Managing people

It's been a great experience managing people. I have managed people in the past, but now taking a team of 5 is a different ball game.
It's been interesting in the last few days with 1 of them. She is roughly the same age as me and as been in the company for the same ammount of time, though not progressing as much.
She is now in charge of a project that is due to be presented to a larger team in a few days.
She is a clever girl and has good experience, but lacks in attitude. She can do some work but when faced with difficulties, just goes negative. And most of the times goes to people for help, so that people do things for her.
As her boss, I have been supportive in the last days but am now finding that I need to take a step back. I am now letting her go negative and start complaining, but letting her on her own. If it goes wrong, it will go wrong and my image will be damaged as well but... she will learn responsability and will learn not to rely so heavily on others - who have been doing a lot of work for her.

I am going to get an image of 'bad guy' with some people for this but... if I keep helping her things will go well but she will not progress professionally, she will not take any responsability and she will not get out of her confort zone. If I play 'bad guy' and make her work and 'suffer' a bit, I will get 'bad press' but definitely make her a better worker.

Definitely going for the 2nd option.

Relations at the top

As mentioned, for the 1st time in my career I am in the board of a company. And it's been quite a learning experience.

Previously I had spend 8 years in a division of the company where the culture was outstanding. Although I have worked across different countries, the culture was pretty much 'work hard, play hard' but with a great sense of team and huge dynamics and speed.

In my new role in a new division I am appaled at the team spirit.
In the board, at least one of my colleagues is more concerned and focused on doing his internal work. On finding other peoples mistakes and exposing them or making his mistakes look like somebody else's... And he's getting away at doing a poor job at what he should really be doing, which is being the sales director.

I am struggling with this. I have been raised in a culture where the team comes first and you support everyone in the team. Together the team would overcome everything. Deal together with all the problems.
Now, I am finding that to survive in the current job, I need to just focus on doing my job so that it is unattackable and not go out of my way to support anyone, as this could backfire.

I can't expect any support from anyone in the board as we're all suspicious of each other and feel we can get stabbed by a colleague very easily.

I can see that this is the way to operate, if I want to survive. But in my mind, this isn't definitely the way to work, we'll never achieve outstanding results like this. We'll never do grand things like this.

I need to figure out a way to deal with this. I don't want to become a cynic like all the others. I want to believe you can work in a cooperative trusting way.

Getting things done

Since I've started working I've managed my tasks either by ordering them in A-B-C priorities or under the S.Covey's 4 quadrants (Urgent-Important / Urgent-Not Important / Not Urgent-Important / Not Urgent-Not Important) and to be honest it has worked just fine.

Now, since I've moved jobs and am managing a team of 5 junior people and am finding myself needing to give them advice and direction on all of their projects as well as my own workload, I've found myself getting more anxious and stressed, as I can't ever seem to be on top of my actions.

Every morning I'm doing my to-do list, that I never manage to complete...

A week or so ago, browsing over the internet, I came across a couple of articles on David Allen's system 'Getting Things Done'... It got me interested and I have now been reading the book for the last few days.
And I must say I'm having a few of those wow moments, almost life changing...!!

It's early as I am still reading and only taking the 1st steps in implementation. But already a few eye openers:
- we keep our minds busy with the tasks that need to be done... building stress and anxiety as we are not doing them. And there's only so much we can keep on our minds. and, as the book says: 'This constant, unproductive preocupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.'
- so it's key to get everything out, on to an organization system that you can trust and rely on and that you'll visit frequently.
- other key learning is that it is key to define clear next action steps for all the projects/commitments we have. Lots of times we don't progress projects and just worry about them because... we don't know what the next action step is. Adn if only think about the projects as they come up and define the next physical action we can take, then we get it going. And as we do this action, the next one should become clear. And it will quickly progress towards completion.

I'm still reading... I'll share more findings in the next posts, as I progress through the book! But I'm really really impressed!