Management News & Views Can Remote Employees Be Productive?
Effective Delegation in a Work at Home Environment
Can a managers effective delegation be managed when an employee is remote or working from home? this seems to be a burning question for many leaders.
Someone I know very well recently convinced their business unit manager to allow them to work from home on a “trial basis” to aid in the transition with care of their new baby. The wife was returning to work and the scheduling of baby care was tricky. this employee completed all assignments on time, communicated effectively and was as productive and by all accounts more productive without the normal in-office distractions. When the trial was over, management’s view was “yes, you made it work but we don’t see this as a workable process for our needs.
Sounds a bit like the the Yahoo CEO position. Our article selected this week deals with this very issue. See what you think?
She might be the embodiment of British remote working in 2013, but Annelise Pesa can often be found in the very heart of the capital’s commercial district, rather than a leafy provincial suburb. Until the first of her two children arrived two years ago, the client relationship director at legal support start-up Obelisk lived the decidedly Ally McBeal-esque life of an international lawyer at City bank Morgan Stanley, working long days with frequent travel. When she returned to work after her first child, she realised that “you just can’t be in the office 15 hours a day,” and decided to leave when she fell pregnant again.
Today, Pesa operates from home or from a London club, overseeing 120 consultants and two client relationship managers. She says the arrangement is perfect for her, although she adds: “If I were single and didn’t have a family, I’d miss the office and the social life that comes with it.” Remote working is most effective, she says, if employees have a strong commitment to the organisation, with highly tailored individual management, regular face-to-face meetings, calls and detailed action plans. Yammer (a message-board system) is a crucial way to keep in touch, she finds.
People like Pesa are in the vanguard of a remote working revolution that has been mooted for decades: soon, we have been repeatedly assured, the days of the nine-to-five office slog will be over as empowered homeworkers rewrite the corporate rule book. Numerous studies have shown that remote workers are more productive and achieve a better work-life balance.
A 2013 survey of 1,000 British office workers by Ipsos MORI found that 70 per cent of those given the option to work remotely say they can get more done away from the office, and 38 per cent think they are more creative.
When Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer banned working remotely in a widely distributed internal memo in February, she found herself on the receiving end of plenty of dismissive rhetoric (including from Sir Richard Branson, who tweeted “Give people the freedom of where to work and they will excel!”). But even if Yahoo! managed remote working poorly, does Mayer have a valid point?…More at When remote working really works – People Management Magazine …
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Leadership Styles Continues to be an Important Productivity Factor
What Are the Impacts on Performance for Different Leadership Styles?
Managers and executives likely don’t give too much thought to the importance of leadership styles (but they would be wise to do so). Yet, this has such an important impact on management success and business unit performance.
Style comes into play in any number of areas such as communication, work relationships, the manager’s personal branding, to name a few. In this edition of Management Skills News & Views we explore the “styles” issue and bring you some important resources.
From Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill to Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs, there can seem to be as many ways to lead people as there are leaders.
Fortunately, businesspeople and psychologists have developed useful, simple ways to describe the main styles of leadership.
By understanding these styles and their impact, you can develop your own approach to leadership and become a more effective leader.
We’ll look at common leadership styles in this article, and we’ll explore situations where these styles may be effective with your people.
Note:The leadership styles in this article are based on several core leadership frameworks. You can read more about these in our article on Core Leadership Theories.
Adapting Your Approach to Leadership
In business, a leadership style called “transformational leadership” is often the most effective approach to use. Transformational leaders have integrity, they inspire people with a shared vision of the future, they set clear goals and motivate people towards them, they manage delivery, and they communicate well with their teams. (You can find out more about transformational leadership at the end of this article.)
However, leadership is not “one size fits all” thing; often, you must adapt your style to fit a situation or a specific group. This is why it’s useful to gain a thorough understanding of other leadership styles; after all, the more approaches you’re familiar with, the more tools you’ll be able to use to lead effectively.
Let’s take a deeper look at some of the leadership styles that you can use….More at Leadership Styles – Leadership Skills from MindTools.com
There is not really a right style from the managers point of view but could be a wrong style for the staff and the mission. This is a senior management concern. Knowing your leadership style, and the strengths and weaknesses of it, puts the manager in a position to consider his/her impact on the people and productivity of the unit. Knowledge is the important first step.
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Improving Communication – A Key Management Skill
Improving Communication Skills is for Every Manager
There is little question or argument that the more effective your communications as a manager the more effective you can lead your business unit. That said, why is so little time spent by managers in developing their skills at communication? We have uncovered several good references worth looking at in the hopes that managers will take notice.
Information Support Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This was a great bunch of students who achieved significant overall success rates during the elicitation practical exercise. One of the benefits of these four day programs is that we build into the course numerous opportunities to practice the skills taught in the course and conduct after action reviews to discuss these practice opportunities and provide feedback. We do some of these practical exercises in class. We do some of them together out of class. We also give the students practical exercises to do on their own.
I am a strong believer in applying newly acquired skills immediately after learning them. There is ample research that suggests that if one does not immediately apply newly acquired skills, they will forget most of the knowledge associated with that skill and never correctly incorporate it into their lives. That is unfortunate, as people invest their time and organizations their money for training courses that do not result in a significant change in people’s skill levels.
In my own courses, I experience mixed results. Some courses have the majority of the students actively working through the practical exercises each night. Other courses have a relative few that choose to make the effort. Those who make the effort will improve the effectiveness of their own interpersonal communication skills. Those who do not make the effort will remain at status quo. Some, who give no further thought to what they learned during the course, will have wasted four days of their lives and may have taken an opportunity away from someone who could have benefited from the training…More at Practicing Intelligent Communication Skills
Managers need as many quality resources as possible for personal and professional development. Effective communication skills are just one aspect of leadership and management skills development.
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- Developing Good Communication Skills | Blackboard Student Support
- How Good are Your Communication Skills … – Mind Tools
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Read MoreManagement Development – Know Your Strengths
Management Development Involves Assessing Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Management development, to apply a much used adage, is a journey and not a destination. To a great extent, this is the problem. A manager’s growth happens one thing at a time, one experience at a time and one idea at a time. It becomes critical to know your strengths and weaknesses and build an ongoing development plan around improvement. This is managing your journey. The following excerpt gives some valuable insights.
I’ve been writing a lot recently about the personal development mindset. A key part of the mindset is self-belief. But before you can believe in yourself, you need to understand yourself; particularly your strengths, your weaknesses and your personality. This is particularly important if you want to be successful at managing others!
I have important news for you – there are no perfect managers. Managers have strengths and all of them have weaknesses too. You are no different to the rest. There will be things that you are good at and there will be other things that you might prefer not to talk about, or even to admit to yourself. And every one of us has our own quirks of personality. Believe me, you need to understand yours! If you want to succeed as a manager, you need to be honest and, not least, with yourself.
Being a good manager doesn’t mean you need to be perfect or to know everything. But, you do need to be good at covering the gaps; that only works if you know where the gaps are. Then you have options….More at Managing People – Know Yourself! | WiseWolf Talking – the …
My experience taught me to go a step farther and look at weaknesses in two categories. The first, things I need to improve on that will compliment my strengths or be relevant in many important situations. The second category represents weaknesses that I would be much better off “off-loading” to a person around me…much more skilled in the area of my weakness. This is part of developing your management development goals.
It is very hard to have all skills for all situations. To illustrate, I am simply not a technically oriented person. For me to learn a new technical skill, say becoming 100% proficient is a project management software program would be a waste of time. I would be far better off assigning that to someone already capable. On the other hand, improving public speaking skills is not something I could outsource.
In a sense, it is like do what you do best and outsource the rest, except for management skills that you must do yourself.
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- Banking View | Managing people assets: turning words into action
- 3 Tips for Managing People Who Are “Smarter” Than You Are – The …
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Delegating Authority Is The Key to Productivity
Delegating Authority – What’s Wrong With This Picture
Over the last 4 years, the average willingness of managers in companies world wide to delegate authority was ranked less than 4 in 10! (source Google public data).
You wonder why so many managers have productivity issues and fail to build a hing-performance team…look no farther than the statistics. The ability to effectively delegate work and assignments, manage the execution and build a culture of performance is the missing piece.
