How to be “The Best Manager You Ever Had”

How to be “The Best Manager You Ever Had”

By Martin Z willing

Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around.
 

Almost every one of us in business can also remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or business crises.

I’ve asked many for the traits or attributes they saw in that person, and most will list the positive functional traits of a good manager:

• Leadership - outstanding skills in guiding team members, encouraging them towards attainment of the organization’s goals and the right decisions at the right point of time. As Drucker said "management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."


• Plan and delegate – foresight and skills to understand the relevant capabilities of employees, and then scheduling tasks and delegating to get tasks done by the employees within deadlines.


• Domain expert - complete knowledge of his field and confident about that knowledge, with the common sense to make quick productive decisions and think outside the box.


• Set clear expectations - employees should always know what is expected of them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set deliverable milestones for each employee over a set period of time. Then review the performance vs. the roadmap or deliverable at least six months prior to a performance review and discuss ways to improve and set new goals.

• Positive recognition - when employees complete something successfully or show initiative, recognize it. Congratulate them on a job well done. Most employees are not motivated by sheer money. They need recognition even if it is not public. Good managers know that employees feed off acknowledgement that their job is being done well.


In my view, these are all “necessary” attributes, but are not “sufficient” to put you in that ‘great’ category. Most people recognize that it takes more to be ‘great,’ but the attributes are a bit more esoteric, and harder to quantify. Here are a few:


• Active listener - shows traits such as listening with feedback, an optimistic attitude, a motivating ability, and a concern for people. Listening to what is said as well as what is not said is of the utmost importance. Instrumental in the listening process is the environment. It can be most demoralizing to an employee to be speaking to a supervisor and be interrupted for a phone call. All interruptions should be avoided.

• Shows empathy - refers to the ability to "walk in another person's shoes", and to have insight into the thoughts, and, more importantly the emotional reactions of individuals faced with change. Empathy requires that you suspend judgment of another's actions or reactions, while you try to understand them, and treat them with sensitivity, respect, concern, and kindness.


• Always honest – simply put, today’s managers live in glass houses. Everything that a manager does is seen by his employees. If a manager says one thing and does another, employees see it. Managers must be honest and straightforward in words and in actions. A manager must “walk the talk.” That also means recognizing weaknesses, and admitting and learning from mistakes.


• Sense of humor - people of all ages and cultures respond to humor. The majority of people are able to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and see an irony. One of the most frequently cited attractions in great personal relationships is a sense of humor.

• Keep your cool - does not lose his/her cool even while facing a difficulty. He/she is able to correct the team members without emotional body language or statements. A good manager is an effective communicator and a composed individual, with a proven tolerance for ambiguity.

Whole books are written on this subject, but hopefully you get the picture. Great managers must do the technical job well – and they also must do the people job very well. Now that you understand these things, I’m not sure why it is so hard to find a great manager. I guess an even harder question I should ask is why is it so hard to be one?


Marty Zwilling, Founder & CEO, Startup Professionals, Inc.

IT: It's Not Just About Technical Skills

IT: It's Not Just About Technical Skills

by Mike Schaffner, 11.11.09, 06:00 AM EST

Why interpersonal skills may be more important now.

 

While perusing the online versions of some of the more well-know information technology journals recently, I was surprised to find one that had quite a few stories on the stupidity of users. While these stories ostensibly were presented as humor, they also represent a dark side of IT behavior: The IT guys really are the smartest guys in the room, and users are dumb and annoying.

 

A closer reading of some of the stories shows the fallacy of this: Users were having problems, and the IT person was more concerned with showing his superiority than in providing customer service. This type of stereotypical behavior has long been an impediment to IT's success and acceptance in the corporate world.

 

The good news is that this attitude among IT workers isn't nearly as prevalent as it used to be. We've made great strides in improving customer service. These stories, however, show that our job is not complete. There is more to do.

The biggest part of developing the right attitude is realizing that it isn't all about us. The IT guys really may be the smartest guys in the room, but nobody cares. It is more about what gets done than about what you know. It is more about making the team (IT and business) successful than it is about individual accolades.

Information technology has become more self service. It used to be that you had to get everything through the IT department. IT built the databases, and you could only get the data out or get it analyzed by asking IT to do it for you.

Over time, the role of IT has shifted from knowledge provider to knowledge facilitator. We no longer extract and analyze data. Instead we provide tools enabling users to do this themselves.

 

With this shift in roles, IT support must shift from doing to enabling. This means IT has to focus on understanding the user's needs and providing training and tools. It also means understanding the business in order to suggest ways to use technology that meets needs. It involves, dare I say it, empathy, a word not always associated with IT.

Being successful in this role depends on personal skills, such as:

 

--Being a good listener to learn what the user needs and a willingness to listen completely without jumping in with the answer.

--Being a good interviewer to draw information from our users.

 

--Being good at explaining and teaching.

 

These skills can be as important and perhaps more important than raw technical skills.

Accordingly we, as IT leaders, need to change our perspective. We need to work to develop these skills in our people. Technical ability alone is no longer enough. We cannot continue to hire people and do personnel evaluations based solely on technical skills. Likewise, the training we provide has to go beyond just technical training.

When we do personnel evaluation or are hiring, we should include our user community in the process. Having our users interview candidates can provide some useful feedback on how the candidate relates to people outside IT, how well they communicate, how well they listen.

Users also can provide valuable insight into just how good our customer service really is. Getting this insight is extremely important for personnel evaluations. Perhaps we should rate this just as highly as technical skills.

If we expect people to change, we also have to help them. Rather than sending people to a software conference or the latest programming class, perhaps we should send them to classes on team dynamics or finance for non-financial people.

As the role of IT has shifted over time, the skills of our people need to shift, and we as IT leaders need to be actively involved in making this happen.

 

Mike Schaffner directsinformation technology for the Valve and Measurement Group of Cameron in Houston and aims to infuse a business-based approach to IT management. He also blogs regularly at Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms, and you can follow him on Twitter at mikeschaffner.

Eat That Frog

Eat That Frog
BY: Brian Tracy

Introduction

This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more possibilities and opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals than exist today. As perhaps never before in human history, you are actually drowning in options. In fact, there are so many good things that you can do that your ability to decide among them maybe the critical determinant of what you accomplish in life.

If you are like most people today, you are overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. As you struggle to get caught up, new tasks and responsibilities just keep rolling in, like the tides. Because of this, you will never be able to do everything you have to do. You will never be caught up. You will always be behind in some of your tasks and responsibilities, and probably in many of them.

For this reason, and perhaps more than ever before, your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop.

An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but who gets very little done. It has been said for many years that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Your "frog" is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment. It is also been said that, "If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first." This is another way of saying that, if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest and most important task first. Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.

Think of it as a "test." Treat it like a personal challenge. Resist the temptation to start with the easier task. Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is your choice of what you will do immediately and what you will do later, if you do it at all.
There is one final observation. "If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long."

The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is for you to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning. You must develop the routine of "Eating your frog" before you do anything else, and without taking too much time to think about it.

In study after study of men and women who get paid more and promoted faster, the quality of "action orientation," stands out as the most observable and consistent behavior they demonstrate in everything they do. Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single mindedly until those tasks are complete.

In our world, and especially in our business world, you are paid and promoted for getting specific, measurable results. You are paid for making a valuable contribution and especially, for making the contribution that is expected of you.

"Failure to execute" is one of the biggest problems in organizations today. Many people confuse activity with accomplishment. They talk continually, hold endless meetings and make wonderful plans, but, in the final analysis, no one does the job and gets the results required.

Fully 95% of your success in life and work will be determined by the kind of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behavior. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes both automatic and easy to do.

You are designed mentally and emotionally in such a way that task completion gives you a positive feeling. It makes you happy. It makes you feel like a winner. Whenever you complete a task, of any size or importance, you feel a surge of energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem. The more important the completed task, the happier, more confident and powerful you feel about yourself and your world.

Important task completion triggers the release of endorphins in your brain. These endorphins give you a natural "high." The endorphin rush that follows successful completion of any task makes you feel more creative and confident. Here is one of the most important of the so-called "secrets of success." It is that you can actually develop a "positive addition" to endorphins and to the feeling of enhanced clarity, confidence and competence that they trigger. When you develop this "addiction," almost without thinking you begin to organize your life in such a way that you are continually starting and completing ever more important tasks and projects. You actually become addicted, in a very positive sense, to success and contribution.

One of the keys to your living a wonderful life, having a successful career and feeling terrific about yourself is for you to develop the habit of starting and finishing important jobs. At that point, this behavior takes on a power of its own and you find it easier to complete important tasks than not to complete them.

You remember the story of the man who stops the musician on the street of New York and asks how he can get to Carnegie Hall. The musician replies, "Practice, man, practice." Practice is the key to mastering any skill. Fortunately, your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger and more capable with use. With practice, you can learn any behavior or develop any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary.

You need three key qualities to develop the habits of focus and concentration. They are all learnable. They are decision, discipline and determination. First, make a decision to develop the habit of task completion. Second, discipline yourself to practice the principles you are about to learn over and over until you master them. And finally, back everything you do with determination until the habit is locked in and becomes a permanent part of your personality.
There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, efficient person that you want to be. It consists of your thinking continually about the rewards and benefits of being an action oriented, fast moving, focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets important jobs done quickly and well on a consistent basis.

Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior. Visualize yourself as the person you intend to be in the future. Your self-image, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. As professional speaker Jim Cathcart says, "The person you see is the person you will be."

You have a virtually unlimited ability to learn and develop new skills, habits and abilities. When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move yourself onto the fast track in your life and career and step on the accelerator.

Eat That Frog!

Putting It All Together

The key to happiness, satisfaction, great success and a wonderful feeling of persona power and effectiveness is for you to develop the habit of eating your frog, first thing every day when you start work.

Fortunately, this is a learnable skill that you can acquire through repetition. And when you develop the habit of starting on your most important task, before anything else, your success is assured.

Here is a summary of the 21 Great Ways to stop procrastinating and get more things done faster. Review these rules and principles regularly until they become firmly ingrained in your thinking and actions and your future will be guaranteed.

1. Set the table: Decide exactly what you want. Clarity is essential. Write out your goals and objectives before you begin;

2. Plan every day in advance: Think on paper. Every minute you spend in planning can save you five or ten minutes in execution;

3. Apply the 80/20 Rule to everything: Twenty percent of your activities will account for eighty percent of your results. Always concentrate your efforts on that top twenty percent;

4. Consider the consequences: Your most important tasks and priorities are those that can have the most serious consequences, positive or negative, on your life or work. Focus on these above all else;

5. Practice the ABCDE Method continually: Before you begin work on a list of tasks, take a few moments to organize them by value and priority so you can be sure of working on your most important activities:

6. Focus on key result areas: Identify and determine those results that you absolutely, positively have to get to do your job well, and work on them all day long;

7. The Law of Forced Efficiency: There is never enough time to do everything but there is always enough time to do the most important things. What are they?

8. Prepare thoroughly before you begin: Proper prior preparation prevents poor performance;

9. Do your homework: The more knowledgeable and skilled you become at your key tasks, the faster you start them and the sooner you get them done;

10. Leverage your special talents: Determine exactly what it is that you are very good at doing, or could be very good at, and throw your whole heart into doing those specific things very, very well:

11. Identify your key constraints: Determine the bottlenecks or chokepoints, internally or externally, that set the speed at which you achieve your most important goals and focus on alleviating them;

12. Take it one oil barrel at a time: You can accomplish the biggest and most complicated job if you just complete it one step at a time;

13. Put the pressure on yourself: Imagine that you have to leave town for a month and work as if you had to get all your major tasks completed before you left;

14. Maximize your personal powers: Identify your periods of highest mental and physical energy each day and structure your most important and demanding tasks around these times. Get lots of rest so you can perform at your best;

15. Motivate yourself into action: Be your own cheerleader. Look for the good in every situation. Focus on the solution rather than the problem. Always be optimistic and constructive;

16. Practice creative procrastination: Since you can’t do everything, you must learn to deliberately put off those tasks that are of low value so that you have enough time to do the few things that really count;

17. Do the most difficult task first: Begin each day with your most difficult task, the one task that can make the greatest contribution to yourself and your work, and resolve to stay at it until it is complete:

18. Slice and dice the task: Break large, complex tasks down into bite sized pieces and then just do one small part of the task to get started;

19. Create large chunks of time: Organize your days around large blocks of time where you can concentrate for extended periods on your most important tasks;

20. Develop a sense of urgency: Make a habit of moving fast on your key tasks. Become known as a person who does things quickly and well;

21. Single handle every task: Set clear priorities, start immediately on your most important task and then work without stopping until the job is 100% complete. This is the real key to high performance and maximum personal productivity.

Make a decision to practice these principles every day until they become second nature to you. With these habits of personal management as a permanent part of your personality, your future will be unlimited.

Just do it! Eat that frog.

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day

By Peter Bregman How We Work

2:27 PM Monday July 20, 2009

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people's problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I'd been ambushed. And I know better.

When I teach time management, I always start with the same question: How many of you have too much time and not enough to do in it? In ten years, no one has ever raised a hand.

That means we start every day knowing we're not going to get it all done. So how we spend our time is a key strategic decision. That's why it's a good idea to create a to do list and an ignore list. The hardest attention to focus is our own.

But even with those lists, the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?

We need a trick.

Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru, knows all about tricks; he's famous for handcuffing himself and then swimming a mile or more while towing large boats filled with people. But he's more than just a showman. He invented several exercise machines including the ones with pulleys and weight selectors in health clubs throughout the world. And his show, The Jack LaLanne Show, was the longest running television fitness program, on the air for 34 years.

But none of that is what impresses me. He has one trick that I believe is his real secret power.

Ritual.

At the age of 94, he still spends the first two hours of his day exercising. Ninety minutes lifting weights and 30 minutes swimming or walking. Every morning. He needs to do so to achieve his goals: on his 95th birthday he plans to swim from the coast of California to Santa Catalina Island, a distance of 20 miles. Also, as he is fond of saying, "I cannot afford to die. It will ruin my image."

So he works, consistently and deliberately, toward his goals. He does the same things day in and day out. He cares about his fitness and he's built it into his schedule.

Managing our time needs to become a ritual too. Not simply a list or a vague sense of our priorities. That's not consistent or deliberate. It needs to be an ongoing process we follow no matter what to keep us focused on our priorities throughout the day.

I think we can do it in three steps that take less than 18 minutes over an eight-hour workday.

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful. What can you realistically accomplish that will further your goals and allow you to leave at the end of the day feeling like you've been productive and successful? Write those things down.

Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam during a period of 30 days. 100% of those who said where and when they were going to do it completed the exam. Only 53% of the others did.

In another study, drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay before 5 p.m. on a certain day. 80% of those who said when and where they would write the essay completed it. None of the others did.

If you want to get something done, decide when and where you're going to do it. Otherwise, take it off your list.

STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus. Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour. When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don't let the hours manage you.

STEP 3 (5 minutes) Review. Shut off your computer and review your day. What worked? Where did you focus? Where did you get distracted? What did you learn that will help you be more productive tomorrow?

The power of rituals is their predictability. You do the same thing in the same way over and over again. And so the outcome of a ritual is predictable too. If you choose your focus deliberately and wisely and consistently remind yourself of that focus, you will stay focused. It's simple.

This particular ritual may not help you swim the English Channel while towing a cruise ship with your hands tied together. But it may just help you leave the office feeling productive and successful.

And, at the end of the day, isn't that a higher priority?

* * *

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults about how to lead and how to live. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and advises CEOs and their leadership teams. He is the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

* * *

Information and Study Skills

Information and Study Skills

Good information skills are essential for successful professionals.

Early in your career you must successfully study and digest a huge volume of information, simply to become effective. As you become increasingly successful, you will need to digest huge numbers of documents, data and reports just to do your job, as well as assimilating all the information you need to keep up-to-date in your field.

The articles on reading help you to increase your reading speed and become highly selective in what you read. The item on review techniques helps you to keep information fresh in your mind. The article on note-taking gives you a powerful tool for recording useful information.

Enjoy the articles!

• Introduction to Information and Study Skills
• Effective Note-Taking with Mind Maps
• SQ3R - Increasing your retention of written information
• Speed Reading - Substantially increase your reading speed
• Reading Strategies - Reading efficiently by reading intelligently
• Review Techniques - Keeping information fresh in your mind
• Learning Styles - Learn in a way that suits you
• The Conscious Competence Ladder - Making learning a happier experience

Introduction

The techniques in this section help you to manage information better. By using them you will be able to improve:

• Your reading skills, so that you can find the information you need quickly and easily
• The way you make notes, so that they become clear and easy to understand, and quick to review
• Your review techniques, so that you can keep information fresh in your mind.

These techniques will help you to assimilate information quickly. This may involve keeping yourself up-to-date on events within your field, absorbing information within reports or learning specialist information needed to complete a project.

These are also very useful tools for mastering course material where you are studying for exams.

Techniques discussed are:

• How to take notes effectively - Mind Maps
• Fully absorbing written information - SQ3R
• Speed Reading
• Reading faster by thinking what to read - Reading Strategies
• Keeping information fresh in your mind - Review Techniques
• Learn in a way that suits you - Learning Styles
• The Conscious Competence Ladder - Making learning a happier experience

Mind Maps are powerful tools for recording and organizing information. They do this in a format that is easy to review. Once you understand and start using Mind Maps, you will never again want to take notes using conventional techniques.

The next three techniques (SQ3R, Speed Reading and use of Reading Strategies) help you to assimilate and understand written information quickly and efficiently.

The section on Review Techniques will help you to keep information that you have already learned alive in your mind.

Finally, the article on Learning Styles will not only help you develop the ways in which you can learn, but you'll be able to tailor what you do so that others can learn from you more effectively.

Leverage

Achieve Much More with the Same Effort

"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the Earth."
- Archimedes

To lift a heavy object, you have a choice: use leverage or not. You can try to lift the object directly – risking injury – or you can use a lever, such as a jack or a long plank of wood, to transfer some of the weight, and then lift the object that way.

Which approach is wiser? Will you succeed without using leverage? Maybe. But you can lift so much more with leverage, and do it so much more easily!

So what has this got to do with your life and career?

The answer is "a lot". By applying the concept of leverage to business and career success, you can, with a little thought, accomplish very much more than you can without it. Without leverage, you may work very hard, but your rewards are limited by the hours you put in. With leverage, you can break this connection and, in time, achieve very much more.

Note: We're not referring to financial leverage here. Financial leverage, using "other people's money" to grow your business, can be a successful growth strategy. However, it's outside the scope of this article.

Levers of Success

So how can you apply leverage to your career? And how can you achieve much more, while – if you choose to – reducing the number of hours that you work?

To do this, you'll need to learn how to use the leverage of:-

• Time (yours and that of other people).
• Resources.
• Knowledge and education.
• Technology.

Time Leverage

Using the leverage of time is the most fundamental strategy for success. There are only so many hours in a day that you can work. If you use only your own time, you can achieve only so much. If you leverage other people's time, you can increase productivity to an extraordinary extent.

To leverage YOUR OWN time.

• Practice effective time management. Eliminate unnecessary activities, and focus your effort on the things that really matter.
• As part of this, learn how to prioritize, so that you focus your energy on the activities that give the greatest return for the time invested.
• Use goal setting to think about what matters to you in the long term, set clear targets, and motivate yourself to achieve those targets.

To leverage other people's time.

• Learn how to delegate work to other people.
• Train and empower others.
• Bring in experts and consultants to cover skill or knowledge gaps.
• Outsource non-core tasks to people with the experience to do them more efficiently.

Providing that you do things properly, the time and money that you invest in leveraging other people's time is usually well spent. Remember, though, that you'll almost always have to "pay" up front in some way in order to reap the longer-term benefits of using leverage.

Tip 1: This is why delegation is such an important skill: If you can't delegate effectively, you can never expand your productivity beyond the work that you can personally deliver. This means that your career will quickly stall, and while you may be appreciated for your hard work, you'll never be truly successful. Use these skill-builder resources to learn to delegate: Delegation, Successful Delegation, The Delegation Dilemma, and Bite-Sized Training: Delegation. It's also one of the reasons that micromanagement is such a vice: You spend so much time managing a few people that you constrain the amount of leverage you can exert. See our Avoiding Micromanagement article for more on this. Tip 2: As you learn to use the leverage these things give you, you'll find that using them involves some up-front costs, such as the investment of time and resources you'll need to make to get someone started with a job that you'd otherwise need to do. While it's natural to want to conserve these resources ("I don't have time to train him - it's got to be done by next Tuesday!"), if you don't make these investments, you'll lock yourself into the old way of doing things - and this will limit you to achieving only those things that you can do by yourself.

Resource Leverage

You can also exert leverage by getting the most from your assets, and taking full advantage of your personal strengths.

You have a wide range of skills, talents, experiences, thoughts, and ideas. These can, and should, be used in the best combination. What relevant skills and strengths do you have that others don't? How can you use these to best effect, and how can you improve them so that they're truly remarkable? What relevant assets do you have that others don't? Can you use these to create leverage? Do you have connections that others don't have? Or financial resources? Or some other asset that you can use to greater effect?

A good way of thinking about this is to conduct a personal SWOT analysis, focusing on identifying strengths and assets, and expanding from these to identify the opportunities they give you. (An advantage of SWOT is that it also helps you spot critical weaknesses that need to be covered.)

Tip: As you do this, think about how you can help others with your strengths and resources. Remember, when you can give to others, the more you're likely to get in return. (Just make sure that you're clear as to how you will be rewarded!)

Knowledge and Education Leverage

Another significant lever of success is applied knowledge. Combined with education and action, this can generate tremendous leverage.

Learning by experience is slow and painful. If you can find more formal ways of learning, you'll progress much more quickly. What's more, if you select a good course, you'll have a solid foundation to your knowledge, and one that doesn't have high-risk gaps. This is why people working in life-or-death areas (such as architects, airline pilots, medical doctors and suchlike) need long and thorough training. After all, would you want to be operated on by an unqualified surgeon?

While few of us operate in quite such immediately critical areas, by determining what you need to know, and then acquiring that knowledge, you can avoid many years of slow, painful trial and error learning.

In the same way, it's inefficient if many people in an organization have to learn how to do their work by trial and error. A much better way is for organizations to capture the knowledge gained by the first few in some way and pass it on to others. This is the core of the "knowledge management" concept. Premium Members of the Career Excellence Club can hear more about this in our Book Insight on The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knowledge Management.

The keys to successfully leveraging knowledge and education are: firstly, knowing what you need to learn; secondly knowing to what level you need to learn it; thirdly, being very focused and selective in your choices; and fourthly, in taking the time to earn the qualifications you need.

Even then, having more education or more knowledge isn't necessarily a point of leverage. These become advantages only when they can be directly applied to your career goals and aspirations--and when they're used actively and intelligently to do something useful.

By hiring, consulting with, and outsourcing to other people, you gain the leverage of their knowledge and education as well as their resources. This only works if you choose the right people - the wrong ones can slow you and drag you down. Don't let this happen!

Technology Leverage

Finding technology leverage is all about thinking about how you work, and using technology to automate as much of this as you can.

At a simple level, you might find that all you need to keep you in touch with home and work is a laptop computer. Alternatively, a personal digital assistant (PDA) can help you maintain a single, convenient, properly-backed-up time management system. Cell phones that access email and browse the web are handy tools for making the best of your downtime during working hours or while traveling.

If you're a slow typist, voice recognition software can help you dictate documents and save time. Tools like Google Desktop Search can help you manage and find documents in such a way that you no longer need to file digital documents. And Google itself provides a great, quick way of finding relevant information online.

At a more sophisticated level, you may find that you can use simple desktop databases like Microsoft Access to automate simple work processes. If you do a lot of routine data processing (for example, if you run many similar projects) you can find that this saves you a great deal of time. More than this, you only need to set up a process once with a tool like this - afterwards the process will be executed the same way each time, by whomever initiates the process (this reduces training, meaning that new team members can become productive much more quickly, meaning that you can scale your operations – and your success – more quickly.)

Businesses can choose from a wide array of software solutions. Some of these can automate or simplify tasks that are otherwise very time-consuming. Customer relationship management (CRM) databases can bring tremendous benefits for sales and customer service organizations, as can point-of-sale (PoS) inventory systems for organizations that need to track and manage inventory. Websites and web-based catalogs can give clients easy access to up-to-date product information, and help them place orders simply and easily. And blogs and email-based newsletters help people stay in contact with thousands of people quickly and easily. All of these use technology to provide tremendous leverage.

Key Points

Using leverage is the art and science of getting much more done with the same, or less, effort. At a simple level, this can free up your time to concentrate on things with the highest priority. At a more sophisticated level, it helps you achieve at a much higher level.

When you invest time and resources to leverage technology - as well as to leverage time, resources, and knowledge (both your own, and that of other people) - you have a recipe for unprecedented success. Use what you and others have to your advantage, and see how far it will take you.

Apply This to Your Life: Complete a personal SWOT analysis. This will help give you a real sense of what you're good at and what activities might benefit from some outside help. From there, you can start to build a leveraging strategy to maximize your productivity and performance. Look for a mentor who understands and uses leverage, and learn from his or her experiences. This is an example of using leverage to learn more about leveraging - so that exponential factor kicks in again. Increase your personal expectations. Take a look at your current goals, and ask yourself how much further you could push those goals by using leverage on a consistent basis. You may far surpass your pre-leverage goals once you commit to "working smart." Surround yourself with a network of great people who have skills, knowledge, and expertise that you don't possess. Look for opportunities to create synergy, and leverage the talents of everyone involved. When you work together, you can accomplish so much more than going it alone.

In Flow

Maximizing Productivity Through Improved Focus

What is focus?

Let's take an example. Have you ever seen a hassled mom trying to get her young daughter to leave whatever she is doing and do something else? It's a common enough sight: Young children can get so wrapped up in whatever they're doing that it takes a lot of persuasion to get them to switch their attention.

This ability to focus totally on one thing comes naturally to young children, but it's one of the biggest challenges that most of the rest of us face. We struggle to concentrate and, because of this, fail to get on with the work we're doing.

Some people, though, seem able to focus intensely on what they're doing, and perform exceptionally well as a result. Modern psychologists refer to this state of absolute absorption or concentration in what we are doing, as being "in flow."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first described the concept, suggests that this state of being able to achieve total focus applies to almost every field of activity. According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow involves "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost". So how do we enter this "ecstatic" state?

Creating the Right Environment

Flow is easiest to achieve when:

• You have enough pressure on you to stay engaged, but not so much that it's harming your performance.
• You believe that your skills are good enough to perform well.
• You have distraction under control.
• You are attending to the task in hand, rather than analyzing and critiquing your performance.
• You are relaxed and alert.
• You are thinking positively, and have eliminated all negative thoughts.

Some of these are hard to achieve in a busy office environment. Your phone rings, your e-mail beeps to indicate that a new message has arrived, and co-workers pop by to ask you questions. At the same time you can't stop thinking about a whole range of personal and work issues that are causing you stress, not least of which is the sheer quantity of work which is piling up.

So if you're to have a good chance of getting into flow, you need to sort out all of these distractions first. Here are some practical things you can do:

• Get comfortable, and eliminate distraction from your environment. Rearrange your working environment so that you eliminate as many distractions as possible. Change the orientation of your desk, so that people passing don't distract you. Use plants and screens to damp noise. Adjust furniture so that it's comfortable. If untidiness distracts you, tidy up. Make sure the temperature is comfortable, and that your work area is well lit.
• Keep interruptions at bay. Put up the "Do not disturb" sign, switch off your cell phone, close your email reader and web browser, and do anything. anything that will block the most common things that distract you from work. You'll be surprised at how much you can get done in just one hour of uninterrupted work, which may be the equivalent of plodding on for several hours if you're handling interruptions at the same time. For more on this, read our article on managing interruptions.
• Manage your stress. Identify the sources of stress you experience with a Stress Diary, and then work to reduce or eliminate the greatest stressors. One of the most common sources of stress at work is feeling that you have too much to do. See our section on time management to find out how to deal with this. And if you're under so much pressure to perform that this is distracting you, use relaxation imagery to calm yourself down.
• Keep a To-Do List or Action Program. Empty your mind of those distracting things you have to do by writing them down in a to-do list or action program. You'll be amazed how much this can clear your mind! Do the same for worries - write them down and schedule a time to deal with them. And don't try to multi-task: Just concentrate on doing one thing well.
• Think positively. It's very hard to concentrate if you have negative thoughts swirling around your mind. What's more, the negativity they cause undermines the way we deal with work, with people and with issues, often making things more difficult. So the final step in preparing to concentrate is to stop thinking negatively and start thinking positively.

Successful athletes commonly use relaxation and positive thinking techniques as they face the challenge of competition. They deal with their feelings of nervousness with relaxation techniques, and by reminding themselves that they have the skills needed to succeed. And when they are out there running, jumping, or throwing, they concentrate on what they're doing, rather than on the distractions around them.

Getting Into the Flow

With all of that in place, you can start to practice your concentration skills. Try to focus on one task at a time to the exclusion of others, as far as you can.

Before you know it, you will be in flow. You'll be so involved in any activity you undertake that nothing else seems to matter. Not only will your productivity increase, you'll find that your work is more rewarding. Flow is productive, flow is fun, and flow is essential for real success!

Key Points:

When you achieve a state of flow, you're able to achieve more because all of your thoughts and energy are focused on the task in hand. To get into a state of flow, you need to eliminate interruptions and distractions from your environment.

More than this, you need to empty your mind of worries, anxieties, negative thinking, and all those little "mental notes" that flit in and out of our consciousness. This sounds hard, but in reality is quite easy if you take the time to get into the right habits.

Apply This to Your Life: Look for ways in which you could improve your work environment so that you can get into the flow more efficiently and more often. If you work in an open-plan office, consider using a meeting or rest area when you need to concentrate. Alternatively, use headphones to block out the noise when you're working at your terminal. Be disciplined about shutting down your web browser, and only checking your e-mail once you have completed a task. Follow our advice, set up an effective time management system, and get on top of the stressful thoughts buzzing around your mind. You'll be amazed by how much better you can concentrate if you get everything down on paper! If you get stuck with a certain part of your task, don't succumb to self-distraction and hurry off to get a cup of coffee. Instead, remind yourself that you have the skills to break through the problem, and maintain your focus on finding a solution.