Managing Your Manager - Getting Things Done.

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Managing Your Manager - Getting Things Done.

Note: This article was authored by Douglas Castle, Chairman and CEO of TNNWC Group, LLC, and was originally published in the TAKING COMMAND Blog at http://TakingCommand.blogspot.com . Become a Member of TNNWC and begin enjoying the benefits immediately - at no charge - by clicking on the "JOIN US" button on http://www.tnnwc.com/.

Dear Commanders-In-Training:

You can be in a position of command regardless of your rank within the heirarchy of an organization, and regardless of the nature of your work or title.

Part of your job is to get things done. When you do, you benefit personally as well as professionally, as do all of the members of your organization. Anything that enables you to be more efficient and effective is something of benefit.

One of the greatest failings which a commander can have is an inability to "manage his or her manager." You must learn how to do this. It requires that you assess what is expected of you, and that you indicate, in clear, organized terms, what resources that your manager should be assisting you with or providing with in order for you to of best benefit to him or her.

When you manage your manager, you are doing it for three purposes:

1) To make your manager look better because of the fact that you are able to perform your function better;

2) To do your job with more resources, support and appreciation;

3) To reduce your workload to a manageable level.

Managing your manager is especially key if you are generous and hard-working by your nature. It is a means of showing your value to your manager, and of promoting yourself.

If you fail to manage your manager (who should never be assumed to be aware of your difficulties or appreciative of your efforts), you will not be in command. If you are successful at managing your manager, you will both ultimately benefit. As an added bonus, you will invariably make yourself more highly visible, more readily promotable.

Management is a two-way street. Your manager will have to work with you if you are to work for him or her.

Just be certain to be clear, factual and pleasant (yet assertive) when you manage an individual who perceives himself or herself as your senior, supervisor or superior. Communicate with maximum eye contact, minimum fidgeting, and a clear, controlled matter-of-fact voice. Now go and do it. 

Summary: Graduate from the dimly-lit, poorly-ventilated mailroom to the CEO's posh corner office (with mini astro-turf putting green) by learning to manage your manager, as well as by learning to manage your employees.

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

TAKING COMMAND! - http://takingcommand.blogspot.com/



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Are you truly ALIVE, or just going through the empty motions? Find out: http://ping.fm/0f9T6 #douglascastle #social #buzzology #TNNWC

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Are you truly ALIVE, or just going through the empty motions? Find out: http://ping.fm/0f9T6  #douglascastle #social #buzzology #TNNWC


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"The line between earned respect and cold fear may mark the difference between a great leader and a mere dictator who tempts fate." - Douglas Castle

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"The line between earned respect and cold fear may mark the difference between a great leader and a mere dictator who tempts fate." - Douglas Castle







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POWER IN PICTURES

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Above and Beyond - Do You Have What Is Required To Be Part Of An Entrepreneurial Team?

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Note: If you click on the picture above, and blow it up to its full size (with incredibly poor resolution), you'll note that the fellow wearing the armor is either saying or thinking, "Man! It's getting awfully hot in here!" -DC

Above and Beyond - Do You Have What Is Required To Be Part Of An Entrepreneurial Team? Dear Friends, TNNWC Members, Fellow Entrepreneurs and Frustrated Leaders of Emerging Enterprises: One of the first, but most challenging jobs of championing an entrepreneurial enterprise is the dilemma of choosing and assembling a team. Assuming that you have some brialliant and commercially viable ideas, and the ability to articulate them, you are going to have to sift through hordes of "helpful" people in order to find the right players. The qualifying questions that will be running through your weary and wary mind will include some of these: 1. Does this person have a skill which we require? Is this persons level of skill adequate? Is this person capable and complementary to the team's objectives? 2. Is this person trustworthy, honorable and reliable? 3. Is this person purely a "talker - i.e., a member of the philosophical and cerebral elite" or is he or she a "roll up your shirtsleeves and get it done" person? If everybody on the team is working the soil, is your prospective team member "above it all," either because he or she is lazy, too egomaniacal, or too obsessed with enjoying the harvest that is being sown and reaped by his or her teammates? Someone who likes to stay away from all of the dirt and detail, small-time operational problem-solving, and things that are not included in his/her "Executive Job Description" is not so much an entrepreneur as an opportunist. 4. Is this person willing to be an active participant in the venture, and take the journey with you and your team? 5. Is this person socially skilled enough that he/ she can truly become an integrated part of the team? Does this person know how to communicate, to listen and to openly share? 6. Does this person have a hidden (or obvious!) personal agenda that he or she is merely using your team to help him or her to achieve? Does it conflict with your team's agenda, or does it coincide and harmonize with your plan for the team? 7. How would you feel about introducing this person to a third party as your partner or teammate? This question goes straight to your gut. You can either build yourself up or destroy your own reputation by those people whom you choose to keep company with -- you are judged by the company you keep. [This is sad, but true] Your choice of teammates is actually your choice of Human Capital - the most important assets in the world. If these assets aren't truly adequate, you're going to fail. Tainted assets and attitudes will destroy or dissuade your very best Human assets if you put them together on the same ship. Choose your team members well. Each team member should not only be a helpful addition to the team's collective competence and synergistic potential, but should be interested in the success of the whole venture and in the success of all of its participants. --------------- NOTE: An aside to those of you whose skill sets are truly centered around any or all of the following "personal and professional assets": 1. You want to wait for the best opportunity for yourself, and you want to join the team as one of your options. After all...it might get funded, and your stock could be valuable if you just hang around; 2. You are good at proposing ideas for others to execute, but do not like to participate in the raw sweat work of getting things started; 3. You do not really believe in either the team's objective, your teammates' abilities, or the leader of your team; 4. You are ggod at delegating and instructing, but you do not want to "put yourself out on a limb" to negotiate as necessary and to recruit capable people to delegate this work to; 5. You generally have a "let's wait and see attitude." My message to those of you (the vast majority of the population) who feel a resonance with the five characteristics listed immediately above should not be entrepreneurs. If you are fortunate enough to have a high-payiong trade or profession, stay with that. If you don't have either of those advantages, put on your best smile, polish those shoes and prepare a batch of resumes at Kinko's - some company might have sufficient funds to expend on sustaining you, and you might be hired! (too bad about the rough economy though). Some government "employment opportunities" and even financial aid might be worth looking into. On a personal note, if you are a member of the vast majority of the persons described above, please do not waste your time, or anybody else's, on trying to take up space on an entrepreneurial team. You are probably not an entrepreneur, or a true team player. Most importantly, please don't attempt to engage me in conversation -- I am far too busy working to create value for my teammates and myself. I might even be out there in the field helping my teammmates work the soil. As a leader, my job is to serve my team. As a teammate, each member of my team is working to serve all of the other team members. Nothing less would be acceptable to either my teammmates or myself. Faithfully, Douglas Castle http://www.tnnwc.com/ Douglas Castle - THE DAILY BURST OF BRILLIANCE .001 http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/ Tags, Labels and Key Words: entrepreneur, leadership, teams, team-building, Human assets, sharing, synergy, how to assess a partner or teammate, self-growth, personal-growth, management, TNNWC Group, growing businesses, selecting winners, behavioral psychology, communications, Blogs by Douglas E. Castle, a self-assessment, leadership training, personality typing, team synergy, The TNNWC Emerging Enterprise Report, hidden agendas, conflicting purposes, Best Blogs Of The Week.

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"Desperate times do not call for desperate measures. They call for focus, analysis and fast responsiveness" - Douglas Castle

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"Desperate times do not call for desperate measures. They call for focus, analysis and fast responsiveness" - Douglas Castle p.s. Would someone kindly mention this to the world's government and business leaders? From: Douglas Castle's Daily Burst Of Brilliance .002 --------------- TAKING COMMAND! - http://TakingCommand.blogspot.com



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Communicate With Precision and Power - SENDING SIGNALS! - Blog and Widget.

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Communicate With Precision and Power - SENDING SIGNALS! - Blog and Widget.

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SENDING SIGNALS! WIDGET: Communicate With Precision And Power!

Grab this widget if you'd like to: bring more visitors to your site; increase the length of visits; add a source of fresh, captivating content to build more substance into your site; and, increase your prominence in search engine results and SEO.



SENDING SIGNALS! - Communicate With Precision and Power.

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The Worldwide Effect Of Social Media On "Politics As Usual" - http://TheInternationalistPage.Blogspot.com

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The Worldwide Effect Of Social Media On "Politics As Usual" - http://theinternationalistpage.blogspot.com/ Dear Friends, TNNWC Members and Internationalist Colleagues: For many years, the means to establishing and keeping power (in addition to the customary demonstrations of military might and unbridled aggressiveness) have been simple, and easy to utilize: 1. Acquire and keep secrets from your subjects (I use this latter term distastefully, but for the purposes of making myself understood through brutal simplicity). Hide your agenda, your plans, your activities, your knowledge...your treasure map to the trappings of power. Secrets are powerful weapons in the war to acquire minds; the mere "legend" of a secret, existing or not, is even quite a powerful tool; 2. Divide your subjects against each other by leading them into disputes, squabbles, ethnic issues, racial tensions, false enemies, false prophets and with grand lies. If you continually divide and conquer your vanquished subjects, they will never achieve the critical mass of concensus or of minds to overthrow you -- they will be distracted with either hurting each other, defending against each other, or suspecting each other. Historical examples abound, from the Mayans to Nazi Germany to Angola to China and Rwanda. The opposite side of this silver coin (one out of a colletction of thirty or so) is to "unite these terribly victimized folks against a common enemy" -- "Either you're with me, or your with the terrorists!" 3. Control the media - print, television and radio. Squelch stories that obstruct your objectives and fill the media (a bit of encouragement at the point of a sword helps to get cooperation) with propaganda that serves to either speak supportively of your nefarious agenda, or speaks in the most negative terms about your designated enemies or opponents. Silence the naysayers and those who serve as your detractors. This has gooten increasingly difficult to since the inception of the Internet and proliferation of its children; the Social Media 4. Use symbols, pomp and circumstance, banners, flags, battle hymns, special celebretory honors, rituals, and  and other sensory stimuli (as well as subliminal stimuli) to stir up atavistic emotion, and to de-intellectualize issues that might otherwise receive too much questioning or thought from your subjects -- you want to enslave them, so you require them to be completely emotional, highly conformist, and comfortable playing the smallest role possible within the bounds of your kingdom. 5. Be certain that the masses (or is it, as Dick Cheney once said, laughingly, "Them asses"?) believe that there is indeed an afterlife in a kinder, gentler, happier place than that which exists in the miserable present, and that if they follow your rules, which you may invent as you go along, they will be rewarded posthumously. Who uses this strategy? I will not name names, or cite any specific parties like the Vatican or the madrassas in makeshift mosques throughout the poorest parts of the Arab World. Note: This is not to disparage or insult those who do believe in a Divine Being, organized religion, religious scriptures or an afterlife, either north or south - it is to focus your attention on the persons, those Human Beings, who utilize these belief systems to enslave us, or to have us kill for them...either by going to war, or by committing suicide in such a manner that the maximum Human collateral damage is done. Social Media is changing everything. Citizen journalists with their own ideas, thoughts and disclosures are reaching out to others all over the planet. Secrets are hard to keep. Dissidents are difficult to suppress. Lies are harder to promulgate, with propaganda and dogma being challenged more vociferously every single day. It is now 3rd February, 2011... What started as an uprising in Tunisia has spread and sown the seeds of revolution and discontent to Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria (pre-emptively). This type of "What in the hell is going on?" question, the question that so often ignites and inspires rebellion and regime change might even spread to the United States. Social media has become a weed in the garden of the status quo. True free speech (as opposed the "legally permitted" variety), combined with the ability to broadcast throughout the world simultaneously is fomenting great unrest. Old leaders have to adapt new strategies or they will find themselves usurped by a generation of more technologically-oriented leaders-in-training who are genuinely chosen by the people whom they will have to serve, and to whom they will be accountable. New leaders will have to seize and hold power by far more sophisticated methods than those used by their soon-to-be-uprooted predecessors. The International Dialogue has given birth to International Action. I, for one, am ready for a change of pace. I feel a renewed sense of adventure and excitement. Faithfully, and in the Spirit of International Friendship and Commerce, Douglas Castle http://AboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com http://www.DouglasCastleBlogosphere.com http://twitter.com/douglascastle --------------- THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE - "A shrinking world, with expanding opportunities." http://theinternationalistpage.blogspot.com/ --------------- TAKING COMMAND! - http://TakingCommand.blogspot.com



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Persuasion By Insinuation - How I Got Onto A Fully-Booked Air Flight - Douglas Castle

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Persuasion By Insinuation - How I Got Onto A Fully-Booked Air Flight - Douglas Castle
Marketing is about getting attention -- but it also requires delivering a message which contains a demand for action. Your must be pursuasive not only by using descriptive language, but by actually letting your quarry's imagination do the rest. Politicians, spin doctors, and teens wanted to spent the night somewhere where they probably shouldn't have all used some variation on this approach.

Summary: It uses an incomplete, but not untruthful story to stimulate the imagination of the audience, prospect, nosy mother, victim or (in this case) the airline ticket agent.

Lingovation - What I've Named This Technique: "Persuasion By Insinuation" Real-Life

Example: Because of massive winter snowstorms by flight from Florida to my favorite airport in Westchester County, New York had been cancelled. Flights were being cancelled, postponed and redirected because of the inclement weather. I went up to the ticket agent (a kindly-looking woman, who looked like a hybrid of Angelina Jolie and Aunt Bea), and asked if there was a chance that I might get onto the next flight going to my favorite airport. She indicated, sadly, that the next flight, scheduled to leave in five hours was fully booked, with passengers on standby. She then added that the next flight would not be until the next day! What to do... What to do...

I first asked her if she could re-check the next flight to see if something might have changed or somebody might have cancelled, leaving a seat available. She sympathetically nodded, checked her computer manifest, and told me "No sir. I'm so sorry. Every single seat is taken."

Suddenly, inspiration struck me. I looked directly into her eyes (she had two), with a slightly panicked expression, and with my hands trembling slightly, and said, "Oh my God. I'll miss my treatment!" I then wrung my hands, looked down at the floor, and then met her eyes again. She responded, "Let me see what I can do." I said, "Thank you so much, Miss. You're a lifesaver."

She attacked her keyboard with inspired ferocity, and smiled at me, saying, "It appears that I can get you a boarding pass for one seat that IS available on the next flight, Mr. Castle." Without hesitation, she printed out a boarding pass, and handed it to me with a compassionate, Florence Nightingale/ Mother Theresa expression on her face. I thanked her profusely.

Yes. I still feel guilty. I didn't have any "treatment." I wasn't in pain. But I am convinced that she had bumped some faceless passenger from the flight because she had seen me as a vulnerable person needing her help, and that she had the power to do something righteous.

Many people like to be saviors. I had touched her personally, and had, in a few minutes, become a Human Being in need of her help. It was the confluence of Persuasion and Compassion that served as her call to action. What does this have to do with marketing? Everything.

Apply what you've learned here using your conscience as your compass, and only to the extent required. Don't make a habit of abusing people by utilizing the sins of implication and omission - but don't stay one more night in Florida than you have to if you need to get back to New York. Amen.

And now I'm off to my local house of worship to pray for forgiveness...

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

Tags, Labels and Keywords for this Article: humanization, pursuasion, persuasion, insinuation, assumptions, imagination, painting word pictures, asking for help, conscience, establishing rapport, air travel, behavioral psychology, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, innovative tactics, appealing the the goodness in people, the sin of omission, the sin of misdirection, exploiting the imagination, compassion, making people feel needed, Articles by Douglas E. Castle, Mad Marketing Tactics, TNNWC Group, manipulation, telling a story, accordians in Hell, true confessions of mad marketers, rapid adaptation, profiling personalities, eye contact, an emotional appeal, The National Networker Weekly Newsletter, The National Newspicker, The TNNWC NEWSROOM blog, DouglasCastleBlogosphere, Mini-Media Buzz Blitz, master marketing secrets, Taking Command blog, RadioDazz blog, The TNNWC RSS Feed and Daily Email Supplement Blog, messaging, personalization, Linked In, blue ice, connecting personally. 

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TNNWC Group, LLC, in Brief TNNWC Group, LLC empowers emerging enterprises locally, worldwide and inter-globally by providing 1) informational publications and products; 2) an indispensible suite of crucial, unparalleled services for business planning, development, growth, marketing and capitalization, which are offered to all of our Members who are all 3) interactively involved within a growing, mutually-supportive collaborative, cooperative community of individuals and businesses. We are run by entrepreneurial people, and we live to serve entrepreneurial people and the business initiated through their inspiration… from the garage-based technological start-up, to the “small business” wanting to break free of its limitations and grow larger at an accelerated but sustainable pace. We Empower Emerging Enterprises™ - not with “happy talk” and “grandiose ideas”… but with real tools and expert interpersonal guidance to use each of them for their optimal effectiveness. Visit us at TNNWC Group, LLC. - Join us. We have so much to offer you. Our philosophy is simple:
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