Got Email? Of course - what manager doesn’t? We know managers who get 200 (or more!) emails every day. Email is a necessary evil in the corporate management world, and highly effective managers know how to get the most out of their email WITHOUT spending too much time on it. In our latest podcast, we talk about how to make your technology work for you, and how you can spend less time on email while getting more done.

Also, thanks to Tom Comeau for mentioning us during his interview on the Cranky Middle Manager Show. The kind remarks are very much appreciated. For those of you who haven’t heard Wayne’s interview of Tom, you can find the show at the The Cranky Middle Manager Website.

Mark made reference during the podcast to the process of setting-up multiple “in-boxes” in Outlook. Here is a PDF document outlining the steps Mark uses to set those up.

If you’re a manager, don’t think for a moment that someone else is managing your career. Those days are long gone. YOU are managing your career. What you do - not only in job skills, but also in what we call “Transition Skills” - will be the primary determinant of your career success. You’re not going to have the richest, most rewarding series of roles and opportunities by allowing someone in HR to know enough about you to get you where you need to be. And succession planning won’t save you either.

And one of the most important of the Transition Skills is Building And Maintaining Your Network. Most people are terrible at it. We know this because they have no network.

Now, notice that we did NOT say that the skill was “networking”. That term conjures up schmoozing, and cocktail parties, and too many people don’t like it. So, we’re not suggesting you do that.

We’re suggesting you Build and Maintain Your Network. It only takes THREE SIMPLE SKILLS, and we’ll walk through them.

Oh, yeah … and there’s a blooper in the show. Did you catch it?

We spent a lot of time at the end of last year talking about how to write someone else’s review.

What should you do to prepare for your own?

Think of it this way. Suppose you had three folks working for you, and one of the three spent a couple of hours over the previous months preparing for their time with you. They had reviewed the entire year, prepared better information for you for their review, and had taken their time writing their self-evaluation, including specific data to support their points.

Wouldn’t that be impressive? If there were a close call to be made, might it go in your direction?

In this cast, we walk you through everything YOU need to do to prepare for YOUR review with YOUR boss.

And if you think it’s too early, think again – the timeline is THREE MONTHS!

And, by the way, during the show we promised a couple of things. You’ll find all of these in the Manager Tools website under Tools section under Preparing for Your Review Documents.

1. A complete transcript of the entire show
2. A Powerpoint presentation (in PDF form) with a detailed outline of the review preparation process
3. A detailed note-taking form to guide you through the process.

Folks, no note-taking required … we’ve done all the work for you. As we discussed on the discussion boards, these are examples of what you’ll get with our premium membership program … which will be announced shortly!

Note: So everyone can get a look at the documents associated with this podcast, we’re making this month’s member-only cast available to ALL listeners. Enjoy!

Today we cover the 2nd part of our series on Preparing For Your Review. After you’ve listened to the podcast, I think you’ll agree that if you follow this simple process you will be in a position to not only get the best possible review possible this year, you will also have all the information you need to improve your performance (and your next review!) over the coming year.

And, as a reminder, you’ll find a number of documents to assist you in this process in the Tools section under Preparing for Your Review Documents.

1. A complete transcript of the entire show
2. A Powerpoint presentation (in PDF form) with a detailed outline of the review preparation process
3. A detailed note-taking form to guide you through the process.

Radio Shack has laid off 400 employees, notifying them by sending them an email.

Notified by email. You’d think organizations couldn’t go any lower.

Alas, they already have.  A British firm laid off at least one employee recently by sending them an instant message.

Yep, you read that correctly.

It’s creepy, it’s clumsy, it’s unprofessional.

But what does it say about the organization’s managers that they couldn’t be trusted to carry this water?

I can’t say that the company decided to do this because the managers couldn’t be trusted.  In fact, I would bet that thinking about how well the managers could handle this unfortunate task never crossed the minds of whomever made the decision.

But I will also bet that if the company trusted and respected its managers, so much so that it considered its management to be a key part of its success, the managers would have been trusted with this effort.

This was a sad day in the compact between managers and organizations.

One of our most popular podcasts - and it was actually a series of casts - were titled “The Efficient Assistant and The Effective Executive”. We laid out a plan for having a great relationship with one’s assistant, and we get comments and mails almost every day from managers and executives thanking us for sharing what their firm never did. [Think about the penny-wise and pound-foolishness of giving someone an administrative assistant and then not teaching the basics of how to make the investment valuable!] Many of the assistants actually say thanks for the fact that our system recommends that they do a LOT MORE work than what they’re doing now.

But we need to talk about assistants again, because in our original series, we left out a key part of executive and managerial life.

EMAIL.

This cast tells you how to handle email if you have an admin.

Now, if you’ve already come up with 10 (erroneous) reasons why it won’t work for you, listen in. If the CEOs of billion dollar companies can do this… you can too.