Management Excellence News, Updates & Coming Attractions
Filed under: Career, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading the Generations, Life and Business, Management Education, Middle Management, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: While I’m remarkably sensitive to not creating an infomercial out of my blog, I am involved in a number of exciting activities that I’ve shared with some of you personally. Here’s a bit broader update and a call for speakers and interview subjects.
-Coming Soon: The Management Excellence Interview Series
I truly enjoy some of the blogs that push the envelope on mixing media to provide audio and video posts, podcasts and events, and I’m moving in that direction as well. I experimented earlier this year with some podcasts and got tired of talking with myself and haven’t come back to that medium yet.
That’s changing over the next few weeks as I embark on what I hope will be a regular feature here at Management Excellence in the form of brief audio interviews with some fascinating professionals.
I’m on tap to record the first one on Monday (for posting later that week) with Mike Mulcahy, a scrappy, no-nonsense executive that has held the hot seat in large and small organizations, and has some great insights on “The CEO’s Perspective on Product Management.”
As an aside, I conducted yet another experiment on Twitter yesterday and asked the product management community #prodmgmt what they want to hear from Mike. Their list of great questions might just help define the outline for a book! If you’re not using Twitter to tap into the many great minds out there, you are missing a great opportunity.
I am interested in building on my list of interview subjects and would love to chat with executives and professionals that have something to say about leadership, strategy, sales and marketing and performance excellence and any of the other topics that I cover here at Management Excellence. Drop me a note and I will get in touch with you.
-Where Distance Learning Meets Professional Mentoring to Support Professional Growth
During the past few years, I challenged myself to do something way out of my comfort zone and that is to learn to teach on-line. I’m a huge advocate of face to face learning, but the world is changing. I now teach distance classes here in my community and actually managed to gain permission from DePaul to teach an elective MBA course (Project Management) in a hybrid fashion…one week face to face and the next on-line. The experience has been fascinating and enlightening for me and the students have voted with stellar reviews.
It’s time for the next step.
I am putting the finishing touches on my initial distance learning meets professional mentoring programs and will launch a new website for this in September.
The first program is focused on early career professionals, and is entitled: “Considering Leadership: What to Do and How to Prepare,” and will be quickly followed with, “Congratulations You’re a First-Time Leader, What Next?” (There are another 6 on tap for more experienced professionals and audiences in product and project management, marketing and on topics ranging from leadership to strategy and execution to developing executive presence.)
What I’m excited about is that the programs are designed to offer a blend of distance learning with personal mentoring time (telephone or skype) to deliver complete schedule flexibility while integrating person to person involvement. I’ve designed the lessons to communicate core concepts and tools in short audio and video segments, supported by synced slides, and then the pdf Action Guide documents for each lesson outline the very important developmental exercises.
I engage with the participants in up-front and back-end personal calls, as well as via live teleseminars during the program. Of course, they get unlimited e-mail access to me. Programs will run 45 to 60 days and will be priced extremely aggressively to allow individuals as well as corporations to get involved.
I’m working hard to help fill some gaps in the market with these programs. People need schedule flexibility and affordability, and they need tools and programs that don’t just talk but that challenge and guide them on taking action. After all, you can no longer count on your company to support your own development and there’s little else in the market that blends flexibility with affordability with pragmatism and quality.
Step one is a quality check and I’ll be putting several early career professionals through the “Considering Program” prior to launch. More soon.
-News Sound Bites:
Practical Lessons in Leadership will be used as a text at yet another school…this time for a program on Creative Leadership at McHenry Community College here in Illinois. I’ve been invited to guest speak and I can’t wait. Nothing beats walking into a classroom and seeing your book in front of everyone with post-its sticking out and pages bent. Prior talks and Q/A sessions in these settings have been great! That’s what it was meant for!
-Speaking of Guest Speakers: I am teaching Business Plan Development at DePaul University on Monday nights this fall and would love to hear from any Chicago-area professionals with experience in venture financing and business planning interested in a guest speaking opportunity. I can talk with you about specifics. Drop me an e-mail and I’ll get in touch with you.
-More Speaking:
Creating a High Performance Culture on a Foundation of Leadership Excellence is one of my keynote topics and I’m looking forward to delivering it at a CEO Conference at the Sawmill Cree Resort in Huron, OH on September 1.
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That’s it for now, although there is some “Marketing” news in the works, but more about that later. Back to more Management Excellence content with a new Leadership Caffeine post on Monday!
Enjoy your weekend!
Living, Learning and Leading in an Increasingly Virtual World
Somewhere between the world I grew up in and the world that we are living in today, everything about working, leading and learning began to change. It’s increasingly a virtual world, and everything about communicating, interacting and developing relationships feels a bit different than it used to. While many/most of us are compliant with the changes in communications (telex to fax to e-mail to IM, web conferencing etc.), I wonder how many of us are truly working to become competent at living and working in this world.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the changes in how we live, learn, earn and engage, and I’m working hard to adapt.
- A valued colleague sends me a note expressing frustration over the challenges of leading remotely. I can’t believe I haven’t spent more time on this valuable topic. Stay tuned.
- I delivered a webinar and I realized that I have to get better at communicating without interaction. I’ve set a schedule to begin doing some of these blog posts as podcasts as a means of increasing my comfort and competence communicating to an invisible audience.
- I signed up to teach an on-line course expressly for the purpose of discovering what it means to “teach” on-line.
- My kids don’t use their phones for talking. If I want to reach them, I send a text message and get a response practically before I’m done typing. (I saw this coming a few years ago when I asked my youngest son why he never calls friends on the phone. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “Why would I want to talk with one person when I can be on-line with all of my friends at the same time.”)
- An article at Fast Company indicates that in the next few years, technology will obliterate the need to travel. (Hmmm, I’m suspicious of the word obliterate.)
- I am busy working on an on-line content strategy to augment my own face-to-face seminar/workshop activities.
The common thread in all of these items is the shift in how we work, lead and learn. Like it or not, the world is becoming more and more virtual everyday, and those of us that are old enough to remember life before fax machines and e-mail will be well-served to quit fighting the trend and start learning how to become competent and comfortable communicating to no-one and everyone at the same time.
It was just a few years ago that I received my first request to fund an employee’s pursuit of an on-line degree. I am a staunch advocate of the importance of the face-to-face network developed at school, especially for MBA students, and while I approved the request, I recall challenging the value. Since that time, I know of dozens of professionals that have had great experiences earning degrees on-line. I still question whether there is any chance that you can develop a close network in that manner, but hey, this is the era of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, where it is seemingly more about contacts than close relationships. (I’m still suspicious of that premise.)
One of the critical leadership skills of our time is developing comfort and competence at leading distributed teams. There are still some firms that insist on their managers and leaders being housed within a line of sight, but they are showing their lack of understanding of how the world is changing. The literature on leading remotely seems to offer superficial guidance from people adapting old models to new situations. I suspect that as time moves on, the profession of leadership will evolve to take into account the very distinct skills and approaches needed to lead effectively while never coming into personal contact. (As a side note, I deal with many people on the receiving side of remote leadership. At best, the leader to employee relationships they describe are superficial. We haven’t figured this one out yet. )
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The difference between compliance with new technologies and new styles of communicating and competence at leveraging these tools and styles for results is significant. Deriving value from virtual leader/employee relationships or on-line learning is a very different task for all parties involved than it was in the almost bygone era of face-to-face. It’s time to quit fighting the changes and learn how to master the new opportunities to engage. I still struggle to see how these new methods will replicate the richness of face-to-face communication, but that’s my problem to deal with as the world keeps changing. In the meantime, if you are looking for me, don’t call…I’m busy learning how to communicate all over again.
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