Team Taskmaster

It’s summer. It’s warm. You have PTO coming. So why are you sitting here reading this blog instead of sunning on a beach?

Could be you’re taking less vacation than you can (or should). If so, you’re not alone; an estimated 47.5 million Americans leave an average of three vacation days unused.  Most cut back on days off due to work constraints, and many say that work intrudes on vacation even when they’re out of the office.

But the truth is, your brain needs a break. Time off recharges your batteries and allows you to be more efficient. Burnout never served anyone well, and a well-timed vacation can help avert mental overload. Plus, getting out of the office can free you from the annoying details and help you see the big picture.

So go ahead, take a summer vacation. If it makes you feel better, think of it as an investment in your future productivity as well as a chance to get a tan.

(image by Rene Ehrhardt via Flickr, CC 2.0)

As the price of fuel continues to skyrocket, there’s a workplace trend afoot to shortening workweeks to save energy. In Utah, administrative offices will be closed on Fridays while hours will be extended Monday through Thursday.  Birmingham, Ala. implemented a truncated schedule for city employees on July 1, and officials in Montgomery County, PA are considering a four-day plan as well.

In addition to reducing fuel costs and electricity usage, a four-day plan could actually improve your workplace. Robert LaJeunesse has argued that a shorter workweek is correlated with higher productivity.  That’s supported by a recent Brigham Young University study that found a four-day work week may increase job satisfaction and productivity. Aaron Newton also points out that a four-day workweek could reduce absenteeism, decrease labor costs, and improve both employee morale and efficiency.

In a real-world example, says Time magazine, Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Fla., went to four days for the 2007 summer session and saved $268,000 in energy costs. And over the year, sick leave fell 50%, and turnover among the 1,500-person staff dropped 44%. There are also a host of non-work benefits: less traffic congestion, potentially reduced childcare costs, spending more time with family, more time for volunteering and community outreach. And really, who wouldn’t want a three-day weekend?

But it’s not an option that everyone embraces. Workers may struggle with child-care schedules and finding personal time, and a 10-hour workday can be grueling. And from a business perspective, it can be difficult to maintain a four-day schedule when your clients are still working five.

What do you think?

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(image by C.C. Holland)

Are you hiring? If you are, chances are you’ve been spending a good chunk of your time sitting in one-on-one interviews with a multitude of candidates, many (or most) who won’t make it past this initial grilling. But there’s a way you can increase your interview efficiency and improve your odds of finding the right person: Conduct panel interviews instead.

Panel interviews involve having a group of hiring stakeholders (four to six is a typical number) conduct the interview jointly and lob both prepared and off-the-cuff questions at a candidate.

The benefits are many:

• It saves time and allows all stakeholders in the hiring process to get the same information.
• You can quickly build consensus toward the interviewee’s fit with the culture of the company.
• It can emphasize to the candidate–and reemphasize to your staff–the teamwork nature of the job.
• You have a chance to think more about the candidate’s responses since you’re not the only one asking questions.
• You can minimize errors due to first impressions, personality style, and preconceptions.

To avoid having things turn into a free-for-all and to keep from scaring your candidates silly, plan ahead and structure the panel interview wisely.  Give it a try; done right, this approach can be a powerful tool in finding the right talent for your team.

(image by euthman via Flickr, CC 2.0)

I recently came across an oldie-but-goodie post from Merlin Mann of 43 Folders called “Kick Procrastination’s Ass” and was thrilled to learn a new technique for getting my posterior in gear.

Mann points out that any time you put something off, the problem gets bigger, which leads to more stress and possibly another bout of procrastination, because now the task is REALLY ugly. But instead of feeling that you have to tackle the whole thing in one fell swoop, use the dash approach instead. Commit to a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time. Really short — as in one minute.

What’s so different about the dash? It accomplishes that most difficult of tasks: getting you started.

The guidelines are simple. Pick your appropriate dash — time-based for some projects, unit-based for others, or a combination in which you stop when you reach one threshold or the other — and choose a time or a target that’s long enough to actually accomplish something but too short to seem intimidating. For example, set a timer for 10 minutes and spend that long filing. Or if you need to write a report, get 100 words on the page. Then stop. Easy.

If you’re on a roll and want to continue, by all means do so; but the beauty of the dash is that it’s no-strings attached. If after 10 minutes or 100 words you’re ready for a coffee break, just move on.  But chances are you won’t, because now you’re kicking procrastination’s ass — and liking it.

(image by emdot via Flickr, CC 2.0)

This past weekend I attended BlogHer ‘08, an annual conference that attracts (primarily female) bloggers from all spheres of interest. I expected to get a lot of value out of the workshops and panel discussions, and I did, but I also got a bonus benefit: sparks of inspiration fostered by the collaborative atmosphere.

A fellow attendee and I were killing time between sessions when we started bouncing around ideas for a fledgling Web enterprise we’d been discussing for months. It’s been one of those “We should really do this” things, where we haven’t gotten anything off the ground; it’s been good cocktail chatter and not much else. But being steeped in the creative juices of a thousand fellow bloggers managed to get the ball rolling in a way just random chatter couldn’t. By the end of the lunch break, we had a tentative business plan, a page full of notes, huge enthusiasm for the project and even a new domain name.

It got me thinking that there’s more to collaboration than putting two (or more) people together and hoping for the best. The environment in which collaboration occurs is critical. While my friend and I are both bright and ambitious, we weren’t able to harness all our creativity and ideas until we were lifted along by the currents of entrepreneurial energy at this conference.

So the next time you’re trying to get a collaborative project going, consider where your idea-making happens — and if the well seems to be running dry, consider a change of venue. Whether it’s attending a conference or just moving a meeting to a coffee shop, a different scene might make all the difference.

(image by Hyku via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Executive coach Leila Bulling Towne argues that you’ll never get “caught up” with everything you need to do. Instead, to be an effective manager and leader, you’ll need to learn to prioritize. Here, Towne shares four tips for deciding what’s important and managing your time more effectively.

Idea Champions recently conducted a poll to discover which catalysts spurred its clients’ brightest ideas. While many of them involved solitary activities or reflection, two of the top five — brainstorming with others and collaborating with a partner — reveal the power of team ideation in sparking creativity. A third top-five factor, being immersed in a project, arguably fits in that mold as well, assuming you’re not taking part in a solo endeavor.

The top 10 catalysts for best ideas:

1. When you’re inspired
2. Brainstorming with others
3. When you’re immersed in a project
4. When you’re happy
5. Collaborating with a partner
6. Daydreaming
7. Analyzing a problem
8. Driving
9. Commuting to and from work
10. Reading books in your field

Study authors Tim Moore and Mitch Ditkoff noted that forced physical teamwork from employees doesn’t tend to engender great ideas: “Rafting trips and ropes courses can work well to bond teams instinctually. But in this poll, we found all activities requiring physical exertion scored low as idea catalysts.”

Some of their recommendations for fostering a better collaborative environment for creative thinking:

• Let your team daydream and brainstorm
• Create a buddy system for people to explore new possibilities together
• Encourage friendships and fun in the workplace
• Don’t reject creative ideas out of hand

As a manager, leveraging the positive aspects of teamwork can help your employees get more inspired — and that can lead to innovation, better job satisfaction and performance, and more engagement.

You know the guy on your team who’s always pushing back against unusual ideas? The gloom-and-doomer who’s convinced that if it’s different, it must be wrong? Could be he’s just afraid of not succeeding at a new endeavor.

Here’s some food for thought to convince him that failure can indeed be an option.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas Edison

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” - Woody Allen

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” - Truman Capote

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.” - George Bernard Shaw

“Success is never permanent, and failure is never final.” - Mike Ditka

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” - Oscar Wilde

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Confucious

And my personal favorite:

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

(image by leoniewise via Flickr, CC 2.0)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the new-PC dilemma I was facing: whether I should desperately cling to Windows XP, bite the bullet and accept Vista as my new OS, or take the plunge to Mac. I was concerned about the productivity issues that might plague me with a significant change in OS. Turned out I was right to worry.

I opted for choice #2 for practical reasons: I didn’t want to pledge continued allegiance to an OS that would soon lose Microsoft support, and I saved about $1,000 by buying a Dell PC instead of a similarly tricked-out Mac. Guided by a good friend who’s a sysadmin extraordinaire, I proceeded to migrate from my old PC to the new Vista machine.

Argh.

Never mind that doing this took all weekend and the better part of Monday (PCMover isn’t the foolproof solution it would like you to think it is, by the way), and that I had to repurchase some software that didn’t play nice with Vista. Those things, I expected. But there were several Vista-centric annoyances that rubbed me the wrong way and cut into my work until I found fixes. Here’s a brief list:

1) Vista has the incredibly annoying habit of asking the user for permission every time an admin-level task is performed. I understand that increased security is one of Vista’s big bragging points, but adding an extra layer of clickage in the name of “user account control” made me want to scream. Thank goodness I figured out how to get rid of those annoying UAC messages.

2) A known bug with Microsoft Office 2003 and Vista made the EULA agreement pop up every time I launched Excel, Outlook, or Word. Every. Single. Time. No matter how often I clicked “accept.” I finally fixed that with a registry edit, but for a while there it was worse than fighting pop-up ads online.

3) My supposedly Vista-compatible mouse played Russian roulette with dialogue boxes and window controls. If I wanted to click “OK” to a message, it took a half-dozen tries to find the right zone somewhere in the approximate ZIP code of the button. The fix? Disable the Aero mouse pointer scheme. Now it only takes one click to close a window, not 10.

4) Why did Vista rename a bunch of tried-and-true stuff such as My Documents and Add/Remove Programs? I mean, it’s not the end of the world to realize that My Documents is now CC/Documents, or that “Display Settings” is now found under “Personalize,” but it slows down my process. There’s no real fix to this except time, and a week and a half into my new machine I’m getting used to it. Still, figuring out new organization schemes is not the most efficient use of my time.

This all might be old hat to those of you already on Vista, and if you’ve discovered workarounds for other annoyances, please feel free to post them! Meanwhile, I’ll continue my attempts to ascend the Vista learning curve — and to get back to my old levels of productivity.

Former White House spokesman Tony Snow  succumbed last weekend to colon cancer, but his legacy of effective interpersonal interactions lives on, says Kris Dunn.

Dunn says Snow inspired four lessons that can help people improve their professional approaches.

1. Be willing to put your money where your mouth is. Don’t complain about a bad situation unless, like Snow, you’re willing to jump in and fix it — even if it’s really messy.

2. Stay likeable and take the high road. People cut him slack because he was upbeat and positive, says Dunn, and “That’s an edge any of us could use.”

3. Defend without taking it personally. Understand that in your position as a leader, you’re going to take flak. It’s not you; it’s the job. Respond appropriately.

4. Say “I don’t know.” Admitting ignorance and avoiding “buzzword land” builds trust, respect and authenticity. (Just don’t say “I don’t know” to every question.)

It occurs to me that these four approaches will work equally well in a personal situation as well as a professional one. Give them a try. And thanks, Tony, for leaping into the fray and bringing some journalistic class to a thankless job.

(image courtesy the White House)