Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem
Harvard Business
OCTOBER 28, 2022
To fix a broken meeting culture, start by canceling everything for 48 hours.
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Managing Meetings: How to Drive Productivity and Success
Tom Spencer
APRIL 12, 2024
Meetings can either be a powerful catalyst for collaboration and decision-making or a drain on time and productivity. Whether you are in consulting, strategy, operations, or product management, the ability to manage meetings effectively is a crucial skill that can significantly impact the success of your endeavors.
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Polite Ways to Decline a Meeting Invitation
Harvard Business
MAY 17, 2016
There it is in your inbox: a meeting invite to a meeting you really don’t want to attend. Or it’s for a time that’s already booked, and now you’re left to decide whom to turn down. Whatever the reason, sometimes you need to decline a meeting invite. How Top Salespeople Land Hard-to-Get Meetings.
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Team Interdependence for Higher Performance
LSA Global
NOVEMBER 11, 2024
If people believe that they no longer have a choice in how things are done or that counting on others would add too much risk to their ability to meet their individual performance expectations, they may resist teaming. Is the strategy and culture aligned enough for the team to succeed?
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Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person
Harvard Business
APRIL 6, 2017
Executives need to own up to their role in creating the workplace stress that leads to burnout—heavy workloads, job insecurity, and frustrating work routines that include too many meetings and far too little time for creative work. Many corporate cultures require collaboration far beyond what is needed to get the job done.
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4 Ways to Manage Deadlines on Cross-Cultural Teams
Harvard Business
JUNE 10, 2016
My friend likes to tell the story of what happened when she planned for a cross-cultural group of people to meet up to go to the lake when they were on holiday in Europe. But not understanding or effectively managing these different ways of working can lead to frustration, stress, and missed deadlines.
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4 Lessons Learned Outside the Classroom during an MBA
Tom Spencer
DECEMBER 12, 2020
Through teamwork you learn how to assert your position and also how compromise in all areas where a decision needs to be made: separating roles and responsibilities, selecting fonts and graphics to use in a presentation, creating a meeting agenda, deciding on a meeting place and time, you get the idea. Time management.
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Do You Know How Each Person on Your Team Likes to Work?
Harvard Business
MAY 30, 2017
When we travel to a country that has a different culture than ours, many of us spend time learning ways to communicate and connect with the people there. Similarly, when you first become a manager, it’s helpful to spend time up front connecting and creating a common language with your team. Marion Barraud for HBR.
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How to Help Your Team Manage Grunt Work
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018
To Retain New Hires, Make Sure You Meet with Them in Their First Week. Why Great Employees Leave “Great Cultures” Melissa Daimler. Time management is a skill that many need help to learn, and as a manager, you may need to be the teacher. You and Your Team Series. How to Lose Your Best Employees.
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To Get More Done, Focus on Environment, Expectations, and Examples
Harvard Business
NOVEMBER 19, 2018
For the first time in my young career, I was going to lots of meetings, and my job had become as much about convincing, cajoling, and coordinating as it was about designing. My manager told me about a team that was working on the Google Help Forum. We were product managers, designers, and leaders. Expectations.
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Why Minimize Management Decision Time
Johanna Rothman
AUGUST 4, 2020
Let me show the impact management decision delays had on one team: The managers started their portfolio decision meeting. They adjourned the meeting to get forecasts from the teams. The teams spent about a day of forecasting work, but the managers didn't take the time to meet again for three weeks.
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Designing a hybrid workplace? Avoid this mistake.
Brimstone Consulting
JANUARY 14, 2022
In the absence of guidelines, the organization had evolved into an always-on culture with communication taking place 24/7 – and across multiple platforms. Yours may look different depending on your collaboration tools, goals, and culture. Finally, we worked with the organization to go back to the basics of meetings and emails.
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Managers Need to Work as Teams
Johanna Rothman
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
Benefits of Management Teams. Management teams help the organization in many ways: Management teams reduce overall decision time. Individual managers reduce their cycle time. Managers can remove organizational impediments that cross teams. Your management teams don’t need to be formal.
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What to Do When Personal and Professional Commitments Compete for Your Time
Harvard Business
APRIL 26, 2018
It’s not just one meeting scheduled over another. As a time management coach, I help working parents navigate these challenges on a daily basis. The first is to define how you want to prioritize your time when professional and personal commitments collide. Family culture. Time split.
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How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work from Home
Harvard Business
MAY 5, 2017
Back-to-back meetings, a constant stream of conference calls, and obligatory break room chitchat make it next to impossible to complete important tasks. Working remotely, on the other hand, “gives you the time and space to concentrate without distractions,” Bloom says. “Face time in the office is important.”
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Why Shared Services “Teams” Don’t Work with Agility
Johanna Rothman
APRIL 14, 2021
The organization wonders why no one can “meet” a deadline. The organization lives with many delays when the managers choose a shared services model. That's because the managers think resource efficiency works. You will have an easier time managing the project portfolio. In any culture or lifecycle.
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Why My Company Serves Free Breakfast to All Employees
Harvard Business
MAY 1, 2017
Our approach is rooted in extreme programming and agile processes , and the foundation of our work environment is a pair programming culture. It signals that breakfast is over and the office-wide meeting is about to start. I’m not quite as motivated (in terms of my fitness) or organized (in terms of my time management).
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4 Conversations Every Overwhelmed Working Parent Should Have
Harvard Business
AUGUST 8, 2018
Working parents sometimes struggle with the feeling that they are either letting down their family or not meeting their career goals. The other, Joseph, saw how Brittney’s skill in doing this not only made Brittney happier but also changed our whole company culture to be more supportive of working parents.
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The Greatest Leadership Principle of All-Time
Rick Conlow
MARCH 29, 2021
Managers often miss the greatest leadership principle of all-time. Let’s get to where the rubber meets the road. They give you clues to what’s going on in organizations, and the potential impact of The Greatest Leadership Principle of All-Time. This is true about what it takes to be a successful leader.
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Mastering the Art of Leading Remote Work Teams
Rick Conlow
JUNE 19, 2023
Bottom-line, companies with people-first culture led by Servant Leadership principles outperform their competitors. Time Mismanagement: Remote work requires effective time management skills. However, employees may struggle to prioritize tasks and allocate their time efficiently.
Leadership 101
101 How to Manage Managers
Harvard Business
AUGUST 29, 2016
In some ways, managing managers is similar to managing anyone else — you need to align their goals with yours, provide feedback, and help them advance their careers, says Sydney Finkelstein, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and author of Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Manage the Flow of Talent.
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Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 2: Where Does Management Fit?
Johanna Rothman
AUGUST 14, 2019
That's a cultural change to self-managing teams. That's why we need managers to understand how to create and cultivate an agile culture. Managers Create and Refine the Culture. Instead of local optimization, we need global optimization: How can we decrease the time of all the various feedback loops ?
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How to Create Space for Professional Growth
LSA Global
JUNE 20, 2024
How to Create Space for Professional Growth Are you too busy at work to set aside time to learn and grow? Is your calendar full of back-to-back meetings? Talent management experts know that the ability to create space for professional growth and development is about opportunity. Are you addicted to being busy?
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Transforming from a Good to Great Coach
Rick Conlow
OCTOBER 19, 2023
10 Companies that Exemplify the Value of a Great Coach A handful of companies do an outstanding job of creating a positive culture through coaching. Here are ten notable examples: Google: Google is renowned for its robust coaching culture. These meetings involve 20-60 minutes. You take notes and track your discussions over time.
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Would Amazon’s 30-Hour-Week Experiment Work in Your Company?
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 26, 2016
A friend of mine was having a hard time balancing her career at a large financial firm with her family demands. She worked at one of those all-too-typical workplaces where employees are expected to log 60 hours or so a week — a perfect illustration of what I call a “ culture of overwork.”
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Designing a hybrid workplace? Avoid this mistake.
Brimstone Consulting
JANUARY 14, 2022
In the absence of guidelines, the organization had evolved into an always-on culture with communication taking place 24/7 – and across multiple platforms. Yours may look different depending on your collaboration tools, goals, and culture. Finally, we worked with the organization to go back to the basics of meetings and emails.
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4 Organizational Mistakes That Plague Modern Knowledge Workers
Harvard Business
MAY 10, 2016
And yet in my work with clients, I often discover old ideas about time management that don’t take this new reality into account. Is it common at your company for email to be used for urgent and time-sensitive communications? Encourage “technology-free meetings” whenever possible. The office kitchen.
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What Great Managers Do Daily
Harvard Business
DECEMBER 14, 2016
”Utilization” essentially looks at the average amount of time between your first and last email or meeting of the day across several months of data and estimates total weekly working time for each employee. In the companies we analyzed, the average manager spent 30 minutes every 3 weeks with each of their employees.
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70 How Many People Really Combine Work Trips with Vacation?
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 16, 2016
As most business meetings take place during the working week, there is usually no business reason for travelers to arrive two days before meetings start or depart two days after meetings end. Hospitality and destination management professionals can use data like this to better anticipate and meet the needs of business travelers.
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70 I Ran 4 Experiments to Break My Social Media Addiction. Here’s What Worked.
Harvard Business
OCTOBER 18, 2018
Social media can connect us to new ideas, help us share our work, and allow previously unheard voices to influence culture. Yet it can also be a highly addictive time-sink if we’re not careful about our goals , purpose , and usage. Barcroft/Getty Images. The hardest part is walking out the door without the phone.
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132 How to Get Your Team to Use Their Vacation Time
Harvard Business
AUGUST 4, 2017
Use a few minutes in a team meeting to share some of the research on the benefits of vacation. A 2015 HBR article by Ron Friedman is a treasure trove of facts about the benefits to reaction time, creativity, and engagement. Take advantage of that creativity by scheduling an extra-long meeting with the person a few days after vacation.
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All you need to know about the interview (Part 1: Overview and Fit Interview)
Tom Spencer
MARCH 10, 2018
Fit Interviews are all about showing your compatibility with a firm’s working environment and culture. Recall what I have mentioned many times, management consulting firms are assessing candidates for their Leadership, Achievement, and Problem Solving skills. Find a real consultant and try to ask for a mock interview.
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Sales Management Skills to Master
LSA Global
MARCH 17, 2025
Leading, Managing, and Coaching We know from sales leadership simulation assessment data that great sales managers lead, manage, and coach their teams to perform at their peak. Effective sales management ensures that everyone is accountable to the defined sales processes and strategy success metrics.
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GROW your approach to coaching
The Management Centre
APRIL 1, 2020
In turn, by adopting a culture of coaching, you are then free to step back and focus on more strategic activities. The GROW framework can be used in conversations, meetings and everyday leadership – it’s not necessarily something you need to set aside a specific time or location for. It can be used in a wide range of situations.
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How to Work Remotely Without Losing Motivation
Harvard Business
SEPTEMBER 22, 2016
Its story of a bibliomaniac who unearths an ancient poem, cracking opening the cultural door to the Renaissance, has inspired me with a creative way to write about a risk capital project that’s due later this week. Meeting up with other work-from-homers to “keep each other company” is like that.
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70 How to Know If Someone Is Ready to Be a Manager
Harvard Business
JUNE 2, 2016
For some real-world perspective on becoming a first-time manager, I reached out to my friend Dr. Jim Mitchell, a computer scientist who made the leap into management from an engineering position, eventually retiring as Vice President at Oracle Laboratories. How to Get the Most Out of an Informational Interview. Rebecca Knight.
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GROW your approach to coaching
The Management Centre
APRIL 1, 2020
In turn, by adopting a culture of coaching, you are then free to step back and focus on more strategic activities. The GROW framework can be used in conversations, meetings and everyday leadership – it’s not necessarily something you need to set aside a specific time or location for. It can be used in a wide range of situations.
Development 69
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Empower Employees for Better Decision Making Capabilities
LSA Global
JULY 19, 2021
Who Should Decide Do your managers feel overwhelmed by all the decisions they must make day-by-day? It is estimated that decision making can take up to 70% of a manager’s time. Managers need to gain better decision making capabilities. The Right Culture Not just any decision making culture will do.
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Is a COO-as-a-service solution right for me?
Asamby Consulting
MARCH 24, 2022
At the same time, as the CEO, you probably don’t want to spend all your time managing that day-to-day and building your backend systems. One could be responsible for documenting your processes, while the other is responsible for running great meetings.
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Make Strategic Thinking Part of Your Job
Harvard Business
OCTOBER 26, 2016
It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. .”
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70 Being a Good New Manager Is Not Magic
LSA Global
JANUARY 12, 2018
Focus on the five disciplines of effective management as they suit your own unique organizational culture : Understanding a manager’s role in your organization. Communicating as a manager. The one thread that links all the management disciplines is communication. At times like these, trust your intuition.
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Productivity and Creativity – awkward bedfellows or birds of a feather?
Ben de Haldevang
FEBRUARY 14, 2017
The Guardian recently published a long but interesting piece on the history of time management (from Taylor forward). In an argument many years ago with a good friend of mine, the debate boiled down to whether creative endeavour and success / value was at all related to time taken to create. You’ll find the link here.
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45 Being a Good New Manager Is Not a Matter of Luck
LSA Global
SEPTEMBER 14, 2018
Too many new managers have not been taught how to effectively lead people. Research on New Manager Effectiveness. With more than half of first-time managers reporting that they received no training when promoted, it is not surprising that up to 50% of new managers are deemed ineffective by their bosses.
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