Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

This latest podcast is part seven of a funny and useful conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including:

• Put something “at stake”
  • Power of a public promise
• Integrity under uncertainty
• Stop grasping, start gaining
  • The power of “giving up”
• “Hero Managers” attract unreliable employees
• Don’t be sorry, be successful
  • Recovering from failure
• Choose your thoughts

Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.

You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.

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The New York Times recently ran a nice article about how Google–in its usual highly-analytic, data-driven way–measured the results of different management behaviors amongst its own workforce. The recommendations that emerged from this research will be familiar to readers of this blog.

I wish these were practiced as often as I preach them!

 

Google’s Project Oxygen

Eight Good Behaviors

Be a good coach
Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.
Have regular Read the rest of this entry »

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People have three basic wants that make them susceptible to social influence.

1. First, people have a hedonic motive, or a desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
2. Second, people have an approval motive, or a desire to be accepted and to avoid being rejected.
3. Third, people have an accuracy motive, or a desire to believe what is true and to avoid believing what is false.

As we shall see, most forms of social influence appeal to one or more of these motives.

–Psychology
Page 16-22
By Schacter, Gilbert, & Wegner

See also, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, on this blog.

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Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions

Excerpted, by Art Kleiner in Strategy+Business, from chapter 2

Here’s how the process works. The day before meeting, your coworker brings you a list of five or six key objectives, detailing her progress on each. During the review on the following day, you simply assess the data and discuss how performance compares with objectives. Depending on the employee, this can be a short thirty-minute process, or take as long as two hours. [If you do this weekly or every day, as you might on a tight deadline or vital project, the meeting might last ten minutes. --Tony]

When an employee comes into your office, she should always bring a pen and paper and be required to take detailed minutes of the meeting. Once the meeting is over, the employee should make a photocopy of the minutes for your file. [This is a bit dated! Have the employee email a summary. For high value employees, use a Read the rest of this entry »

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I found more evidence of just how much we lost when Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch died. Today, while revising my executive coaching materials on goal setting and time management, a colleague mentioned that Randy Pausch was most proud of his talk on time management.

We are in the midst of a famine,
a prolonged, widespread deficit of a resource
essential to life: productive time.

Pausch’s talk is a thorough and entertaining presentation of the essentials and I highly recommend it for my executive coaching clients (though I can not agree with every suggestion). You may have heard much of it before, but Professor Pausch’s celebrity, good humor, and excellent example give it tremendous impact. You will do something different and better as a result of watching.

Highlights

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• Record and priority rank your tasks to reduce stress

• Batch your tasks, questions, and communications by person

• Schedule blocks of time adequate for the task

• Avoid interruptions and distractions

The video and the PowerPoint slides, along with lots of other Pausch material, are available here.

Watching this talk may leave you with a big question, especially if the advice is familiar. “Why am I not doing these things despite the knowing that they work?” That gap, the mystery between what we know and what we practice, is my domain: executive coaching.

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The Economist newspaper has an excellent summary of Warren Bennis’s work on leadership, adapted from their book: Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus. Bennis makes a strong case for leadership as something to be nurtured and learned.

Four things an effective leader must embody, communicate, and encourage are:

• Vision
• Meaning
• Trust
• Self-knowledge

Mr. Bennis and I share, along with many other management consultants and executive coaches, a debt to the pioneering work of Werner Erhard‘s EST and Landmark Education.

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