Section 1 - Establish Personal Work Goals

Section 2 - Set and meet own work priorities

Section 3 - Develop and Maintain Professional Competence

1.1 Serve as a positive role model in the workplace through personal work planning and organization.

1.2 Ensure personal work goals, plans and activities reflect the organization’s plans, and own responsibilities and accountabilities

1.3 Measure and maintain personal performance in varying work conditions, work contexts and contingencies

2.1 Set and meet own work priorities

2.2 Use technology efficiently and effectively to manage work priorities and commitments

2.3 Maintain appropriate work-life balance, and ensure stress is effectively manages and health is attended to

3.1 Assess personal knowledge and skills against competency standards to determine development needs, priorities and plans

3.2 Seek feedback from employees, clients and colleagues and use this feedback to identify and develop ways to improve competence

3.3 Identify, evaluate, select, and use development opportunities suitable to personal learning style(s) to develop competence

3.4 Undertake participation in networks to enhance personal knowledge, skills and work relationships

3.5 Identify and develop new skills to achieve and maintain a competitive edge

All any of us have that we can offer to our employers is our time and our knowledge. Essentially, every job, throughout the world, whether professional, entrepreneurial, agricultural, service or industrial is a job where the individual is trading their time and knowledge for money. Granted, not all workers receive the same pay, nor do they all deserve the same pay. That would be socialism. There are a few things that affect a worker’s value to the company:

• Leveloftrainingneededtoobtaintheirexpertise• Efficiencywithwhichtheywork• Theexperiencetheyhavegainedonthejoband

how that affects their work• Expertisewithwhichtheywork• Rarityofpeopletrainedinperformingthatjob

To some greater or lesser extent, all of these are controlled by the worker, not by the employer. Many would say that this isn’t true, because some jobs, such as doctors and lawyers pay more than others. Okay, but why do those jobs pay more? Isn’t it because of the level of training needed to obtain their expertise? Do we have an excess of cardiac surgeons in society? Are you willing to have a truck driver operate on your heart?

Generally speaking, jobs that pay higher do so because of the amount of training required to become qualified in that area of work and the rarity of people who can do that job. A star football player receives a huge salary because there aren’t many people who can do what they do. Oh, many may be able to play football, but not to that athlete’s level of expertise.

At the other end of the scale, jobs that require little to no training tend to pay low wages, with little job security and almost no chance of promotion. There’s an overabundance of people available to fill those positions, so companies don’t need to offer a premium to hire people.

Within any one professional field you will also find a range of pay based upon the company’s evaluation of an individual’s value to the company.

Take engineering for example; an engineer who has been working with a company for 15 years, and knows all the company’s products, procedures and even the quirks of the equipment used in the factory is worth more to the company than an engineer fresh out of school. His knowledge, based upon his years of experience is what makes him worth more to the company.

What about two seemingly equal individuals, with the same amount of training and experience, who work in the same job; is it possible that one would be worth more to the company than the other? What about if one of those workers is able to complete more work than the other, because they work more efficiently? Doesn’t that make them more valuable to the company?

Let me bore you with a little of my personalhistory. Many moons ago, I started my work career as a production technician in a medical equipment factory. We manufactured kidney dialysis machines, and I was part of a group of technicians who tested and calibrated the machines when they came off of the production line.

Although I was only trained as a radio repair man in the army and didn’t have a high enough level of training for the job, I was hired by this company as a junior technician. After a year, I was promoted to technician, then after another year, they created a senior technician position so that they could promote me again.

The reason that the company decided it had to promote me was that in my typical work day, I produced 200 to 300% of what was expected of a technician, then I stopped working on test and calibration and started working on developing new test equipment, training manuals, and other things to make the department work more efficiently. The department kept giving me more and more responsibility, taking over some tasks from my supervisor, even though I was only 22 years old.

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As a senior technician, I was put in charge of a group of technicians who tested and calibrated the new kidney dialysis machine the company was producing that was computer controlled. Although there is more computing power in the average cell phone today than we had in our machine, at that time it was a breakthrough. IBM had just come out with their PC XT, which used 2 5-1/4” floppy drives, had no hard drive and a black & white (actually black & orange) screen.

As with most new products, we had our share of problems bringing this product into production. Since the actual time for test and calibration was unknown, the initial time standard was set at 24 hours; six times the time allowed for the standard machines.

After three or four weeks of bumbling along with problems on these new machines, we were running an average of over 40 hours for test and calibration. Only one thing… while everyone else was running over 40 hours, I did one in 5-1/2 hours. The first reaction to that was that I’d obviously done something wrong and Quality Control would catch it. However, they only found three write-ups, at a time when we were running over 20 write-ups per machine.

The next day, every engineer in the company was in a conference room, trying to determine how I could work so much faster than anyone else. No, I’m not Superman; I’m just a person who knows how to work efficiently. I had worked with those machines long enough, and developed a good enough understanding of the test procedure, that I had reorganized the work to make it run more efficiently. While other technicians were sitting on their stools, waiting for a test to run, I’d be making use of that time to run two or three tests, that didn’t conflict with each other, at the same time.

They never invited me to that engineering meeting, nor did they bother to ask me why I could work more efficiently, but the result of it was that I was pulled out of production and moved into manufacturing engineering as a junior engineer. In the remaining 4-1/2 years that I worked for that company, I was promoted once more, to the position of engineer.

After seven years, I left that company to work as a consultant, not my most successful work experience. After 3 years of being self-unemployed and independently poor, I decided to go back to the workplace. This time, I went to work for a city transit bus manufacturer.

Starting at that company as a senior engineer, I was twice promoted, ending up my last two years there (of 5) with the title of Engineering and Materials Manager. Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it, I never finished earning my engineering degree. My success in engineering wasn’t based upon my education, but upon a few basic principles:

• Neversay“Ican’t.”Figureouthow.• Never say “it’s impossible.” That just means that

nobody else has figured out how.• However you aredoing it, there’s always a better

way.Findthebetterway.• Thinkoutsidethebox…Box?Whatbox?• Andmostofall,accomplishmoreforthecompany

that you work for than anyone else in the company.

I can honestly and literally say that my success as an engineer was based more than anything else on learning how to work efficiently. I have walked into factories that I had never seen before and after taking a tour of the factory, sat down and wrote a report of ways to increase that factory’s efficiency. How? Simple, Ithink“HowcanIdothismoreefficiently?”

Anyone can learn how to work efficiently. Anyone can be that person who can accomplish more than others. It’s a matter of learning how to control your time and your priorities, instead of letting your time control you.

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There’sanoldsayingthatsays,“Themanwhohas no goal, will surely complete it.” In case you didn’t get what that means, it’s saying that such a man will accomplish nothing, because he has no goal. Goals are wonderful things that serve a number of very useful purposes in helping us accomplish something with our lives.

• Goalsgiveyouadirectioninwhichyouaregoing.

• Goalstellyouwhenyougetthere.• Goalsmotivateyoualongtheway.• Goalsserveasameasuringrodtocompare

other things to and know which are worth your time and effort.

• Goals keep you from falling into whatevertrap someone else lays to rob your time.

• Goals help you determine the priority ofvarious proposed actions.

Okay, so how do you establish your personal work goals? First of all, your goalsmust fall inline with the company’s and your department’s goals. If you don’t have a copy of those, ask for them. If they don’t exist, write some up and get them approved (especially for your department).

Once you have your company and departmental goals, you can begin to determine your personal goals. Let me repeat myself onthis; your personal goals need to support both your departmental and company goals. They are how you are going to help the department and company complete their goals.

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Letmesaysomethinghere.Manypeopleare so focused on goals that personally serve their needs and desires that they forget about the company. These people never succeed.

Oh, they might succeed for a season, but not for the long run. If all you do is create business goals based upon what is good for yourself, you aren’t an asset to the company. There is no reason for your superiors to be interested in your success. On the other hand, if you create goals based upon what is good for the company and complete those goals, you will prove yourself valuable to the company. You won’t have to seek promotion, it will seek you. I don’t say this just from theory, but from personal experience.

Your goals need to be clearly written and posted someplace where you can see them regularly. While many people like to put them in their personal planner, posting them on your wall not only helps you to see them, but demonstrates to others that you have goals, and are working to fulfill them.

A man without a plan will surely complete it.

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Most people are not organized with their time or their workplace. Even those that think they are organized may not truly be. What they are calling organization may only be creating a calendar of what others have dictated that they have to do; meetings they have to be in, deadlines that have to be met and regularly reoccurring reports that have to be compiled.

While these things are important, and need to be on your calendar, they aren’t proactive means of organizing your time, they are merely reactive. If you want to succeed in work planning, you must become a proactive organizer.

You need to realize that time spent in planning is always time well invested. All successful businessmen are planners by nature. By investing in creating a plan, you are insuring that the important things are being done; while lesser important things may be allowed to pass by the wayside.

The first step in being proactive about organizing your time is to understand the scope of your work

responsibility. In the process of developing your goals, you should have defined what your area of responsibility is. If not, you need to do so; otherwise, you will never be able to manage that area. When I started engineering in the bus plant, I was responsible for 1/3 of the production line. By knowing that, I knew that every problem that happened in that part of the plant was my problem. I needed to deal with them, before my boss knew about them.

Once you know your area of responsibility, the next step in being proactive is to determine what regularly reoccurring tasks are part of that responsibility. In most companies, those are low priority items that are time eaters. Anything you can do to minimize the amount of time you spend on those tasks makes you more efficient and more productive for the company. Get creative; put technology to work for you, and make those tasks as automated as possible.

Every job has certain problems that go along with it. In many cases, they are the same problems, cropping up over and over again. Here is where your proactive planning can really start to shine. Identify those areas and develop a plan to watch for them and catch them before they reach critical mass.

In the bus plant, the buses we built were semi-custom, based upon the customer’s (a city) specifications. This required the design engineering department to release the right options into the bill of materials and often develop new options. We invariably had errors in the engineering bill of materials, which caused problems on the production floor. I developed a checklist for the common problem areas and a plan for checking and dealing with them before those orders hit the production line. This saved me and the company an enormous amount of time and problems.

I remember reading a management article back

1.1

Serve as a positive role model in the workplace through personal work planning and organization.

Steps for being proactive in your work planning:

1. Form the habit of planning your time2. Understand the scope of your work

responsibility3. Find regularly reoccurring tasks and

automate them4. Seek out the regularly reoccurring problems

and deal with them before they become problems

5. Find the 10% of wasted effort and eliminate it6. Find better ways to do things

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in my engineering days, which reported that 10% of the work done by any person in a company is totally unnecessary. To me, that was a pretty significant figure. I decided that finding that 10% and eliminating it was a good way to make myself at least 10% more efficient for the company.

The way to find that 10% is to follow the work you do, in order to determine what happens to it. As I did that, I found that one report that every engineer in my department was required to do weekly was only filed and never used. I wrote up a proposal, and received approval to eliminate that report. I also found that part of the work we were doing to verify the production flow was also being done by the production superintendants. Both versions were given to the floor supervisors (who worked for the superintendents) and they decided which one they would use, or whether they would use either of them. I succeeded in eliminating that documentation, except in cases where it was specifically requested by the floor supervisor.

Finally,beingproactivewithyourworkplanningmeans finding better ways to do everything that you are doing. In today’s computerized world, there are a plethora of tools available to help you organize you time and workload. But, finding better ways isn’t really about technology, it’s about an attitude.

I mentioned this attitude when I was talking aboutmyworkexperienceasanengineer.Isaid,“Nomatter how you’re doing something, there’s always a better way.” Methods constantly change, technology constantly changes and new knowledge is constantly being discovered. But, in many companies, things are done the same way they have always been done. Why? Because that’s the way they do it.

If something is being done the way it’s always been done, then it isn’t being done in the best possible

way. Somebody, probably you, needs to take a look at whatever it is, with a fresh set of eyes and the attitude that there is a better way.

Organizing your work also means organizing your workplace. A well organized workplace can increase your efficiency by as much as 30% in the average day. Why? Because most people spend that much time looking for the things they need to do their jobs.

Try this experiment with a couple of co-workers. Buy two sets of cheap stackable blocks, the kind where one will go inside of another. Set the two co-workers side by side at a table. Place one set of the blocks before one worker, nicely organized in a line. Dump the other set in front of the other co-worker in a disorganized fashion. Have a race to see who can stack the blocks the fastest.

I’d be surprised if you come up with any result other than a 30% difference in their work efficiency. I’ve run this test hundreds of times, teaching work efficiency in a number of places. Almost without exception, the worker who had their blocks organized was able to finish the job, while the other one had 30% of the blocks left.

While this example is rather simplistic, it does show the principle of how organization affects workplace efficiency. This was one of the secrets that allowed me to work more efficiently than my co-workers in the medical equipment plant. I had invested my personal money into buying my own tools, which were organized in a toolbox in such a way that I could grab anything, without having to look.

When I moved from the production floor to the office, I kept the same habit of organizing my workspace. By eliminating the wasted time of looking for things, I gain a couple of extra hours of work time every day. That made me more valuable to the company I worked for.

If something is being done the way it’s always been done, then it’s time for a change.

1.2

Ensure personal work goals, plans and activities reflect the organization’s plans, and own responsibilities and accountabilities

As I’ve already mentioned, your personal business goals need to reflect the goals of your company and department. In addition, they need to accomplish the job for which you have been hired. Even if you’re the best, most efficient, most knowledgeable employee your company has; you won’t get any kudos if you don’t get your job done.

If you don’t have a job description, which explains what your job entails and what your employer is expecting from you, ask for one. You should have a copy of that in your personal file, where you can reference it as needed. At a minimum, this is what the company is expecting for the money they are paying you. In other words, if you don’t do what that job description says, your company is paying you to do what you want to do, instead of what they need done. That’s not a very equitable arrangement for the company.

In many companies, job descriptions are prepared by theHumanResourcesdepartment, andareoverlyvague. Instead of describing your job as a manager, they may be describing a generic management job. However, your job description is what you should be rated by, when performance review time comes around. A vague or generic job description doesn’t give you any useful information to rate yourself by; nor does it give your boss any useful information to rate you by.

If that’s the case, then it’s time for a re-write. You must take the initiative on this, because nobody else is going to. It’s your job and it’s your performance review, so you have a vested interest in making sure your job description is accurate. Sit down with your boss, discuss his expectations, and revise your job description to match those expectations. Then submit the amended job description for approval.

Some supervisors are better than others at providing feedback on your job performance. This feedback is vital to your success, even if receiving it maybealittlebithardonyournerves.Remember,youaren’t there to satisfy your desires in the company; you are there to satisfy the company’s needs. The better you

can do that, the better your job will ultimately fulfill your desires.

If you have a boss who is not good at providing feedback, or only does so when he has a burning desire to yell at someone, you’ll need to take the bull

by the horns, and go see him. It is more effective to ask about how you handled specific tasks or projects thantoaskageneral“HowamIdoing,boss?”typeofquestion. By asking questions about specific projects or tasks, you are able to receive much more directed responses, which will ultimately provide you with better information on how to meet expectations.

Another good source of information for the company’s expectations and your specific boss’ expectations is your co-workers. While there is always that one person who will lead you astray, the rest of them will usually tell you the truth about the company, your immediate supervisor and the person who held your position before you.

Most companies have policy and procedure manuals, which are supposed to be available to all employees in the company. Amidst the human resources section, you will probably find the company’s policy on performance reviews. Studying this policy will tell you a lot about how your performance will be viewed by the company and how much of a difference superior performance can make in your personal remuneration.

As I mentioned in my personal testimony about

If you’re not getting enough feedback about your work from your direct supervisor, take the initiative and go to him. It’s your job, you need to know how you’re doing.

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my success as an engineer, how well you perform on the job doesn’t only affect your pay increases, but also affects your promotion potential. What made me so effective for the companies I worked for was my personal efficiency, finding better ways to do things.

However, what created the attitude of looking for better ways to do things was my commitment to my job and to the company I worked for. My primary goal was always to make my company a success. In fact, there were a couple of times I got into some pretty heated disagreements with engineers in the company, because they were making changes to our product, in order to be like everyone else. We were supposed to be the best in the market, why lower ourselves to the level of our competitors?

If you are committed to your company, it will show in everything that you do. You can always tell the ticket punchers in a department, those who are there just to put their time in. They will be in that same position, or one like it, putting in their time, when you are promoted. Why? They aren’t committed to the company.

Commitment creates an attitude of excellence. It also causes you to accomplish more. Employees who are committed to their jobs will perform up to 28 percent better than the ticket punchers in comparable jobs. That means they will accomplish almost a third more than their co-workers on any given day. It also means that they will do a better job on the work that they do. Those people are the ones who are valuable to the companies that they work for.

It’s important that I say a word about personal integrity here. Many people steal from their company in one way or another. If it isn’t taking pens home from work, it’s calling their bookie from the office. Whether you are stealing time or material from your employer, you’re still stealing.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. I’ve been the employee who took something home (a long time ago) that I shouldn’t and I’ve been the business owner who had employees stealing time and materials from me. I learned something through that; I learned that I had been wrong, so I went back to that company to make restitution. Anyone else would have called me

crazy to do so, but in my mind I had to make it right.

Later,whenIwasworkingforanothercompany, Idid the right thing. In fact, I brought my own pens and other miscellaneous office supplies to work, so that I couldn’t be accused of taking them home from work. As a professional, I could afford it.

Integrity means doing the right thing, no matter what. That means doing the right thing, even if it hurts you. Don’t worry about it; take that as an investment in your future. If you lose something through acting in integrity, you will always get paid back many times over.

As a manager, you want to create an environment where you are trusted both by your superiors and by your employees. Your superiors will trust you when you demonstrate by personal accountability that you can be trusted. What does this mean? It means that you show your superiors that you can and will get the job done; even more, it means that you will keep them in the loop, not just about the problems, but in how you’ve overcome those problems. It means that you work in such a way that they realize that when you have been given a responsibility, they don’t need to worry about it.

You become trusted by your employees when they realize that you are interested in their personal success. Part of that is in letting them know that you want to help them succeed, and then demonstrating that through your actions. Another part of it is by opening effective communication channels with them.

Effective communications with underlings can only happen when they realize that they can come to you to talk about whatever problem, including their own failing on the job, without having their head handed to them on a platter. The need to know experientially that when they come to you, you will help them overcome their failing and their problem, so that they and the company both come out on top.

The worst thing you can do for communication is to pass negative attitudes, comments and rebukes from your superiors on to your underlings. You need to be the buffer between them; accepting the rebuke, complaint or negative feedback from your superiors and not passing it on.

If you are committed to your company, it will show in everything that you do. Integrity: doing the right

thing, no matter what.

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1.3

Ensure personal work goals, plans and activities reflect the organization’s plans, and own responsibilities and accountabilities

There is no way of knowing how successful you are about anything without measuring your performance. If you remember my personal testimony that I gave in the introduction, I mentioned that as a production technician I would complete 200-300% of the expected workload every day, before moving on to work on other things. I knew what I was accomplishing because there was a work standard and I was being measured against that standard.

All jobs have standards, whether they are official ones, like we had in the manufacturing plant, or unofficial ones that everyone expects are the norm. Most companies only bother publishing time standards for direct labor operations. That doesn’t mean people don’t have expectations for other jobs, just that they aren’t published.

Take accounts payable for example. An accountant working in accounts payable should be able to process acertainnumberofpaymentsperday.Let’ssaythatthe process consists of the following steps:

• Verifyingthepurchaseorder• Verifyingthattheshipmentwasinfactreceived• Verifyingthattherewerenoqualityissueswiththe

shipment• Verifying that the invoice received matches the

purchase order and shipment received• Processtherequestforpayment

Most of that information will be available on the company’s computer system. The accountant has to pull up the information, compare everything and then change to another screen to process the request for payment.Forthesakeofdiscussion,let’ssaythattakesan average of 5 minutes to complete. Remember,averages are made up of the good, bad and ugly all together. So, even though there will be some invoices where that accountant has to go searching for the records they need, there will be others that they can just fly through.

That accountant probably can’t spend 100 percent of his time processing accounts payable vouchers. There will be departmental meetings, breaks and interruptions throughout his day. With all that, let’s say that he should be able to spend 80% of his time processing accounts payable vouchers. That means that in an eight hour day, he should be able to process 76.8 vouchers, let’s call it 77.

While there may not be an official time standard for the accounts payable department, “everyoneknows” that it takes an average of 5 minutes to properly process a payment, and that the average within the department is processing 77 per day.

In the mind of the accounts payable supervisor and the comptroller, any accountant who is processing less than that average is going to be a poor employee. On the other hand, if they find an employee that processes even five percent above the average, that person will become the department superstar. The higher above that average an employee performs, the better he will be liked by management.

You’re going to have to decide who you want to have like you. If all you’re concerned about is being popular with your co-workers, you’ll probably be in the same job for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you want to be popular with management, you’ll become that superstar employee. You may not be popular with your co-workers, but when time comes for raises and promotions, you’ll be the first on the list.

Regardless of whether or not there are official standards for your job, you need to find out what the expected standards are.

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Regardless of whether or not there are officialstandards for your job, you need to find out what the expected standards are. If there aren’t any, create your own. Make the effort to find out what others who are doing that job or similar jobs are accomplishing. Evaluate your co-workers performance in your own mind; which ones are good and which ones are just there to get a paycheck? How much work do the good ones do? How does that compare to how much you are accomplishing?

Standards without measurement don’t mean anything. Even if nobody else is measuring your use of time, you need to do so. You need to know how well you are accomplishing your goals, how well you are working, and how well you are meeting that unofficial time standard.

Just the action of tracking your work time will help you work more efficiently. Knowing that you are tracking your time will give you an awareness of where your time is going, and help you to avoid wasting it. You can either do this on a computer, or create a simple document to use as a time log. Most personal planners have this feature built in, especially if you are using a planner that is based upon one page per day.

By totaling the time you spend on various projects, tasks and even unproductive time, you will be able to seewherethebulkofyourtimeisgoing.Let’sgobackto the accounts payable example for aminute. Let’ssay that one of those accountants were to track their time and end up with these results for their average work week:

• Processinginvoices-20hrs• Meetings-6hrs• Breaks&conversationswithco-workers-4hours• Interruptions- 10hrs Okay, so what does this tell us? • Firstofall,theaccountantisonlyspendinghalfof

his time doing what the company is paying him to do. That’s a serious problem.

• Secondly,he’swastingtoomuchtimeinmeetings.Granted, some jobs require a lot of time in meetings, but not processing invoices. He shouldn’t have to spend more than an hour a week in meetings.

• Thirdly,he’sprobablywastingabitoftimeonhisown. Granted, we all need a break, but he’s taking

45 minutes a day, that’s probably a bit too much. Even so, it’s probably less than his co-workers.

• The real telling item on this list is the last one,interruptions. There’s something wrong with their system if it allows this much of a trained person’s time to be stolen by interruptions.

If there are 4 accountants in accounts payable, and each of them is losing the same amount of time, that’s a whole person’s work week. They could hire a clerk to field those interruptions and answer those questions for a lot less money and improve their department’s performance.

That accountant who tracked his time would now have the data he needs to create a proposal, justifying the hiring of a clerk for his department and increasing departmental efficiency. Even if management decides to move one accountant out of the department, he won’t have to worry about losing his job; he’s just become his department’s superstar.

As you track your time, you will both find things that are stealing your time and things that are taking more time to accomplish than what you expect. These areas that are taking excess time are prime areas for you to develop more efficient ways to do thing. Alternatively, they may be things that don’t require someone of your level of expertise. In those cases, you are doing the company a favor by suggesting that those tasks be done by a lower grade individual.

A very typical example of this could be engineers checking bills of materials. In many companies, this is the norm. In reality, this is more of a high-level clerical function. Engineers do it, because engineers have always done it. But, that doesn’t make it right. If an engineer were to train a clerk, or even a technician in how to do that, it would ultimately save the company money.

The clerk could still use the engineer as a resource for dealing with discrepancies that they encounter in the bill of materials. Taking care of those types of problems is definitely the work of the engineer, which is why many companies have engineers do the checking. But, taking the mundane grunt work out of his hands, increases his efficiency and freeing him up to do engineering work.

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One of the things that reduce everyone’s efficiency in an organization is emergencies. While they can’t always be eliminated, they frequency should at least be able to be reduced. Emergencies, other than those caused by natural disasters come about in a business because of lacking foresight. While none of us are issued glasses that allow us to see the future, we should be looking for potential problems, with an eye to avoiding emergency situations.

The time you spend seeking out potential problem areas and correcting them is always less than the time you spend dealing with the emergency. Not only that, but many of those emergencies can steal time from other people in your organization.

Back in my first engineering job, we had a product change that had to be accomplished. The principal series of electrical connectors that we were using in our equipment had been discontinued by the manufacturer because of a health risk in manufacturing them. Our purchasing department scoured suppliers, buying up their remaining stock. Even with that, we only had enough inventory for two months of production. We had to change all of our products designs to using a new connector, and we had to do it yesterday.

I was the engineer assigned with the responsibility ofmaking this change. For twomonths, Iworked inemergency mode to make that product changeover. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people, we were able to make that product changeover with no loss of production time. The costs I incurred, having to do everythingasa“rushjob”wereactuallyminimal,whencompared to the potential loss of $100,000 per day of production time we expected to lose.

The only loss in that project was the time that I couldn’t spend on my regular work. Everything else I was doing had to go on hold for two months, while I dealt with that crisis. Even though I accomplished a huge quantity of work during that time, my personal efficiency for my work went down the tubes.

The sad part of the story is that the purchasing department knew about this potential problem for several months before it reached an emergency point. Although they knew, they didn’t bother communicating that information to anyone, thinking that they could get the connectors from an alternate source. Only… there was no alternate source. Had we known, the changeover could have been accomplished, without having to do it on an emergency basis.

A final note to this story: When my performance review came up, my boss brought up the issue of my work that hadn’t been completed and my loss in personal efficiency. Because I had records of the time I had to invest in that emergency, I was able to dispute his performance review, and receive both a better review and the raise that went with it.

Emergencies happen when people don’t foresee potential problems, or ignore what they do see.

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2.1 Set and meet own work priorities

In any responsible position in any company that you ever have, it is a given that there will be more work to do than there are hours in the day. You could kill yourself, trying to do everything that needs to be done, and still not manage to complete it all. As a manager, your most important task is to determine priorities, so that the things that need to be worked on are those that receive your time and attention and that of your department.

Priorities have to be established based upon what is best going to meet your company’s needs. But, that’s not always easy to determine. What often looks like the best possible solution may not actually be so. Properly determining priorities requires understanding the various tasks that need to be done, how they relate to your company’s goals and how they compare to other tasks that also appear important.

We’re going to take a look at a number of tools which can help you in determining priorities.

Urgent/Important Matrix

Many people have a hard time understanding the difference between urgency and importance. Essentially, these are people who don’t plan, but only deal with things as they come up. To them, what makes things important is their urgency. However, these two words are not synonyms:

Important – of great significance or consequence; in business, these are the things that help us meet our goals

Urgent – requiring immediate action or attention; in business, these are the emergencies

Starting from time point zero, nothing is urgent, although there are things that are important. However, as we saw in the last section, not taking care of something that is important, can make it into something urgent. The lack of purchasing taking care of those connectors turned an important change of a product into an urgent problem that had to be dealtwith.Formostcases,urgentthingareso,simplybecause of people not taking recognizing or taking care of important things.

As we look at this matrix, we can see that everything that we do in our work day fits into one of these four categories. If we draw a horizontal line across the middle of the matrix, we divide our activities

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into the important and the not-so-important. As much aspossible,youwanttokeepyourselfworking“abovethe line.” However, others will constantly try and keep you below that line.

Let’slookateachofthesefourcategories:

Important, not Urgent – These are things that help you accomplish your company and department’s goals. Planning and preparation always fall into this category. So does professional development.

Important & Urgent – Dealing with true emergencies. As previously stated, many of these are caused by improper planning. You want to work towards eliminating these. However, when they do crop up, deal with them quickly and decisively, because they are affecting the company’s performance.

Urgent, not Important – These are usually urgent because others didn’t do their job and are expecting you to take up the slack. Often, they are somebody’s pet project, that may not even have anything to do with your department’s responsibilities. Otherswillalwaystryandkeepyouhere.Learnhowtosay“no.”

Not Urgent or Important – The only word todescribethiscategoryis“interruptions.”Somebodywants a report on something or other and they’re not even sure why they want it or what they’re going to do with it. Or, somebody wants to just stop by your office and chat a while. Try and eliminate these things.

Unless you actively work to keep yourself above the line, others will work to keep you below it. You must learn how to identify which things are truly important and which ones are truly urgent; as opposed to things that people think are important or urgent because they help them build their little fiefdom.

ABC Prioritizing

The most common form of prioritizing tasks is by a simple ABC method. In this method, you make a list of all the tasks that you have to complete, and assign them a letter code:

A = High priority, very important to get this doneB = Medium priority, this should get doneC=Lowpriority,itwouldbeniceifthiscouldgetdone

It is assumed with this method that you know how important the various tasks are in regard to your company’s and department’s goals. Otherwise, the priorities you place on the individual tasks really have no value.

The next step in the process is to add a due date for each of these tasks. Most important tasks need to be completed by a particular time. If they aren’t completed by that time, they move from just being important to being important and urgent. Some items may not have a due date, especially things that are priority C. However, a priority C item, that never gets dealtwithmaybecomemoreimportantovertime.Forthis reason, some people put a start date on the items as well. That way, even items that may be a Priority C will have some visibility.

When planning each day’s work. One starts by lookingatthepriority“A” items.Thosethathaveduedates the soonest are obviously more important than those who’s due dates aren’t coming for three months. Therefore, they must be the first ones to go on that day’s schedule. Your day will consist of some items within each of these three priority levels, depending upon importance and due date.

The trick is balancing everything in such a way that everything gets done before its due date. You must realize that in some cases, this can’t be done. But the better you can do it, the better you will look to your boss and other members of management.

Paired Comparison Analysis

The paired comparison analysis is a method for determining which of a variety of tasks, that all seem important, is actually the most important. With it, individual tasks are compared to each other; breaking down the decision process of deciding the most important of ten tasks into A/B decisions, instead of trying to compare A to B through J. The total of these individual decisions allows you to see which task or tasks are truly the most important.

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In a paired comparison analysis, one makes a matrix like the one shown above. I’ve blacked out over half of the blocks on this matrix, because there is nothing to be gained by comparing an item to itself or to comparing two items to each other more than once.

1. The same items are listed along the top and along the side. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve calledthem tasks A through E in this example.

2. Then each pair of tasks are compared to each other, with a decision being made as to which is more important.

3. The more important task is written in the box,witha“score”1=notverydifferent;2=somewhatdifferent; 3=very different. Remember, we’re talkingabout importance here, nothing else.

4. Finally,thescoresareaddedup.Inmysamplechart the final scores are:

a. 7b. 3c. 4d. 1e. 4

Frommyexample, it’s clear thatA is thehighestpriority, after which C & E come in together at second place. When I am planning my time or the workload of my department, I should allocate the largest part of the time to completing item A.

Pareto Analysis

Where the Paired Comparison Analysis can be sued for almost anything, the Pareto Analysis is a specialized management tool, used for prioritizing problems. It is

also a comparative tool, but one that looks to see the root cause of problems, with the idea of attacking the roots which are causing the most problems first.

A Pareto Analysis works under the assumption of the“ParetoPrinciple”otherwiseknownas the“80/20Principle.” This states that 20% of causes generate 80% of results (please note that these numbers are merely illustrative, not exact percentages). So, if you can identify those 20% of causes, you can more quickly eliminate 80% of your problems.

To do a Pareto Analysis:

1. Start by identifying a list of all the problems that you need to resolve. Use whatever resources you have (team members, analytic data, surveys, customer input) to identify those problems.

2. Identify the main cause of each problem. While it may be possible that there are more than one cause, there are usually only one or two main causes.

3. Assign each problem a score, based upon what you are trying to accomplish. If the main issue you are trying to work on is customer satisfaction, then score based upon that. If it is profits, use that to score the problems.

4. Group problems together by root cause. You will probably find that you have the same root causes cropping up more than once, put those items together.

5. Add up the scores by groups. This will show you the highest priority items to tackle first.

Remember,anyformofanalysisisonlyasgoodasthe information you are using and how honest you are in your analysis. Don’t allow yourself to be swayed by your or others preconceived notions about what the causes are or what corrective action needs to be taken.

Whenever possible, allow your customers to do the scoring for you. An easy way to do this would be through customer complaints. If your tech support department is receiving a lot of complaints, develop

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your problems and causes, and then let the number of customer complaints for each item be the score that you use. This gives you the most impartial score possible. Not only that, but the score is coming from your business’ most important people, your customers.

Please keep in mind that these tools are just that, tools. While they can help you get a better picture of what’s going on in your department, they can’t, and shouldn’t make your decisions for you. There are many other similar management tools available; both for prioritizing your workload and other management tasks. A great place to look for them is at: www.mindtools.com

When looking at large projects, it is very helpful to breakthemdownintosmallertasks.Failuretodothiscan lead to the same problem you had in turning in a school project. When the teacher assigns the project, it seems like the due date is a long way away. There is no need to worry, because there’s lots of time to do it. So, that project gets largely ignored. However, the day comes when that project is suddenly due, and there isn’t enough time to do it. Why? Because it went from not urgent to suddenly urgent!

Let’s take for example a major report you haveto produce for management about the company’s web site. You’ve got two months to do the report, so although the project is important, it’s not urgent. Okay, so what are the steps you need to do in order to create this report:

1. Gather automated data on traffic and sales through your web site.

2. Gather customer feedback from the web site. 3. Collate the customer feedback.4. Compare automated data to customer feedback

and develop your analysis of the effectiveness of the company’s web site to meet your company’s goals.

5. Develop recommendations for improving the company web site.

6. Develop cost projections and ROI for thoseimprovements.

7. Develop your final report.8. Edit & proof read your final report.

Okay, the first question is, how long will each of those steps take? If you don’t already have a method in place to accomplish steps one and two, you’re in trouble. Two months may not be long enough to complete your project, no matter what you do. If you wait a couple of weeks, thinking that you’ve got plenty of time, you’re sunk.

By breaking the project down into steps, we can easily see how we need to schedule the project. However, if we don’t do the breakdown, it’s very easy tosaytoourselves,“Icandothisinacoupleofdays,there’s no rush.” Maybe you can do the actual writing and editing of your report in a couple of days, but there’s no way you can do the preliminary work in that amount of time. You need every minute you can get.

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2.2

Use technology efficiently and effectively to manage work priorities and commitments

Modern electronic technology has come to the aid of the manager in creating a number of tools to help manage time, tasks and priorities. Utilization of these tools can not only help you work more efficiently, but have a better idea of how your time and the time of your staff are being utilized. Just like any other time spent in organizing and planning your time, time spent investing in learning to use these tools and putting them to work for you is time well spent.

Personal Information Manager (PIM)

Personal information managers are the computerized version of the day planner. Its electronic memory holds:

• Yourschedule• Contactinformation• Prioritytodolist• Notes• e-mail(insomecases)

For those that use Microsoft Office software,Microsoft Outlook comes as part of the package and is a PIM. However, there are also a number of other commercial and freeware PIM software packages available on the market. Here are a couple of web sites to check for free PIM softare:

• http://www.freewarefiles.com/category_8_85.html• http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/

pim_software/

If you use more than one computer, such as using both desktop and laptop computers, you will find it more effective to install your PIM on your laptop computer, since that is the one you always have with you. When working in the office, you can use your desktop computer for your main work computer, but keep your laptop open on a corner of your desk for using the PIM.

Using two computers like this takes some getting used to, but can actually be a real advantage. Your laptopcanhandleyourPIM,“notes”andtimetracking,preventing you from having to have these functions open on your desktop computer. With both of them open at the same time, you have constant visual access to more information.

As you can see from my testimony in the introduction of this course, I am known for being an efficiency expert. I regularly use two computers, with a total of three screens on my desk. My laptop is open at all times for my PIM, Microsoft OneNote ™ and my time tracking software.

My main computer has two monitors on it. One is my internet monitor, and the other is my work monitor. The internet monitor normally has two browser windows open, with six tabs each. The six tabs on one window are all for e-mail accounts and maintaining open communication with various people. The six tabs on the other window are all for managing various projects I have in process. When I need to do research that requires a number of tabs open, I open a third browser window for that.

My main work screen holds whatever I am working on, a number of widgets that I use regularly, and has the desktop liberally sprinkled with icons for programs and documents that I use regularly. Additionally, I put links to projects and documents in process on the desktop, so that I don’t have to go hunting for them.

I also link my projects in process to my laptop, throughanonlineservicecalled“Dropbox.”Thisinsuresthat I have the latest files for my current projects on both my desktop and laptop computers. When I am away from the office in a meeting, I have all the latest information available. Or, if I have some downtime, waiting for a meeting to start, for example, I can open up my laptop and continue working on whatever I

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was working on in the office. That turns dead time into productive time for me.

Time Tracking SoftwareI mentioned that I use a time tracking software.

In my average day, I work on anywhere from 3 to 9 different projects. I track every minute I spend, from the time I walk in to my office, to the time I leave at the end of the day, to include breaks, interruptions, and time wasted with somebody else’s sudden emergency.

This information is regularly printed in reports

and maintained in a file. But, before it goes into the file, I analyze the effectiveness of my time for that day, week, or month. I constantly grade myself on my personal efficiency and effectiveness. That helps me to improve in how I am utilizing my time.

I also require that everyone working for me tracks their time as well. While I know that it is very easy for them to lie about how they are using their time, I also know that I need to know if other people or priorities are wasting my people’s time.

Every task we work on is given a time estimate before beginning. I create one, then I ask the individual who is responsible for that task to create one. Their time estimate is the one we go by; they don’t even know what my time estimate is, unless we have a great disagreement. In those cases, I will ask them to justify their time estimate. If their justification is reasonable, we go with theirs. If it is not, then and only then do I let them know mine, along with the reasoning behind my estimate.

Any deviance from the estimate, whether high or low has to be explained. This is more of a training tool

for my employees than anything else. By making them explain it, I am making them analyze what happened. This analysis helps them learn how to better estimate the time needed for various projects.

I need to say something here. Too many managers have used time tracking software as a stick to beat their teammembersoverthehead.Likewisewithusingtimeestimates as a stick. I am careful to never use these tools to beat up my staff, but as a way that we can improve our performance over the long haul. As a manager, I’m constantly working to improve the training level of my

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people. Making them analyze their time usage helps them become better; that’s why I do it.

Note Taking Software

Everybody needs someplace to take notes; notes on projects, notes on the company, notes on their co-workers, even notes on plans for the weekend. The old waytodothiswaswithanotebookandpen.Foryears,I carried a notebook around everywhere I went in the factory; jotting down notes on problems, projects, conversations and information that I would need.

The problem with any notebook system is keeping it organized. This is why electronic notebooks are so

much better than paper ones. No, I’m not talking about notebook computers, although my electronic notebook is in my notebook computer, I’m talking about a notebook software package; someplace to take notes.

There are two notebook software packages that I want to mention to you:

• MicrosoftOneNote• TreePad

While there are others available on the market, by mentioning these two, I hope to give you a general idea of what they all can do for you. These two packages are both designed to accomplish essentially the same task, giving you someplace to take notes, but in different ways.

TreePad comes in a variety of versions, from a simple version that you can download and use for free to a much more robust version of the program. It is a textbasedprogram, suchasother“Pad”programs(Notepad, WordPad). The “tree” part of the nameexplains how it works. TreePad organizes information much as a directory tree.

With TreePad, you create a file, which can either be a general file, or a file for an individual project. Within this file, you create a number of categories, which they call“nodes.”Eachnodecanhavechildnodes,likesub-pages in the file. Your child nodes can also have child nodes. I’m not really sure how many levels of child nodes you can go down. Each node is also a page, where you can add your own notes.

The limitation to TreePad, at least the basic version that I’ve worked with, is that everything is text based. You can’t format text, put in bullet lists, add hyperlinks,

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diagrams, graphics, video or audio to the pages. However, you can organize a lot of information in a way that makes it easy to find and view.

The more expensive versions of TreePad allow extensive formatting and graphics to be added to your individual nodes. TreePad’s website can be found at: http://www.treepad.com/

Microsoft OneNote is a much more robust notebook program and for those who use any version

of Microsoft Office, from 2003 onwards, it is free. OneNote is much more graphically oriented than TreePad.Ontheleftofthenotebook“page”therearea number of tabs, each of which represent a separate notebook. Across the top of the page are tabs, much as the tabs you would put in a three ring binder, and on the right you have tabs that represent individual pages.

Switching between pages, tab sections and

even notebooks is just a matter of clicking on the appropriate tab, all of which are visible. This makes

OneNote extremely easy to navigate. Any changes you make are automatically saved. If you have the same notebook on more than one computer on your network, they will all update automatically, if you so select.

Each page is fully customizable for format, including tables, lists, font, size, color, etc. If you want to save something from the Internet, it automatically addstheURLofthepageyoufounditon;alifesaverif you have to find it again. You can even save images,

audio and video from the Internet to pages in OneNote.

If you use a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) such as a Palm, Blackberry or iPaq, there is a portable version of One Note that will link directly with your PDA, allowing you to take notes on your PDA and have them show up as a separate notebook in OneNote.

Project Management SoftwareI mentioned the idea of breaking projects down

into steps at the end of section 2.1. The larger a project

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is, the greater the need to be able to break it down into individual tasks. Tracking and scheduling these individual tasks, especially when they require the efforts of different team members or even different departments can be challenging.

I am a firm believer in graphical representations of any complex task. The mind is much faster to grasp

complex issues when they are presented in a graphical form, than when they are in a text form. Even more to the point, the mind can easily capture the interrelation between a number of tasks, when they are presented graphically. Using a project management software package, such as Microsoft Project, allows you to create a graphical representation of any project, showing the plan, participants, resources, individual tasks, timeline and progress. In an instant, all the necessary information about project standing is presented in a much clearer and easier to understand manner than voluminous reports and charts.

Setting up a project in project management

software takes time. However, it is a clerical function

that you can easily train your secretary to handle. It is well worth the effort, in how well it will convey to your project team all the pertinent information about a project’s progress.

I actually ran an entire factory using Microsoft Project. As an engineering manager, I started a factory where we were remanufacturing city transit busses. The

company I worked for manufactured these buses for a number of municipalities in the United States. Our bus was unique in that the entire body and structure was made of a low grade stainless steel. Therefore, when these buses reached the end of their programmed service life, we would take them as trade-in on new buses, and remanufacture them.

The process of remanufacturing these buses consisted of over 1200 separate tasks, ranging from a few minutes to over an hour. We needed to schedule individual workers to complete the tasks, sometimes moving them to the work station where the bus was, and at other times moving the bus to the area where the work was to be done. Managing the workflow of this operation was an extremely complex task.

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By establishing the 1200 production tasks as steps in a project, I was able to timeline them in the project management software. Each bus we ran through the plant was placed as a separate project, with its 1200 tasks. We than printed this out as a wall sized chart, and were able to see for any day, who should be working on what on what bus. This became an invaluable management tool for the production manager.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

is like having an electronic secretary in your pocket. I first started using a PDA when I noticed that I was leaving my notebook type planner, with all my important information, in my car way too often. I’d be talking to somebody, and needing information, or needing my calendar to schedule something,

but it would be in the car. So, I bought my first PDA. I’m now on my 6th one, and still use it constantly.

A PDA is a combination calendar, contact directory, note taking electronic device, with wi-fi capability to connect to the Internet. They are made with touch-sensitive screens that are actuated by a stylus (fingers are usually too big). I personally prefer PDAs that run on Windows Mobile ™, simply because they give me a mobile version of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, so that I can both read and create documents for these two programs, on the go.

Many “Smart-phones” are also PDAs, giving youthe same functions as a PDA, along with your Cell phone capability. Some PDAs have built in keyboards, while others use an on screen keyboard. The one complaint I have about PDAs is that they are a bit slow to type on, because using the stylus is a bit like the old hunt-n-peck typing method. While I have a foldable keyboard for my PDA, it isn’t

always convenient to get it out, or even bring it with me.

What makes PDAs great is the amount of information you can bring with you. Most use removable SD memory chips, which means that you can have multiple chips if you need more memory. I even have chips with a number of full-length feature films on them, so that I can watch them while traveling.

TabletsTablets, such as the iPad

and the Motorola Xoom are the newest productivity technology to hit the marketplace. They provide the user with the convenience of a PDA along with the capacity of a laptop computer. While the full impact of PDAs is yet to be realized in the marketplace, they are rapidly taking over large segments of both the PDA and the laptop computer market.

There are several benefits of using a tablet over a PDA; specifically that they run faster and have a larger screen. This allows them to be utilized for Internet access much better than a PDA and also allows much faster typing on the touch screen keyboard.

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2.3

Maintain appropriate work-life balance, and ensure stress is effectively manages and health is attended to

While it is important to your employer that you are dedicated to the job, it is equally important that you are able to function well on the job. The old model of expecting people to be so dedicated to their jobs that they ignore their families is an erroneous model, and has been shown to be so. People who are that dedicated to their jobs tend to have more stress related health problems than people who are able to strike a happy balance between their home life and their work.

Families are the support circleweall need.Theyvalidate our efforts at work, because our work gives us the ability to provide for their needs. It is they, not our co-workers, that pick us up when we feel low, encourage us when we feel like we’ve hit the end of our rope, and help us to relax from the stress of battling dragons all day long.

Work will never relax you, no matter how much you enjoy it. We all need recreation, the time to re-create, or remakeourselvesbackintowhowereallyare.Leavingwork at the end of the day to do something enjoyable helps in being more effective on the job the next day.

Stress is one of the biggest killers today. It causes high blood pressure, heart attacks, aneurisms, mental health problems, ulcers and a whole host of other maladies which take people away from their jobs. Even those who stay on the job can be negatively affected by stress, causing a reduction in their performance.

Here are some signs of an unhealthy work-life balance:

• Depression• Anxiety• Irritability• Neglectingyourpersonalbusiness• Becoming more negative in your speech and

expression

Part of managing your time is insuring that you have enough personal time to meet your needs. While the temptation may exist to overwork yourself in an attempt to accomplish more, you must realize that extra hours don’t necessarily mean increased efficiency. In fact, a number of studies have been done, which conclusively show that after eight hours of work in one day, one’s efficiency starts to drop off.

Another thing that affects your personal efficiency is how tired you are. The first thing that is affected by lack of sleep is the higher brain functions. As a manager, you are being paid to think, not just do. A janitor or production line worker may be able to do their job without much thought, but you can’t do yours. Spending excessive hours at work, without getting enough rest is a sure plan for reducing your ability to think; in other words, reducing your ability to do your job.

So, rest is an essential part of doing your job well. Not just in the sense of sleep, but rest in the sense of taking your mind off of your job. Many times, the reason we can’t find the solution to a problem is that we are so focused on one train of thought, that we can’t see other possibilities. Taking one’s mind off the problem insures that when they come back to it, they will have a fresh perspective on the problem.

There are several things that you, as an individual, need to do to insure that you are getting proper rest and allowing yourself to get rid of stress:

• Besuretotakebreaksattheappropriatetimesatwork.

• Speakupwhenyourwork load isoverwhelmingyou.

• Prioritize yourwork, so that themost importantthings are done first.

• Don’t try to live in theoffice,gohomewhen it’stime to go home.

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• Takeyourholidaysandvacationsasscheduled.• Findanenjoyablehobbythatyoucandoinyour

off time to help you reduce stress.• Exerciseregularly;exerciseisagreatstressreducer.

Additionally, it strengthens your heart, to be better able to handle stress.

Remember,goinghomeandspendingyourtimethere worrying about work isn’t fooling anyone except yourself. That isn’t taking time off from the stress of work, that’s just being at work at another location. Even worse, you’re not accomplishing anything, you’re just worrying.

As a manager, you are also responsible for checking on the stress level and work-life balance of your team members. Here are some points to help track the condition of your employees:

• Ensure clear, effective communication ofmanagement’s actions and goals to all team members.

• Ensure that teammembers are fully trained andcompetent to fulfill their areas of responsibility.

• Ensurethatteammembersaregivenopportunitiesto continue their professional development, both through in-house training and outside seminars.

• Ensure that the individual workloads are notexcessive.

• Ensure that teammembers are not working toomany hours.

• Ensure that team members are taking theirscheduled holidays and vacations.

• Ensure that you are not unduly adding to teammembers’ stress by poor management, unrealistic expectations or poor communication techniques.

• Ensure that workplace harassment, bullying andsexual harassment are not allowed.

• Ensurethatemployeesreceiveadditionalsupportwhen outside problems cause excessive stress (family problems, accident or sickness of a family member, financial difficulty).

• Ensure that team members are taking care ofthemselves, specifically their personal health.

• Ensurethatteammembersconcernsarebroughtbefore management.

• Ensure thatemployeeswhoneedcounselingaregiven that opportunity.

There is a saying that I first heard from a navy chief petty officer, talking about his commander, “Thereare many ways to impress a superior officer, but only one to impress a crew.” There was a lot of wisdom in that saying. It is true that you can impress upper management by a variety of means; all it takes is one thing coming out of your department that is above and beyond expectations. On the other hand, there is only one thing that will impress your employees, that is when they realize that you are concerned about them.

I can tell you, from personal experience, that most people will go above and beyond the expectations for a boss that they know is concerned about them. I’ve experienced this as a captain in the army, as a retail store manager, as an engineering manager, and as a director of a non-profit organization. Showing my people that I am concerned about them and their needs has always done more to get outstanding work out of them than a whip ever could.

Since I’m on the subject, even though it’s not part of this course, one of the important ways that you show employees that you are concerned about them is to recognize their outstanding accomplishments, achievements and contributions to the company. Napoleon is quoted as saying, “It’s amazing what aman will do for a piece of colored ribbon.”

Military organizations throughout the world have taken advantage of Napoleon’s wisdom. There isn’t a country you can travel to where the members of their military don’t sport ribbons and medals on their dress uniform tunics. Those little pieces of ribbon and tin are recognition for their accomplishments.

While I don’t think you should institute a system of ribbons and medals in your workplace, I do think that you should recognize people’s performance. Some sort of reward is always appreciated and will motivate others to accomplish more.

“It’s amazing what a man will do for a piece of colored ribbon.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

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My son worked for a coffee shop, part of a large chain, while studying in college. He has a whole collection of pins and certificates he received for recognition of his outstanding service as a barista. I have an old jacket that was given to me by one of our

customers, back when I was working in the bus plant. I’ve also got a number of plaques, cups, ceramic doo-dads, pins and certificates which were given to me for outstanding service in one company or another. Each of those items is a prized possession, as valuable to me as a medal that some soldier won on the field of battle.

Everybody craves recognition. I don’t care if you have to create a bogus award for something, like maintaining the neatest desk, in order to give your worst performer an award, make sure you publically recognize any outstanding act on the part of your team members. Not only will it motivate them, it will show them that you care about them. It will also, take some of the stress out of their jobs, replacing it with joy.

Your employee’s family relationships are important to their work efficiency as well. The old management modelwas“Youleaveyourpersonalproblemsatthedoor.” Reality is thatpeople can’tdo that.Nomatterhow important their jobs are to people, their home life is more important. As a manager, you need to be aware of what’s going on in the lives of your people. If they are having problems, take that into account when dealing with them. More importantly, help them get help with their problems.

Everyone deals with family issues. The two major areas are:

• Problemsintheirmarriagerelationship• Problemswiththeirchildren(especiallyteens)

So, if those problems affect the employee’s ability to concentrate on their jobs or interfere with their workplace performance in any way, they become your

concern. What can you do? The first thing is to steer them in the way of counseling. Many company health insurance packages also pay for some amount of personal counseling. Use it, or at least encourage your employees who are having problems to use it.

The other thing you can do, which may seem a little bit off the wall, is to make marriage and family training seminars part of your company’s professional development training. Even if you don’t have a budget for this, there are many non-profit and faith based organizations who are willing to give these seminars for free, as long as you can guarantee them a group of people.

Do you want to show your employees that you care about their work-life balance? This is an ideal way to do so. Arrange for the use of a conference room after hours, and arrange for one of these groups to come in and offer free seminars for your team. You may have to encourage them a little bit to come; for some reason, the ones who need it the most are the least likely to take the initiative. However, it will be time and effort well spent. Not only will your employees know without a doubt that you are concerned about their home life they will also be able to overcome their problems, which will in turn make them work more efficiently.

Maintaining a healthy sex life in your marriage is also an important part of maintaining your personal work efficiency. Medical studies have been done which conclusively prove that people (both men and women) who participate in satisfying regular, frequent sexual relationships in their marriages accomplish more on the job than those that only have sex infrequently or irregularly.

It is important that we clarify something here. When we are talking about sexual intimacy, we aren’t just talking about the physical sexual act, but everything that is involved in having an intimate relationship. Sex is not just a physical act; it is more an emotional and mental act. To connect emotionally requires knowing the other person and focusing on them, not just focusing on them satisfying you.

How can sexual fulfillment affect one’s work on the job? There are actually several parts to this complex issue:

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Maintains a Healthy Marriage – All hormones (defined as sexual chemicals) have an affect on people’s emotions. If you don’t believe me, just be around a woman right before her menstrual period. The change in her hormone levels cause PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome). Sexual intimacy releases the hormone oxytoxin into the bloodstream. This hormone, which is found in both men and women, causes the emotional feeling of being“in love”withthe other person. So, sexual intimacy, what we call “makinglove”literallydoescreatethefeelingofloveina marriage relationship.

Any couple, who engages in regular, frequent sexual intimacy, where both partners are satisfied, is going to experience much more closeness in the emotional part of their relationship. Not only that, but the sexual intimacy acts as a catalyst to rectify other areas of problems in their marriage. Communication, romance, non-sexual expressions of love and interest in each other’s lives and feelings all increase from sexual intimacy.

Eliminates Stress – There is no greater muscle relaxant known to man than sexual orgasm. If one of the things we are trying to accomplish by maintaining a healthy work-life balance is stress elimination, sexual intimacy is the most effective part of that stress elimination program.

I must mention that sexual intimacy without orgasm doesn’t reduce stress, but increases it. So, in the case of couples where the woman rarely has an orgasm or doesn’t experience orgasms at all, sexual intimacy will not help her and may cause insomnia.

Why would a woman not experience a sexual orgasm? There are two reasons. First of all, frompurely the physical part, lack of frequency and lack of foreplay can make it extremely difficult for women to experience orgasm. The longer a period of time that lapses between sexual encounters; the less likelihood that the woman will experience an orgasm. On the issue of foreplay, a woman needs about 30 minutes of kissing, caresses and other foreplay to prepare for penetration. If all the couple does is a quick, purely physical sexual encounter, without proper preparation, she won’t have an orgasm.

Secondly, from the emotional viewpoint, for a woman to have an orgasm, she needs to be able to give herself emotionally to her husband. The more successful she is in giving herself to him, the greater the chance of an orgasm. If there is any unforgiveness or lack of trust, she has a great difficulty in giving of herself.

Helps You Sleep Better – Because of the stress relief and relaxation that sexual intimacy brings, it is much easier for people to enter into a deep sleep after sex. Deeper sleep means a more complete sleep, allowing the person to awake more rested and refreshed for the same amount of time in bed.

Helps Maintain Your Health – Medical studies have shown that men who have regular, frequent sexual intimacy with their wives live an average of seven years longer than men who don’t. That’s not the surprising part though; women who have regular, frequent sexual intimacy with their husbands receive a lot of health benefits.

There is one medical study in particular, conducted by a female gynecologist, who demonstrated that in the case of women who have frequent sex with their husbands, virtually all of the regular problems for which women visit their gynecologists are eliminated. On top of that, it gives them younger, more wrinkle-free skin.

Maintains a Woman’s Emotions – Some very recent medical studies show that women who engage in frequent sex with their husbands have almost no cases of depression. These studies (and there have been several) indicate that there is some chemical element in semen, which is absorbed through the vagina, that is beneficial to woman’s emotional health.

The same level of frequency, when using condoms does not produce the same results. In fact, in one study where they compared women who had sex with condoms to women who had sex without condoms, over 90% of the women whose partners used condoms suffered with depression regularly; while 0% of the women whose partners did not use condoms had problems with depression.

One final issue in this section is personal health.

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Many of us don’t put enough emphasis on our personal health as we should. When one is young, that really isn’t much of a problem, but as we grow older, we need to pay more and more attention to our health.

People who are overweight, smoke, eat an unbalanced diet, don’t exercise, don’t sleep enough or drink too much all have one thing in common; they aren’t taking care of their bodies. While we can get away with that any of that for a short while, continuing in it, especially continuing in it when we are at middle age and beyond, is a sure recipe for disaster.

People with unhealthy lifestyles live shorter lives, with more health complications, more medical bills, and more days lost from work for health issues. Additionally, as their situation progresses, it affects their ability to work efficiency and even to move efficiently. Since they typically die at a younger age, their expertise is lost to your company.

You, as an individual, need to watch over your personal health. Your company and your family need you healthy, so that you can do your job, both at work andathome.Likewise,youneedtosettheexampleforyour work team. If they see that you are taking care of yourself, it will help encourage them to do so as well.

One of the things that Japanese business is well known for is instituting exercise in the workplace. Many companies have regularly scheduled exercise, where employees are led in some stretching exercises and low-impact calisthenics right at their work station. Is this generosity on the part of the company? Absolutely not. These companies have become aware of the importance of the health of their work force. They are doing what they can to help people maintain their health, so that they don’t have the cost of paying their medical bills and the lost time of those people missing work.

If your company doesn’t have an arrangement with a local gym, perhaps you could be the one to propose it. Many gyms will work with companies to create a package deal for their employees. The gym offers a discounted price, part of which the company pays and part of which the employee pays.

It’s a good deal for the gym, because they gain a sizable group of new members. It’s a good deal for the company, because they have a healthier workforce for minimalcost.Finally,it’sagooddealfortheemployees,because they can get the membership at a reduced rate.

One last point that I’d like to make about using technology and maintaining an appropriate work-life balance. You need to realize that implementing the strategies that I’ve outlined in this section is going to make you the proverbial boat rocker. Most people and most companies don’t like this, or if they do, it’s to a minimal degree. However, implementation of this technology, these planning strategies, and these health policies has its advantage. You will have a more efficient department, accomplishing more and making a positive impact on your company.

Just be ready for some criticism as you begin to make these changes. Those that follow the herd always criticize the lone wolfs. That’s okay, let them follow the herd; it’ll make you look all that much better. Once you prove the effectiveness of your new methods, they can still follow the herd as your company implements your initiatives throughout the company.

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Upon receiving a degree in whatever, most of us are convinced that we are now the world’s greatest expert on… whatever. I remember when I was awardedmy PHD. For a couple of days, Iwas floating around somewhere on Cloud 9. Then I had to repair a leaking toilet in my house. Suddenly, while I was kneeling on the floor in frontofthattoilet,thethoughtcametome,“Thisis what a doctorate gets you.” Needless to say, I came crashing back down to earth in a hurry.

Gaining a title or degree doesn’t mean that we’ve arrived; all it means is that we’ve passed another checkpoint on the road of learning. Professional development is an ongoing task, one in which true professionals constantly engage, working to improve their knowledge and competency.

Take medical doctors for example. Medical science is constantly changing, new discoveries are being made and new techniques developed. To even try and keep current in one area of medical specialty is an impossibility. Yet truly professional doctors, the cream of the cream you might say, strive to keep abreast of the major developments

When you stop learning, you start dying.

in as many medical specialties as possible. That’s why they spend so much time reading professional journals, constantly educating themselves on what is happening in their field.

It’s not just medical doctors who need to do this. When I was working as an engineer, I received six different trade publications per month. While I didn’t read them all from cover to cover, I did go through them, seeking for information and new technologies that would help me in the job I was doing. I even kept an indexed file of articles which I thought would be of use to me at a later time.

The point is, learning doesn’t stop, or at least itshouldn’t.Iliketosay,“Whenyoustoplearning,youstartdying.”Learningistheintellectualpartofgrowing and growth is a necessary element to life. Medical science tells us that at about the age of 20ourbodiesstopgrowing.Fromthatpointon,we have more cells dying per day than we have being created. In other words, from the age of 20 on, we are dying. So, it’s easy to draw the parallel between physical growth and mental growth; when growth stops, death starts.

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3.1

Assess personal knowledge and skills against competency standards to determine development needs, priorities and plans

Self-assessment is fundamentally healthy. We must all realize that those we come into contact with are constantly assessing us; whether it is a colleague, a friend, a blind date, or our boss. If we want to pass their “test”wearebestoffcheckingourselvesout,beforethey do.

To make any assessment, it is necessary to have a standard of comparison. Without a standard of comparison, the only thing that gets assessed is one’s opinion of themselves. Those who think highly of themselves will decide they are doing great, while those who don’t think highly of themselves will think that they are doing worse than they are.

Ideally, you want to be able to use standards that are specific to your business enterprise in your evaluation. While many jobs have similarities across broad industry lines, each company has their own internal procedures, policies and systems. These can and will affect how well a person rates in their competency.

In some fields, competency is very highly related to product knowledge. Take engineering for example. You can hire the best electrical engineer in the world to work for your company; but no matter how much that engineer knows, he doesn’t know your products. When faced with a product related problem, the first

thing he has to do is learn about those aspects of the product. This can make that highly experienced engineer look like they are incompetent. No, they aren’t incompetent, they are just ignorant of your product.

The same situation exists in many fields. An accountant who is new in a company won’t show up his first day of work, with an automatic understanding of the account numbering system that is used in that company. Even if he has worked 30 years as an accountant, in 10 different companies, he’ll still have to learn the specific system that is used in that company.

Competency standards within a company should be part of the job description for any position within that company. Since these are the standards that individuals are rated upon, they are the most important for you to know. Additionally, if your position is one in which there are several grades (junior technician, technician, senior technician) you need to know the competency standards for the next higher level, so that you can work towards becoming qualified for that promotion.

Whether or not your company has actual published competency standards as part of their job descriptions, they do have unofficial competency standards. These unofficial standards may fluctuate constantly, as they are based upon the competence of the various people doing the job. In other words, the average competence that people bring to the job automatically becomes the average competence expected of the people working that job.

Typically, everyone knows who the best worker or workers are in any particular job or department. Everyone else is either consciously or unconsciously compared both to that best worker and the average.

Three types of competency standards:• Enterprisespecific• Unofficial(peer)• Nationallyendorsed

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Promotions, raises and important assignments are all given out based upon this unofficial evaluation.

In addition to the job specific or company specific criterion for competency, there is a whole realm of information and knowledge that isn’t specific to a particular organization, their products or their policies. Knowledge of these facts transcend a companies, industries, and locations. In these cases, nationally endorsed standards for competency are a better basis for comparison. These are the competency standards that are expected of any professional working in that field.

When assessing your professional knowledge and competency, it is important to compare yourself to all three of these standards. Even if you far surpass the competency standard that is stated in official company policy, it won’t truly be recognized, unless you are also one of the top people within the company for competency in that particular job.

There are two basic parts of assessing your competency: knowledge and performance. It is possible to be the most knowledgeable person in the world on a particular subject, but that doesn’t automatically make you the best performer. Performance takes in a number of characteristics, including knowledge. But, it also takes into consideration work habits, attitude and productivity. Many people who aren’t as knowledgeable about a subject are superior performers, because they better utilize the knowledge and ability that they have.

You should reassess your knowledge and competency in a structured way on a regular basis, at a minimum once a year. In that assessment, be sure to compare yourself to both local and national standards of competence. At the same time, compare yourself to your peers level of competence.

Just evaluating your level of knowledge and performance isn’t enough if you don’t do something with those conclusions. As part of your assessment, you need to decide upon some action steps to take you to the next level of competence. Are you needing more training in your profession? Do you need to develop better work habits? Do you need to seek ways of broadening your knowledge? Is there a problem with your attitude that is affecting your work? All of these questions and more should be included in the action plan you create.

Your assessment isn’t complete until you develop a plan of action from it

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3.2

Seek feedback from employees, clients and colleagues and use this feedback to identify and develop ways to improve competence

Let’s be honest here, performing an unbiasedappraisal of ourselves is tricky. Our opinion of ourselves is bound to creep into that evaluation, coloring everything we do. While this doesn’t mean that our

self-evaluation is useless, it does indicate that we need some sort of outside evaluation to balance against our own.

There are a number of different sources we can go to, in order to receive useful feedback that can balance our self-evaluation; these include:

• Colleaguesatoursamelevelintheorganization• Managerswhoreceivetheproductofourwork• Internalcustomerswithinourorganizationwhom

we trust• Externalcustomerswithwhomweworkregularly

and have developed a relationship• Teammemberswhomwemanageorcoordinate

the efforts of

Regardlessofwhomweselectforthisfeedback,itis important that we select people with a proven track record, whom we trust and who know us and our work. Itisalwayseasytofindpeoplewhowilltellyou,“You’rethe greatest. You’re doing everything right. That stupid company just hasn’t recognized your potential.” This type of feedback, while it may help us feel good, won’t help us at all with our professional development.

At the same time, if we don’t select people whom have a sound professional standing and outlook, it

can be all too easy for us to dismiss whatever they say; especially if it is contrary to our own opinion. That isn’t going to help us any more than listening to someone who tells us we’re okay.

It is also important to seek feedback from several sources; one source isn’t enough. These sources should show a wide range of social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds and with a range of physical and mental abilities. No, this isn’t about being anti-discriminatory; it’s about getting the best feedback possible. You might receive great feedback from intellectual people, but those with a lower education say that you come across likeyouare speaking“down” to them.Or, youmightfind that you don’t communicate well with certain ethnic groups. If your job requires communication, and most jobs do, this type of feedback is important.

Quite often, others will see things in us that we are blind to see in ourselves. This can be especially true of bad habits we have, mannerisms that can be annoying

Be sure to assess both your knowledge and your performance.

Get feedback from people from a wide range of:

• Professionalbackgrounds• Culturalbackgrounds• Socialbackgrounds• Ethnicgroups• Educationalbackgrounds• Physicalabilities

• Mentalabilities

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to others, and methods of communication that are hard for others to understand. Without the feedback of others, we will never know about these areas of weaknesses.

Don’t just accept the opinion of one person and change your whole professional development plan based upon their opinion. That’s just one opinion, and it can be a false opinion. However, you should be ready and willing to take that opinion and seek

for confirmation of it. When you find that others agree with that person’s assessment, then you have something you need to work on.

Just as you did with your self-assessment, you need to integrate the feedback you receive from others as part of your professional development plan; seeking ways to overcome those areas of weakness and improving your ability to succeed in your chosen career.

3.3

Identify, evaluate, select, and use development opportunities suitable to personallearningstyle(s)todevelopcompetence

Individuals learn by different means. Educators like to say that learners fall into three categories: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. While there is some truth to what they are saying, I don’t believe they’ve covered the whole gambit of learning styles. Here are some other factors that need to be taken into consideration:

Individual Learning (self-taught) vs. Classroom Learning – Some people thrive in a classroom environment, while others learn best on their own. If you remember from my personal testimony at the beginning of this course, I mentioned that I ultimately became an engineering manager, without having an engineering degree. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t study engineering however. I studied engineering on my own, from books, as opposed to learning it in a classroom.

Examples vs. Explanations – Some would call this visual vs. auditory, but I think it goes farther than that. While some people need everything explained to them, step by step, others learn better by seeing an example, and figuring out the steps by themselves.

Concepts vs. Facts – Most modern education focuses on teaching facts. The student learns those facts and learns how to spit them out or apply them at the time that they are needed. Take multiplication for example. We learn our multiplication tables, up to12x12 ingrade school. From thenon,wheneverwe need to know how much 8 x 8 is for example, we spit out 64. Great; but what happens when we need to know something like 15 x 17? Most of us reach for our calculators. However, someone who understands the concept of multiplication can easily derive the facts that 15 x 17 is the same as (10 x 17) + (5 x 17). Since ten times any number is just adding a zero to it, we have 170 + (5 x 17). Since 5 if half of 10, 5 x 17 is really (10 x 17) ÷ 2. So, that means that 15 x 17 is 170 + 1/2 of 170, or 85, giving us an answer of 155. If you couldn’t follow that, you’re not a concept type learner.

Memorization vs. Analyzation – There are those whose minds function very good for memorizing facts. Some of these people can memorize and recite an incredible amount of information, much more than you could imagine. Give them a textbook to study and

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they’ll come back knowing all the terminology, with the definitions, even though it was a textbook in a field that is totally foreign to them. Other people have trouble memorizing anything, but their minds are very good for analyzing information, seeking a solution to the problem, based upon available information.

When Henry Ford became a financial success,his family tried to have him tried for incompetency (obviously so that they could get their hands on his fortune). In the trial, the opposing lawyer asked him to recite the preamble to the constitution. He replied that he couldn’t. The lawyer jumped upon this opportunity, proclaiming,“Yousee,thismandoesn’tevenknowthemostbasicoffacts…”Wherein,HenryFordinterruptedhim, saying, “But, give me five minutes and I’ll findsomeone who does. Why should I waste my mind, filling it with useless facts, when I can utilize it to solve problems?” Henry obviously won.

Intensive, Short-Term Seminars vs. Long-Term Classes – The traditional learning model in our schools is to sit students down in long-term classroom situations, where they are fed the information they need to know. Once someone is in the workplace, that style of learning is virtually impossible, since the their schedule doesn’t allow long-term commitment to those classes. However, brief, intensive seminars are a great way of increasing these same people’s training.

Feed it to Them vs. let them Figure it out Themselves – Again, we’re dealing with the classic teaching system of putting students in a classroom, and having a teacher direct them. Some people learn better when faced with a problem, given the resources, and left to figure it out for themselves.

As you can see from this, there are a number of factors to consider when trying identifying the learning style of an individual. Each of those items I’ve listed affects each of us as individuals. We basically fall on one side or the other on each of them. To continue our own professional development, it is helpful to know what our full learning style is. Taking evening college classes to prepare ourselves for our next promotion, when we learn best studying on our own, isn’t an effective use of our time. Nor are we likely to learn the material as well when we resort to methods

that are outside of what works best for us.

You must take responsibility for your own continuing professional development. Don’t expect your company to do it for you and don’t expect your boss to do it for you. In many cases, continued growth and promotion within a company requires additional training. While it is difficult to pursue higher education while working, it is not impossible. However, there are other alternatives open to you.

With the way that technology is changing the workplace, it is unrealistic to depend upon the education you have already received to keep you current. Of the top 10 jobs in the world today, five of them didn’t exist when the practitioners of those professions were in college. Technology is increasing at an accelerating rate, entering into many new fields and changing many jobs.

Individual Training Programs

Programs like the one you are taking now are a great way to develop your professional skills, increase professional knowledge and prepare yourself for future promotions. Programs of this type provide you with certification for new positions.

Professional Seminars

Professional seminars are a great way of broadening your professional knowledge or deepening it in an area of specialty. A number of companies offer these seminars, training on new technologies, new methods and how to integrate them in the workplace. Additionally, most manufacturers of medium to high-tech equipment provide training seminars in the application of their technology in business. By being alert to the opportunities available, you might be able to become your company’s expert on some emerging technology.

Another good source for professional seminars is from trade shows. Most trade shows consist of two parts, seminars and the exhibit hall. In the exhibit hall, you will find new products and services that can help your company, or just take your money. However,

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in the seminars you will often hear about the latest trends, emerging technologies, and development of new products.

Trade Journals

I mentioned earlier that during my engineering years I received 6 trade journals every month. While it was impossible to keep up with everything that was in all those journals, I was able to pick and choose the articles that most interested me and appeared to have the greatest possibility of application to my company, our products and our processes.

By maintaining a file of those trade journals, I had a ready reference, in case something came up that I didn’t remember clearly. Most trade journals publish directories of the articles they publish every year. So, I could easily search out and reference anything that they had written. Today, with the Internet, it is even easier to reference these back issues and search for articles that have information you need.

Personal Study

Part of my success as an engineer is due to my parents. As I was growing up, one of the things that my parentshammeredintomewas,“Neversaycan’t.”Anytime I tried to say that I couldn’t do something, they would hit me with that mantra. It got so ingrained in me that it affected my work style. I literally don’t know how to say that I can’t do something. If I don’t know how, I’ll learn how.

My first boss as an engineer actually complained about this. He said to me, “You never say that youcan’t do something.” I explained what my parents had taught me and that the result of that was that when I didn’t know how to do something, I’d go find a book and learn it.

Again, the Internet has made this easier for you today. If you don’t know how to do something that applies to your job, it’s time to do a search on the ‘Net and learn about it. Whatever you need to learn exists somewhere on the Internet, all you have to do is find it.

There are a number of learning techniques that have been used effectively in business environments, most specifically for training individuals on a production line. While these techniques aren’t so applicable to management, managers need to be aware of them for the sake of training the personnel working for them.

Action Learning

Otherwise known as “learn by doing,” actionlearning is your basic on-the-job learning philosophy. In it, the individual is shown a task, then expected to do it under supervision. Once they are able to complete the task, they are left alone to do the job.

While action learning is a great methodology for simple repetitive tasks, such as assembly-line work, it doesn’t work well for more intellectual tasks, tasks with a lot of variation, or tasks requiring a complicated decision tree. If action learning is used in cases where there are many variables, it is necessary to provide the worker with references for how to deal with said variables, along with training on how to use those resources.

Another aspect of action learning in more complicated jobs is for the individual to analyze their own actions, making a value judgment on how well they did on the job they just completed. This evaluation is done with the intent of seeking ways of doingitbetterthenexttimearound.Lessonslearnedare immediately applied, at least on an experimental basis, for the next time the task is completed. In this manner, the worker can strive to constantly improve their performance.

Coaching

Coaching is an ongoing process of learning in which an experienced individual regularly oversees and evaluates the work of a more junior worker. Based upon their observations and evaluation, they offer correction, advice and additional one-on-one instruction.

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Typically in a coaching situation, a particular coach is assigned to work with each trainee. This is a long-term relationship, for as long as is considered necessary to fully train the individual. More than any other system of training, coaching resembles the old system of apprenticeship; where an apprentice worked with a journeyman, until he had learned enough to qualify him as a journeyman craftsman.

Exchange/Rotation

Having department members exchange jobs, or working on a rotation basis is a very common method of cross-training workers in a factory to complete a number of different tasks. This gives the supervisor a trained pool of workers, each of whom can work a number of different stations. In the case that one of his workers is absent, all he has to do is move another worker into that position.

In this type of a situation, the trainer for the line workers will usually be a lead man, who knows all of the tasks in that part of the assembly line. There might also be a floater, who is used to fill the line wherever there is an absence, the line is falling behind, or there is a need to pull someone off of their work station for training.

Induction Training

When new personnel are brought into a company or operation, there is a real need to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible. Induction training is a systematic training program, normally managed by the direct supervisor, to bring the new employee up to speed on the corporate culture and operations of a company as quickly as possible.

The supervisor will use standardized materials, which have been created by the company’s internal training department. These materials should give the new employee a feel for the company’s background, market, products, culture and operations. From thispoint, the individual is then trained on their specific department and job responsibilities.

In some companies, especially where a large number of new employees are being processed at the same time, such as in the case of a workforce expansion or opening a new division, the induction training will be centralized for a short period of time. Instead of having the individual supervisors manage their employee’s training, the Human Resourcesdepartment will train them as a group, and then turn them over to the individual supervisors for further training.

With induction training, the goal is always to bring the individual on board as part of the team as quickly as possible. Experience has shown that employees who have been thus trained become productive much more quickly than employees who do not pass through an inductive training program.

Mentoring

While the training methods that have been previously mentioned are predominantly limited to use with hourly employees, mentoring is generally limited to use with people who are in staff and management positions. In a mentoring situation, an experienced worker or manager takes a younger worker “under their wing” to train them, mostly bypassing on their years of experience. Because this isn’t just about training in how to do a particular job, mentoring relationships can exist cross-department or even from one company to another.

While some companies try and force mentoring relationships, assigning mentors (experienced people) to work with particular mentees (junior people in training), the most successful mentoring relationships happen when mentors pick their own mentees. There is something almost like a sibling relationship, or a father/son relationship in successful mentoring situations. This suggests that one of the things that makes mentoring successful is that the mentor sees something of themselves in the younger worker and “adopts”theminaprofessionalsense.

Truly successful mentoring relationships last for years and can guide the mentee through several promotions and changes of position. At the same

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time, while you are being mentored by someone else, you can also mentor others who are junior to you. This doesn’t end the relationship with your mentor, only adds another link in the mentoring chain. Eventually, those that you mentor will be mentoring others.

As I said, mentoring relationships can cross departmental and even company boundaries. In many cases, they start within one company, but as the individuals grow in their professional career, one or the other may move on to work in another company. This doesn’t necessarily mean the mentoring relationship comes to an end; any more than moving to another city destroys a family relationship. While the mentor may no longer help the mentee with problems particular to the place of work where they met, they might still help them with overall career objectives, learning life lessons and learning how to function in newly promoted positions.

Shadowing

Shadowing is an effective way of training new staff members about company organization, procedures, and allows them the opportunity to meet people whom they will be interfacing with in their new job. When using shadowing as a training method, the new employee is assigned to “shadow” an experiencedpeer who does the same job. By going with them in everything they do, and working together with their trainer, they find out about the company’s procedures, paperwork that is required to do their job and how their department interfaces with other departments in the company.

Typically, shadowing continues for a week at most. After this time period, the new person is given their own area of responsibility. Their trainer may continue to work with them as a coach or mentor.

Structured Training Programs

Every company should have some sort of structured training programs. These would be programs that have been professionally produced, either in house or by a training consultant. Such programs are very useful for induction training and in cases where many

people need to be trained in the same task or subject. For most companies, developing structured

training programs for every individual task is cost prohibitive. However, there are always a number of companywide or division wide areas that people need to be trained in.

There are a number of companies which offer pre-recorded training programs in areas that are of common interest to a number of companies; specifically in areas of corporate legalities, sales, and customer service. These are an inexpensive way of starting a structured training program for your company, without having to invest in creating your own training material.

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3.4

Undertake participation in networks to enhance personal knowledge, skills and work relationships

Networking is a term that has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, more than anything because of the great influence the Internet has on modern society. There is no place that this influence is so acute as in the ways we communicate, especially communicating information. Where before people were limited by time and space, today we work across international boundaries, as if we were in the next office.

Everyone has a network, whether they make effective use of it or not. Your network is the people you know; family, friends, co-workers, even the guys you play golf with every Saturday. Each of those people has people they know, who are their network. It continues extending, until there is a theoretical connection between you and every other person on the face of the earth.

Realistically,weonlyconnectwiththosewhoareclosest to us. But, that doesn’t mean that what we say to them, stops there. Often, our comments go much farther than we intend, being passed from person to person, sometimes even returning back to us from another route.

When this communication is good, positive and productive we call it networking. When it is hurtful, harmful and maligning we call it gossip. While the mechanism of the two is amazingly similar, the purpose is grossly different.

Let’s say that you’re looking for an innovativesolution to a problem you have at work. You don’t want to do the same old thing, because you’ve tried that before and it only works for a little while. While playing golf on Saturday, you happen to mention this problem to your golf buddies. One of them remembers hearing something from someone in his network that had a

similar problem. He doesn’t remember the details, but he remembers who it was. So, he digs out his phone and calls the co-worker who told him about this great new idea. The co-worker stops mowing his lawn to answer the phone, and says it was something that his brother-in-law’s company had instituted, which was apparently bringing great results. The co-worker then puts you in contact with his brother-in-law, so that you can get the rest of the information.

If you hadn’t mentioned the problem to someone in your network, you might have never found that solution, or if you did, it might have been only after much painstaking research. By utilizing the network you already have, you found the answer that your company needed.

People who are the most effective at using networks try and maintain as broad a network as possible. These aren’t deep relationships, they’re just people that you know and talk to once in a while. However, because you know them, they become resources and channels that you can use to find information, broadcast information, and connect with other people, adding to the number of useful relationships that you have in your network.

In corporations, people with strong networks:

• Tendtobehighperformers• Stayintheirjobslonger• Aremorelikelytogetpromoted• Coordinateprojectsmoreeffectively

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While networking started on the personal level, with personal relationships where you could see the person face-to-face, as social media networking has grown, it has even impacted the way we network with others on both a personal and professional level.

Many social networking tools are readily adaptable to business usage. Some of them, like facebook, are recognizing the growth of commercial business using their services to create effective work networks and are capitalizing on it, providing specific networking services for businesses and other organizations. What this is creating is a system that integrates our personal and professional networks into one.

Social media networks are tools that can be used for professional networking:

• Linked In–Linkedinwascreatedasaprofessionalnetworking platform, not just for finding jobs, but for connecting with other professionals for collaboration, teamwork, and sharing information. Linked In has professional forums, where issuesand ideas for particular professions are shared.

• Facebook – Part of networking is knowing what is going on in the other person’s personal and professional life. Facebook gives you the abilityto keep track of a large network of people, maintaining connection with them, their lives and their work.

• Twitter – Twitter is a network of ideas, allowing you to follow threads of conversations, each person adding their thoughts to that thread. Another great feature is having a customizable running feed of news headlines for areas where you have personal or professional interest.

• Blogs – Many people use blogs as a way of “thinking out loud,” allowing them to receivefeedback from others, both on their team and off it, that may improve the idea or even spark a new one. This list is by no means conclusive; there are

many more social and professional networking tools available on the Internet. I only give this list as a representative sampling of what is available.

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3.5

Identify and develop new skills to achieve and maintain a competitive edge

In today’s global economy, the more skills and talent you can bring into a job, the more marketable you as an individual become. Even skills that have no clear connection with your job can enhance your ability to complete it, making you more valuable to both your current employer and any future employers.

Companies desire multi-talented, highly skilled employees, because those are the people who help them become more competitive in the marketplace. Considering that competition is the driving force behind the free-market system, any competitive edge a company can create is worth the time and effort to create it.

Skills fall into three basic categories:

• Hardskills–Those thataredirectlyapplicable tothe job you are hired to do.

• Softskills–Thosethatarenotdirectlyapplicableto the job, but might be able to help the company in some other way.

• Workhabitskills–Thewaysthatyouwork,whichmake you more of an asset to your company than the guy at the next desk.

As part of your regular evaluation of your professional competency (we talked about in section 3.1), you should be evaluating yourself for all three of these areas. If all you concentrate on are the hard skills needed to your job, you may find yourself passed by, while others are being promoted.

Hard Skills

With the way that technology is changing the workplace, there is a constant need to increase your knowledge and ability in the hard skills of your job. if you are an engineer, this means keeping abreast

of technological innovation and how those new products could apply to your company. If you work in IT, it means knowing of software development trends, especially what emerging technologies could make your company work more efficiently.

As the general population becomes better educated, keeping ahead of the game in leaning new hard skills becomes more and more of a challenge. Those who are most effective in doing this generally work to both deepen and broaden their knowledge base. In other words, they look for associated areas of knowledge which they can study, as well as learning more about their own field.

Soft Skills

It is easier to find ways of developing soft skills that can help you become more competitive in the workplace. Many companies need people who can occasionally do something extra, something that’s not part of their job, whether it is taking some professional photos, designing a flyer, developing new pages for their web site, of designing a facility expansion. While these skills may not be laid out in your job description, being able to do them makes you of greater value to the company. Not only that, but by pitching-in on those tasks, your visibility to upper management increases, increasing your promotion potential.

Most engineers are poor writers, yet I leaned to write as an engineer. Whenever we needed to make a major change to the manufacturing plant, especially where capital funds were involved, we had to present a proposal to management. Being an innovator, I started writing proposals. Looking back, my first proposalswere very poorly written; but as I wrote more and more, my ability as a writer increased. Eventually, I became the main proposal writer for my department; then I

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became the person that the Vice President soughtout,whenheneededaproposalwritten. Finally,mywriting ability won me a promotion to Engineering & Materials Manager for a new division that I created for the company.

Without a doubt, there were other engineers who were more technically knowledgeable, better educated and more skilled as engineers than I was. But, they didn’t have the ability to do what I could do; they hadn’t developed the reputation I had developed; and theyweren’tintheVicePresident’smindwhenitcametime to staff that new division. My soft skills gave me the competitive edge.

Work Habit Skills

Throughout this course, I’ve returned to the theme of being a greater asset to your company than anyone else. More than anything, what makes you a greater asset is when you become part of the team, putting the company’s success before your own, and doing everything you can to make that success a reality.

Your work habits stem from your attitudes. If you have the attitude that the company owes you something, you’ll never give the company the best you have. Instead of being a star player on the team, you’ll become a ball and chain around the company’s leg, keeping it from winning the race.

In the introduction to this course I talked about my personal experience and how I was promoted six times in 12 years. Most of the people I started out with were still in the same positions, or similar level positions in other companies at the end of those 12 years. There was one woman in particular I remember. She was working as a production technician when I started. Every day, she would do her 100 percent of the production standard, then stop her work for the day, and sit there talking to her co-workers. She never gave even one percent more than what was expected of her, even though she had the ability to do so.

The last I heard, that woman was still doing the same job, in the same room, at the same pay grade, after 20 years. I don’t know what has happened to her

since then, but I see a lot of wasted potential when I look back at her. She had the ability to succeed, but her attitude held her back.

What about you? Do you have what it takes to succeed? What are your underlying attitudes? How do they affect your work? Do you need to change?

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