This guidance completes our discussion on how to handle your lunch hour.

This may not make sense to a lot of folks, us talking about how to eat lunch. But the fact is, we all do it almost every day at work. If you do take a full hour, that's roughly 10% or maybe even 15% of your day as a manager or professional. That's a huge part of everyone's day. But, for many of us, our approach to it is rooted in how we had lunch at home as kids, or in school. That makes no sense for the busy professional today.

Suppose your boss takes a 45 minute lunch break most days between 1230 and 115. Should you eat then too, or eat at a different time? Should we eat a big meal, or a small one? I'm so busy…should I work through lunch, at my desk?

In a way, lunch at work is like email: we learned how to eat before we became professionals, and we learned how to communicate before we started doing email. And in both cases we probably have some bad habits worth pruning.

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This guidance describes how to handle your lunch hour.

This may not make sense to a lot of folks, us talking about how to eat lunch. But the fact is, we all do it almost every day at work. If you do take a full hour, that's roughly 10% or maybe even 15% of your day as a manager or professional. That's a huge part of everyone's day. But, for many of us, our approach to it is rooted in how we had lunch at home as kids, or in school. That makes no sense for the busy professional today.

Suppose your boss takes a 45 minute lunch break most days between 1230 and 115. Should you eat then too, or eat at a different time? Should we eat a big meal, or a small one? I'm so busy…should I work through lunch, at my desk?

In a way, lunch at work is like email: we learned how to eat before we became professionals, and we learned how to communicate before we started doing email. And in both cases we probably have some bad habits worth pruning.

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This guidance describes how to be ready to talk with your boss about your team.

Most managers overestimate how much their boss knows about their directs. That's true for most of us – we think the people around us know far more about what we're thinking about than they actually do.

But is this a good or bad thing when it comes to what our boss knows about our team? For the most part, it's okay that your boss doesn't know a lot about your directs. If your boss has 5-8 to maybe even 10 directs, she's probably just keeping up with you and your peers. If you and each of your peers have 5-7 directs, think about it. Your boss has between 30 and 50 people to keep track of.

Which is to say, she's not doing it.

But what are we to do? There are several things that an effective manager does to make sure their team members are being given appropriate attention. We'll talk about some simple quarterly updates for everyone in a different show. But there's something more urgent that we recommend you be ready to discuss.

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This guidance concludes our discussion on how to learn about your skips and develop your direct report managers by discussing your skips on a regular basis.

We get asked all the time, "Should I have One on Ones with the directs of my directs? If relationships are good, relationships with everyone in my organization would be very good, right?" By this reductio ad absurdum logic, of course, the CEO "should" be having One on Ones with everyone, right?" That math doesn't work, and so the only question becomes, where to draw the line.

Others ask us, "How CAN I have One on Ones with my skips? I can barely fit in my directs' One on Ones. This is killing me!" Well, we don't know what else to say, but thank you for making our point to the other guys, and hey, we never told you to have O3s with your skips anyway. But, alas, one of our listeners and good friends tells us we once said the only day of the week to have O3s was Thursday. Whoa. I think what we said was only have One on Ones on days that end in Y.

It boils down to: What do we do about cultivating some sort of knowledge about our skips, for whose work we are responsible?

An even smarter question is How do I get the most out of my entire organization? It's not enough to see them in groups, as we recommend in our Skip Level Meetings guidance. How can we consider them wisely in our succession planning? Because, you know, you're supposed to be thinking about succession planning for your directs' positions, right?

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This guidance describes how to learn about your skips and develop your direct report managers by discussing your skips on a regular basis.

We get asked all the time, "Should I have One on Ones with the directs of my directs? If relationships are good, relationships with everyone in my organization would be very good, right?" By this reductio ad absurdum logic, of course, the CEO "should" be having One on Ones with everyone, right?" That math doesn't work, and so the only question becomes, where to draw the line.

Others ask us, "How CAN I have One on Ones with my skips? I can barely fit in my directs' One on Ones. This is killing me!" Well, we don't know what else to say, but thank you for making our point to the other guys, and hey, we never told you to have O3s with your skips anyway. But, alas, one of our listeners and good friends tells us we once said the only day of the week to have O3s was Thursday. Whoa. I think what we said was only have One on Ones on days that end in Y.

It boils down to: What do we do about cultivating some sort of knowledge about our skips, for whose work we are responsible?

An even smarter question is How do I get the most out of my entire organization? It's not enough to see them in groups, as we recommend in our Skip Level Meetings guidance. How can we consider them wisely in our succession planning? Because, you know, you're supposed to be thinking about succession planning for your directs' positions, right?

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This cast concludes our guidance on what to do and why when directs want to describe why they did what they did when you have given them negative feedback.

One of the big hesitations that many, many managers have to giving negative feedback is that they don't want to have a long conversation with their directs. They've tried to talk about a mistake before, they've tried to broach the subject, but it's never as easy as you want it to be. It happens even to the most well intentioned of managers. They were willing to tolerate some mistakes. They only mentioned this mistake because the direct repeatedly asked to be told how they're doing. Maybe they really didn't even want to, but they felt like they could this time.

And what happens? The direct gets defensive. The direct says well, let me explain. The direct says, but you don't understand. The direct wants to engage to win the point that they didn't mean to do it wrong, they didn't mean to have it come out wrong, what they did made sense before things didn't go well.

The manager thinks, to hell with this. What they did wasn't effective, they asked for me to tell them how they were doing, I did – politely, I might add – and they go ballistic. Not doing this anymore. These directs really don't comments – they want to get credit for wanting, but they don't handle it well. I'll believe what they DO, not what they SAY.

And so, everybody loses. But we have to tell our folks how they're doing, and still have time to get everything done and not have everyone angry and hurt all the time.

If you're a manager who isn't giving enough feedback because of the responses you get from directs, this guidance will help.

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This guidance describes what to do and why when directs want to describe why they did what they did when you have given them negative feedback.

One of the big hesitations that many, many managers have to giving negative feedback is that they don't want to have a long conversation with their directs. They've tried to talk about a mistake before, they've tried to broach the subject, but it's never as easy as you want it to be. It happens even to the most well intentioned of managers. They were willing to tolerate some mistakes. They only mentioned this mistake because the direct repeatedly asked to be told how they're doing. Maybe they really didn't even want to, but they felt like they could this time.

And what happens? The direct gets defensive. The direct says well, let me explain. The direct says, but you don't understand. The direct wants to engage to win the point that they didn't mean to do it wrong, they didn't mean to have it come out wrong, what they did made sense before things didn't go well.

The manager thinks, to hell with this. What they did wasn't effective, they asked for me to tell them how they were doing, I did – politely, I might add – and they go ballistic. Not doing this anymore. These directs really don't comments – they want to get credit for wanting, but they don't handle it well. I'll believe what they DO, not what they SAY.

And so, everybody loses. But we have to tell our folks how they're doing, and still have time to get everything done and not have everyone angry and hurt all the time.

If you're a manager who isn't giving enough feedback because of the responses you get from directs, this guidance will help.

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This cast concludes our guidance on how to effectively work with your manager when he or she is geographically distant from you.

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This cast gives our guidance on how to effectively work with your manager when he or she is geographically distant from you.

We have a cast on Manager Tools which is designed to give managers who work with geographically dispersed teams some simple things to do to make achieving results more likely. In this cast, we want to give directs a few simple things to do from their side to assist their manager and themselves in achieving results.

You can look at this issue from two sides. For your boss, taking the actions described in this cast will give him confidence that you are a productive member of the team even though you're not co-located. For you, it means that out of sight IS NOT out of mind. Your chances of recognition, payrises and promotions go down when you're not co-located with your boss. These simple steps go some way to mitigating that fact.

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This cast concludes our conversation on helping you deal with the situation when your boss finds faults with your work.

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