Whether we like it or not, other people are part of our professional lives. And, as Dale Carnegie sagely noted, “A person’s name, to that person, is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

But how to remember them? It vexes the best of us.

And one of the keys: you really don’t have to.

PLEASE NOTE: If you downloaded this show and got part 2 of the Meal Interviews series, I’m sorry. I’ve since corrected the problem. You should now get the correct show.

May 12, 2008 13:48 GMT Update: iTunes has now refreshed the feed. If you downloaded the wrong show (sorry), you may delete the show within iTunes, refresh the podcast list (alt/option click the disclosure triangle next to the Manager Tools podcast), then download the podcast again by selecting the “Get” button next to the latest show. Sorry for the troubles!

We have NO EXCUSE for why we didn’t do this podcast 2 years ago. We get this question all the time, so much so that we’re making it part of the standard weekly show rather than restricting it to the interview tool. Meal interviews are becoming more and more common, even as they become ever less intelligent as a tool.

The cast is really just a long list of small tips – there is very little overarching strategy to share. The STRATEGY is clear, though, right? It’s an INTERVIEW!

And, in this cast, we make a very exciting New Product Announcement!

The Link: Manager Tools Resume Service Description

Many managers mistakenly fail to connect the process of hiring with the later successes and failures of the organization. When someone doesn’t work out, particularly if it’s 3-5 years after they were hired, very few managers think that the problem started when they were being interviewed. But the fact is, just like our elected leaders in a democracy, we get the people we deserve. If we hired them, we MUST have wanted them? Right?

Somehow, though, this kind of analysis is never done. While it’s probably not terribly helpful for those who leave the company after 20 years, there ought to be a way to evaluate managers’ abilities to find and hire good, talented people (”talent”) for the company.

And now there is: The Manager Tools Talent Scouting Average.

One of the things we have learned over the years is that bad hiring is easy, and good hiring is hard. It’s easy to hire someone who isn’t going to work out – just do one interview, don’t dig for details, don’t listen to the doubts you’re feeling, don’t interview for the soft skills.

Of course, this is what happens far too often…and then when there are culture or discipline problems, everyone starts talking about changing the culture, or doing exit interviews. But the answer lies in smarter — and harder — hiring.

In this cast, we share a simple way for a hiring manager to make a decision about a candidate. You’ll probably hear a surprise or two, so listen in … and you’ll also hear Horstman’s Law of Bad Hiring!

This cast is one in a series to be called How to Hire, which is part of our larger set of series on Managing Talent.

Mark once was asked to adjudicate a discussion between two managers (one new, one experienced). The issue? “Should a manager give feedback about the clothes an employee is wearing?”

Mark sided with the manager who said no, you shouldn’t.

If you’re surprised, listen in!

We have been asked hundreds of times for guidance on what to do as a new manager, and we’re finally ready to start rolling out this series of casts. This first cast will probably surprise some of our listeners, because it’s pretty counterintuitive. On the other hand, we have alluded to it in a few casts before. It’s just not what most people think it should be.

We’ll tell you as well what most managers do…and why they’re wrong.

The first in a series: The Manager Tools Guidelines For New Managers

Ah, the FOURTH member of the Trinity. We did this for two reasons – one, to make it easier to remember. Two, because you simply cannot grow an organization profitably without Delegation. You can grow the profitability of a company without new products, without new distribution – think Tiffany’s, or coal mines. But not without delegation. (Delegation is ESPECIALLY important if you don’t have new products or distribution, and we don’t recommend either!)

Effective Managers know how to consciously and effectively delegate. Good delegation leads to more growth at less cost. How can we call ourselves professional managers unless we do something that we KNOW leads to profitable growth?

This week, we cover the Coaching Model’s inclusion in the Management Trinity. It’s BY FAR the least used of the Trinity. That’s too bad, because it only takes 5 minutes a week per direct to coach them. FIVE MINUTES A WEEK! Who would want to go to their boss and say, “I didn’t coach my people this YEAR, because over the course of the year it would have taken me 4 hours, and I didn’t want to spend that much time on it.”

Not if you worked for us. At least, not for long.

We continue here our recent theme of revisiting the high level rationale and actions involved in the Management Trinity. In our discussion of feedback, we talk about the basics, of course: What the Feedback Model gives the effective manager, and how the effective manager actually puts it into action.

This theme came out of many conversations we have had with managers about the value they were getting from our high level discussion of the Trinity at both Effective Manager Conferences and at onsite corporate client work.

We’re careful to make every cast actionable. This one IS. We make a specific recommendation regarding feedback delivery you don’t want to miss.

We’ve talked about the Management Trinity for nearly three years, but we’ve never really laid out specifically how and why it works. The best managers we know use these basic principles all the time to make themselves, their teams, and their organizations more effective.

All of the behaviors and habits in the Management Trinity are simple to understand, relatively easy to do, and give exceptional returns on a manager’s investment.

And that’s why we recommend them.

How can you get the the most out of the most valuable recurring communication investment you make? This is an important question … and it seems that a lot of managers DO NOT ask it. Some of the managers who are quite good at running their OWN O3s aren’t very good at getting the most out of their time with their boss. Frankly, we think that if they reported to themselves, they’d be disappointed in their direct.

We’ve been watching managers for years, and we have some recommendations for how you can be most effective when you’re the direct.

(But to be clear: We never recommend managing your boss. Never.)

One additional note here: If you are NEW to Manager Tools, the concept of the One on One may not be completely familiar. If so, we recommend you go back and listen to those casts first. While you’re at it, you may want to reference the Manager Tools “Basics” series for the core podcasts outlining our basic thoughts and fundamental practices of effective management.

We surprised some of our members a couple of years ago when we included podcasts on how to attend a party, and how to introduce oneself to someone else. Some saw this as “etiquette”, which the modern business world had, in a sense, done away with. And certainly the world of commerce has changed how people interact, making much of our lives less formal than perhaps they were before.

But at the same time, we’ve also noticed that the blurring of work and family time means more of us are exposed, AT WORK, to situations that call on basic rules of social courtesy. Those managers who do well in these situations are seen as more polished and as better communicators - in short, better future executives.

So, don’t think of this cast as one about “etiquette”. It’s not. It’s about courtesy … and getting promoted.

Our MT Goals 3-part cast generated a great deal of enthusiasm. A lot of managers are thinking right now about what their goals are or will be for this calendar year. And, a lot of managers struggle with the dreaded “SMART” goal standard, which hopefully we successfully put paid to in the previous casts.

MT Goals are much more clear, and frankly just plain EASIER than “SMART” goals. Managers spend too much time making bad goals into ones that pass a misguided test, while other managers are told that goals that are impressive and well-targeted aren’t of the right format. It’s silly and terribly counterproductive.

But after our last three casts, some managers have asked for examples. If you need help turning your goals into MT goals, this is the cast for you.

The fact is, we did not expect three years ago to get such positive responses to our casts and advice on careers and career management. We SHOULD have seen it, but we didn’t (and you’ll learn why in this week’s cast). But we are listening, and thus this week’s cast.

In the same way that “Finances Rule” when it comes to being laid off, PREPARATION makes the entire process so much easier. Both of these recommendations stem from a simple principle: decisions of import made under pressure are dangerous.

So, this week: our Annual Layoff Immunization Guidelines.

Although “merely” a story, don’t fool yourself … there are valuable lessons in there!

Last week we discussed our general thoughts on Goals, and particularly our thinly-veiled disdain for SMART goals. Today, we continue our conversation and discuss our core rules for setting goals.

Next week, we’ll conclude the series with our story of “John and the Gate Guards.”

Many managers are going through goal setting efforts right now, for 2008. We get lots of questions about goals, and goal setting, this time of year. Sometimes, they’re dispiriting. Managers seem to spend an awful lot of time word-smithing their intent into corporate frameworks. All that time would be FAR better spent thinking about the goals themselves, and how the achievement of those goals will help the organization.

A lot of managers have to create goals that are “SMART”, and we don’t recommend your doing so unless you have to. We dislike them SO much we almost called this cast, “SMART Goals are Stupid.” (We REALLY don’t like them). In fact, we spend a good bit of time in our introduction talking about SMART goals, so beware. The fact that the technique is so widespread and so often ineffective causes us to want to address it fully.

And hey, who would have thought that our answer would be “MT Goals”?

Cool.

We get lots of questions on One on Ones (O3s). And, we’re happy that we do, because O3s are the heart of the Management Trinity. We find a lot of managers struggle with when to have their one on ones, whose calendar takes precedence, what days of the week are best, etc.

In this cast, we talk about ALL those factors, as well as the benefits of varying techniques that we’ve seen different managers use to schedule their O3s.

We finish with the single most important guidance regarding O3 scheduling you’ll ever hear, so stay tuned.

Interviewing is one of the real tragedies in most companies. It’s so easy to do it well (once you get over the Horstman Curve), but so few are willing to take the time. Oh, sure, everyone wants to complain about lousy output (low retention, poor performance, attitude difficulties, etc.), but no one seems to be willing to think systemically about the problems.

Come to think of it, there are thousands of companies who never get to the idea that turnover, low morale, and poor performance might just be the output of a broken process: interviewing.

And one of the worst ideas in interviewing is GROUP interviews.

But, since you may very well get one at some point, we have a simple (three key points!) set of suggestions to help you make it through.

Last week, we covered some basics of calendar management the most important of which was that effective managers think about managing their priorities a WEEK at a time - thinking in terms of weeks is the most effective way to stay strategic, and therefore effective.

We then covered our first, and perhaps most surprising point - Family First. Simple in practice … schedule time for your family ON YOUR CALENDAR first. And then give THAT commitment the same level of focus as your other priorities.

This week, we cover our remaining points relative to managing your calendar …

• Schedule time for email
• Nail down your strategic objectives
• Block out one-on-ones
• Schedule time for a weekly network building lunch

We spend a lot of time talking to executive clients about how they spend their time, and how they manage their priorities through their calendars. Several times over the past couple of years we’ve talked about how when we start coaching an executive, we ask for two things immediately: an accounting of what they consider their priorities, and a print out of their calendar.

They almost NEVER match, except with CEOs and COOs.

If you’re a thinking manager, you’re not asking, “why?” but rather, “what can I do to avoid that?”

There are a few simple rules that get most effective executives (thank you Mr. Drucker) started off well, and they start with thinking a week at a time.

Most of us fear being laid off. It’s a good fear to have, frankly - being laid off is a difficult passage for anyone. The fear of being re-employed, the fear of loss of status, the loss of income, risk to one’s family. All good reasons to be scared.

And yet, those who have been laid off express very different emotions than those of us who have not. When those who have been laid off are asked about it, it becomes clear why. It’s not JUST that they’ve, “been through it once and I made it.” It’s what they THEN say: “I’m ready this time.”

And that’s why you’re scared: you’re not ready.

This cast tells you how to start getting ready. And, our entire series about layoffs will be geared to helping everyone get prepared, and helping those that DO get laid off make it through successfully.

Typically, we do a brief podcast with a brief review of the conference when we announce the conference … and this time is no different, although a bit late! However, our lateness comes with a benefit … we’re extending the early registration period by two weeks (ending on November 16).

So here’s a brief discussion about our upcoming Amsterdam Effective Manager Conference!

For more details, our agenda, and logistics, please go to the Effective Manager Conference page.

One of the most maligned arts in professional life today is persuasion. The classic case of persuasion falling out of favor is how often professional sales people are viewed as golfers with big expense accounts. Or, perhaps even more perniciously, why is it that all of the sales roles in technology firms are called “Business Development”? Sales is associated with persuasion, and that taint keeps far too many managers from embracing the real value of persuasion.

But we all know that we have to do it, right? Admit it: you know that you’re going to be called upon to persuade others. Just because you wish you could just MAKE people do what you want, or that they would “just see it my way!” doesn’t change the fact that every manager is expected to be persuasive.

Here’s how to begin to think about it.

We’re in the last quarter of the calendar year, so effective managers are already thinking about performance reviews for their directs. (We don’t agree with delivering all reviews at the end of the calendar year, but we know it’s prevalent). When we delivered our podcasts on reviews, we didn’t discuss compensation, and this cast we cover it for the first time.

The fact is, the compensation decision is truly separate from the performance analysis that precedes the preparation of the review. Nevertheless, managers often have to deliver the results of both at the same time, so it’s prudent to be thinking about compensation in Q4.

If you don’t know the bucket theory of compensation, you’ll need to listen in.

If you’ve ever gotten a voicemail which sounded like, “[your name], this is [their name], call me,” you know why we’re doing this cast.

Phone manners have been steadily decreasing for decades. When boys used to call for Mark’s daughter Kate, they would slouch verbally through, “Is Kate there?” and Mark would answer, “Yes,” and hang up. He safely assumed that any person who asked that question was a boy, and not enough of a gentleman to be allowed to speak with her. (At first she rolled her eyes, but later she liked the hurdle that Mark’s demand created: those boys that never got it ended up being…well, boys.)

What about at work? The “Bob this is Joe call me” is only one example. It ranks right up there with “saw that you called, what’s up?” answered with, “did you, errrrr…listen to my voicemail?”

In this cast, we have recommendations for how to leave a voicemail. We think of this as the first cast on phone skills…out of several hundred to come.

As much as many of the managers in our community love how much more effective our tools (particularly the Trinity) make them, it does seem that every once in a while, something goes awry in perfect-manager-land. A meeting still gets hijacked (even with a parking lot!), a struggling direct still fails (even with late stage coaching).

What do you do when a direct disagrees with your feedback? We think many newer managers – and particularly newer managers who are rookies with the feedback model – are stunned into a kind of affronted muteness. “What?!?”, you think. She must not understand that I have just delivered the sine qua non of development guidance, in a form palatable for all. How DARE she argue. I am … The MANAGER. This is… FEEDBACK. It is… SUPPOSED to work. Mike and Mark…SAID SO!

But it does happen, for a couple of reasons, and it’s really not a big deal.

And we have the answer for you in this, the The Shot Across The Bow show.

We’ve spent a great deal of time on managerial communications, and for good reason. Managers rely on communication to achieve the very basic requirement of their role: aligning and inspiring others to achieve more than they could do on their own. As a former boss of mine was fond of saying, “you may be smarter than me, but you’re not smarter than WE.”

But, there are a lot of different kinds of communication. We’ve talked about meetings, and feedback, and coaching, and late stage coaching, and delivering reviews…and there are hundreds more.

Including plain old conversations.

Conversations are our most FREQUENTLY used verbal communication form, aren’t they? So why does everyone want to know the right way to do all those other managerial communications – like feedback: “do I REALLY have to say FEEDBACK?!?” - but nobody seems to ask about conversations?

In this cast, we’ll share the MOST VALUABLE CONVERSATIONAL COMMUNICATION TOOL you’ll ever learn (that your mom didn’t teach you).

Last week we covered the basics as to why “Playing the Game” doesn’t work … today we get into the details of the dreaded Horstman’s Wager MATRIX.

During the show, we refer to the printed matrix included in the slides for this series. Although the slides are typically only available to premium members, given how much easier having the slides can make following this particular podcast, we’ve made this week’s slides available to everyone … enjoy!

We’ve been pleased by the demand for our interviewing product - close to 1,000 purchases so far, and the early feedback has been quite powerful. If you would like to read what folks are saying, you can see that here. And, if you’d like to order, you can do that here.

One of the tenets that distinguishes the casts is its emphasis on preparation. One of the Forum posts actually suggests that folks buy before they think they need it, because many of our suggestions require time to implement (it can take months, done right).

BUT… there are those who disagree. There are interviewees who believe that the key to interviewing is to “play the game”. Many of these folks will tell you that the way to prepare is learn about the company (false, and proven so in Lesson #1), so that one can “be what the company wants”.

Those who have suggested that to Mark meet with his famous response: “you’ve never seen Horstman’s Wager, have you?”

In this cast, we’ll discuss Horstman’s Wager: why “playing the game” is the kiss of death in interviewing.

In a departure from our normal planning, Mark wrote this week’s show based on his strong response to a recent WSJ article, “Career Mentors Today Seem Short on Advice But Give a Mean Tour”, published 28 August in the Cubicle Culture column (normally written by Jared Sandberg, this week by Elizabeth Holmes). Basically the article says that mentors don’t do a good job and described some of the more pitiful efforts.

[We’re pretty sure you can get the article free by clicking here: Career Mentors Today Seem Short on Advice But Give a Mean Tour]

The state of mentoring today is pathetic. It’s pathetic at least in part because the state of management is pathetic as well. Too many companies ask mentors to do what managers ought to be doing: coaching, guiding, giving candid feedback, providing career guidance, preparing for promotions, helping create networks of associates and resources. A good manager does ALL that.

But we’ve decided that rather than just rail at what exists, we’ll finally deliver the second half of our pair of mentoring casts: How to be an Effective Mentor.

Even if you haven’t experienced one yet, it’s becoming more and more likely.

What does this mean for you? What’s the best way to approach and be successful at pre-employment tests? This is Manager Tools, and we’ll walk you through it.

Today, in this extra cast, we share our thoughts on the last year and what we have planned for this coming year [read as “share our plans for the coming year so you can hold us accountable” ].

if you are a first time listener or fall into the category of “just want the bottom line recommendations without all the fluff”, please ignore this cast and accept our apologies for clogging up your hard drive. I know some of you don’t like ANY tangents we take during the podcast and THIS is one BIG tangent (about 60 minutes worth!).

For those of you interested in our thoughts and where we’re going with Manager Tools, this is the show! If not, we’ll see you in a couple of days on our normal weekly podcast.

You’ve been warned!

This video is a brief 2 minute excerpt of Mark’s Interviewing Presentation, covering Horstman’s 2nd Law of Interviewing - “You Are Not As Good As You Think You Are:You’re As Good As The Recruiter Thinks You Are.”

Agenda preparation is a lost art. We think of agendas as the skeleton of a good meeting. Sadly, too many meetings suffer from a lack of the structure that agendas provide. Meetings without agendas are usually terribly inefficient. Because they are [somewhat ] time-bound, that inefficiency means ineffectiveness. And ineffectiveness is anathema to Manager Tools managers.

In this cast, we tell you what to do once you’ve prepared your agenda. (There’s a separate cast for the details and rules around preparation).

Be a management artist: use agendas.

Our first video is now in the RSS feed. You can either view it in iTunes, on your video/music player (QuickTime), or in windows media player (though it may not initially recognize the file type, click the “try” button).

This video is a brief 3 minute excerpt of Mark’s Interviewing Presentation, covering Horstman’s First Law of Interviewing.

Our intent is to provide much more video this year. Our thoughts include conference excerpts supporting the Management Trinity, the Interviewing Series, and certain casts that lend themselves to visual presentations. As a general rule, video will be Premium Content, due to cost and time of production, but there will be frequent exceptions.

And you’ll see this one on YouTube at some point…

Thanks again for your support: Premium Content subscriptions funded this enhancement to your community.

Go View the Video Now

We thought we’d kick off our third year of casts with an update* to the most frequently-used Manager Tool of them all: The Feedback Model.

If you’re giving adjusting feedback, the fourth step plays a crucial role. The purpose of feedback is to encourage effective behavior. That means that feedback is NOT about what just happened, but rather about FUTURE behavior. (We hope we don’t have to tell you that it’s never been about punishment, or blame, or fault, or a lesson, or “education”.)

But what do you do when you have some directs who stumble when you ask them to come up with more effective future behaviors (in step 4)? We’ve found that there are some situations where “What can you do differently?” can be good…but a different formulation can be even more effective.

We’ll tell you how here, in our first cast of the third year and in Year One of Premium Content, at Manager Tools.

And, as always when we recur to a topic, we encourage you to re-listen to the Feedback casts. And, if you haven’t listened to those casts, and/or aren’t familiar with the Manager Tools Effective Feedback Model, this cast will be nearly impossible to understand . . . please learn about the Feedback Model first.

* - [Look for us to be revisiting ALL of the Management Trinity this year: One on Ones, and The Feedback Model, and Coaching, and the silent fourth lever, Delegation.]

Last week, we covered some introductory guidelines. This week, we cover the 9 steps you should take when you are made aware of a situation that may be harassment.

Very few things strike fear in the heart of a manager more than the thought of a potential sexual harassment claim. The sanctions are severe, there’s the taint of an accusation that may never go away, the gossip… to say nothing of the loss of control of the process, and the danger of false accusations. All this on top of the fact that sexual harassment is not only beneath contempt, but it’s also inscrutably hard to understand, and even the finest employee can unknowingly step into this morass.

To some degree, we’re not surprised by most managers lack of understanding of the rules. For most managers, we don’t have time to try to understand the actual law, and even if we read it we wouldn’t understand its implications. Further, most managers don’t think themselves capable of such things (for all kinds of reasons). But, sexual harassment is an example of Horstman’s Unknown Briefcase Rule: If you were told to carry around a briefcase of unknown origin, and were ALSO told that there might be a nuclear weapon in it, it would certainly change your relationship to it enough to ask, “Okay, even if the chances of it going off are slim, if it did go off it would be VERY BAD, so tell me what I need to do it to keep it safe…just in case.”

This cast will keep you safe. Just in case.

Both this week and last week, we make reference to our Effective Meetings podcast. If you haven’t listened to that show, we recommend highly that you do. All the recommendations we make there apply to teleconferences as well … I mean, you did get our point that teleconferences are meetings and not briefings, yes?

We’ve been asked many times for this cast, and had intended to deliver it much earlier, but it kept getting pushed back. Teleconferences, or meetings conducted as conference calls, are much more widely used today than 20 years ago. Cost used to be an issue, but with costs moot, those very same savings have caused organizational dispersion that drive the teleconference’s ubiquity.

We are appalled at much of the guidance we hear. For instance: using mute while you have the speaker on. This is tantamount to encouraging Blackberry use in a face to face meeting, and laptops fully deployed and in email send/receive mode. What a waste! Somehow, because the COST of the call is free, we’ve lost sight of the VALUE of our time.

Get ready for a distinctly unique set of recommendations.

If you go to meetings all the time… no, wait. BECAUSE you go to meetings all the time, you need an effective way to take notes. There are certainly a LOT of different ways to do so, but if you ask a hundred or so executives, some common themes emerge about what works and why. For most of us, we write too much, and get too little value, for all the wrong reasons.

We figure, at 10 meetings a week - and we KNOW you go to more than that, it ends up being 5,000 meetings every decade… so maybe 25,000 meetings CONSERVATIVELY in your professional career.

In other words, whether you realize it or not, you need to be good at taking and using your notes.

Mark once heard a manager say that when one of his directs started crying, he simply “gave them some tissue and walked out.” Even though he prided himself on being a tough-minded, results oriented, very successful manager, at some level he knew that his response was too callous, too cold. When Mark looked at him, mouth agape, he immediately backpedaled and said something to the effect of, “well, I’m giving them space…I don’t want them to be embarrassed . . . I appreciate their need for privacy . . . I didn’t want them thinking I was evaluating them right then.”

All delivered with that delicate edge of panic that comes from defending the indefensible. Your directs have lives outside of work, and as often as you will ask them to stay late, to do more, to answer emails on the weekend . . . every once in a while, THEIR lives are going to herniate into YOUR work.

What do you do as a manager when one of your team has a crisis? When their spouse is hurt or hospitalized? When their house burns down? When someone’s parent passes away?

We’ll tell you in this cast.

Our first conference, in April, was a huge success for us - Mike and I described it as the best two days of our professional lives. And our attendees agreed:

“I have attended Dale Carnegie, American Management Association, etc conferences and the MT conference blew them away!”-
Jeff Vose, April attendee

The basics: It’s September 5-6, in San Antonio, at the Hilton Palacio Del Rio. Over the two days, we will again deliver what you expect from us: detailed, specific, actionable recommendations about your day to day management life.

For more details, our agenda, and logistics, please go to the Effective Manager Conference page.

If you’re ready now, go to our conference registration page to register now.

We’ve once again limited space to 100 attendees, to ensure you get personal attention. BUT, our first conference was SO successful that those attendees asked us to let them know about San Antonio a few days early, so they could be sure to send their directs right away. We did, and we have already registered 20 people for September. There are only 80 slots left as we open registration today. Please act fast (some of you know our first conference filled up in 30 days.)

“This is the best manager training I have attended in my career. By a wide margin. Do yourself a huge favor: As soon as registration opens for San Antonio, sign up!”
- Paul Moriarty, April Attendee

We’ve published a podcast about the conference as well - Mike and I informally go over the basics of the conference agenda and why you should attend.

We hope to see you soon!