Aug/090
Personal Goals
This is again one article from my eBook, Challenging The Way To Manage. I thought I should post this as this will help managers to understand how to share the responsibility among the team. Responsibilities should be shared by what motivates team members, some like to think about processes, some to lead projects, and so on. There is no sense to give responsibility to someone if he doesn’t want it, in the end, this is always the best solution.
Overview
The idea behind setting personal goals is to praise learning. At the same time it provides a good tool for management to track how people are performing, what they want to do and what problems are in their way.
How To
The way I run this is that I interview each team member personally; together we define the goals for the next 3 to 6 months and answer to four questions for each goal: how could management help me to achieve this goal, current and target status of the goal estimated by the team member and what problems are in the way. We use scale from one to five for evaluating the current and target status. Remember to give the team members enough time to prepare before having the interview. After the interview I will give my own estimation of the current and target status below the ones done by team member. Goals should be aligned to what is the person’s vision of his career, say in the next two to five years.
Management Support
Idea is that management will help the team members to reach their goals, by providing tools (working groups), more responsibility (e.g. let some one study processes and make improvement proposals), and anything else that might be needed. By giving this kind of commitment to team members from management will make them feel like
somebody really gives a damn about what they want. This in my experience boosts team members motivation, which again reflects to everything they do.
Study Time
You’ll also need to reserve some time for the learning. Don’t assume that all the team members are like you and work 24 hours a day and use their own spare time for learning. I solved this by giving four hours for each team member a week.
Results
Here are the things that happened during a few weeks:
- Team members were more motivated and learning
- Presentations about the things they learned for other team members – sharing the information (very important)
- Continuous improvements – challenging the Status Quo, finding better ways to do things
- Now after three months, when second round of interviews are coming, around 80% of the people have really spent some time to really reach for their goals, which is a very good, but not perfect.
This is a real working tool to strengthen learning environment and build a better team.
Aug/090
Classical Tip: Write to Learn
During my journey as a blogger and as an ebook writer I have learned a lot about writing, well, that should not be a surprise. But, I have also learned a lot more about the topics I have written. I cannot even describe how much it has helped me to clear my thoughts and find solutions for different problems. When you have written something down you can look at it from many perspectives, which allows you to compare the solutions or at least to get a more extensive look at it.
I really encourage everyone to try writing your thoughts down, it helps to get a better picture of your own thoughts. This is a very classic tip, but people tend not to do it because they think it doesn’t help or because it takes too much time. I was one of those persons before I started blogging and writing ebook. Five to ten minutes a day is enough at start, that is not too much to ask, just take a topic that has been going through your mind and start writing about it: what do you think is the problem and what could be the solution?