Throughout my career, Sunday evening has been my “boot up” time for the week.  I like to go to bed on Sunday night knowing my goals for the week and I like waking up feeling energized, organized and ready to conquer the world.  Additionally, I’m a firm believer that I do some of my best thinking while I’m sleeping.  It’s amazing how often I wake up with a solution to a vexing problem that eluded me the night before.  (Yeah, I know that I’m odd.  My wonderful wife reminds me regularly.)

Every week represents an opportunity to improve your performance as a manager and leader. In spite of the setbacks of the prior week, the fire drills that caught you by surprise and your own lack of follow-through on your goals, every Monday offers a clean slate for you to fill. My very positive intent here is to offer you a few suggestions each week that will inspire your pursuit of continuous improvement.  Enjoy and Prosper!

1.  How current are your Individual Development Plans? Most people in my workshops indicate that they do not have an Individual Development Plan, so the odds are pretty good that you can improve in this area.

Regardless of your performance evaluation cycle, if you have not created (or updated within 12 months) an Individual Development Plan for each of your direct reports, it’s time to get this activity started.  This is a great opportunity to conduct quality discussions with your associates about their interests and aspirations on your team or within the organization.  Of course, the most important part of the discussion is the joint action plan and plan for follow-up.

2.  How effectively are you communicating during these tough times? Chances are, your employees would like more from you.  Quite a bit more! During times of change or times of strife and stress, a good rule of thumb is to keep the communication flowing.

Create opportunities to update your team on key performance indicators and to discuss the impact of the economy on the organization’s performance.  Also, create new forums where you and your employees focus on identifying opportunities to increase the value you provide customers or identify opportunities to eliminate waste from your business systems.  If you already use a quality discipline like Six Sigma, these are natural discussions.  If not, emphasize focusing on improving customer value by making things easier/faster/better for your customers by streamlining service and product processes.

3.  It’s time to build new bridges and repair old ones across your organization. It’s easy to get caught up in our own functional pursuits and lose track of what’s going in departments that are dependent upon you or that serve your department.

Take time this week to reach out to one or more of your peers and find out what’s on their mind and how you and your team might help.  There’s no substitute for great relationships across the organization, and building and maintaining those relationships takes time and energy.  And remember that the cardinal rule of networking is always to give more than you take.

Have a great week!  -Art