Archive for August, 2009
How to Influence Your New Boss, Part II August 7 2009 one response
One of the questions that I get asked all the time in coaching sessions and speaking engagements is, “How do I work with or influence my new boss?” That’s a great question because it outlines a situation that most executives are going to face multiple times throughout their careers. I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a riff on how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rather seamlessly transitioned from working for George W. Bush to Barack Obama. (You can see that post here.)
A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who was working on a story about how to influence your boss and found the Gates post online. He was pitching the story to a web site that’s focused on Gen X and Gen Y guys in the workforce. When he told me the intended audience, my first thought about how to influence your boss was, “Ask for directions.” Of course, as any wife or girlfriend who has been lost with her guy in the car knows, asking for directions is one of the hardest things for guys to do. Getting into why that’s the case would provide enough material for a whole separate blog. So, let me focus in on why asking for direction is my first piece of advice for anyone (not just guys) who wants to influence their new boss.
Here are three quick tips:
Starbucks as a Leadership Case Study: Efficiency, Effectiveness or Both? August 5 2009 2 responses
Been to a Starbucks lately? If so, what do you think? If you’re a long time Starbucker, how does the experience in the stores lately compare with the way things were four or five years ago?
What do any of these questions have to do with leadership, you ask? (After all, that’s what this blog is supposed to be about.) Here’s where I’m coming from.
There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how Starbucks is starting a company-wide program to implement the concepts of lean manufacturing to raise the efficiency and productivity of its stores. In a tight economy, it’s understandable why Starbucks or any organization would focus on controlling its costs.
I’m reminded, however, of a point Stephen Covey made years ago in the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
That brings us to the effectiveness part of the equation. One of the original goals of Starbucks founding (and current) CEO Howard Schultz was to create a “third place” between work and home that people could use to meet, work and hang out. For me personally, this concept worked so well that when I wrote my book, The Next Level
What I’ve noticed lately is that people don’t seem to be using Starbucks as that third place location as much anymore. (You’d actually thing that in a recessionary economy they might be using Starbucks more as a meeting place for networking and such but it doesn’t seem that way.) Have you noticed the same thing? Maybe the leadership emphasis on efficiency is out of balance with an emphasis on effectiveness.
Let’s say that you were appointed as the new “guru of effectiveness with people” for Starbucks, where would you start in returning the company’s stores to that magnetic status of being the “third place”?
From a broader leadership perceptive, what do you notice in your own organization about striking the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness? Especially in a tough economy, what are your best ideas for keeping your customers and employees engaged with your organization? Let’s get a conversation going on this and see what good ideas we have to share with each other. Who knows, we may even come up with some that our friends at Starbucks want to pick up and run with.
It’s Monday. Do You Know Where Your Time is Going? August 3 2009 3 responses
Last week was a vacation week for me and this week sort of, kind of is. What’s the difference? Well, one big difference is location – Laguna Beach, CA vs. Northern Virginia. I learned last week that when the Pacific Ocean is a three block walk down the street from where you’re staying that it’s pretty easy to lose track of time. And then there’s the three hour time difference between the West Coast and the East Coast. That always throws off my rhythm a bit.
So, still being in vacation mode, I was really interested to see a graph in the Sunday New York Times that draws on an annual survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that asks Americans to track how they use their time over every minute of the day. The printed version compared the differences in time usage between employed and unemployed people. No big surprise that people with jobs are more likely to be up by 6:00 am than people who aren’t working. Likewise, it may not be that big a surprise that people without jobs tend to socialize more and later into the evening than people with jobs. Wonder if there’s any correlation between the longer evenings and the later wake-up call? Nah, probably not.
If you share my tendency to be a data geek, you’ll love the online version of the graphs prepared by the Times. I just spent 20 or 30 minutes (Hmmm, how do I account for that? Working, leisure, computer use?), toggling back and forth on the differences in time usage between age groups, education level, ethnicity, employment status and kids or no kids at home. It’s pretty fascinating and raises some questions as well as provides some answers about where we are as a society.
For instance, it looks like the third most common activity at any given point in the day after sleeping and working is watching TV and movies. Playing sports is way down on the list as is relaxing and thinking. As a matter of fact, it looks like no more than 2% of Americans are relaxing and thinking at any given point in the day. (The implication being, I guess, that relaxing and thinking and watching TV or movies are mutually exclusive.) It really makes me wonder what the impact on the quality of our work is when we spend so little time relaxing or thinking.
As I’ve written here before, the lowest ranking item in our Next Level Leadership™ 360 degree survey of high potential managers and executives is consistently “Paces himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.” Here’s something to consider. How long can you stay with the same task (e.g. answering e-mails, staying engaged in a conversation, writing a report, prepping a presentation) before your performance degrades? (It’s what economists call diminishing returns.) Most people I ask that question of tell me it’s somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes. What would it do, then, for your productivity to be intentional about inserting some reenergizing relaxation or think breaks into your day? They don’t have to be long. Five or ten minutes of breathing, stretching or walking around the block could do the trick. Give it a try this week and see what happens.
And , for my fellow data geeks out there, take a look at the interactive graphs from the Times and let me know what’s in the “how we spend our time” data that makes you go hmmm.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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