The 8020Info Water Cooler

Back to Newsletter Archive

The 8020Info Water Cooler
Issue #102 - Vol. 7 No. 05
16 April, 2007

1. Using Promise-Based Management

At its heart, every company is a dynamic network of promises, as employees make promises to one another, customers, outsourcing partners, and others. "Promises are the strands that weave together co-ordinated activity in organizations," management professor Donald Sull and consultant Charles Spinosa note in Harvard Business Review.

Most of the challenges that leaders face come from broken or poorly crafted commitments. So the authors suggest you can overcome some of your thorniest problems by "promise-based management," cultivating and co-ordinating commitments in a systematic way. The five characteristics of a good promise are:

Public: Promises that are made, monitored and completed in public are more binding and therefore more desirable than side deals hammered out in private.

Active: Instead of people hurling requests at others who catch them and put them in a pile, negotiating a commitment should be an active, collaborative process.

Voluntary: The most effective promises are not coerced -- orders from a boss grudgingly accepted by a subordinate -- but voluntary.

Explicit: Both parties should clearly acknowledge who will do what for whom and by when. When a new party to an existing commitment arrives, the need for explicit negotiation increases.

Mission-based: The provider should know why the request matters.

While promises hold an organization together, they are as fragile as they are crucial. "Leaders must therefore weave and manage their webs of promises with great care -- encouraging iterative conversations to make sure commitments are committed reliably," they conclude.

2. Ten Questions To Improve Your Job Interviews Top

Resumes don't tell you everything you need to know about a job candidate. So try these 10 questions from Inc.com in interviews to better assess your candidates:

Have you ever had several projects with the same deadline? How do you tackle that?

Could you tell us about a time you failed at a task?

How have you handled the last few angry customers you came across?

Tell us about a project that you had fiscal responsibility for. How did you stay on budget?

Tell us about a recent split-second decision you made on the job. How did you approach it?

What's the last thing on which you and your boss disagreed? How did you settle it?

What is the most significant presentation you've given to clients?

What was the most frustrating experience in your past job? The most satisfying?

How do you handle a task when you are asked to make changes at the last minute?

Tell us about a time you took a risk and it failed. How did you feel?

3. Three Must-Have Marketing Metrics To Collect Top

Marketing metrics can help you keep track of how you are faring, when you are buried under the flurry of day-to-day activity. Consultant Jay Lipe, on RainToday.com, suggests using one or more of the following:

Cost per new client: How much, on average, does your company spend on marketing to generate a new client? This is crucial for all growing companies.

Communication frequency with clients: For business-to-business companies, referrals and word-of-mouth are crucial, so you need to spark them by communicating with your clients at least every 90 days, he says.

Lifetime value of a customer: Knowing how much each customer generates in general business over a lifetime helps you to develop your customer strategies.

4. When To Upgrade Your Technology Top

With Microsoft's new Vista operating system and Office suite recently launched, organizations are faced with the dilemma of when to upgrade. On Inc.com, Anne Stuart says the starting point is whether the proposed upgrade offers genuine improvement and features that you actually want (and are easy to learn and use). Also: Does the upgraded product have a track record, or is it better to wait until the bugs and security holes are apparent, and an updated version has been produced that addresses those post-launch problems?

You also need to consider whether this is the best time to upgrade. If you have some important project in process, waiting may be a better option. You also should check whether the new software communicates and works with your existing programs and hardware. "Even if your existing computers will run the upgraded program, it may be more cost effective in the long run to upgrade everything at once. For instance, if you're planning to license Vista for your current computers, but you also expect to replace those machines in the next year or so, it might make more sense to invest now in new PCs that will come with Vista already installed," she advises.

5. Zingers Top

Balance is a myth, says consultant George Torok. Successful people do not have balance. They tend to have an obsession. But they can benefit from a break that flushes their mind -- some activity that total clears the mind of what it normally is thinking about.
(Source: Business In Motion blog)

Most ideas for products or services don't work out the first time. Is there some way you can develop a prototype of your latest idea and show it to people or test it in action, so you get feedback before launching?
(Source: Entrepreneur.com)

If you're in a dialogue with a client and want to make sure your e-mail will be responded to, sales consultant Jeffrey Gitomer says you need to ask a specific question within the message body, near the end of the e-mail, relating to something your customer considers important -- something that gets the customer involved.
(Source: Sales Caffeine Newsletter)

A provocative question from management coach Lisa Haneberg: How do you know when you are not measuring the right things? What are some of the clues that the measurement might not be the right one on which to focus?
(Source: Management Craft blog)

In Microsoft Word, you can use the keyboard and mouse to select a group of sequential words in your document. To do this, position the insertion pointer inside the word at one end of the group you want selected, then click on the word at the other end of the group while you are holding down the Shift key.
(Source: Allen Wyatt's WordTips)

6. Q & A with 8020Info    Top

Question: How can I improve my delegation?

8020Info associate Harvey Schachter responds:

The tendency with delegation is to suddenly toss duties at someone else, often in frustration because you are overloaded with work or the assistant has been complaining about not being handed enough responsibility. Even when it's a more thought-out process, part of a development and growth strategy for a subordinate, the tendency is for delegation to be like a light switch: One day you are doing the task and then with the flick of the switch the other person is.

Steve Prentice makes an interesting point in his new book Cool Down -- a paean to adopting a slower, more deliberate pace in our working life -- by arguing that delegation must be an unhurried, staged process. It's a slow act of building education and trust, rather than a sudden act of dumping.

He suggests it involves four steps. The first time you delegate a task you must be there to instruct and will probably be doing much of the work anyway, so it might take even more time and effort. The second time you can expect the other person to try to go it alone and get about 50 per cent of it satisfactory, so you have to be prepared to handle the other 50 per cent. Next time, arguably, the person will be able to perform about 75 per cent of the task and by the fourth time it will be close to your standards, although even then you still will need to allow time to finish it off.

Not all delegation will follow that approach, obviously. In some cases, the person has enough knowledge and skill to do the work immediately and you are close to the fourth stage already. As well, Prentice's stages are too neat and precise to cover all situations. But I think his scenario helps us to prepare ourselves better for delegation, understanding how to manage the handoff better. Think carefully about the individual's abilities and what you are delegating, and then figure out a measured process that fits the situation.

7. News From Our Water Cooler:     Top

When we facilitate strategic planning sessions, we often employ 8020Info tools and activities that make use of both left-brain and right-brain thinking. We focus on both the literal and the associative, the detail and the big picture, the logical and the motivational. We think that using the whole brain helps a team make better plans and decisions.

Last week in Neat Net Tricks, a newsletter published by Jack Teems, we saw an excellent example that illustrates the split-brain effect beautifully. It's a simple little 60-second colour-to-word matching test: you may be surprised by the experience of the left/right brain struggle when you try the match-up at http://www.fireworkspop.com/colortest.htm

8. Closing Thought    Top

"What exists is getting old."
-- Peter F. Drucker