The conclusion of our guidance on how to attend happy hour.

Your boss and your co-workers are going to happy hour. Should you go? Should you drink? Should you just go home and read a story to your kids/go to the gym/do what you want to do? Do you really have to hang out with the people you work with all day? In this guidance we give you all the answers.

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Our guidance on how to attend happy hour.

Your boss and your co-workers are going to happy hour. Should you go? Should you drink? Should you just go home and read a story to your kids/go to the gym/do what you want to do? Do you really have to hang out with the people you work with all day? In this guidance we give you all the answers.

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This guidance recommends asking your directs for work to be done - meaning requesting things in the form of a question – rather than stating your desire for something to occur.

Most managers, when they need something done, tell their directs what to do. Telling relies on role power. It works, but there’s a better, more strategic way: asking.

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This guidance recommends the ‘Ready Now/Ready Next’ Approach to Succession Planning.

Every really effective executive spends a great deal of time on the people in their organization. Who’s good, who’s struggling, who’s doing what we need them to do, who’s taking up too many resources, who’s creating conflict where they oughtn’t. This is because the core responsibility of an executive is to ensure the future profitability of the organization.

That means you’ve got to know who’s going to fill what roles in the near term. Further, based on what the market is going to do in the next 5 years, where is the organization strong or weak relative to that in human capacity, and therefore what hiring/development needs to happen to create the future we want or meet the future we think is going to happen to us.

Here’s how to do Succession Planning now for you and your team.

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This guidance recommends greeting all of your directs when you first interact with them each morning, and how to do it.

This guidance ought to be unnecessary, but sadly, it isn’t. The short answer is, you’re never so busy as to be able to get away with ignoring your directs.

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This guidance tells you how to structure meeting agendas around the biggest, most important items.

What should come first on your meeting agendas? How do you divide time among four or five items that you want to discuss or decide or action?

It’s not hard – put the most important item FIRST, and give it plenty of time.

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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 how to manage one of your directs who wanted the job you’re in now, and you may have reason to believe that they will hold it against you.

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