Advising, Consulting And Mentoring Greater Houston Area Business Since 1986
From the Editor...
Richard Hendee
Recently I read an article that mentioned some large companies are eliminating employee performance reviews and requiring managers to do more frequent quality feedback of employees. The article further noted that after a one year period one Company's study cited that only 5.0% of the managers were able to effectively manage their employees without some type of rating or evaluation system.
In my 45 years of experience in managing employees I used a combination of an annual performance review coupled with feedback throughout the year. Sometimes the feedback was in the form of praise for a job well done or goals being exceeded, but I also used those situations of missteps as a means of coaching my employees to become better employees by learning from mistakes, whether they caused the blunder or someone else was at fault.
Time to negotiate that big deal! Let's go make it a win/win and get the business on the books right away! Wrong. If you are dealing with a company of any size at all I can promise you that the person across the table has had extensive training in how to get what they want and make you feel it. We call this the "Pit Bull extracting the pound of flesh" negotiating process. So the most common first mistake is Failing to Recognize and Knowing how to Deal with a "Player"
Of course that would be much easier if we had done some pre negotiating planning. Do we know the 12(oh yes at least 12) most common negotiating gambits and how to handle and counter them? Have we made lists of what is important to us as must haves and what we can concede to get the deal? Did we preplan response to what we know is coming and have we planned for the very worst? Or have we committed mistake number 2,"Weak Pre Negation Positioning
You will never become a leader without getting into the fray of trying to lead. Likewise, you will become a much better leader by continuing to learn how to do so.
Leadership has many similarities to sports activities. I learned how to swim on my own in a small lake because I wanted to water ski. While I can swim, I can't compete with individuals who practiced swimming daily taking lessons from a coach. And then they go to competitions watching and talking with fellow swimmers on how to improve their style before, during, and after the race. Their learning is just far greater than mine.
Like swimming lessons, there is a lot of academic and experiential information on how to improve your leadership. That is why in my book, Develop a Leadership Plan: Become a Great Leader, has a chapter on Leadership Insights. Here is a brief summary from the book on what I think are leadership essentials.
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