Let’s get better at people management
One on One’s are a critical component of people management—both up and down. They’re the touchpoint with your reports and with your manager. They should be a central pillar for information transfer, coaching, utilization & capacity understanding, humanizing yourself and, critically, getting in front of things before it blows up and turns into turd pie.
In other words, One on One’s are the core mechanism for people management.
Read MoreMillennials, moreso than any prior generation, have a fundamentally performative life experience. Being digital natives means more than simply “understanding the social” or “knowing how to Insta”: it means that we came of age on Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and Friendster and we are used to the presentation of information in an idealized world. When you went to high school and college viewing someone’s vacation photos or their posts from a Friday night, you get a false sense of Their Amazing Life—without having to view the gristly bits that comprise the reality of life.
Read MoreTo use a sports analogy, from 1871 – 2017 over 18,918 have played Major League Baseball. In 146 years of play, in a largely consistent game, only ~50 have hit more than 400 home runs, which is, generally speaking, a Hall of Fame worthy career achievement. That .26% of all players.
In other words, prepare for someone to drop from a Top performer.
Read MoreI’m not going to argue whether having remote employees in 2019 is a good or possible thing. It is. Gaining access to a national, or international, pool of talent focused on your company’s mission is worth the cost in adaptation. If you question that, you’re in the wrong place and, simply put, you are the problem remote workers have been trying to overcome in your organization.
Read MoreRead MoreYou are not managing for any one person, and that includes yourself. You are managing for your team. The team succeeds or the team fails. No one person defines the team and no one person is bigger—or smaller—than the team, and that, again, absolutely includes yourself.
