This cast gives a guide balancing your professional countenance with your community relationships.

A few weeks ago on our Facebook page, we asked: what are you doing to use your professional skills to improve your community? Many people posted about the projects they were involved with from working with children to marketing for non-profits.

We absolutely support all your efforts to improve your communities. And, there are some cautions about your behaviors which prevent problems in both your professional and your community efforts.

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This cast concludes our discussion on how to use your calendar more proactively.

We regularly get requests from managers wanting to know how they can either be a good executive, or increase their chances of becoming one. We often get the sense that they're asking because they think there's something different or hidden that makes for an effective executive. There is just an air of their questions and assumptions that there's a mystique around becoming or being an executive.

We don't think that's really true. We can understand it. It certainly is a harder job than most people realize, and almost no one understands how demanding being a very senior executive is at a large multi-national corporation. It's not for the faint of heart.

But as for being effective, there are all kinds of things managers can do as managers that will prepare them to be an effective executive.

It's probably frustrating to hear, but many of the activities or strategies or tactics – most of them, in fact – are available to anyone, and are just basic blocking and tackling around effectiveness and efficiency in general. And when it comes to effectiveness, the first lever is time. Most of us are terrible around our "time management" skills, but really good executives are really good at it.

Right of First Refusal is one of the ways they do it, and you can too.

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This guidance describes how to use your calendar more proactively.

We regularly get requests from managers wanting to know how they can either be a good executive, or increase their chances of becoming one. We often get the sense that they're asking because they think there's something different or hidden that makes for an effective executive. There is just an air of their questions and assumptions that there's a mystique around becoming or being an executive.

We don't think that's really true. We can understand it. It certainly is a harder job than most people realize, and almost no one understands how demanding being a very senior executive is at a large multi-national corporation. It's not for the faint of heart.

But as for being effective, there are all kinds of things managers can do as managers that will prepare them to be an effective executive.

It's probably frustrating to hear, but many of the activities or strategies or tactics – most of them, in fact – are available to anyone, and are just basic blocking and tackling around effectiveness and efficiency in general. And when it comes to effectiveness, the first lever is time. Most of us are terrible around our "time management" skills, but really good executives are really good at it.

Right of First Refusal is one of the ways they do it, and you can too.

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This cast helps you be more efficient in following up.

We've talked about following up in numerous Career Tools casts. It's one of the marks of a true professional. People who follow up well, who don't let things fall through the cracks and who are in control of their workload stand out from the crowd. So how do you become one of those people?

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This is the second of our casts that describe our recommendations about calendar management.

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

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This cast describes the first of our recommendations about calendar management.

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.

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Today, we finish up our series on building a sense of urgency in your team.

Here's a brief outline of the Sense of Urgency series:

1. Ask the right questions
2. State the deadline ... don't ask
3. Know how to combat bad answers
4. Accelerate all deadlines
5. Use passive updating
6. Feedback every time ...
   

You know you're a manager - really, truly in a role of managing others - when you get frustrated that things don't happen as fast as they used to. "Gosh, why don't they GET IT? Can't they SEE what kind of pressure we are (I AM) under?" What is taking SO *(@((&$^*@^Q@*#% LONG?"

That's what all that extra pay is for. ;-)

If you've wondered whether it's just YOUR team, it's NOT. We find a lack of a sense of urgency to be pandemic. Most managers spend time complaining about this very thing when we coach them.

This week, we finish (finally!) our series on working effectively with administrative assistants.

Also, for all of those who went to Podcast Alley and voted for Manager Tools, thank you very much! We achieved a long-held objective of getting in the Top 10 list of all podcasts. We don't know how long we'll stay there ... but we're enjoying the moment. And we owe that to all our friends here on Manager Tools. Thank You!

This week, we continue our series on working effectively with administrative assistants. Given that this is part 2 of 3 parts, we've obviously had a lot to discuss on the subject.

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