ICML

Don’t Speak to a Person; Write an Email!

admin — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:25:20 +0000

If you read about leadership or management, you will often see a disapproving comment about people who write an email while they’re sitting next to the recipient. In leadership courses you regularly hear the same criticism.

The wisdom is that you shouldn’t abuse email. You should not send a message when you can discuss it face to face or over the phone. I’d like to put a bombshell on that from a Time Management point of view. I think we should turn the argument around:

Do not interrupt someone’s work, when
you might just as well send an email!
We know from many studies that interruptions cause massive productivity losses. When you’re in the flow of a task and you get an interruption, it can take 5 to 20 minutes to get back into the same flow.

By contrast to an interruption of someone at your desk, reading emails is entirely within our control. If you want to increase your productivity, you limit dealing with emails to only two or three times a day. For more ideas on email management, Click here to read our blog on The 7 Golden Rules of Email Writing

So, when should you use face to face contact
or a phone call instead of writing an email?
• Complexity: it’s easier to clarify yourself in a conversation; it allows for question and answer to get to the heart of the matter. This is where emails go wrong in ping-pong games that waste everyone’s valuable time
• Decision needed: if you need a decision and there may be some discussion involved, use personal contact. You’ll reach your decision much faster and with more clarity from all sides
• Urgency: if you need an answer fast; don’t expect people to read their emails all the time. If they did, they’d be wasting precious company time
• You need buy-in: it’s hard to engage people through an email

The message: give someone a precious productivity gift: an email instead of an interruption.

I’d like to hear your views. Do you agree or not? Do you have other circumstances in which an email or personal contact are more appropriate? Leave a comment below.

If you’d like to get into more depth into productivity, join our Time Management course and you’ll learn much more about keeping yourself in a highly productive flow of work. If you’re looking at improving your writing, from a spelling, grammar, structure or style perspective, our Effective Business Writing course will help you write better emails and other business documents.

Peter Munnik

How to Use Emotional Intelligence to be More Effective

admin — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 01:27:20 +0000

If you think Emotional Intelligence is something ‘airy fairy’, think again. Understanding and using emotions is highly practical. One example is that if you are in tune with your own and others’ feelings, you can work more effectively.

When you’re happy, you are better at generating ideas and solutions. This is the time to work on problem solving, on innovation and on planning and strategy. When you’re in a positive mood, don’t try to do work that requires detail; don’t try to proofread or find errors in a financial report.

By contrast, a downbeat mood narrows your vision and will help you see problems you ignore when you’re feeling happy.

You can use this knowledge to choose your activities to match your mood. Alternatively, you can change moods to match the task. When you’re making important decisions after an upbeat meeting; try bringing the mood down a little.

When you are in sales, try to create a happy mood with your client when you want to close the deal. Also, your brainstorm session will be much more effective if you create a happy, enthusiastic mood.

Emotional Intelligence is not only a critical leadership skill, it is a skill that everyone can and should develop. EQ helps in management, work relationships and personal relationships alike. Unlike IQ, EQ can be learnt and developed, which is what you will do in our Emotional Intelligence for Managers course. The skill to use your mood to be effective and productive is only one of the practical elements you will learn in our workshop. Click here for more information on our Emotional Intelligence training and course dates.

Click here for more information on our Management and Leadership courses
Click here for more information on our Communication and Effectiveness Courses

Feel free to leave your comment or question: have you had challenges or successes in using Emotional Intelligence?

Peter Munnik

Time Management: How do I prioritise my 100+ To-dos?

admin — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:00:36 +0000

The river of tasks is flowing mercilessly and for many it’s growing every day. If you are like most of us, you can never do all the things that you need to do, let alone do all the things you want to do. The only way to manage the madness is to make choices.

You will need to prioritise. In fact, you always prioritise in some kind of way. When you decide to do something, you implicitly decide not to do something else. The trick is to prioritise consciously, rather than letting others or ‘events’ determine what you end up doing.

A question people often ask me is: “How do I set priorities, when there are so many things I have to do?” In our Time Management course we use the well-known Covey matrix to distinguish urgent and important tasks.

We are often ruled by all the ‘events’ coming our way during the day. They can be emails, people coming with requests or for advice, etc. I bet you can name a number of these interruptions that unexpectedly changed the course of your last work day (today?). These ‘events’ are usually urgent, because they demand your immediate attention.

You feel these tasks need to be done right now, and therefore you implicitly feel they are important as well. But here comes a critical time management distinction. Truly important tasks are those that bring you closer to achieving your goals. They are not necessarily the ones that seem to have a need to be solved right now!

Therefore give your tasks and all the events coming your way either the label urgent or not urgent; and important and not important. You end up with a matrix with four quadrants.

When prioritising; you take care of the important and urgent stuff first. Then comes the major time management trick: you then do not move on to the other urgent and not so important tasks. Instead, you block out time for your important but not urgent tasks!

In this important and not so urgent quadrant, you will have activities such as networking and planning for a long term project with no immediate deadlines. It also involves working on prevention; finding out why things go wrong rather than extinguishing fires. At the same time, this quadrant contains time spent on building relationships (but distinguish this from ‘chit-chat’).

Maintaining good health is also an important activity and often it doesn’t feel very urgent.

When you block out time for the important and not so urgent activities, your work will slowly but surely end up with less need to fight fires; e.g. the urgent and important tasks. You will be working ahead of time, rather than trying to make deadlines at the very last minute.

How do you prioritise? Have you ever tried distinguishing tasks in terms of urgency and importance, and if so, how has it worked for you? Please leave some comments below about your experiences, or if you have any questions.

Perhaps you’d like to immerse yourself for a day in a great Time Management course. Then Click here to get more info about our Time Management program, or click here to make a booking.

Peter Munnik

Beating Procrastination: Setting Deadlines

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:59:52 +0000

After my last Time Management post ’4 Tricks to Beat Procrastination’, John, one of our readers commented that setting artificial deadlines is a time management strategy that helps him tackle it and I fully agree.

How many things do you have on your to-do list that have no or wishy-washy deadlines? And how are you getting on with those?

As humans we have the tendency to give the immediate reward more importance than the long term pay-off. It means that answering that email from a colleague about that not very important issue gives you a very pleasant feeling of satisfaction: it’s done! It feels much better than working on that report that needs to be finished in two weeks’ time.

I once managed a young woman who was putting off starting project we had agreed she would deliver in 6 months’ time. Although it wasn’t a massive project, it was really necessary that certain things were in place well ahead of time.

When I’d ask her in our one-on-one meetings about her project plan and progress, she would say that her day-to-day tasks and current projects were too pressing to make a start on it – yet. It was clear that the lack of clarity on the project and lack of deadlines created some issues.

We agreed a short term deadline for her to come back with a small project plan. When she did, one thing had become clear to her: there were some critical deadlines in the project! She then defined intermediate steps (milestones) and also decided to self-impose deadlines. She decided to share the timelines and deadlines with me and the rest of the team, to make them firmer to herself.

Once she got going in the project, she couldn’t be stopped. Making the short term deadlines gave her a great feeling of satisfaction and motivation to make the next.

Important time management lessons of this story:
1) Break up your projects or tasks into small chunks
2) Identify as soon as possible when chunks really need to have happened (critical deadlines)
3) Even if you don’t have critical deadlines; set deadlines yourself
4) Make small steps; set many small deadlines. You feel great when you make them, and it gives you the motivation to make the next one, then the next one.

You can learn much more about procrastination and productivity in our one-day Time Management Training: click here for more info.

If you would like to learn some Project Management skills to tackle your smaller and everyday projects, check out our Project Management Essentials course, or Working Effectively Using Project Management Techniques.

Further reading (to help you put off what you really should be doing for a little longer):
This blog from Psychology Today gives an interesting psychological background to procrastination if you’re interested.
Click here for some great procrastination quotes, including my favourite: “The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.” – Unknown

Peter Munnik

4 Tricks to Beat Procrastination

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:57:04 +0000

Don’t we all do it? We seem to have this innate tendency to delay doing those things that we feel we really should be doing. Often they seem hard and are not really urgent for us now. There are so many other things that are pressing. It’s often just too easy to ignore this project or task and just do the stuff that’s in the here and now!

Procrastinating is draining: feeling guilty about what you should be doing can be pretty stressful. It can make you feel anxious and demotivate you. On the other hand, beating procrastination and boosting your productivity can feel fantastic. So there are clearly many reasons to try out our tricks!

You can tackle procrastination with a few time management strategies; which are part of the nine strategies you learn in our Time Management course:

1) Forget about it

Yes, that’s right; think about the consequences of not doing the task at all: how important are they? And is this one task or project really more important than the other 5 on the top of your list?

2) Chop it up

If you have a project on your to-do list and you haven’t thought through where to start and what the steps are to get to your objectives, it’s often just too overwhelming: no wonder it seems all too hard. Break the project down into small tasks.

Most importantly; define what your next action is and put that on your to-do list. Make this a concrete, physical action. For instance: the action ‘Organise meeting’ probably consists of a number of steps. If the first thing you need to do is to check with your colleague John who to invite for the meeting, then your next action is: ‘Call John to agree on meeting attendees’.

3) Delegate

You can get so much more done when you ‘leverage’ your skills and knowledge, and when you give other people a chance to ‘grow’ and make mistakes. If you want to develop this critical leadership skill, a management course can help you.

4) Ask for advice

In my early career I once procrastinated the development and launch of a new product range I was expected to develop. In a coaching conversation about my project management, my manager asked me why I thought I needed to figure it all out by myself: I was surrounded by brilliant and experienced people. I then organised a workshop with my colleagues and manager and got all the ideas I needed and more, and as a bonus we worked out my whole project plan. I was able to successfully launch the new range well before the agreed deadline!

If you feel time management is something you’d like to work on and get help with a few more strategies to help your productivity, check out our fun, intensive and interactive one-day Time Management training: Click here for more information. Our Project Management Courses might be useful as well.

I’d love to hear your own experiences: leave a comment and tell your story or your opinion. Have you tried any of these procrastination-beating strategies? Do you have a better one? If you want to ask a question: we’re here to help and answer.

Peter Munnik

The 7 Golden Rules of Email Writing

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:35:00 +0000

Did you know that email is a great productivity tool? You can be forgiven if you don’t. The average email onslaught on the inbox is enormous. At the same time, writing emails costs a lot of productive time. Nevertheless, if you use email in the right way, you will find you will get more done in less time. Abiding by the Seven Golden Rules of email writing will give you an advantage. It improves your time management; you will spend less time writing emails and your emails will be better read and actioned!

1) Stop and Think!

What do you want to achieve with your email? Can you do without? A phone call or quick personal conversation can be more effective, especially if the matter isn’t straightforward. You will have more influence on others if you choose the best way to communicate. Sometimes that is email.

2) Use the ‘Subject’ line effectively

Use a proper subject line. Try to stick to maximum ten words and CAPITALISE the main point. If you write external to your organisation, include your organisation’s name. This makes it easier for the recipient to find archived emails.

Change the subject line if the subject changes when you reply to a message! This makes it so much easier to find the right email back, saving you a lot of time down the track. It also makes more sense to the recipient.

Use the words IMPORTANT and URGENT (and the red ‘urgent’ exclamation mark) sparingly. Only use them if you are sure the recipients will find the message important or urgent too.

3) KIS – Keep It Simple

Be concise and specific. Nobody likes to read long emails. Make short sentences and paragraphs. Bullet points are great. Use active short and sharp writing; instead of ’70 outlets were visited by the sales team and 4 new accounts were generated’; write ‘The sales team visited 70 outlets and generated 4 new accounts’.

4) What is your point?

Make sure that you make a clear point in the email. You are writing because you wanted to achieve something. Do you want them to action something? Is it clear what exactly and by when? No ambiguity!

5) Check, check, check

Use spell check and read over your email before sending! Double, triple check the recipient list.

6) Mind your language

Written language misses the intonation and body language of spoken word. It comes across much harsher. Be gentle and professional.

Assume everyone should be able to read the email: email is not private! Mostly IT administrators have access to emails within the organisation. Sometimes you accidentally send an email to the wrong person. There are hackers, malicious criminals etc.

Do not use txt message or instant message spellings and symbols in professional emails (smileys, LOL etc.) – again, keep your reader in mind.

7) Leave it alone!

For your own sanity and productivity: only check your emails a few times a day: do not reply to all emails instantly. Plan your day and plan your email time as part of your overall priorities. Is this email more important than the report you need to have finished by 5pm?

Do these rules resonate with you? Do you already apply them or do you think you have better ways to tame the ‘email beast’? Let us know by leaving a comment or question.

Peter Munnik

If you want to learn more tips and tricks on email writing and other business writing, attend our Business Writing Courses.

For help with time management and taming the ‘email beast’, we recommend our Time Management training.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

admin — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:51:47 +0000

You often hear that Emotional Intelligence (EI) is important in leadership, but for many it’s not clear what it is. We define Emotional Intelligence (EI) as your ability to identify your emotions in yourself and others and to understand and manage your responses and actions. Daniel Goleman said: “Emotional Intelligence is what prevents anger from turning into rage and sadness into despair.”

So an example of emotional intelligence is when you are aware that you’re getting angry; you understand why and you manage to control your anger. Instead of acting on impulses, you act more deliberately. Let’s have a look at the steps of Emotional Intelligence in some more detail.

Identifying emotions

The first step towards managing emotions is identifying them. You can recognize your own emotions by listening carefully to your thoughts, impulses, and physical sensations when you face a situation. Some feelings will be obvious to you and you will realize when you are sad, angry, scared, tender, excited or happy. Sometimes your feelings will not as obvious. When you have a quick impulse to react without thinking there is a good chance you’re having a feeling you’re not recognising: stop and think!

Understanding and managing emotions

Once you are aware of your emotions, you want to be aware how your feeling is affecting your judgment. Instead of reacting impulsively, take in the information your feelings are giving you and determine if how your reaction will help or hurt the situation before you. For instance, if you feel strong pressure because you and your team are not reaching your targets, you should think about your feelings and how your direct reports would react if you showed them your emotions without filtering. How would your team perceive a pessimistic versus an optimistic reaction?

Using and communicating emotions

Managing your emotions helps you reach your goals. Let’s look at our last example: if you show pessimism, your team members are likely to feel the same. On the other hand, if you show the challenges, your optimism and a way to get back on track, you are likely to instil feelings of optimism and motivation with the team. You are channelling your emotions and use them to enhance your leadership.

In our two day Emotional Intelligence for Managers course we get deep into the subject and will help you develop your professional and personal leadership skills by helping you understand and effectively manage your own and other people’s emotions. You will grow your ability to inspire, influence and grow people.

Use influence instead of your title

admin — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:49:51 +0000

What exactly is leadership? Can the job title of manager make you a leader, or is more needed to fit you for the role? A managerial title can sometimes give you a few benefits: authority, standing, and – depending on the organisation – varying degrees of credibility and input with peers and superiors. Yet, this doesn’t prepare you for actual dealings with your team.

Most would agree that authority is an important component of the management equation. After all, no manager could function adequately without it. Yet, authority is an interesting phenomenon since it’s more a state in which management functions than a tool it uses for influencing or compelling the cooperation of employees – or at least it should be.

Authority works best when used least! If you are manager who continually finds it necessary to call upon the authority of your position or title to keep people in line and make them more productive, you might want to rethink your strategy. You’d be better off developing the interpersonal skills that enable you to exert real influence on your team.

So, what’s the key here? To put it simply, the more “people skills” leaders possess, the less they need to use authority to get results. The factor that separates real leadership from mere management is learning and using the skills that inspire people to do the things you ask – i.e. the things that benefit the organisation – not because they’ll get into trouble if they don’t, or because they might get a poor evaluation at their next performance review, or even because they might be passed over for a raise or promotion – but simply because they want to.

What skills are so important for influencing your team to reach its full potential, making an almost-magical difference in employee attitude and transforming reticent and often uncooperative rebels into your most enthusiastic allies? The simple human traits we all crave in our dealings with others – traits like empathy, honesty, fairness and flexibility – which demonstrate respect for others and validate their worth. These transformational traits also include the ability to demonstrate our own humanity, to admit our mistakes, to model the behaviours we want to see in others and to be failure-tolerant by judging outcomes rather than individuals. These are the traits that build trust and foster an attitude of collaboration. These are the true measures of influence. They are the qualities that will make you a true leader.

Say “I”, not “you”

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 07:09:51 +0000

The ability to effectively communicate is one of the most important leadership skills necessary for successful management of a business. Whether you are managing a team or an individual, getting your audience to be receptive of you and understand what you are saying is not always an easy task. There are many different components to communication. Communication consists of verbal information, our gestures, our tone, our body language, our facial expressions, and the words we choose to relay information.

Communication is complicated and how we say something to someone could have unintended consequences. People have a tendency to become defensive or even offended when given feedback or criticism in the workplace as well as in our personal lives. The way we deliver information can mean the difference between effectively coaching a team towards a common goal or lowering morale and lowering productivity.

Using “I” statements when communicating is much more effective than using “you” statements. Examples of these types of statements are “I feel…” versus “You make me feel…” Using “I” in your communication not only makes what you are saying more personal but it also allows your audience to become less defensive and listen to your perspective. Using I statements makes your communication more clear. In contrast, “you” statements are perceived as a verbal way to point the finger or place blame on someone else. This makes most people defensive and angry. Once someone is defensive and angry, communication breaks down.

It is important to use I statements when we are confronting another’s behaviour. Speaking from your own personal perspective allows you to use a coaching approach as opposed to a commanding approach. Issues can threaten good relationship. We are most likely going to preserve the relationship with the person we are standing up to if we stick with our own thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and avoid direct or implied criticism of the other person. I statements allow us to communicate in a matter-of-fact, non-judgmental tone of voice.

It is helpful to plan what you will say before you confront someone. Write notes to yourself. If you have written “this worker doesn’t get his work done on time” translate this into an I statement such as “I feel upset when your work is not completed when I need it. I depend on that work to finish my work. This makes me feel frustrated.” It is important to state feelings and avoid judgements, solutions, or assuming they understand what you are implying. Be direct and allow the conversation to flow in a manner that allows you both to come to a solution to the problem. In general “I feel” statements are helpful. It is important to keep in mind that stating “I feel that” is not expressing a feeling at all and is often expressing a judgement. Try to avoid “that” after “I feel”.

Establishing leadership can be an arduous task. Successful leadership is personable. The team respects the leader, identifies with the leader, and wants to understand things from his/her perspective. I statements allow people to understand where a leader is coming from and where a leader needs everyone to go. Effectively directing a group towards a common goal is an essential task of business management. This simple concept of using I instead of you can make you a more successful communicator and leader in all facets of your life!