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Trevor Manning Consultancy
Achieving  Business results 
through Real-World Training 
and Leadership Development

More time, means less

6/17/2014

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I have just finished designing a new board game, for an upcoming training course on Managing Teams. The game illustrates the challenges of a typical manager regarding time management. Having attended many time-management courses in my working life, I realised most of them miss the point. They all focus on how to be more efficient in cramming more activities into their day.

For many people their reality is the better they get at multi-tasking and being efficient, the more activities are thrown their way. Rather than freeing up time to go home on time, organised people get a reputation for getting things done, so guess what? They end up getting more things to do. There is a limit to efficiency and once we try doing multiple tasks at the same time, it’s game over, as it turns out our brains are not designed to work this way. Even applying our multi-tasking skills to switching between tasks, has a limit - when we try to switch too often.

Most managers will eventually figure out that the number of activities they could do is infinite. Managers get into these positions because they are hardworking and self-driven. The problem is they do not manage themselves very well. They schedule 60 hour weeks for themselves and then wonder why they are always the last one to leave the office. The trick is two-fold: Have less time; and only plan to only do the most important and most urgent things.

Ironically, when we have less time, we get more done. If we plan our week as though we have 20 hours available, we would end up getting a lot more done, due the urgency it creates - shorter deadlines. If we then triage everything we have to do and only prioritise the most urgent and most important things and get those done, we will be a lot more effective than trying to cram all the nice things in that we believe we should be doing. 

The last point is to make sure you communicate your priorities,  to those around you. Tell them what did not make the cut. Remember even when you do those 60 hours weeks there is a long list of things that didn’t make the cut. Managing the cut line is a key skill in time management. For those who will get to play the new game in one of my courses, I won’t give away any more, for the rest of you reading this, plan what you absolutely have to do, stick it in your diary as a priority, and then make sure you do it first!


































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Fancy a trip to the beach?

6/9/2014

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What comes to mind if I mention beautiful white beach sands? What if I enticed you with promises of the sunshine of the French coast and even included a trip to Paris? No doubt the majority of us would be excitedly imagining a fantastic holiday. This week we were reminded of the terrible loss of life of thousands of Allied troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944. No doubt for the few hundred thousand people who experienced the terrible consequences of that heroic invasion - that arguably was the single most important event in ending the second world war – the thoughts and memories of a sun soaked beach in Northern France, are anything but pretty.

There is often a debate about whether the red I see, is the same as the red you see. How would we ever know? When we communicate with other people, we try to impart what an event means to us, but how do we know what it looks like in their world? Key words will trigger memories of the past or assumptions about the future, that dictate how the other person will react to our message. I watched with interest this week when two managers reacted in opposite ways to the same idea in a brainstorming session. One saw a fantastic opportunity to improve staff engagement, the other saw an unnecessary expense that would indirectly have a negative impact on staff. There is no easy answer here. One way to be sure that what we are intending to communicate is understood in the right way by the other party is to ask them. Listen and observe carefully to learn more about the context of your message. Good communication is both an art and a skill and demands our full attention. Just announcing the good news that we are all going to Paris via the beach will not always have the reaction you may expect! 

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Why I am right and you are wrong

6/2/2014

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The new government in Australia has just released its austerity budget and it seems a lot of people are very unhappy! Their popularity rating plummeted as all the various socio-economic groups counted the cost of throwing away the credit card. The age of entitlement is over, declared the treasurer. “Here, here”, said all those who believed that meant their hard earned tax dollars would no longer go to lazy louts who refused to work. “Boo, boo”, said all those who believed their government was abandoning the sick, the poor, the unemployed. Political ideals often have opposite meaning depending on context. If you are employed in a well-paying job, and see half your income disappear in taxes to help the not-so-needy, you may have a different perspective to these announcements, than the twenty-something job seeker, after their umpteenth “sorry, no jobs here” letter.

In management, to improve communication we have to consider the context of the other person. Our beliefs are shaped by our life’s experiences and we find it hard to understand how things may look or seem to someone else, through a different lens. Their life experiences may filter the information in a completely different way than the way we intended. The common advice is to walk in someone else’s shoes before we judge them. But is it ever possible to really walk in someone else’s shoes? Even if we do experience identical circumstances, the context in which we will frame that new circumstance, is shaped by a lifetime of unique experiences. Having a starting position that we are right and the other person is wrong is often at the heart of all miscommunication. A different approach is to explain your context - how something looks to you, and then truly try to understand the other person’s context - how it looks to them. Communicating is a two way process. It is explaining what something means to you, and then understanding what that something means to the other person.

In the entitlement case mentioned above - which led to much emotional anguish and even protest marches – if it was explained that supporting a disabled person, or someone who genuinely cannot find work is a legitimate tax expense, and then listening and understanding what entitlement actually meant to voters, this miscommunication could have been averted.

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    Author

    TMC Global has been established to provide real-world training and consultancy in wireless technology and technical management. 

    Its founder, Trevor Manning is passionate about people development and has developed training courses and business offerings that combine theory and practice to make a real difference in the workplace. 


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