One of our British members posted something today that was so good I wanted to highlight it.

In order to do her post justice, some background. Quite often when I am coaching someone, I get a comment that sounds something like, “hey, I know everybody else knows this, so I couldn’t ask you except in private. What do I do about ‘X’”?

The thing that USED to catch me, but now just makes me smile, is the “everybody else knows this.” It’s as if every manager I’ve ever coached is the ONE who doesn’t “get it”, and they’re deathly afraid of being caught.

Well, here’s the truth. Very few - less than a hundred, maybe even less than 50 - of the tens of thousands of managers I have known actually “get it” in a way that puts them at ease and at peace with their skills in ALL situations. What might surprise you is that they’re not all clustered at the top of their organizations. They’re not all CEOs. [I know plenty of CEOs who are terrible managers, and yet still are quite deservedly CEO.]

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Further, it doesn’t do as much good as people think to “hide” our weaknesses. Trust me, everybody knows them. And in the spirit of rewarding self-deprecating candor - which is just professional honesty - here’s an excerpt from the post I mentioned above:

I listened to the time management podcast at the end of last week. It was a tough week, back to back meetings and nothing usual getting done. Well, so I thought! Friday, I did a quick tally of just how many meetings I had - 20 hours! So where did the other 17 (plus!) hours go? I don’t know. But it did incentivise me to block out some time for my number 1 priority this week - hidden in my diary subtly marked MH!

This morning when I got in, I tried to ignore my email and start immediately on my priority. I dithered a bit but started about 10 minutes late. 45 minutes later, the document I’ve been trying to start/finish for weeks was done. Cool! I thought. That was so important, what shall I do now.. and for the next 3 hours, when i had uninterrupted time that I never get, I faffed and dithered and didn’t achieve anything.

I’m still trying to work out what I learnt from this.. but going to try again tomorrow - the FRPlan is about to be ticked off!

You can find the post and responses here.

Thanks to Wendii for her candor. More is better.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under general.

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