It's Okay to Be the Boss

Participant Workbook

Bruce Tulgan

• Publisher: Pfeiffer
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470538258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

A companion to the dynamic It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Management Workshop, this Participant Workbook is a hands-on resource that will help you learn how to overcome the common obstacles to becoming an engaged manager. You will gain a clear understanding of which management challenges can be controlled, along with tips and techniques for effectively controlling them. You will also discover the proven strategies for working around issues that cannot be avoided or controlled.

The It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Management Workshop leads you through a series of eight back-to-basics techniques that clearly show how to develop the skills that will enhance your management abilities and help you

• Build relationships of trust and confidence with employees
  
  

• Delegate tasks, responsibilities, and projects
  
  

• Keep employees focused and moving in the right direction
  
  

• Increase productivity, quality, retention of high-performers, and turnover among low-performers
  
  

• Sharply reduce waste, inefficiency, errors, down-time, and conflict among employees
  
  

It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Management Workshop will help you incorporate into your daily routine the time-tested management techniques that spell success—tracking employee performance, correcting failure, and rewarding success.

BACK-TO-BASICS TECHNIQUE 1

GET IN THE HABIT OF MANAGING EVERY DAY

Managers who are positively convinced that they don’t have any time, spend more time managing them anyone else. They just spend all their management time in crisis mode. If you don’t spend time managing up-front, in advance, before anything goes wrong, you will spend all of your management time solving problems that never should have happened in the first place and doing work that other people should be doing.

You don’t have time not to manage.

ONE-ON-ONE CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PEOPLE YOU MANAGE

Focus on the work—expectations, goals, deadlines, problems.
Ask for concrete details about how things are going
Talk through the work that needs to be done. Ask, “What steps are you going to follow?”
Tell them how to avoid unnecessary pitfalls.
Tell employees what you need from them.
Ask what they need from you.

GETTING STARTED

Focus on three to five people a day.
Keep the meetings short, no more than fifteen minutes.
Consider having stand-up meetings, with a clipboard in hand for taking notes.
Meet with everyone at least once every two weeks.
If any of your employees work on other shifts, stay late or come in early to meet with them.
If you manage people in different locations, use phone and e-mail regularly when you can’t have oneon- one meetings.

HOW TO MAKE TIME AVAILABLE

Make a commitment and stick with it.
Block out the time on your schedule.
Try different schedules, different days and times, and see what works best.
Make appointments with each individual for each one-on-one and keep them.
Endow the time for one-on-ones with the same characteristics as other things you do routinely.
Figure out what information can be communicated at brief team meetings and set up some one-onones after those meetings.

WORKSHEET: MAKING TIME FOR MANAGING EVERY DAY

1. What will you do to make the time available for regular one-on-one meetings with the people you manage?

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2. Look at your schedule for the next four weeks and block out an hour a day for one-on-one conversations with your employees.

BACK-TO-BASICS TECHNIQUE 2

LEARN TO TALK LIKE A PERFORMANCE COACH

The best performance coaches talk like teachers—people who care enough about the other person’s success to spend time guiding and directing. They have lots of one-on-one conversations with direct reports about the work, and they break things down, using specific, concrete language that spells things out.

A coach . . .

• Tells people what they are supposed to do and how to do it

• Helps people build their skills

• Monitors performance and gives feedback

• Provides encouragement and support

• Helps people solve problems

NOTES

HOW A COACH TALKS

NOT THIS (NAMING)	BUT THIS (DESCRIPTION)
You’re working too slowly.	It was due Tuesday at 2:00 and you turned it in Thursday at 3:00.
Your work is too sloppy.	You made serious mistakes in three of the last five orders you processed.
You’ve got a bad attitude.	You’re walking around this place with a grimace on your face and you ...