Posts tagged as:

feedback

Reenergize Action with Appreciative Feedback

by Steven M. Smith

All work requires energy. Middle-managers who divert all energy to new actions fall into a common trap: They fail to reenergize existing actions, which may kill the success of new actions.
Middle management success depends on fueling both new and existing actions. How can appreciative feedback help you discover existing, effective actions and preserve them?
On your [...]

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Waiting For People Who Arrive Late

by Steven M. Smith

What does it say about the participants of a weekly meeting when the meeting consistently starts 5-10 minutes behind schedule?
Answer, the participants are cooperating with each other to start late.
Starting late is the status quo.
Let’s explore:

Are you cooperating with the participants of your meetings to start late?
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel [...]

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Make Results Predictable

by Steven M. Smith

Your organization is in chaos. You want to create pockets of stability. What do you do?
Make the results of meetings predictable.
Winfrey is the manager of a geographically dispersed software development team at the XYZ Corp. Ellsworth, her manager, assigns Winfrey the management responsibility of hosting a biweekly training conference call. The objective is to keep [...]

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Influencing Management

by Steven M. Smith

In response to my post entitled Check the Box where I suggest that you choose not to argue with your manager about doing a task whose primary purpose is the furtherance of a PR campaign with their manager, my colleague Bob Lee writes “How much Fantasy Experienced As Reality is building up above?”
It depends on [...]

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You’re Too Good of a Speaker

by Steven M. Smith

“You’re too good of a speaker.” I’ve heard those words and they depressed me. Now they put a smile on my face.
I realize now that my friends, all excellent technicians, were telling me that they preferred a complex presentation that was a little rough around the edges—just like the world they lived in
I had a [...]

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Coping with a Double Bind

by Steven M. Smith

In my last post , I posed the question, “What coping strategies are better than ambivalence and apathy (in a double bind situation)?”
There is nothing wrong with being ambivalent or apathetic about an environment that constantly puts you in a double bind. These coping strategies are reasonable and always available. My question was intended to [...]

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