good partner has become a key corporate asset. I call it a company’s collaborative advantage. In the global economy, a well developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive leg up.—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor It is rare in today’s flat world to find important projects…
7 Easy Ways You Can Rejuvenate Your Project Team
Over the course of a long project, a team sometimes drifts off course and loses momentum. The project manager needs to swing into action to realign the project team with the project objectives and step on the pedal. What options are there for the project team? There are both formal and informal solutions. Informal actions:…
Virtual Project Team: Challenges, Solutions, Success
Building a high-performance project team among a mixture of part-time and full-time members is a challenging task. Consider how much more challenging it is to build a team when members cannot engage in face-to-face interactions. Such would be the case for a virtual project team in which the team members are geographically situated so that…