Roberto Martinez, a (clearly very cool) Manager Tools member, shared with us last night his Spanish translation of our One on One email (announcing that you intend to start having them.) You can find the original HERE.

Equipo: He decidido empezar a reunirme individualmente contigo (y con el resto del equipo) cada semana. A esta reuniones las llamaremos “Uno a Uno” [“ONE on One’s”]. Es un buen camino para mantener una comunicación buena, abierta y seguir construyendo nuestra relación profesional. Nos reuniremos 30 minutos cada semana, con un agenda establecida previamente (que no deberá cambiarse). Será una conversación privada, sólo tú y yo, nos reuniremos cuando sea posible en persona o por teléfono. Es lo mismo que hacemos cada semana, pero de forma formal y bajo una agenda.

El formato que seguiremos en los 30 minutos, será siempre el mismo.

+ Los primeros 10 minutos serán para TU agenda, todo lo que me quieras contar de los temas que quieras: Tu trabajo, tu familia, de ti, pasatiempos, mascotas, tus Retos, tu Carrera, nuestra relación trabajando juntos. El objetivo primordial de esta reunión, serás TU.

+ Los 10 Minutos siguientes, serán para MI Agenda. En ese tiempo te comunicaré lo que necesite decirte. Hablaremos de proyectos en los que estamos trabajando juntos, cosas que necesito de ti, y direccionamiento que necesite comentarte. “Be prepared” en todos los casos haremos una breve revisión de todos los negocios a tu cargo (One Pager). En este tiempo quiero hablar de la oportunidades del negocio.

+Los últimos 10 minutos los usaremos tú y yo para hablar del FUTURO: Hablaremos de Desarrollo, Coaching y Feedback. Por lo general esta sección se lleva un poco mas de tiempo, por lo que a veces no la terminaremos pero no importa, tendremos el tiempo para establecer lo que queremos hacer y siempre tendremos tiempo la siguiente semana.

Probablemente estés pensando, “¿puedo confiar en él?” Espero que sí. Debo decirte que si de algo te quieres quejar, estoy dispuesto a escuchar, si en algo me estoy equivocando, estoy dispuesto a comentarlo, espero que estas contribuciones las hagas en forma objetiva y profesional lo que me interesará es tener un diálogo contigo. Esto también me dará la oportunidad de compartir “coaching” y “feedback” contigo en cosas que tenemos que mejorar. Te invito a que seas lo mas abierto posible, con el tiempo estoy seguro que los dos nos sentiremos mas cómodos con este proceso.

Esto no lo haremos una sola vez. No haremos esto por un tiempo y después lo dejaremos de hacer. Esta es la mejor manera de conocernos mejor, porque logrando conocernos mejor, mejor trabajaremos.

Adjunto a este comunicado, hay una sugerencia de calendario para llevar estas sesiones. Necesito que me confirmes el compromiso de llevarla a cabo para poder cerrar mi disponibilidad otros asuntos en estas fechas.

By early next week, we’ll get it turned into a text document and attached to the One on One podcast content.

Muchas gracias, Roberto.

We sent out an email today, asking everyone to vote for us at the Podcast Awards (reminder: you can vote every day!…and you can just click on the ad at the top left of our home page, too).

We were pleasantly surprised by how many nice notes we got BACK saying thanks for the reminder, and how happy folks were to vote for us. It’s late, I’m tired, had a rough day, and those notes were just a great way to take a late night break.

Here’s an example:

Thanks for the reminder! Your e-mail gave me an opportunity to let
the folks at Podcast Awards know, “I didn’t start listening to
Manager-Tools because I had an i-Pod. I bought an iPod because I
wanted to listen to Manager-Tools.”

A raving fan,

Tim McCormick

Tim, thanks. Notes like yours make jobs like ours even better.

And to all of our community, whether you vote or not: THANK YOU. it’s a privilege to serve you every day, and some days it’s a dream come true.

I’m sure there are going to be a few people very upset with me. I frankly don’t care.

I do not like Twitter.

I’ve used it, and I don’t like it, and I’ll tell you why. Because if you’re a manager, and as we like to say, if you’re an executive, which is not as exclusive a territory as it used to be, you have no business learning when other people are doing laundry, when other people are working with clients, or driving to school, or working with their kids, or whatever else, because that causes you to be distracted from what you’re doing.

The idea that anybody else would care about what I’m doing, frankly, is not terribly exciting to me. But it’s really much more about other people. If you have 100 or 150 people that you’re keeping track of, the idea that the banality of some of the Tweets, I think is what they’re called, is far beneath the time constraints of most managers and executives.

You have to control your time. This concept of continuous partial attention, if you’ve been reading about it, it’s complete and utter blather. It makes no sense at all. Executives can only suffer from continuous partial attention, and Twitter is the classic example of it.

Look, email was invented after we all learned how to read and write and after we all learned how to communicate. It’s a great technique, and we all use it terribly poorly. And Twitter is just all the negatives of email on steroids.

I’m sure some of you like it, and that’s great. I like playing golf, but I don’t do it in my office, and I certainly don’t do it when I’m trying to be effective around my work. Twitter makes you ineffective almost always. Stop it.

Most any manager can manage well, or at least look good managing, when times are good. Retention is as easy as it will ever be, budgets tend to grow to hide lack of controls, and others want to join your team, so hiring is easy too.

But during tough economic times, the professional manager has to manage with more effectiveness than at almost any other time. She is distracted by her own concerns, while having to keep tabs on the concerns of her team. She has to listen to the rumors flying around about layoffs and mergers and industry moves, and then apply them not only to her situation, but also make sense of them for her team.

And oh yes, she has to do all this and cut costs too. Listen in and we’ll share the first rule of budget management in a downturn.

Please take 30 seconds and vote for Manager Tools in the Podcast Awards, both in the People’s Choice Awards and Business categories.

You can vote HERE, or by clicking on the link at the top left of our home page.

You can vote every 24 hours (which is not quite the same as every day).

Thanks for supporting us in our efforts to support the management community!

for Manager Tools, at the Podcast Awards, in both People’s Choice and Business Categories.

You can too! HERE.

Thanks in advance.

At some point, we are going to do a couple of podcasts, perhaps 10, 20, 30, I don’t know, regarding culture in the workplace. A big part of culture at the workplace is stories we tell one another.

I read a “Harvard Business Review article” a while ago, it may have been over a year ago, in which companies were decrying the fact that employees weren’t speaking up. They weren’t responding to requests for information or feedback about how things are going.

And the article basically says, “Sometimes employees fear speaking up because there is a perception, maybe not reality, but there is a perception that the organization, managers in particular, were genuinely hostile about past suggestions or recommendations for change, which imply that something is wrong.”

And basically, they held back because there were broad and sort of vague perceptions about this and no one could really point to anything specific necessarily. And basically what it boiled down to was a culture is built, at least partially, on stories and on collective story telling. And the problem, folks, is that stories that get told are always dramatic. You don’t tell anybody about going to the copier and making a copy successfully.

Stories at work are like news in our lives. The news is famous for saying, “We don’t report every plane that lands safely” and while you may agree or disagree with what news gets covered and why, the fact is, news is dramatic and stories are dramatic. And if you are going to tell a story about someone, for example the fact that somebody got promoted. Unusually if someone tells a story about getting promoted, it is about carping that he got promoted or she got promoted and I didn’t.

A good example would be, somebody says something in a public organizational venue, at a meeting in town hall or something, and as somebody put it afterwards, “he spoke up and suddenly he was gone from the company shortly thereafter.”

It is probably not entirely true, this story, or he may have left on his own. But it doesn’t matter - the story goes around and that gets into people’s genes, which basically says “Don’t speak up, don’t talk, don’t respond to requests for information.” In part, because my boss has a hat on in his head, or a sign on his forehead that says “Watch out I am your boss, I could fire you”.

If you are a leader, if you are a manager, be careful of the stories you tell. I am sure I can’t convince you to not tell any negative stories, but I can suggest: please consider telling positive stories every once in a while to add it to the myth-making that your employees do about your company.

Please vote for us every day, starting tomorrow, in the 2008 Podcast Awards.

Click this link to vote! (You can also click the banner ad at the top left of our site for the next two weeks.)

Thanks to our great community, Manager Tools has been named a finalist for both Best Business Podcast, and People’s Choice Award. We appreciate your nomination efforts. It’s a privilege to serve you, and it’s an honor to know that you believe we are meeting our obligations well.

You can vote every day (for two weeks), and you can vote for us in both categories. We hope you do so - we have tough competition this year (Bloomberg, Economist, Money Girl, Get it Done Guy - all fine efforts).

We might just send you a couple of reminders…

Mark has been re-reading Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive for the billionth time lately. Every time he reads it, something different strikes him. This time he was looking to get some validation that Drucker believed that consensus is overrated (it is), and he stumbled across this gem. It’s two simple sentences, but as only Drucker can do, they’re powerful:

In fact, no decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then there are only good intentions.

Seriously – can you just hear the power of that idea? All those times we felt good when we “made” a decision? That feeling of “it’s done”, and “glad that’s over”, and “can’t wait to be proven right”?

Yeah, well, we were all wrong.

Because a decision, says Drucker, isn’t made until work assignments and responsibilities have been made clear.

The question is, HOW?

Some of you have probably heard me talk about this before. Email is a scourge on all of us, most days. I see all kinds of email behavior, all the time - at clients, everywhere I go. And the one thing that surprises me the most, and this goes back to some comments I made in the last couple of years about continuous partial attention, is people being notified every time they get an email. Literally, they are drawn to the email regardless of how good or bad or important it is, because they don’t know - they just go and look at the email as soon it comes in.

We recommend checking email three times a day, but example of constantly being distracted by email [and if you are an manager or an executive, you already have enough distractions, because email is not urgent] is the idea of something called “toast”. Toast is Microsoft’s word for the little reminder that comes up, that comes up in Outlook that slides up, at least in some versions, it slides from the bottom right hand corner of your screen and then slides back down.

And the joke was for a while that it looked like toast popping up. But the real story is they call it toast because if you pay attention to it all the time, you will BE toast. If you are doing that, if you have notifications, if your computer buzzes, or rings, or beeps, or you get a message over all your other work saying “you have new email” you are being distracted…and distractions are the bane of executives. If you pay attention to the toast, you’re toast. (Thanks to Kate Horstman for correcting my use of your vs. you’re in that last line - H)

So stop it. You will be more effective.