Your company likes to promote from within. One day you come in to find that management has recognized all the leadership you’ve been providing and has promoted you to your first position as a team manager.
Congratulations!(?)
Keep it simple, make it fun
I’ve received dozens of performance reviews over the years and yet only really one stands out. What made it different?
It took place over a pair of ice cream floats at a quiet, private table in a restaurant near our offices one afternoon.
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In case you missed one or more of these, here are this blog’s top five posts during the month of February 2011.
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a sprout by lilfishstudios, from Flickr
I saw a phrase recently about the need to “nurture leadership”. The article was about a centuries-old institution that is in decline for reasons that are complex. And while I may find a way to tie the institution and the reasons into this site’s theme of leadership and management in a further post, it is solely this phrase that I want to focus on.
Nurture is a transitive verb; it’s an action that is done to something or someone. Protect, support, feed, encourage, to bring up, train, educate. And leadership is the action of leading or the people doing the leading.
So how is leadership nurtured?
I focus on both the environment and the people.
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Successfully communicating a vision to your people can make the difference between a lethargic, apathetic group and an energized, motivated one.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Not all roadblocks are so well-identified
One moment your team is efficient and effective and the next moment: they’re at a dead stop.
What happened?
Someone hit a roadblock.
"You can't tell how far a frog will jump by looking at him" - ancient saying
How do you decide whom to hire? Do you rely on your recruiter? Does HR call the shots? Do you interview and then call their references?
Let’s say you’re hiring a juggler or a chef—would you hire either without watching them juggle or tasting a meal?
Of course not! Then why do we do just that—hire sight unseen—so frequently when we’re hiring knowledge workers, leaders, managers?
A resume can only say so much about someone.
The posts on this site are intended to give you additional insight into my professional side: who I am, what I think and how I make decisions. If you’re looking for an experienced Information Technology Leader and Manager to lead a technical group of people in your organization, keep on reading.
You’ll learn about my management styles, the importance I place on leadership, my strategies for team development and the kind of written communication you can expect when you hire me.
I encourage you to read my posts, follow me on Twitter and get a sense of how I think about leadership, management and things that make a difference to companies that use technology to achieve their business goals.
When you’re ready, please contact me via email at JeffreyGifford (at) gmail (dot) com.
Stanley Ott has another great post over at VCI this month. He encourages us to slow down over our meals to create “leisurely times of conversation and mutual encouragement.”
One of my favorite ways to build an environment where teams can be repaired, grow and thrive is over a meal. When Frank & Pauly’s was open (as a restaurant) in downtown Cleveland, I would regularly order a couple of trays of their delicious pasta dishes and bring them back to a conference room in our offices. There, the team would spend a very long and leisurely lunch talking about whatever was important.
Measured in dollars, it wasn’t too expensive, but measured in building trust, breaking down barriers and opening dialog, it was priceless.
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BSA Eagle Scout Badge
Last night my son and daughter and I attended an Eagle award ceremony—a double Eagle award ceremony—two Scouts from the same Troop being awarded the rank of Eagle Scout on the same evening.
For readers who aren’t familiar with Scouting, Eagle is the highest rank awarded by the Boy Scouts of America. Very few Scouts (between 4 and 5% of all Scouts) earn the rank of Eagle Scout.
These two young men had worked toward a goal set before them nearly a decade earlier. And they achieved this goal through hard work, perseverance, planning, leadership and execution.
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