Someone asked me about the importance of product management in my prior tech businesses. My answer was blunt. Great product managers see beyond customer requirements to the often unspoken needs, and they move organizational mountains to fill those needs.
The first year of your first job responsible for others (supervisor, lead, manager) is the early-awkward phase. Your technical or functional expertise and someone’s perception of your potential for leadership got you here. Your as of yet undeveloped or at least under-developed communication and coordination skills are what will carry you forward. Here are 5 suggestions to help you get this right.
Few things evoke as much negative emotion in otherwise kind and gentle souls as a bad experience as a customer. Focus in your mind on your last really bad customer service experience and you can sense the tension in your neck growing along with the rise in blood pressure. That bad experience becomes “the company” for us. What do your team's performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?
There’s a secret to why I have so much fun producing this podcast. I only interview people who fascinate and inspire with their ideas. The subject of this interview, , Executive Coach, business owner at Aspire CS and popular leadership blogger, Mary Jo Asmus, hits the bullseye on all criteria.
Many first-time leaders are given the equivalent of “battlefield” promotions with no more context than, “You’ve done a great job, you’re in charge.” If you end up on the receiving side of this “Go get ‘em Tiger,” philosophy of leadership development, it’s important for you to quickly gain context for your team’s role and accountabilities.
Routines are comfortable..and at the risk of being redundant, habit forming. Eventually, routines become mind numbing. Here are five ideas to help jump-start your thoughts on breaking the routine:
Performance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results. Here are 7 ideas to promote high performance with your team:
Unfortunately, good work alone is not always enough to stand-out from the crowd. In a noisy, competitive workplace, where others choose us for big projects and new opportunities, finding a way to stand-out...while not becoming one of those aforementioned obnoxious characters, is a fact of life. Joel Garfinkle, a leading executive coach, speaker and author, offers some excellent and practical guidance on this important but awkward topic in his latest book, Getting Ahead-Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level.
Whether professional or personal, it seems that most of us carry around ideas and dreams that inspire us and give us hope for our future. Unfortunately, many of us don't do much more than think about those dreams as they age and then spoil in our mental cellars. Here are 6 slightly different ideas to help you get going on pursuing yours:
For all of us, ignoring this very real human behavior that manifests itself as organizational politics, is a sure-fire way to end up at best on the fringe of irrelevance, and at worst, to end up outside, wondering what happened. Here are 7 ideas you can apply to "play politics" and maintain your integrity:
