#manager tools

[thesharpiemarkerapproach]

If you want to be a great manager, do these things with love. What I mean is professional love: the willingness to risk yourself for the benefit of another. It means doing something that may be a little more difficult for you, as a way of showing respect for your colleagues and your organization.

Mark Horstman, The Effective Manager

This guy and the whole Manager Tools team have become my idols. Have learned and continue to learn so much from them.

[rickschrader]

Work family balance

This morning, I listened to a Manager Tools podcast about work/family balance. It basically argued that trying to balance them is the wrong approach to begin with, since family should always be a higher priority. Balancing them is like saying the Sun and a yellow M&M are the same. It makes sense to schedule time with the family first and then work can have remaining time.

[viciousmenhavemanymasters]

For this reason, Andreessen believes that tech companies should be run by their founders. The problem for eBay is that its founder, Pierre Omidyar, had no interest in running it. And Donahoe, a talented manager, had the wisdom to know he was not the kind of visionary who could found an innovative tech company. So he decided he was going to have to go after the next best thing. He was going to have to build a team of founders, or founder-types, and give them the run of the place. He, meanwhile, would operate as their in-house consultant (and boss).

You Can Explain eBay’s $50 Billion Turnaround With Just This One Crazy Story

This is perfect. Gathering together the innovative, creative people, and then acting as a mediator between them. That’s kind of ideal for me. I don’t consider myself particularly creative, but I think I’m good at telling dirt from diamonds and talking in a way to get the most out of the people who do the good work.

[viciousmenhavemanymasters]

Manager Tools fights discrimination

One of the enduring strengths of Manager Tools is it's focus on behaviourally-evidenced evaluations. They're all about looking at what people actually do, learning to identify that behaviour, and using it to form evaluations (and vice versa, in order to help people to come off better in evaluations). They're all about practical guidance based on observing real patterns of behaviour. Now, it's one thing thing to talk about anti-discriminatory policies and to just will yourself into being fair. But as Horstman points out in these podcasts, we're all biased in many ways we can't overcome by sheer willpower, in the moment. The only way to defeat one's biases is giving voice to one's judgements - and the only fair judgements you could look someone in the eye and repeat are those based in evidence. I just love this. I was listening to the Manager Tools podcast on how to feed back to job candidates you've rejected after interviewing. He's very impassioned about this and I love this (and how he very obviously uses women in hypothetical examples or will say "her" when talking about hypothetical managers). He goes off about how effective management, guided by principles of observation regarding demonstrated behaviours... He'll go on about how this is the way to fight discrimination in hiring, in firing, in the workplace overall. I mean, it's not a cure-all, but damn if it doesn't go a long way towards routing out the weasley racism or sexism of "she's just not a good fit" or "he's just not quite right."

[garagequeen]

[civdesignr]

This cast concludes our conversation on an even more basic model for effective meetings than in our original guidance.

[civdesignr]

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Owning the Inputs Part 1 - Manager Tools

A podcast from one of the sites i follow called Manager tools about direct employees who blame others for things not completing projects on time.