Three DON’TS when you become a manager

July 21st, 2010
  1. Don’t be a part of the office gossip anymore. I know the temptation is too high but refrain from participating in such conversations. Moreover, your role now is to support everyone on the team.
  2. Don’t fall into the usual “boss bashing” activity that goes on in most offices in the coffee room. You lose credibility, you lose control and above all you lose reputation. You are a part of the management now.
  3. Don’t take your new role to the extreme. In other words don’t project the attitude of one-upmanship that you’re better than your former coworkers. The biggest disadvantage of such an attitude is — you lose all the home court advantages that promotion from within can give you. In the bargain you create distance, distrust and greater challenges in managing the same group.

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Management Meetings or Time Management …or Wasted Hours

June 20th, 2010

Of all the woes that curse our race there is management meeting in the case.

If you want to save time, you need to ask yourself:

  1. Do I need to be present in the meeting?
  2. Do I need to be present for all the meetings?
  3. Is it possible to delegate to some one else?
  4. As a chairperson, before I begin a meeting do I have an idea how long will it take?
  5. Do I know how much time I plan to allocate on each item on the agenda?

I am assuming you have an agenda for the meeting.

Here is an eye opener

The time spent on any item on the agenda will be inversely proportional to its value.  In other words, there is a huge tendency to spend a disproportionate time on the trivial issues.

How do you ensure you don’t devote more time on trivial issues?

By prioritizing the items and then allocating appropriate time in relation to their importance. This is a very important consideration and often ignored by most managers.

It is not a test of intelligence that

The length of a meeting increases in proportion to the number of people invited.  Therefore, as a chairperson of the meeting, it is your responsibility to keep everyone’s contribution on target without offending them.

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Your Leadership Style Demonstrates Your Administrative Efficiency

June 14th, 2010

Do you remember Parkinson’s Law?

“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

If you are unable to set time deadlines for yourself, you will stretch the work to fill the available time. A leader’s administrative efficiency starts with you.

What does administrative efficiency mean?

It   means that you need to organize your desk, remove clutter and distractions. I strongly believe that do one thing at a time rather than multi tasking everything and put finished work out of the way. If you maintain the right focus, it will take you far ahead.

Use the “FOUR – D” method to keep your focus on the right administrative tasks:

  1. Do
  2. Delegate
  3. Delay
  4. Dump

Use discretionary powers to demonstrate your Leadership Style and enhance your administrative efficiency

You are the best judge of what has to be delegated, what has to be done by you, what has to be delayed and what needs to be dropped.

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Nothing Happens Until Something Moves

May 12th, 2010

The few minutes you will invest in our audio learning programs will be some of the most productive minutes you would have ever spent.

When you have finished listening to a particular audio learning program, that’s great, but the true test is how you apply the knowledge. Remember, the process of learning will accelerate your path to correct action, and taking action will get you ahead. Find your own way to take action, because nothing happens until something moves. So take action and click on one of the links.

Leadership Audio Learning

How do you earn more if you do not get the time to learn more? Therefore, how can you expect improvement in your skill sets? See for yourself at

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Open your mind, listen with passion. Come on let’s all learn together!

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Random Thoughts on First Level Leadership – Octopus on Skates

May 10th, 2010

Yesterday, I was reading about adaptive leadership. While cross referencing a piece, I came across a thought, which is worth sharing.

New York Times best-selling author Dr. John C. Maxwell in his book, “Talent is not Enough” says, that focus should be your friend.

Talent without focus is like an octopus on roller skates. There will be a lot of movement, but you will hardly reach any where. Talent with focus will take you far ahead.

Ladder of Success

Psychologist James Dobson said, “What is the use of climbing the ladder of success only to find that it is leaning against the wrong wall?”


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It’s Time to Invest in Presentation Skills

May 2nd, 2010

An investment with recurring interest

A presentation is an investment on the part of both the presenter and the audience, in terms of time, energy and financial resources. Every presentation should facilitate the final outcome in terms of selling an idea, persuading the audience to choose a desired course of action or disseminating knowledge, which is important and beneficial to the audience.

Develop this competency (Presentation Skills) before you need it

As such, delivering Power Presentations are now a required competency of any employee whose job includes the above functions, not just typically sales executives. I strongly believe that delivering good presentations requires more skill than talent. So don’t ignore this essential skill which is required by every leader.

Next Step: Sign up for the First Level Leadership E-zine and get access to good information without any fluff right into your mail box. When You Subscribe to our audio e-zine, you’ll receive a FREE Audio Learning Program: “Seeds of Leadership.” Get your copy now.

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An Idea for Self Improvement

April 28th, 2010

You can increase your personal efficiency if you invest in continuous self development. You could learn through reading specific books or by attending trainings and seminars. Reading takes a lot of time and seminars are expensive. So how do you invest in continuous self development? Moreover, you don’t have enough hours at hand and time is slipping by.

What if you invested in just one percent daily acts of self development?

Invest in one percent daily acts, and by the end of the year you would have made an investment of________ %( Fill in the blank)

But the question is – how do you find time?

Can you learn during waiting times, which includes your commuting time, queuing time and travel time? I am sure if you look carefully you can treat these small packets of opportunities for self improvement rather than just spending your time doing nothing. Your travel time or your driving time can be your opportunity to catch up on the latest thinking on management, or to revise a topic of leadership which could help you at work.

So how could you do this?

Commit yourself to daily improvement by listening to audio learning programs. This can be done in your passive time, and you will be amazed at the incremental gain in your knowledge over a period of time. So take an audio book with you when you go out, and try to listen to your favorite topics between your waiting times. Then assess your efficiency at the end of just three months. Trust me, small packets of audio learning will make a big difference.

Take home lesson

The single most important lesson, I hope you take from this article is the need to make continuous improvement in how you do what you do as part of your everyday work activities. Audio learning offers you an easy option. Just plan and organize your spare time – after all, planning and organizing are known as the Siamese twins of management.

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Leader’s Dilemma – Problem Solving and Decision Making (Part 2)

April 22nd, 2010

As promised, here are some techniques, which can help you to structure your Decision Making:

Prioritization – A system of ranking, which helps you to choose more easily. It works best for recurring decisions such as allocation of resources or customer service procedures. I t is not as good for one time decisions.

Check List – This technique proves very handy in simple decision making, involving few alternatives. You can simply tick off the factors that are acceptable or unacceptable, and then choose the best alternative.

Brain Storming: It encourages members of a group to let their mind wander to find creative ways to solve problems and develop alternatives. Some one has to facilitate the session and record the ideas. This technique also helps to generate lots of new ideas.

Pay offs – When one main decision is needed you can use a pay off method to help you structure your options in a clear and concise manner.

Decision Trees – When multiple decisions are to be made at different times, when a situation cannot be managed by a pay off method, Decision Trees become indispensable. It is used for tracking complicated decisions and their effects on subsequent decisions.

There are dozens of decision making techniques available

I have just listed a few to draw your attention towards the methodology. No one technique is best; each has its limitations and is applicable in certain situations. You might have to use a couple of techniques in tandem. If any of these interest you, I suggest you please consult many instructional texts that are available, and then integrate them into your decision making process.

Remember- Leaders get paid to solve problems correctly and make the right decisions.

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Leader’s Dilemma – Problem Solving and Decision Making (Part 1)

April 22nd, 2010

Which is the most important skill required by a leader?

I think Problem Solving and Decision Making relate to every thing you do as a leader. You will always be judged as to how effective a leader you are by your ability to solve problems and make decisions.

Why do Problem Solving and Decision Making Skills overlap?

It is strange but true, problem solving and decision making skills are pretty closely related. Their actions and their processes frequently overlap.

Let us take an example – If your customer satisfaction is dropping, what will you do?

It is a problem right! Solving a problem initially involves finding out possible solutions…  You would immediately start thinking of all the solutions that could fix the problem.

This could be:

- Hiring new customer service professional or

- You might think to increase the frequency of training.

Now the moment you start looking at the solutions, you start looking into your decision making techniques

You start thinking, which alternatives to accept and implement. So decision making and problem solving are quite closely related and they can often overlap.

Therefore, I am going to give you a set of five questions to follow

This might help you in your process of decision making. You will have to come up with a structure to your problem solving process to explore and analyze the problems, so that you can look at the solutions.  However, you can best do this by exploring and understanding some of the major issues involved in making decisions by asking the following five questions:

  1. What are the time constraints?
  2. Who will participate in the decision making process
  3. Will this be recurring or one time decision?
  4. What are the components of this decision?
  5. What techniques will be used to make this decision?

Remember – Leaders get paid to solve problems correctly and make the right decisions.


There are several techniques available to help you structure your decisions. In part two of the post, I am going to list some decision making techniques…

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First Level Leadership Qualities – What Does Good Look Like?

April 12th, 2010

Enough research has been done to find out what good looks like

The search for better leadership techniques is never ending.  I believe in the common sense approach to managing people and operations. Here are some leadership qualities for your consideration:

  • You have seen qualified experts failing miserably as managers. Why?

    One reason could be -lack of leadership qualities

    These people lack basic or practical skills of planning and organizing their work. They are relatively oblivious to the more abstract portion of their job, which requires skills entirely different from their core area of expertise. Therefore, those who lead well are sagaciously aware of themselves as leaders. In other words, the high performance leaders tend to be highly self aware individuals.

    • Why a workaholic leader is preoccupied with solving problems rather than getting them solved?

      One reason could be – lack of leadership qualities

      A high performance leader looks at himself as one who mobilizes people, where as a reasonably skilled leader tries to solve every problem by himself. A high performance leader cleverly engages human resources to bear upon a problem.

        • Do you know the avenue to leadership excellence?

          Those who lead well are committed to self development. They are not content with the status quo. They read, they study, they attend trainings/seminars, they discuss ideas and they take an active interest in life itself. They are devoted to their own personal growth. The company or department they manage usually benefits from the effects of their personal development.

            • What is the key part of leadership performance?

              The manager who manages reasonably well may be called a reactive leader. A high performance leader may be described as an assertive leader. The assertive attitude forms a key aspect of leadership performance.

              Are you a high performance leader or a leader who leads reasonably well?

              Only a high performance leader can bring together the efforts of many people into worth while accomplishments.  A leader who leads reasonably well remains a face in the crowd.

              Remember –all these functions operate to shape human activities

              These dimensions, which I have highlighted in the functioning of a high performance leader, might prove handy to you. See how you stack up against these leadership qualities.

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