Mitbe Blog

Today, you and peers may find yourselves in two new situations. You are representing your firm in forming alliances with other organizations, which will involve you in a traditional negotiation. Perhaps you may find yourself on one side and your peer on the other, negotiating with each other for necessary resources—money, people, or time. Even [...]

In negotiating with a customer, you will be using more traditional negotiation skills, although here, too, it’s important for you to be aware of your customer’s needs. Your own parameters for flexibility may have to be extended, but keep in mind that the final settlement must benefit both of you.
Traditional negotiations may be done [...]

In negotiating with your own manager, the situation is reversed—you are the person with less authority. On the other hand, the same rule applies— WIIFM. Your manager will be concerned with how the decision is received by upper management, the manager’s peers, your peers, and perhaps other staff members. How can you position your request [...]

As the leader of your team, you are responsible for representing it in negotiations. By negotiations, I am talking not only about the traditional negotiations you might use in dealing with vendors, customers, or potential allies but also about nontraditional negotiating situations—what I call horse trading—that you use to get critical resources from peers or [...]

Living with the Change
Throughout the transition, you can expect implementation problems. Mistakes are part of the learning process, after all. But they may arouse resistance to the change all over again. Tell your employees that the only failure you’re concerned about is the failure to try anything at all. You should explain that solving [...]

While senior management may mandate change, generally its implementation will be up to you and your staff. If so, involve your employees in the decision making. Try to get as many of them involved as possible. This will encourage buy-in to the change.
Even after all these efforts, you may still find some people are [...]

As soon as the plans are made public, meet with your staff to answer employee questions and undo any misconceptions. Don’t just tell your employees the reason behind the change—make a compelling case for it. Many experts attribute the failure of change initiatives to a lack of sense of urgency about the need to change. [...]

To overcome resistance to change, you need to understand what prompts people to resist it. There are four reasons for opposition.

Fear of the unknown. With little or no information about the reason for the change, your employees will imagine the worst. Instead of being energized for action, they will be tentative at best, paralyzed [...]

Faced with change, most people go through four stages.
At first, they refuse to acknowledge the need for change. This is the denial stage. During the second stage, resistance, they will resist efforts to implement the change by dragging their feet. It doesn’t matter where the idea came from.
Todd is an employee in Grace’s [...]

Over 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus commented that the only constant is change. Today, change is only different in that there is more of it. There are technological changes like new equipment and processes. Nontechnological changes include new government regulations and market changes. Changes internal to the organization include budget adjustments, new methods [...]

At the end of the meeting, participants should leave with an action plan, eager to, as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation frequently says, “Make it so.” That upbeat attitude stems from the participation that your leader- ship allowed. You told participants how happy you were to have their participation in the meeting. [...]

As the person in charge, you want to improve the quality of the group’s decision making.
Too often, the decision-making process isn’t carefully managed. Someone suggests an idea, then another member suggests something, and someone else suggests still another idea. The group continues to move on until they tire out and just choose the final [...]

During meetings, your key responsibility is to facilitate discussion. You should create an environment where ideas are viewed fairly, no matter who contributes them, and where the group’s energies are positively, productively focused. For instance, let’s assume one participant not only criticizes another participant’s idea but also the participant. Your task is to remind the [...]

The purpose of any meeting you lead plays a major factor in your selection of participants. Needless to say, if it is a staff meeting, all your employees will attend. If a crossfunctional group is involved in developing a new product or resolving an organizational problem, then you might want participants with relevant expertise.
Generally, [...]

The best-run meetings are brief and focused. Such meetings happen by design—that means that they have a clearly defined mission, operating ground rules, and a well-organized agenda.
Mission
A shared understanding of the meeting’s purpose is critical. Attendees need to know why they are meeting. You might have an operating meeting that is held every [...]

Meetings can serve many different purposes. Informational meetings share news with staff. Educational meetings teach employees something new. Discussion meetings provide a forum for employees to give their opinions, brainstorm together, and find solutions to problems and ideas for new projects and ventures. Planning meetings focus staff attention on critical goals and energize employees.
Whatever [...]

Before discussing problem solving in detail, let me go over some basics. As you know, a problem is a situation that is a deviation from standard— something that needs correcting, a disruption in normal operations, or just a plain mess that needs cleaning up. Sometimes a problem, while an uncertainty or a difficulty, can represent [...]

Problem solving can take up a lot of time. So it makes sense for you to resolve problems before they develop, let alone grow to impact the bottom line. I’ve come to call this preventive management. As you walk through your workplace, you should be looking for recurring problems—gaps between what should be and what [...]

Fear of making an unpopular decision is one reason that many managers hold off making a decision. They think if they wait long enough, circumstances will change, making no decision necessary. Other reasons for indecisiveness include:

Fear of making a wrong decision or a mistake
Fear of the unknown
Fear of taking responsibility

These issues [...]

As a manager, you may have to make a decision that won’t be well received. But keep in mind that a manager who refuses to make unpopular decisions when needed undermines her own managerial role in many ways, depending on the nature of the decision. It may affect operations, it may affect the respect in [...]

As a manager, you will be making several different kinds of decisions. For example, you will be making considered decisions, choices made after careful consideration of a variety of possible solutions. For instance, a considered decision might involve the purchase of new office equipment or the addition of a product to your current line. As [...]

Problem solving and decision making are not the only activities of a manager, but they are extremely important ones. Much of your success as a manager will depend on your ability to make the right decisions. Often, those decisions will be related to choosing the best of several good resolutions to problems; other times, those [...]

With a thank you to Clint Eastwood, let me share with you what is good about a good leader and what’s bad about a bad leader. The “ugly” is made up of two situations that bad leaders can create.
The good from good leaders:
The team works as a team, not just as a group [...]

Have you gone around to find out what you don’t know? Your first priority as a leader/manager, especially if you happen to be taking over a new situation, is to find out about policies, problems, and opportunities. Not only will you get a better perspective on your position, but the responses to your questions will [...]

As your team’s leader, you will be watched to be sure that you live up to your employees’ idea of a leader, so you need to know what employees look for in a leader. Let’s look at the attributes one by one. Employees want their leaders to do the following:
Clarify direction. A leader provides [...]

As a team leader, your major responsibility is to model the behaviors and attitudes that you want to see within the team. What does this mean? For one, you need to share information with your team, just as you expect members to exchange information with one another. Further, you need to show respect for each [...]

Many departments do not operate as teams—that is, they do not practice teamwork. Members may talk to each other at the printer or over lunch, and their work efforts may be designed to meet the overarching objectives of the department, but these employees work on a day-to-day basis largely as individuals. Such situations are unfortunate, [...]

Within this book, you will discover many of the skills you will need to be an effective leader, such as the skills of delegation and empowerment and communication (Learn to Listen, How to Speak Assertively, Communicating Up, Down, and Sideways, and How to Speak without Words). But in this chapter you will learn about a [...]

This article is about your responsibilities as your unit’s leader. Too many new managers assume that they don’t have to worry about leadership, because they think that term is only used in talking about CEOs and presidents. Not so. If you’re responsible for the performance of a group, then you’re both a manager and a [...]

Writing skills are as important in electronic as in paper communication. Minutes, memos, and reports—increasingly, all these documents are sent electronically. When it comes to e-mail, you need to address two questions: how can I send better messages, and how can I better manage the e-mail I receive?
Not everyone is skilled at writing e-mail [...]

Meeting Minutes
If you write the minutes for a meeting, you want to be sure that you record what was said in a fair and balanced way. Jot down notes during the session as you go along and write up the minutes as soon as possible. Write in the simple past tense: “Tom Brown said [...]