As an individual contributor, it’s easy to focus. Other than being interrupted by your manager you, for the most part, control your time and what you are focused on at any given moment. Managers don’t have that luxury. Because the job of a manager is to orchestrate the activities, direction and goals of a [...]
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This is the third post in my series on communicating with your board. You can find the previous posts here and here. Consolodating key financial information on a single page is a great tool for communicating some of the most important data about the company in a quickly-grasped snapshot. Because of this, it’s not only good [...]  May 4th, 2007 |  Tags: Communicating with Your Board | Category: Boards, Management, Startups |  4 comments Have you ever attended a meeting where, regardless of the the topics covered, everyone left feeling deflated and depressed? Or maybe, you had a one-on-one with your manager where your first instinct at the conclusion of the get-together was to go home and cry or spend the evening at a bar? Almost everyone has, [...] Jason over at Innovation Zen has a great post up titled, The Process of Empowerment. Empowerment is, perhaps, the most important tool a manager has in building strong and successful people and teams. From the post: [empowerment is] the process that provides greater autonomy to employees through the sharing of relevant information in the [...] Managing is hard. It often involves loads of responsibility without commensurate control; it is sometimes thankless and unrewarding; and it always involves working with people that have a variety of often divergent goals and personalities. And, just when you think you have it all figured out, the team or project changes and you [...] In my younger days as an entrepreneur (entrepreneur in training?) – all those many years ago – I had plenty of temper and virtually no control. I mistook any disagreement with my opinions as a personal attack and felt I had to vigorously defend my position at all times and usually very loudly. While I’m sure [...] As your company grows, you’ll find yourself frequently seeking approval for grants of equity from your board. Most often, the desired grants will be for new employees, but you’ll also want to use equity to recognize and retain existing employees, consultants, advisors and even your board members. Since many grants will be made, it’s important to [...] April 13th, 2007 | Tags: Communicating with Your Board | Category: Boards, Management, Startups | 8 comments I’ve mentioned before that it’s likely that your board remembers less about your business between meetings than you think. As much as you think that your business is the most important thing in the world to them, your directors are probably on more than one board and many are on several at any given time. So, [...] April 5th, 2007 | Tags: Communicating with Your Board | Category: Boards, Management, Startups | 9 comments Among the all time greats of classic management mistakes is rewarding the efforts and achievements of an outstanding individual contributor with a management role. To be sure, moving a leading individual contributor into management is sometimes a good thing to do and is appropriate, but often making such a move, especially as a reward, can represent a huge error. [...] Incentives differ from rewards in that they are known up front. While a reward is granted to recognize an action or achievement that has already taken place, the goal of an incentive is to induce behavior that results in such an action or achievement. In this way, an incentive works like a carrot, motivating an individual [...] |
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Copyright © 2012 William Herman - All Rights Reserved |
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