You, or someone you care about deserves a better job and a better life.
I built my own career from entry level engineer to General Manager and CEO.
I say that not to brag, but to make sure you know I had A LOT OF HELP to get there.
I wrote RISE to share all that help.
A Practical Guide
I put everything I learned about advancing my career and standing out as a leader into RISE. It is a very practical and useful guide to get ahead in your career AND like your life.
RISE makes a great holiday gift for your friends or your team.
Buy RISE now for someone whose career you care about.
I promise it’s: Real Advice. No Fluff. Non-annoying.
Here are some of the comments RISE has received over the past few months:
…a book so well organized, so thought provoking, so damn relevant
It will save you a lot of headaches, and you’ll avoid a ton of mistakes.
You have enabled me to see options in my own career I previously could not.
THE most useful business book I have ever read – literally.
You’ll put her ideas to work right away, feel liberated as a result.
…Patty becomes a friend, whom the reader comes to feel, really does want you to benefit from her advice and experience
…simply the best and last business book of its kind that you will ever need to read.
Until now I could not recommend one specific book, With Rise: I have “the” book to recommend.
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Thank You.
About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Recently, I have found myself re-telling a story I read a long time ago, in a leadership book, that really stuck with me.
It was about a boy who had a summer job at a bank. I’m paraphrasing…
One time the CEO of the bank asked the boy, “So, how do you like your job”?
The boy replied somewhat discouraged, “I have a really stupid job. All I do is replace the pens and the make sure these containers that hold the deposit slips are never empty”.
What matters
The CEO then said, “Not only is your job not stupid, you have the most important job in the whole bank!”
“Our bank can’t exist if customers don’t deposit money, and customers won’t deposit money if they don’t have confidence in our bank. It’s your job to make sure that our customers’ very first experience when they walk through our door is a good one. What could be more important than that?”
“How do you think our customers would feel if the pens didn’t write or they needed to go through the time and hassle to ask someone to get them a deposit slip? Would they feel welcome and confident in us?”
Motivation and Effectiveness
The boy suddenly felt much better and kind of proud. Once he thought about his job the way the CEO had explained it, and realized why his job did matter, he thought of ways to do an even better job to make customers feel more confident and welcome. So he started cleaning the counters each day, and making sure every thing on them was neat and organized. And he started greeting people as they walked in the door.
I think there are three important lessons in this story.
1. Every job matters.
2. Make sure each employee knows why their job matters.
3. Employees who understand why their job matters will do a better job.
1. Every job matters
If you can’t explain why each job in your organization matters, you need to question whether or not you need the job in the first place.
You need to make sure you can explain how everyone’s job contributes to the business, both to make sure that you are maximizing your resources, and so you can explain it to the people doing the jobs!
2. Make sure each employee knows why their job matters
As a leader, it’s your job to make sure you explain to everyone why their job matters and how it impacts the business. You need to make sure that the experience that boy had with the CEO happens for every one of your employees.
People want their work to matter. There is no better way to have employees understand why their job matters than for you to connect the dots for them, and give them a clear line of sight both to the top of the organization, and to the outside customer.
Make time to connect the dots
I would always make time in my schedule to talk to individuals and mid-level managers to understand how they felt about their job. I would learn what parts of the business and external world they could (and couldn’t) see from where they were sitting.
I would then connect the rest of the dots for them.
I did this in 1-1s, talking with people in the cafeteria, breakfast meetings, riding in the car for sales calls, brown bags, attending staff meetings of the managers who worked in my organization, and any other opportunity that came up.
If you make an effort to share with people how their work fits into the bigger picture they will be more motivated and more effective. Which gets me to the third point.
3. Employees who know why their work matters do a better job
Once people truly understand how their job contributes to the business and why it matters, they are more likely and able to step up, solve more problems, and add more value.
Once the boy understood it was about customer confidence, not pens and paper, he developed more ideas of how to deliver that outcome on his own.
With personal knowledge of what business outcomes their roles need to drive, people will do more of what the business needs them to do.
Get your people to step up and creatively do the job that needs to be done, not just the one that was defined for them.
Here are a few examples:
Product Development:
I would explain to my product development organization how we made money, and where the profit came from. I would explain how getting new products out sooner would benefit not only our competitiveness, but also cost less.
I helped them understand how their salaries fit into the P&L, and gave them ideas of the kinds of things they could do to impact sales (make it easier to demo) or impact expenses (make it easier to test.)
Tech writers:
I would give tech writers a chance to interact with customers, and share the business model of our customer support function with them. I’d have them talk with customer support people.
They realized that if they could improve the product documentation it would result in both a better customer experience and a lower support cost.
IT department:
I explained the business model to the IT department and how much each sales rep needed to sell, and what all the steps are in the sales process.
I told them about the length of sales cycles and how special deals were often given in the last 24 hours of the month. That helped them to understand why the IT systems had carry a to carry heavier load (and better stay working!) at those times.
They realized that they could change the way they planned and managed IT services to support the sales team to make closing business and handling special pricing easier.
Taking the time to share and explain
Taking time to share with every group, how the company makes money, where the revenue comes from, and where the profit comes from, motivates people to step up and do more for the business.
Helping them understand how the P&L works and if their job is part of the P or the L, and how their job impacts the profit, makes a big difference not only to morale, but to cost reduction, creative thinking, and innovation.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Your strategy will only succeed if you execute it.
We talked about 4 common things that block organizations from making strategic progress on their business, and what to do about them:
1. Talking vs. Action
Smart Talking: Companies can get very practiced at talking about their strategy. Some people fall into the trap of believing that providing brilliant insights about what is going on in the business is adding value. It isn’t. Value comes from doing.
High Level Goals: High level goals are another form of talking. High level goals are motivating, but they are vague. They don’t tell people what they need to do when they get to work in the morning.
Clear, concrete steps. Strategic progress is made in concrete steps by specific people. We talked about how to translate high level goals into specific actionable steps that will ensure strategic progress.
2. Weak Alignment and Support
Passive vs. Active Agreement. There is a big difference between verbal agreements with nodding heads (passive agreement), and people being ready, willing, and committed to take action (active agreement).
Get the whole organization engaged. To make real strategic progress, you need to get the whole organization involved, engaged, motivated, and executing the strategic change.
Expose conflict. Being super-clear about what you expect in terms of defined tasks, measures and resource decisions raises conflict. But working through productive conflict is the only want to get active agreement.
We talked about the specific steps to get active agreement.
Deal with Sabotage. We talked about what do do when people are actively sabotaging strategic progress either because they disagree or are personally threatened by the change.
3. Lack of Measures and Accountability
Acknowledge Deadlines. The problem shows up when deadlines come and go and nothing happens. Too many organizations let this happen. You need to measure, track, and follow-up on the tasks that are required to make strategic progress.
Have the conversation. If a deadline is missed. You must deal with it! We talked about techniques to address missed deadlines and still keep team motivation high.
Show you are serious. The temptation to go back to the old way of doing things is very strong. You need to show your organization you are serious by communicating consistently, and by not making tactical decisions that undermine strategic progress.
4. Being too busy to do anything new
Tactical Pressure: Many organizations struggle to make strategic progress because they stay too busy working on the immediate demands of the current business.
Scaling. We talked about how to break the busy-ness cycle and focus key areas of the organization on scaling, even when it’s the boss who is the one blocking forward progress.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Corporate crap is all that extra, low-value work and random pressures that interfere with delivering on your job…
It’s the stuff that drains your time and energy, and annoys you a lot…
It’s the stuff that makes you feel like you are not controlling your own destiny.
It’s things like needing to defend what your group does, or deflecting low value initiatives and useless demands on your time.
The reality
Your job is to deliver what is in your job description AND deal with all the crap that gets in the way of delivering on your job description.
By the way, the higher you advance in a corporation, the more crap you get to deal with.
It’s part of what they pay you for.
One way to think about this is… if you were to go from a corporation to a startup, you would notice two things:
1. There is no corporate crap. You spend virtually 100% of your time moving the business forward. This feels great.
2. You get paid a lot less. This feels less great.
But it’s a trade-off. I always thought of this difference in pay as the money they pay you for dealing with your allocation of corporate crap.
Politics and The High Ground
One of the biggest time and energy sinks is politics. There is an endless source of negative drama you can get drawn into at work. This is not the high ground. But avoiding it is not free of time and energy either. Crap.
For example, if you get so wrapped up in staying on the high ground that you say, “I refuse to engage in politics. It doesn’t add value, and it’s wrong” this can come back to bite you.
It’s important to realize that if everyone else is playing politics, and you are not, you can get damaged by being invisible, or by having the wrong story out there about you. So you need to do something…
Defensive Politics
One of my mentors gave me some advice that really stuck with me when I was taking the high ground and refusing to engage in a political war.
I told him, “I won’t engage in empire building because it’s wrong. We are trying to cut costs and having a big organization doesn’t mean you are adding more business value. I would rather deliver on my business then spend time building an empire.”
He said to me, “Patty, the only problem with that approach is if you are the only one who is not empire building, you will be left with no people”.
So how do you stay on the high ground when others are being political and you need to defend yourself?
Visible, but not Annoying
I never ever advocate politics and publicity instead of excellent results.
The most important thing is to deliver excellent results first,
THEN make sure to get visibility for it.
This is how you accomplish what I describe as “Be Visible, but not Annoying”. If you are known for outstanding results, visibility does not look shallow or political. People value knowing what you are doing when you are doing great stuff.
Control your story
For example, if someone is spreading the word that “Patty is doing the wrong stuff, her business is not going well, and she is a weak leader”, that story is getting air time. Even if it’s completely untrue, people might be saying this because they are trying to steal my people, or knock me out of the competition for a promotion. And other people might believe it.
I don’t engage in that type of conversation at all, either to defend myself or to go on the offense. It adds no value. But you have to do something.
Saying nothing by refusing to engage in politics can damage you.
You need to control the story about you. So what I would in this situation is to make sure to communicate about the value of what I was doing to key stakeholders. Yes it takes time. Yes you can call it politics. But if your intentions are honorable it is not a negative thing.
By putting excellent work and high-value results out there where people can see them, you “respond” to the political attack, you take control of your story, preserve your Brand, and still stay on the high ground.
Preserving the empire
Ok, back to the plot. Although I didn’t go on the offence and try to build a big empire, I participated in enough discussions and debates to create positive visibility for my team’s work. I was able to control the story about me. I sold the value of what my team was doing which made it clear to everyone involved that my team needed to remain intact.
I was able to stay on the high ground. And by engaging in the game and making my team’s work visible, I was able to defend against the empire builders.
You don’t have to engage in shallow, ugly, negataive politics, but you do need to be aware that others are doing so, and stake your claim on the high ground in a positive, high-value and visible way.
It takes some time
The unfortunate reality is that it does take time. And it’s time taken away from moving the business forward. But once you see this as part of your job, and allocate some time and energy to it, you can proactively eliminate the issues, and take a lot of the stress out of the situation by taking control of the outcome.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
On one of my recent coaching hour conference calls with Azzarello Group members, someone asked me,
“What things do you when you start a job so you make sure to get off on the best possible footing?”
I gave an answer along the lines of my DO Better, LOOK Better, Connect Better model about building credibility and getting an action plan in place, but the person said, “No, I meant, what do YOU do?
“Is there something you did the same way each time you started
a new executive job?”
So I thought about it and in fact there was one thing that was part of my playbook pretty much every time I started a new job. And it worked really well.
After we discussed it, someone on the call said, “you should write a blog about this”. So here you have it…
Getting Started Strong
This approach is not only useful for when you are new to a role or a company, but you can use this technique to give yourself a boost in effectiveness and credibility within your current job as well.
Create two lists.
Desired Outcomes
Recommended Actions
Get feedback on both lists from pretty much everyone.
1. Desired Outcomes
On this list I would write a list of what the world would look like after a year of my making it better. Here is where I would bring to bear my external or fresh perspective and big picture thinking.
For example it would have things on it like:
Perception of our products goes from unknown to desirable and credible
We are spending money more effectively and can see budget tied to specific business outcomes
Morale and motivation of sales team is greatly improved
Industry analysts will reinforce our strategy
We will have reference customers that support our new strategy in each super region
2. Recommended Actions
I would then create a list of actions that I believed would drive progress to achieve these outcomes.
On this list I would have things like:
Resolve internal competing efforts on products and clarify product and service roadmap
Improve our sales enablement function (list top 3 ideas…)
Work with services organization to identify, secure and create reference customers in each region
Orchestrate interaction with analysts and reference customers to prove our strategy
Get Feedback
Then what I would do is I would walk around and talk to everyone about these 2 lists.
I would present these two lists at management meetings for each function, team meetings, and 1-1 meetings with peers and executives and get their feedback.
I would ask, do you agree that these are the right outcomes to be targeting? Do you agree that these are the right initiatives to achieve these outcomes?
Thinking back on it, this approach quickly let me establish myself in a very productive and credible way.
On the DO Better front:
It allowed me to zero in on the most important business outcomes. It helped me both create and prioritize the action plan to get there.
On the LOOK Better front:
It helped me build credibility quickly because I was “out there”.
I was having conversations with business stakeholders far and wide. I was establishing my presence. It gave me a chance to establish myself as a strategic leader that could see beyond the current situation.
Outcome focus
Hint: driving an outcome-focused conversation always makes you appear more credible, than talking about things that are happening today.
On the CONNECT Better front:
Having these conversation based on these two lists gave me a reason to connect with people.
The outcome-focused perspective put people in the mood to help me.
Because I was getting their feedback, they felt like they had a stake in what I was doing and because it was a motivating outcome we were both now heading for, they would offer to help me.
I was able to build up an extra team of connections very quickly by sharing my thoughts on these two lists of outcomes and actions, and asking people far and wide for their inputs and ultimately their help.
By the time I got 30 days in, I had a very solid plan that I put into action. It let me start putting points on the board to maintain the credibility I built initially with this approach.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
I am on a bit of a rampage lately about organizations not-addressing missed deadlines.
I see this a lot. The reason why so many organizations have so much trouble doing what they intend to do, on time, is because when they fail to meet a deadline, nothing happens.
Nothing happens…
The dates come and go and no one talks about it.
People who were on the hook either assume that they have been granted more time, or it wasn’t that important to begin with.
Then there is no new deadline established because no one is talking about it at all. So the strategic task takes an even lower priority over the more urgent tactical demands of the moment.
Strategic Progress
This simple failure to address missed deadlines is one of the biggest factors that keeps organizations from making strategic progress.
You can’t let the date come and go and leave the failure totally unacknowledged and unexamined.
This sends all the wrong messages and sets a very low standard of execution.
What you are communicating (by not communicating) is:
It wasn’t that important
It doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done
There are no consequences for missing a deadline
We’re not serious about meeting our commitments
Late is OK
Why people don’t follow up
I have observed four main reasons why executives fail to follow up on missed deadlines:
1. Too busy to keep track
2. Not personally good at keeping track
3. Don’t like the conflict of keeping track
4. Don’t know what consequences to impose when something is off track.
The first two are really easy to fix. Get someone who’s naturally good at this to help you. I talked about how to do that that here.
Number 3 and 4 you can’t delegate. As a general manager, if these things make you uncomfortable you need to do them anyway.
Here are some suggestions:
How to deal with the conflict:
1. Be really clear up front about dates, owners, and measures, and communicate the status at the beginning of the project when everything is “green”.
2. Start communicating regularly about what is getting done before anything goes wrong.
3. Everyone can see their name on the chart with the due dates and measures. It is up to them to keep on track.
4. Then when something goes from green to yellow or red, it is not as much of a conflict to bring it up. At least it is not a surprise. Everyone saw it coming. The person who failed to deliver had the chance to avoid it, and knew before hand that it would be addressed, so the conflict is not personal.
What consequences to impose
You don’t need to fire someone every time a deadline is missed. So if you don’t fire the person for missing a deadline, what do you do?
There are so many options between termination and nothing!
You don’t need to be a tyrant.
But you do need to have a conversation.
Ask, “what happened? How to do you intend to recover?”. The act of having this conversation sends the message that it is NOT OK to miss a deadline.
It should be uncomfortable
Sure it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it should be! You missed a deadline. That should not be pleasant, comfortable news for anyone.
It’s not about coming down hard on someone or being disrespectful or nasty. It’s about moving the business forward.
Also, I find that strong performers take a lot of ownership in these conversations and put more pain on themselves then they get from you.
Many leaders struggle with the motivation factor. They feel like if they give someone a hard time the person may get de-motivated, be less committed or leave.
In reality, the impact of not having the conversation is that you are letting the person know that what they were working on wasn’t very important, which I think is always even more de-motivating.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Add more value. Adding value = doing what the business values. We talked about how to map your work to key business initiatives, then tune how you work to have more impact. Don’t wait for your boss to do this for you.
Ruthless Priorities. Decide which things you will finish first and best. Map them to business value. Refuse to put them at risk.
Do less stupid stuff. We talked about a number of time wasters and how to eliminate them such as: The “don’t do” list, improving poor communications, and leaving certain things unresolved.
Negotiate your workload
Don’t do everything. Your company can absorb an unlimited amount of work from you and not really care. You be the one to make sure you get to focus on important things.
Educate your executive. Push back. We talked about how to build credibility by catching all the work, but then analyzing it and making recommendations back to your boss about how to prioritize it.
Responsive or Reactive. We talked about the difference between being known for being responsive on the most important things vs. reacting to everything.
Own the outcome
Situation + Response = Outcome. We talked about how teams get stuck endlessly talking about the situation (admiring the problem), and how to break through this by focusing on the outcome and action plan (response).
Don’t add weight. Get known as someone who “takes weight away”. Always move the business forward. Defining and owning outcomes is one great way do this.
Recognition and Satisfaction
Stand out: Get known for driving important outcomes, not just doing work. Upgrading your work to be more strategic will build upon itself and you will find yourself being engaged in even more strategic work over time.
Increase YOUR value: By tuning your work to have greater value to the business, you will find yourself more valued, and your work will feel more satisfying.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
As managers, at some point we all
encounter an employee who frustrates us, and drains the life and energy out of the team.
When you are in this situation with someone, you know it in your heart that
you should act …
…particularly when they really annoy you … but you don’t act right away because you second guess yourself …
and you keep thinking… they really do some things very well… sometimes…
Won’t
A colleague of mine shared this decision tree with me, and since then life has been easier. When you are questioning yourself, whether or not to act, look at this chart. It makes it pretty clear.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I could probably stop here, but I’ll make a few additional points.
Reasons Managers don’t act
The person has flashes of true brilliance, interspersed with being a drain, so you keep changing your mind about their value to the team
You are afraid to lose a person doing some work even if they’re not the best
They are doing work that you don’t know how to cover without them
They have political support from elsewhere in the organization that may be hard to manage
There is a “no replacement” rule and you don’t want to lose a headcount
It’s hard. On any given day it’s easier to ignore the problem
It’s not fun
It takes time away from “real business”
It’s legally complicated
Poor performance is contagious
I am seeing more and more research that says that the overall team performance is defined by the lowest performer, not the highest performer.
One of my favorites was the NPR, This American Life Prologue, where a researcher got an actor to join a work team and act like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive… the rest of the team followed suit! Fascinating.
(By the way if you go to this link, don’t miss the second act, the Mike Birbiglia segment, on a comedy routine gone horribly wrong, it’s wonderful.)
Even though it’s tough to act, it is worth it.
If you have a Won’t on your team – someone who may be capable, but is fighting you at every turn, annoying others, being negative, checking in and out, working against what you are trying to do, or damning it with superficial support, the payoff for dealing with it is big.
Rewards for taking action
My experience has been, 100% of the time, that getting a won’t out has a remarkably positive impact:
You will be more productive, as you will no longer waste time dealing with the variety of annoying, draining, damaging, needing to be corrected or re-worked, “not good enough”, or otherwise apologized-for issues that this person causes
The motivation and productivity of whole team goes up, even if they have to cover the work
Everyone feels the positive impact that results from the negative energy being removed
Your top performers stay motivated to keep performing
You build trust with your team, by showing that good performance counts for something
If you position this as a critical skill replacement, you will often get your replacement headcount, even if the rules say no
Taking Action
Here are a few thoughts for taking action on poor performers:
Be honest with yourself
Don’t shy away from the situation or just hope it will improve. Face it head on.
Get your data together
Start making notes as soon as someone’s performance starts bugging you.
After a couple of weeks you will have suffering + data vs. just suffering.
Get support from HR
Let your manager know and HR know what you are considering, early in the process. HR can help you with the process.
Reinforce your performance standards
Reinforce your standards and the level of performance you expect with the rest of your team, before, during and after dealing with a problem employee.
Everyone is watching
It’s also important to note that the problem between you and a poor performer is not just between the two of you. Your whole team sees it and they are watching and waiting to see what you will do about it.
The longer you don’t act, the more you degrade your credibility and trust with the rest of your team, and maybe even your peers and boss.
This is the least fun part of management, but I bring it up from time to time because upgrading low performers has such a big impact on the success of your business, not to mention your sanity.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
All organizations struggle at some point to put their Strategy into Action (Read: actually get done what they say they want to do).
I find that key problems of executing are common in companies of all sizes and industries — but particularly in companies that want to scale.
Why?
Because people have to do new things to support the evolving business needs, and that’s hard.
It’s hard to get alignment, it’s hard to prioritize, and it’s hard to resist temptation and keep focus.
5 that block strategic progress (and how to fix them).
Or if you prefer reading, here is a brief summary.
5 things that block strategic progress:
1. Talk vs. doing
Problem:
Companies can get very practiced at talking about their strategy.
The trouble arises when people (at every level) don’t understand how to change their day to day work to do what the strategy requires.
Solution:
Translate the exciting, high level strategy-talk into much more mundane, concrete, measurable and trackable action items.
2. People don’t agree
Problem: Nodding heads around the table is a red flag!
It doesn’t mean people agree. It mostly means they think they’ll get out of the meeting faster if they nod their head. If people don’t agree, they won’t move forward in an aligned way. Your strategy stalls.
Solution:
You need to proactively smoke out the misunderstandings, unspoken disagreements, passive aggressive behaviors, and generally weak or apathetic support. Then you need to set up specific accountability.
3. Resource moves are not clear
Problem:
If you want to do new things, you need to move resources to do it.
Your strategy is where you put your resources.
If you are not super-clear about what resources will move, they will never move. Your strategy will not move forward either.
Solution:
Don’t expect your staff to make tradeoffs off-line to drive the new strategy. This never works. You need to do it top down in the light of day.
4. Too busy to change
Problem:
There is no extra time. Urgent crises, customer opportunities, or changing your mind usurps work on longer term strategic initiatives.
So you stay really busy but you don’t move forward or grow.
Solution:
Keep focus on strategic progress by setting measures and tracking progress. If you miss a deadline discuss it. Find out what happened. Never let strategic milestones slip by un-examined. This is a slippery slope into chronically bad execution.
5. Failure to engage and communicate with people
Problem:
The strategy gets stuck at the executive level.
You forget to tell the people who need to do the work what they need to do.
The inertia for people to keep doing what they are already doing is very strong.
Solution:
Create an ongoing communication plan throughout the entire process of executing the strategy. Motivate and engage people to get on board and give them personal reasons to care. Give them the tools to modify their work to support your new strategy.
Get it done this time
Most businesses know what they want to do, they just have some trouble actually doing it.
I work with companies to use my Strategy into Action Progam™ when they are ready to GO FAST. Contact me if you want to talk about this.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Pretty much everyone I talk to says they would be better at their job if they had more time to think.
Also, when I ask, “What are your biggest time sinks?”, the vast majority of people say “email”.
But almost no one says that email is the most important thing they do.
The need to be responsive
The reason so many people remain a slave to email is because they are afraid to be seen as unresponsive in today’s, always-on world.
You are putting this pressure on yourself.
I had a fascinating discussion with a group of peers, about half of whom worked at home. They communicated on instant messaging as well as email.
One woman was literally afraid to go to the bathroom when she was working at home, because she thought that if she did not respond instantly, her colleagues would think she was goofing off.
I asked her in-office colleagues, “What would you think if you sent an instant message to someone on the team working at home and you didn’t hear back for an hour?”
The resounding reply was, “that they were working on something important”.
Responding instantly doesn’t add value
Taking the time to think through your work strategically, and focus time an energy on the things that have the biggest impact on the business adds value. Improving the way you do your work to be more effective or efficient adds value.
I have talked to managers who say that people who always respond instantly to email seem less effective because they never seem to be working on anything. Ouch!
Free yourself to work more strategically and not let email take over your life.
Here some of the best practices I have collected to spend less time on email, and build your credibility along the way.
7 Ideas to make email less painful
I encourage you to add your ideas and best practices in the comment box below as well.
Spend less time
1. Make the container smaller.
Email will fill any amount of time you give it. If you are doing email every night for hours after dinner you are doing something wrong. How much time in your day is email actually worth?
Set a time limit based on what email deserves compared to other things.
Think about budgeting only one hour per day for email. How would you make sure you got to the most critical stuff?
2. Get the Time of Day Right
We all have a part of the day when we are most brilliant and focused. If you are at your best first thing in the morning, or right after you take a walk at lunch, do your most thinking-intensive, hard, strategic work then.
Don’t waste your best brain on email.
3. Turn off the temptation
Turn off the beeps, the alerts, and the pop-up windows. Don’t keep checking your email all day.
Give your boss a heads up, then set up an auto-responder that lets people know that you answer email at noon and 5pm. That way you are giving an immediate response and you are also signaling that you are working on something important.
Do Less
4. Don’t read all your email
Know your Ruthless Priorities. Keep a list of them with you at all times. Then deal first with the email that impacts your ruthless priorities. You will be seen as highly responsive on the most important things. Everything else does not need the same level of care and responsiveness.
The phone will ring if you miss something really important.
Getting your Ruthless Priorities done will always add more value than doing all of your email.
5. Catch what’s most important Use filters to find the emails coming from your boss, board members, top clients, etc. to make sure you don’t miss those. Only read things you are in the “TO” list not just “CC’d”.
Respond differently
6. File instead of read
One woman I met had a goal for email that was simply to never lose an email from a key client. When she got emails she didn’t read them as she got several hundred a day. She would just file them in a folder for that client, and if something ever came up that was in an email, she would search for it in the moment.
7. Quick reply
When you get an email from someone who wants to give you input or get your opinion, sometimes “got it, thanks” is all you ever need to do. You will be seen as being very responsive without spending lots of time responding to everything. Always acknowledge input from people.
Zero-inbox
Zero inbox is not for everyone, but when I stepped back to think about my own time-wasters, I realized that I personally wasted a lot of time searching for messages I sent, received, deleted…(where was that message?).
Or I would waste time just mindlessly poking around the 1200-2500 messages in my inbox at any point in time to see what I might need to act on.
I now have had zero messages in my inbox for the past 3 years. This saves about 2-4 hours in my week, and a lot of frustration.
Here is how I do it:
Act on any message you can in the moment. Deal with it or delete it. For the others:
File them. You need two types of categories: Action and Save.
My Action categories are:
DO: I need to do something, call someone, do research, write something, etc.
REPLY: I need to send an email reply but can’t do it at the moment
FOLLOW UP: date stamp it for follow-up and get it out of the inbox.
My Save Categories are:
CLIENTS OR PROJECTS: one folder for each
TRAVEL: Itineraries & Travel Logistics
LOGINS & ACCOUNTS: login and account info for various online systems
RESOURCES: pointers to vendors, services, utilities, websites and other resources
GOOD STUFF: miscellaneous things worth saving
WAITING: information I will need to act on later but not now
The Dramatic Improvement:
It took me about 6 hours one day to re-classify or delete everything in my inbox.
But now it takes me about 1-10 minutes each day to clear my inbox.
I do not search for “lost” messages any more.
I do not poke around in my inbox any more.
I schedule working time to take action on email.
Then I get right to the DO and to the Reply folders without needing to look for anything. I’m more productive.
What things have you done to keep email from taking over your life? Please share what works best for you.
Was this useful?
If you found this article useful, please help me share it (share links below) with others and encourage them to subscribe.
About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
