Your goal is to become so dependable that you can say “I got it” to most any request and everyone trusts that you have the situation covered and followup is unnecessary. This will give you freedom in your job.
Author: Josh Bulloc
Endless Cycle of Meetings
My calendar is full of meetings. If someone wants to talk with me they have to schedule another meeting. This leads to even more meetings creating a perpetual cycle of continuous meetings. What if a whole organization is stuck with this problem?
Bigger Organization=More Process Control
scale and ubiquity demands complexity and requires efficiency – Howard Schulze The bigger your organization the more complex operations will become requiring more control of processes and standardization to reduce variability.
Scaling Communication: Standardization is Crucial as Teams Grow
A rule of thumb is that every time your team’s size doubles, the communication required is squared. So as the organization grows communication needs to be more standardized to reduce errors and variability. An example of this is communication over radio in the military. They use standard phrases we do not typically use over the…
Some Projects are a Slog
Some important projects will not move forward because the team members’ will is low in comparison to the effort required. Many may feel the problem is important and needs to be fixed but are unwilling to weather the project’s roadblocks. They may even encourage the project lead to continue working on the project even when…
Instant Messaging Does Not Make up More Productive
I have worked at several companies over my career. I started as an engineer in 2005, and messaging (Skype or Teams) was unavailable until 2012. Now, we use messaging all the time, but it does not seem like my company gets any more done than the companies I worked in before. We are just more…
Some Tasks Will Go Away
Building on last week’s post, be careful when planning your tasks too far in the future or believing that everything on your task list will need to be done. Over time, priorities change, and you cannot predict what will be important in the future. Many tasks will no longer be important, and you can remove…
Let Yourself Off The Hook
“I think Type A people have a Type B problem, and Type B people have a Type A problem.” -Chris Williamson Many of us have a days-long to-do list that we chip away at every day. We add a few minutes to each work day trying to get one more thing on the list checked…
The Administrator Class
I regularly wonder why we have so many additional projects and tasks on top of the business’s primary goal. Are all of these additional activities value-added or just noise over time? I believe part of this is the administrator class in an organization. These people in the business are responsible for managing and coordinating the…
Two Concepts on Delegation
I struggle with delegation. I feel that it is my responsibility, but my logical side realizes that I am hindering their development and my ability to produce in my role. Here are a couple of concepts that I have been considering. Consider the military; young adults are given enormous responsibility, even over other’s lives. They…
Two More Problems WIth Email
Two additional complications make asynchronous communication (email) contentious and inefficient. First, the participants have to remember the past discussion amidst all of the other thoughts and discussions they have had in between the replies possibly forgetting key pieces. Second, the amount of data transfer is lower than synchronous communication (phone, face-to-face) so the participants will…
Someone Should Do Something
Before I became a manager I felt confident in improving how my work was done. Now as a manager, people bring me problems they feel should be fixed. This is interesting to me because many of these problems were the ones I would fix for myself. I still would like to fix these problems but…
I Wish They Would Leave Me Alone So I Can Do My Job
Have you ever wondered why your management did not see a problem beforehand? Are you tired of giving updates to management? Have you ever identified something that needed fixing but your manager did nothing about it? We are are part of a team which is made up of imperfect people with competing priorities and limited…
Feeling Okay About Tasks Left Undone
I think we are partially to blame for the frantic hurry-hurry-hurry culture where we work. Many of us cannot deal with the feeling of things left undone, making us anxious. To alleviate the feeling we bundle it up as the next action for someone else and throw it over the fence in the form of…
Self-directed projects are hard.
It is easy to fight fires and answer emails. You don’t have to think about what to do, you just execute. There is no planning or discipline required. It is easy to display to others that you are working hard. You can justify work on these urgent tasks. You are just doing your job and…
Units of Attention
You only have a certain quantity of attention units every day. Be careful that they are not consumed doing the low-value work. They are also consumed by switching tasks.
What Would Your Manager Do?
Sometimes when I am stuck on a problem, I ask myself “How would my manager solve this” to expand my thinking. I try to avoid bothering my manager with problems I can solve. I even reach out to my manager’s peers to let them know they can come directly to me when my manager is…
Someone should fix that
Did you identify a problem? Maybe you should fix it. Be careful thinking “Someone should fix it”. There are a lot of things that should be fixed not all of them should be fixed right now.
Managers Cast a Shadow
As managers, we need to realize that we cast a shadow. We must be careful what we say to our team members because it may confuse or scare them. For instance, asking about an activity may lead a team member to believe it is a priority for them. Sometimes that shadow we cast is of…
Accumulation of Complexity to Reduce Risk
I recently listened to a podcast where Lex Friedman interviewed Elon Musk and they discussed Musk’s five-step process for problem-solving with emphasis on step two “Delete a part or a process” where he explains that you need to delete so much that you have to put something back. As an engineer, this makes me uncomfortable…