This guidance describes how managers ought to communicate organizational information to their team members.

When we present to clients, there's inevitably a discussion about how the manager's role relates to the larger organization. Managers want to understand, how do I handle my role as the voice of the company? How does that square with staying close to my team? Managers want to know, what's my role in terms of keeping my team informed? How do I balance confidentiality with transparency and openness?

When we probe a little, we discover the average manager is guilty of violating a fundamental rule of managerial behavior. This cast is about how to correct that.

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This show concludes our recommendations on the professional approach to supporting choices you didn't champion.

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This guidance recommends the professional approach to supporting choices you didn't champion.

This isn't a long cast, but it's an important one. It's important enough that it probably ought to be in the Career Tools feed as well. We have it here, in Manager Tools, though, because of the importance of this lesson in professionalism for managers. But please, if you're a smart manager, share this with your team of individual contributors. Help THEM understand it before they make a classic rookie mistake someday.

Here's the situation that teaches us this lesson in professionalism. You're in a meeting with your boss, and you've made your case for some new idea. It might be a change in budget, it might be time of your directs spent on something new, or stopping work on something you think is going nowhere. Or, your opinion wasn't even asked for, but the bottom line is you disagree with the decision that has been made. Your boss overruled you, the decision was made at higher levels and even your boss had no input. Or, you made your case and you lost.

What's the professional response? How do you act/react to having your idea overruled or having to enact a decision you disagree with?

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This cast tells you how to manage your voicemail on a daily basis.

One of the most frustrating issues in the workplace is getting someone's voicemail, leaving a message and then not knowing what's going to happen next. Often their message isn't enough to tell you if they are in the office or out, when they are returning, when they might return your call. It's one of the reasons that voicemails are often followed in quick succession by emails and in-person visits. The urge to reduce the uncertainty is stronger than any urge towards efficiency. We can't change the people around you, but we can help you get it right.

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This cast describes two simple communication behaviors to help determine roughly what someone's DiSC profile might be.

We get lots of questions about DiSC profiles when we provide them to clients or at conferences. Those of you who have taken the DiSC behavioral profile know why – it's amazingly accurate, and it's not about personality.

Knowing your own behavioral tendencies is helpful when working, either by yourself or with others. A core technique we teach at our ECC conference is how to analyze others' behaviors. If you don't know someone's profile (they haven't taken it or shared it), it's still not that difficult to determine their primary tendency enough to be able to significantly reduce the chances of miscommunication and conflict with them.

So what are a couple of simple behaviors we can look for that help us communicate with others?

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This cast describes how to determine your boss's preferred communication style, and how to be more effective knowing it.

We periodically get asked by corporate clients to help not just managers, but also individual contributors. Sometimes it's a highly effective performer who has relationship issues, and sometimes it's helping an entire organization, getting the directs on board with what their managers are doing with One on Ones, or Feedback, or even organizational change.

When we do work with groups other than managers, we get all kinds of questions about working with their boss. The first question we get, is how do I give feedback to my boss? For you long time listeners, you know the answer to that one – you don't. The question we don't often get, one we think is really good, is how can I influence my boss?

And the answer to that question starts with knowing how he or she communicates. Here's how to learn what's best for your boss and how to be more effective with it.

1. Bosses (and Everyone Else) Tend to Be Either Readers or Listeners
2. How To Tell Which Your Boss Is
3. How To Be More Effective Knowing It

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This cast concludes our Career Tools' recommendations for textual communications on portable devices.

1. Put Your Device Away When You Are Addressed
2. Don't Touch Your Device When Conversing
3. Rare – RARE – Urgency Trumps This
4. Ask To Be Excused
5. And Finally, Interrupt Politely

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This cast describes Career Tools' recommendations for textual communications on portable devices.

If you've ever been talking to someone who was distracted and then proceeded to answer a text message, send an email, post on Facebook, "Tweet", or in any other way use their cell phone, smart phone, pager, or any other mobile device to communicate, this cast is for you. Feel free to start playing this cast for the offender, on your own mobile device, and then hit them over the head with it.

Here is Career Tools simple guidance for using mobile phones and messaging devices.

1. Put Your Device Away When You Are Addressed
2. Don't Touch Your Device When Conversing
3. Rare – RARE – Urgency Trumps This
4. Ask To Be Excused
5. And Finally, Interrupt Politely

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This cast explains a simple application of DiSC Behavior on greeting others.

Greeting others seems simple enough.  Most of us probably use the same greeting for everyone.  If we're greeting a lot of people, it sure makes it easier for us.

But if we greet everyone the same, roughly, how does that square with what Drucker teaches us: Communication is what the listener does?  It doesn't.  Most of us tend to communicate in ways that make sense to US, but that only works WELL with 25% of our potential audience.  Here's how to start making a better first impression even earlier in a conversation or professional exchange.

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This cast describes how to begin any effort to change an organization.

At some point, each of us as managers are either going to initiate a change, or have to manage our part of a larger change process. It's usually hard work, and if it's someone else's change process, we get the "squeeze": our directs expect us to know stuff which no one is telling us.

There's a better way. Manager Tools does work with corporate clients, and when we help with a change effort, we run a change playbook. The first step in any change effort is to create an EMOTIONAL appeal to those who will be involved in the change. And that is NEVER achieved with financially solid spreadsheets which show a clear cost-benefit win for the change.

Visual, emotional persuasion is the single biggest idea we have ever come across when it comes to change efforts. If you do this well, other stuff is much easier. If you don't, everything else is MUCH harder.

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